Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

Authors:

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) seeks to develop a versatile model capable of performing effectively on unseen target domains. Notably, recent advances in pre-trained Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the generalization capabilities of deep learning models. Despite the increasing attention toward VFM-based domain prompt tuning within DG, the effective design of prompts capable of disentangling invariant features across diverse domains remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose addressing this challenge by leveraging the controllable and flexible language prompt of the VFM. Noting that the text modality of VFMs is naturally easier to disentangle, we introduce a novel framework for text feature-guided visual prompt tuning. This framework first automatically disentangles the text prompt using a large language model (LLM) and then learns domain-invariant visual representation guided by the disentangled text feature. However, relying solely on language to guide visual feature disentanglement has limitations, as visual features can sometimes be too complex or nuanced to be fully captured by descriptive text. To address this, we introduce Worst Explicit Representation Alignment (WERA), which extends text-guided visual prompts by incorporating an additional set of abstract prompts. These prompts enhance source domain diversity through stylized image augmentations, while alignment constraints ensure that visual representations remain consistent across both the original and augmented distributions. Experiments conducted on major DG datasets, including PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraInc, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum optimal control of steady orbits

arXiv:2606.15383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Periodically driven dissipative systems can settle into steady orbits - fixed loops on their dynamical manifolds. In quantum mechanics, steady orbits occur in cooling engines (used to initialise quantum devices), coherent oscillators (such as lasers and masers), precision metrology devices (atomic clocks, optical and spin magnetometers), and magnetic resonance (steady state free precession, dynamic nuclear polarisation). Steady orbits and stroboscopic steady states are a promising target for quantum optimal control, but the numerical complexity is prohibitive: the infinite loop defeats gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) which relies on explicit numerical propagation in the time domain. Here we propose an efficient quantum control strategy for stroboscopic steady states and limit cycles that are approached asymptotically when a control sequence is repeated infinitely many times. The formalism is different from Floquet-Lindblad state engineering and effective Hamiltonian theories: it finds control sequences that drive a dissipative quantum system towards a steady orbit passing through user-specified waypoints. The software implementation (same numerical complexity scaling as GRAPE) is done for the Spinach library.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Systemic and Mucosal Antibody Correlates of Protection Against Bordetella pertussis in a Controlled Human Infection Model

Abstract Background Despite high vaccination coverage, pertussis has resurged globally. Whole-cell (wP) and acellular (aP) pertussis vaccines induce distinct immune profiles, yet immune correlates of protection against infection and symptomatic disease remain incompletely defined. We leveraged a controlled human infection model (CHIM) to identify systemic and mucosal humoral signatures associated with resistance to Bordetella pertussis. Methods Adults with documented history of vaccination had previously been enrolled in a CHIM study and challenged intranasally with B. pertussis D420. For the present work, longitudinal serum and nasal wash samples were analyzed using systems serology to comprehensively profile antibody features. Multivariate modeling and network analyses were performed to define discriminatory immune features. Findings Baseline aP vaccine antigen-specific antibodies did not distinguish infection outcomes. In wP-primed individuals, protection from B. pertussis infection was associated with broad, high-magnitude, polyfunctional antibody responses targeting non-canonical antigens, including BrkA, TcfA, OmpP, OmlA, FauA, and Pal. Protective signatures associated with resistance to symptomatic disease in both vaccine groups were characterized by enhanced Fc-receptor-engaging antibody profiles with distinct antigenic patterns shaped by vaccine history. Importantly, while conventional aP vaccine antigens failed to reliably distinguish individuals susceptible to infection or symptom development, correlates generated by integrated serum and mucosal models based on select non-canonical antigens achieved near-perfect discrimination of infection and symptom outcomes, outperforming models restricted to aP-vaccine. antigens only. Interpretation Resistance to infection was largely restricted to wP-primed individuals and was associated with integrated systemic and mucosal antibody responses directed against antigens beyond those included in acellular vaccines. Protection from symptomatic disease in both vaccine groups was linked to distinct antibody response signatures, shaped by prior vaccination history. These findings indicate that immune mechanisms preventing infection differ from those limiting clinical disease and provide a framework for redesign of next-generation pertussis vaccines aimed at blocking infection and symptomatic disease.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Human genetic evidence is associated with drug approval across therapeutic areas: an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs with temporal validation and feature ablation

Genetic evidence is enriched among approved drug targets: in an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs from Open Targets and ChEMBL, targets with any genetic association had a 3.25-fold higher approval rate than those without (OR = 3.25, 95% CI 2.79-3.79, p = 1.91e-42). A target-level analysis accounting for non-independence of pairs sharing the same gene gave OR = 2.79 (bootstrap 95% CI 2.22-3.53); the oncology pair-level OR of 6.72 attenuates to 2.71 at the target level, illustrating how non-independence inflates area-specific estimates. The enrichment replicated in post-2015 approvals (OR = 3.51, p = 1.72e-8). Feature ablation across six evidence types revealed that literature mining alone accounts for most classifier performance (AUPRC = 0.099 versus 0.109 for all features), consistent with temporal leakage from post-approval publications. Excluding literature, remaining evidence types retain above-baseline signal (AUPRC = 0.084, 1.63x baseline). Sensitivity analyses bracket the pair-level OR between 3.25 and 4.93. Genetic evidence alone yields only a 1.0-percentage-point absolute AUPRC gain and the best model has poor calibration; the classifier has limited practical predictive value. We catalogue 1,433 genetically supported Phase 1/2 pairs as a hypothesis-generating resource. All findings are observational.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Exploring Extrinsic and Intrinsic Properties for Effective Reasoning with Code Interpreter

Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification. Despite its growing adoption, the behavioral properties underlying effective code reasoning remain largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate code reasoning from two distinct perspectives inspired by prior studies of natural language reasoning: extrinsic properties, represented by crucial tokens, and intrinsic properties, represented by code-specific cognitive behaviors. Across multiple LLMs, we find that stronger CI reasoning models consistently exhibit a higher prevalence of crucial tokens and cognitive behaviors, particularly verification, backtracking, and backward chaining. Building on these observations, we examine how these properties can be leveraged during both inference and training. At inference time, appending code-specific crucial tokens improves performance on several reasoning capabilities, including mathematical, ordering, and optimization, while yielding limited benefits elsewhere. At training time, augmenting a state-of-the-art framework with code-specific cognitive behaviors improves supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning performance in two of three evaluated models. Further analysis shows that these behaviors reduce overthinking in incorrect responses and improve token efficiency, while also revealing factors that limit gains in a certain model. Our findings provide the first systematic characterization of effective reasoning with CI and demonstrate both the potential and limitations of leveraging key properties to improve CI-based reasoning.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

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

Learning Interface Breakup: A Geometry-Conditioned Latent Surrogate for Spray Formation

arXiv:2606.16587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing spray nozzles requires predicting how geometry shapes transient two-phase breakup, but high-fidelity volume-of-fluid (VOF) simulations with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) are too expensive for iterative design exploration. Standard surrogate models are also challenged by this setting because both the liquid–gas interface and the underlying adaptive discretization evolve across time and geometries. We introduce a geometry-conditioned latent surrogate trained on 797 two-phase nozzle simulations that addresses this by encoding the AMR cell-density field, rather than the full multi-channel flow state, as a compact proxy for where the solver concentrates resolution. From this representation, the model reconstructs transient density evolution and nozzle geometry, and a lightweight second stage recovers the remaining flow variables. On held-out simulations, the method accurately captures key interface dynamics while reducing inference time to 0.045 seconds per trajectory, corresponding to a speed-up of more than $6\times10^4$ relative to Basilisk CFD. These results suggest that AMR refinement structure can serve as a compact and learnable representation for geometry-conditioned surrogate modeling of transient two-phase flows.

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

Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

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

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

Rapid Poison: Practical Poisoning Attacks Against the Rapid Response Framework

The Rapid Response (RR) framework, deployed in production systems, including Anthropic's ASL-3 safeguards, continuously improves jailbreak-detection classifiers. When new jailbreaks emerge that bypass these classifiers, Rapid Response generates synthetic variants for training, helping the model generalize from the new attacks and quickly adapt. We reveal that prompt injection can infiltrate this pipeline to deliver poisoned samples into the classifier's training set, enabling two attack objectives: (I) targeted poisoning attacks that create false positives on harmless samples by categorizing them as a jailbreak, with a specific desired feature (e.g., certain formatting, subject, or keyword), (II) concept-based backdoor attacks that induce false negatives on jailbreak inputs, generalizing even to jailbreaks from attack strategies the defender explicitly trained against, when the backdoor trigger is present. Importantly, our threat model restricts adversaries to modifying only jailbreak samples (not benign data or labels), a constraint unexplored by prior work that makes the second objective particularly challenging. We address this with Omission Attack, which exploits a new phenomenon: when training on concept-absent unsafe samples, the classifier misassociates that concept's presence with the safe label. Both attacks cause substantial and in some cases near-complete label flipping at only a 1% poisoning rate, achieving up to 100% false positive rates and up to 96% false negative rates.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

UKBAnalytica: an integrated R package for scalable phenotyping and reproducible epidemiological analysis within the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform

Authors:

UK Biobank provides longitudinal health-related data for approximately 500,000 participants, and its Research Analysis Platform (RAP) has shifted large-scale analyses toward secure cloud-based computation. However, many existing tools address only specific steps of the analytical workflow, leaving a need for an integrated framework that connects multi-source disease phenotyping, survival-ready cohort construction, and downstream analysis on the RAP. Here, we present UKBAnalytica, an extensible R package for scalable phenotyping and integrated analysis of UK Biobank data within the RAP environment. It currently includes 52 predefined baseline variables and a built-in library of 331 curated disease definitions. These definitions are based on multiple UK Biobank data sources, including ICD-10, ICD-9, self-reported conditions, death registry records, algorithmically defined outcomes, and OPCS-4 procedure codes. UKBAnalytica distinguishes prevalent and incident cases, constructs follow-up time, generates analysis-ready survival datasets, and summarizes participant flow. Beyond phenotype construction, UKBAnalytica provides integrated modules for epidemiological analysis, omics analysis, and machine-learning-based modeling and interpretation. By linking endpoint definition with downstream modeling under a consistent data structure, UKBAnalytica reduces repetitive scripting and improves analytical transparency. Furthermore, we demonstrate the package's practical utility through a case study on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) proteomics. The findings align closely with previously reported conclusions, underscoring the robustness and reliability of our analytical framework. This phenotype-centered framework complements existing UK Biobank tools and facilitates reproducible RAP-based biomedical research. UKBAnalytica is freely available at https://github.com/Hinna0818/UKBAnalytica.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

Authors:

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

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

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RAVA: Retrieval-Augmented Viewpoint Alignment for Subject-Driven Image Generation

Reference-driven image generation has made rapid progress on identity preservation, but reliable viewpoint control across different subjects remains poorly understood. The difficulty is not merely generating a new image of the target subject: the model must infer the implicit viewpoint of one subject and transfer it to another subject using only image-level evidence, without camera poses, depth, or ray-based conditions. In this setting, existing generators conditioned on multiple image references often rely on spurious semantic correlations, which lead to viewpoint drift, part-level structural mismatches, and missing or unsupported target-specific content. We formulate this challenge as cross-subject viewpoint alignment and propose RAVA, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies explicit geometric evidence before generation. RAVA first learns a cross-instance viewpoint embedding that retrieves target-subject images aligned with the anchor viewpoint, then applies a LogDet-based subset selection strategy to retain a compact reference set that is both view-consistent and structurally complementary. The selected references are finally consumed by a fine-tuned multi-reference image generator. Experiments show that generic semantic embeddings are nearly random for this task, while the proposed retriever substantially improves viewpoint retrieval quality. On cross-subject generation, RAVA consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines and stronger retrieval alternatives under the same generation backbone. These results indicate that cross-subject viewpoint alignment benefits from retrieval-augmented geometric grounding rather than relying on end-to-end generation alone.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization

We introduce LibriConvo, a synthetic conversational speech corpus for speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR), built by instantiating the previously proposed Speaker-Aware Simulated Conversation (SASC) framework in a dataset and benchmarking setting. The main contribution of this paper is a corpus construction pipeline and benchmark derived from that framework. To make the data more suitable for downstream ASR and diarization, conversational timing statistics are estimated from English CallHome using external voice activity detection, long pauses are compressed, LibriTTS utterances are grouped by book to improve local semantic continuity, and room impulse responses are selected with a spatial-plausibility heuristic. The resulting corpus contains 240.1 hours of audio across 1,496 dialogues involving 830 speakers, partitioned into speaker-disjoint train, validation, and test splits. We report baseline results for both diarization and ASR. On the test split, Sortformer outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization (11.1\% vs.~24.4\% DER). For ASR, a Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge model fine-tuned with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER and 6.97\% cpWER, outperforming zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. These results position LibriConvo as a practical benchmark for studying synthetic conversational speech and for evaluating multi-speaker speech processing systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HandwritingAgent: Language-Driven Handwriting Synthesis in Scalable Vector Space

Teaching machines to emulate natural handwriting styles remains an open challenge, as it requires synthesizing stroke sequences that dynamically vary in shape, texture, pressure and script - not only across individuals, but also within a single person's handwriting. Attempts at this challenge have largely explored deep learning methods in both online and offline settings. However, these approaches are often constrained by style-specific architectural choices, heavy reliance on large datasets, high compute costs, and a lack of flexible control over writing styles through natural language. To this end, we introduce HandwritingAgent, a language-driven agent that can synthesize natural handwriting sequences directly in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format with no need for style-specific training. The agent leverages a large reasoning model to geometrically analyse and autoregressively generate target handwritten glyphs as stroke sequences in a discrete grid canvas environment. Generation is conditioned on texts provided in either conversational or non-conversational mode, along with a reference handwriting-style image. Experiments on diverse handwriting tasks spanning imitation, recognition, multi-lingual handwriting synthesis, and generation of complex handwritten maths and science expressions indicate substantial improvement in performance, with HandwritingAgent matching or surpassing state-of-the-art generative handwriting models, while providing a more efficient, controllable, and generalizable synthesis method.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

How to sketch a learning algorithm

Authors:

arXiv:2604.07328v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the choice of training data influence an AI model? This broad question is of central importance to interpretability, privacy, and basic science. At its technical core is the data deletion problem: after a reasonable amount of precomputation, quickly predict how the model would behave in a given situation if a given subset of training data had been excluded from the learning algorithm. We present a data deletion scheme capable of predicting model outputs with vanishing error $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ in the deep learning setting. Our precomputation and prediction algorithms are only $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ factors slower than regular training and inference, respectively. The storage requirements are those of $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ models. Our proof is based on an assumption that we call stability. In contrast to the assumptions made by prior work, stability appears to be fully compatible with learning powerful AI models. In support of this, we show that stability is satisfied in a minimal set of experiments with microgpt. Our code is available at https://github.com/SamSpo1/microgpt-sketch. At a technical level, our work is based on a new method for locally sketching an arithmetic circuit by computing higher-order derivatives in random complex directions. Forward-mode automatic differentiation allows cheap computation of these derivatives.