Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Taxonomy of Mental Health and Technology Needs for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers

arXiv:2606.19247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers – also referred as the "invisible second patients" – experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dual Dimensionality for Local and Global Attention

Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens. Keys (and Values) are typically represented with the same dimensionality, regardless of its distance from the prediction target. In natural language, however, the next word is most strongly influenced by the immediately preceding tokens. We hypothesize that local and distant tokens impose asymmetric demands on representational capacity: local tokens are more critical for predicting immediate outputs and thus require richer representations, whereas distant tokens primarily serve as long-range memory, for which lower-dimensional representations may suffice. We formalize this idea as Distance-Adaptive Representation (DAR), implemented in a controlled setting that preserves full-dimensional representations within a local context window while assigning reduced-dimensional representations (e.g. 1/4 of the original dimensionality) to tokens beyond that window. Across multiple pretraining scales (70M to 410M parameters), as well as continued supervised fine-tuning on a 1B-scale model, this approach closely matches the performance of full-dimensional baselines. In contrast, uniformly reducing dimensionality across all token positions leads to worse performance. These results challenge the common assumption that key and value dimensionality should be uniform across token positions. Our findings suggest a new direction for designing attention architectures that adaptively allocate representational capacity across sequences, enabling further reductions in KV cache during inference.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction. We cast AU->emotion reasoning as a counterfactual-consistency problem between the rationale, the label, and a structural AU->emotion causal graph G, and propose FACR, which grounds the reasoner in an independently induced, polarity-aware G and trains a counterfactual-faithfulness objective: a do-intervention on an AU that G marks causal for a class must move the prediction, while one it marks irrelevant must leave it unchanged. Faithfulness is thereby both trainable and measurable through a matching interventional metric, which we evaluate against a known causal structure, the PSPI pain-AU composition, as no existing affective-reasoning benchmark allows. We are explicit that this metric tests fidelity to the supplied structure rather than its rediscovery: it asks whether the trained reasoner invokes the AUs the structure marks causal, on held-out subjects and a second dataset. Under subject-independent evaluation on UNBC-PAIN, the objective raises the agreement between the invoked AUs and the PSPI composition from a no-objective baseline of 0.08 to 0.57, at a small detection cost; an unfaithfulness control attributes the gain to the objective. On a cross-dataset emotion transfer, the objective likewise raises fidelity to G on a seven-class task (0.50 to 0.84). Finally, we attach a language verbalizer and extend the audit to the generated text: biasing each action unit's emission by its latent activation makes the rationale faithful by construction, so that ablating an AU removes it from the explanation, a property that transfers to a second language-model backbone, whereas a freely generated rationale is unfaithful.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FitVTON: Fit-aware Virtual Try-On via Body-Garment Size Control

While diffusion-based virtual try-on has achieved impressive visual realism, most methods treat the task as 2D inpainting, prioritizing texture preservation over physical plausibility. Consequently, they often produce plausible-looking images that fail to reflect authentic garment fit across diverse body shapes. We present FitVTON, a Fit-aware virtual try-on model on different bodies in the wild. FitVTON encodes garment-body size through structured text prompts, and learn from simulated try-on triplets from parameterized garment model. To improve the fitting effects over garment silhouettes, we introduce two auxiliary head to predict the masks for both the garment and the exposed body. We further introduce a texture rectification stage to improve realistic appearance from simulated data. To evaluate the fitting fidelity, we curate a real-world dataset, FittingEffect3K, combining VLM-based scoring protocol. Both subjective and quantitive experiments show that FitVTON demonstrate authentic fitting fidelity, with significant sizing accuracy and shape preservation over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive image quality. Project Page: https://zenoning.github.io/FitVTON/.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation

While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Hybrid Iterative Neural Low-Regularity Integrator for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

arXiv:2605.04853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HIN-LRI, a hybrid framework that augments a classical numerical solver with a neural operator trained to correct the solver's structured truncation error. A base low-regularity integrator provides a consistent first-order approximation to nonlinear dispersive PDEs, while a lightweight neural network, operating on a low-dimensional latent manifold, learns the residual defect that analytical methods cannot close. An explicit time-step scaling on the neural correction ensures that its Lipschitz contribution remains $\mathcal{O}(\tau)$, yielding a Gronwall stability factor bounded uniformly in the step size and independent of the spatial resolution. The network is trained end-to-end through a solver-in-the-loop objective that unrolls the full iteration and penalises trajectory error in a Bourgain-type norm, aligning learning with multi-step solver dynamics rather than isolated one-step targets. Under stated assumptions, the global error satisfies $C(\varepsilon_{net}+\delta)\,\tau^\gamma\ln(1/\tau)$, where $\varepsilon_{net}$ measures the network approximation quality and $\delta$ the training shortfall. Experiments on three dispersive benchmarks with rough data show that HIN-LRI improves accuracy over analytical integrators, splitting methods, and neural PDE surrogates, with stable spatial refinement, effective out-of-distribution transfer, and modest online overhead.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

T2MM: An LLM Supported Architecture For Inquiry-Based Modeling

Model Construction is a foundational practice in science learning that relies on visualization and interactivity. Large Language Models, increasingly augmented with multimodal capabilities, have been integrated in education contexts to support learning. However, these tools lack visual interactivity that is required by some learning contexts. We introduce Text to Multimodal Model (T2MM), a robust, dynamic LLM supported architecture that assists in model construction within the open inquiry ecology-based modeling software Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA). T2MM accounts for the current context of the learner's model and creates interactive models, rather than static images, enabling the model to remain responsive to manual adjustment. To measure technical feasibility, we evaluate T2MM through a custom procedurally generated dataset of natural language learner modeling requests and target models within the VERA system. T2MM outperforms a baseline model generation architecture implemented through LLM-supported full code generation, common in the literature, across all measured success metrics. Our contribution not only outlines LLM integration into a inquiry-based learning modeling tool, but also describes a possible architecture through which more interactive multimodal LLM tools can be created.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCs execute safety-critical programs across industrial sectors. The dominant PLC notation, ladder diagram (LD) per IEC 61131-3, remains absent from formal verification: SMT-based model checkers cannot process LD's rung-and-coil graphics. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC, the first open-source formal verifier with native LD support (PLCopen XML format), implemented as a new ESBMC frontend. ESBMC-PLC translates LD rungs to GOTO IR, models the PLC scan cycle as a while(true) loop with nondeterministic inputs, and checks safety properties via SMT-based bounded model checking or k-induction. A five-property YAML language (mutual_exclusion, invariant, absence, response, reachability) avoids temporal logic. A survey of 22 studies (2020-2026) identifies four research gaps; ESBMC-PLC closes two of them. Evaluation on 13 benchmarks (6 domains, 3 sources - including deployed CONTROLLINO PLCs and MathWorks Simulink PLC Coder) shows correct classification across 61 properties: all 9 author-constructed programs (Categories A/B) as expected, all 4 vendor programs (Category C) correctly unlabeled, with 8 bugs found (actionable counterexamples), 7 unbounded k-induction proofs, all runs under 60ms on Apple Silicon. Feature comparison with PLCverif shows that ESBMC-PLC is the only open-source tool that combines native LD, k-induction, and SMT bit-vector semantics.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FacProcessTwin: An LLM-Based System for Process Twin Development

arXiv:2606.17666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process twins provide real-time representations of entire production processes. By capturing how process steps interact, rather than monitoring a single machine in isolation as an asset-based digital twin does, they have the potential to drive efficiency gains across the whole process. However, developing a process twin is costly. It requires accurately modelling the entire production process: its process steps, the equipment and product-specific settings each step uses, and its process variations. The resulting model must then be bound to live operational data. We present FacProcessTwin, a system that leverages a large language model (LLM) to reduce this development time, building a process twin from a plant's process documentation and natural-language input from an operator. FacProcessTwin generates this complete process model and then automatically binds its process steps to live operational data. The generated model and its data bindings are rendered as an interactive process diagram through which manufacturing personnel can monitor and correct the system's autonomous decisions, such as resolving uncertainty at safety-critical binding steps. We evaluate FacProcessTwin through a real-world case study of an Australian food manufacturer, covering 16 production process flows that span chilled, frozen, and aseptic shelf-stable product categories and include process variations within the same product. The results show that FacProcessTwin generates these process models accurately (a mean F1 of 95.2% against ground truth) and builds each twin in roughly a sixth of the manual time. Its human-in-the-loop governance then keeps the safety-critical bindings correct: at ambiguous tags where a single-pass baseline silently mis-binds 75.0% of the time, FacProcessTwin defers to the operator and mis-binds none.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design

arXiv:2511.19468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Dimensional Type I von Neumann Algebras in PyTorch: A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Random Block-Diagonal Operators

arXiv:2606.15882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present \texttt{torch\_vn\_algebra}, an open-source Python library built on PyTorch for numerical experiments with finite-dimensional Type I von Neumann algebras (direct sums of matrix algebras). The library provides: $\bullet$ a compact batched tensor representation $(B,C,k_{\max},k_{\max})$ that handles both Monte Carlo samples and multiple direct summands; $\bullet$ lazy evaluation of operators to avoid unnecessary memory allocation; $\bullet$ generation of random operators with arbitrary eigenvalue distributions (user-provided samplers) and various unitary ensembles (Haar, $\mathrm{SU}(n)$, COE, CSE, diagonal phases); $\bullet$ functional calculus via SVD (absolute value, square root, inverse, entropy) and a hybrid method for extreme eigenvalues (exact diagonalisation for $k_{\max}\le256$, otherwise power iteration); $\bullet$ three trace functionals (blunt, normalised subspace trace, and the von Neumann tracial state); $\bullet$ GPU-accelerated batched linear algebra for moderate-scale Monte Carlo studies (e.g., $2\times10^4$ samples of $100\times100$ operators). The library is validated against analytical expectations (Haar moments, trace properties). Performance benchmarks on a Tesla P100 GPU are presented and discussed. Limitations and future work are outlined. The code is open-source.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Amnesia: A Stealthy Replay Attack on Continual Learning Dreams

Continual learning (CL) models often use experience replay to reduce catastrophic forgetting, but their robustness to replay sampling interference remains underexplored. Existing CL attacks alter inputs or training pipelines (poisoning/backdoors) and rarely include explicit auditable constraints, limiting realism. Here, auditability means a monitor can verify compliance from sampler-visible telemetry - e.g., logged replay index/label statistics - by checking that the realized replay class histogram stays close to a nominal baseline and that replay rate is unchanged per batch and/or over a rolling window. We study a limited-privilege insider who controls only replay index selection, not pixels, labels, or model parameters, while staying within auditable limits such as queue priorities. We introduce Amnesia, a replay composition attack that maximizes degradation under two budgets: a visibility budget delta bounding the TV/KL divergence from a nominal class histogram p0, and a mass budget f fixing the replay rate. Amnesia has two steps: (i) compute lightweight class utilities, such as EMA loss or confidence, to tilt p0 toward harmful classes; and (ii) project the tilt back into the delta-ball using efficient KL (exponential tilt) or TV (balanced mass redistribution) optimizers. A windowed scheduler enforces rolling audits. Across challenging CL benchmarks and strong replay baselines, Amnesia consistently lowers final accuracy (ACC) and worsens backward transfer (-BWT). The KL variant delivers high impact while remaining largely undetected under multiple audit schemes, including per-batch and rolling-window checks. The TV variant is more damaging but easier to detect, especially under tight per-class constraints. These results expose index-only replay control as a practical, auditable threat surface in CL systems and establish a principled impact-visibility trade-off.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.