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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Risk beliefs, intensive digital information and demand for a new preventative health product in public clinics: Evidence from an experiment in Zimbabwe.

Demand for preventative health care is weak in low-income settings. In a field experiment in a low-income, high-risk setting, we evaluated whether demand for a new bio-medical preventative health product, offered free at public health clinics, responds to digital feedback-based intensive information on health risks and benefits of prevention along with a clinic referral enabling access to the product. In our sample of women aged 18-24 years, we find a large correction in risk beliefs sustained six months after the intervention. Against a background of very low baseline usage, within six months we find a 5.8 percentage point increase in take up of the prevention method, a level of uptake which is very large relative to the control group. Reassuringly, there is no meaningful difference in up-take amongst baseline high- risk and low-risk individuals.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exceptional Points as Manifestations of Analyticity Breakdown in the 't Hooft Model

作者:

arXiv:2606.10141v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We use the exactly-solvable t Hooft model of 1+1D large-N_c QCD as a rigorous laboratory for the breakdown of analyticity of a causal response function, the meson two-point function. A PT-symmetric deformation i gamma(x-1/2) of the light-cone meson operator, the analogue of an imaginary chemical potential, drives the lowest two mesons to an exceptional point (EP) at gamma_c. Recasting the resolvent as a Jacobi continued fraction yields gamma_c in closed form: 2 pi g^2 N_c at the two-pole level, converging to 7.966 g^2 N_c by depth five – an analytic, not numerical, threshold. The square-root exponent nu=1/2 is fixed by the 2x2 Jordan form and confirmed by finite-size scaling to N=1999. The breakdown has an unambiguous time-domain signature: the propagator norm is bounded for gamma < gamma_c, grows linearly at gamma_c (the Jordan secular law), and exponentially beyond – observable, since the deformed operator is a non-Hermitian Wannier-Stark ladder, in photonic and topolectrical analogues. The threshold is locked to confinement, gamma_c propto g^2 N_c, and recurs as a uniform EP cascade; a second, non-reciprocal deformation yields an exactly-exponential non-Hermitian skin effect. This is the first analytically-controlled instance of exceptional-point analyticity breakdown in a confining gauge theory.

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

Not all Jensen-Shannon Divergence Estimators are Equal

arXiv:2606.16411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jensen-Shannon divergence is widely reported as a scalar measure of fidelity for synthetic tabular data. Yet, in practice, it is estimated from finite samples using protocols that are often underspecified. This creates a measurement problem. Although the population divergence is well defined, the empirical value depends on the estimator family, sampling protocol, calibration, dimensionality, and class balance. We show that different protocols can yield non-comparable values: marginal-based estimators ignore dependencies in the joint distribution and can severely underestimate divergence, while classifier-based estimators capture joint structure but exhibit strong estimator dependence. We systematically study this behavior across controlled settings with reference divergences and real-world synthetic tabular benchmarks. Our analysis reveals dependence blindness in marginal estimators, prior-shift bias under class imbalance, and estimator sensitivity in high dimensions. To address prior shift, we derive a closed-form posterior correction for classifier-based Jensen-Shannon estimation. Our results show that empirical Jensen-Shannon divergence values are inherently protocol-dependent, making explicit specification of the estimation procedure necessary for meaningful comparison. We provide practical guidelines and an open-source tool for estimator-aware Jensen-Shannon evaluation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Motion-Focused Latent Action Enables Cross-Embodiment VLA Training from Human EgoVideos

Training generalist Vision-Language-Action(VLA) models typically requires massive, diverse robotic datasets with high-fidelity action annotations. While egocentric human manipulation videos are abundant and capture significant environmental diversity, the absence of action labels makes them difficult to use in conventional training paradigms. To address this, we propose a latent-action-based framework designed to extract general action priors from unlabeled human videos. The architecture features a Hybrid Disentangled VQ-VAE that decouples motion dynamics from environmental backgrounds through physical masks, enabling the construction of a cross-embodiment action codebook. By pre-training on human videos with the codebook, the VLM backbone learns deep representations of action intent. For adaptation to specific embodiments, we introduce an intent-perception decoupling strategy where the VLM predicts the action intent while a separate frozen visual encoder provides state-specific features to the action expert, thereby reducing action hallucinations. Results in simulation and real-world environments show that our method, pre-trained exclusively on unlabeled human videos, performs competitively with state-of-the-art VLA models trained on massive annotated datasets, requiring only 50 trajectories for downstream adaptation.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

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

Clustering and Pruning in Causal Data Fusion

arXiv:2505.15215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data fusion, the process of combining observational and experimental data, can enable the identification of causal effects that would otherwise remain non-identifiable. Although identification algorithms have been developed for specific scenarios, do-calculus remains the only general-purpose tool for causal data fusion, particularly when variables are present in some data sources but not others. However, approaches based on do-calculus may encounter computational challenges as the number of variables increases and the causal graph grows in complexity. Consequently, there exists a need to reduce the size of such models while preserving the essential features. For this purpose, we propose pruning (removing unnecessary variables) and clustering (combining variables) as preprocessing operations for causal data fusion. We generalize earlier results on a single data source and derive conditions for applying pruning and clustering in the case of multiple data sources. We give sufficient conditions for inferring the identifiability or non-identifiability of a causal effect in a larger graph based on a smaller graph and show how to obtain the corresponding identifying functional for identifiable causal effects. Examples from epidemiology and social science demonstrate the use of the results.

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

Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence

While LLMs have substantially advanced text-to-code synthesis, many real programming tasks specify intent through visual artifacts such as screenshots, charts, documents, vector drawings, videos, and interactive states. These tasks require models to connect visual perception to executable programs, because correctness depends not only on syntax but also on layout, geometry, data semantics, editability, interaction behavior, and domain-specific constraints that apply after execution. This survey examines Multimodal Code Intelligence, covering systems that generate, edit, refine, execute, or reason with code under visually grounded inputs and outputs. We first formulate the field by the role that code plays in each task, distinguishing code as a rendered artifact, an editable symbolic structure, a scientific representation, an intermediate reasoning trace, or an executable policy or tool interface. We then organize benchmarks and methods into four domains: Graphical User Interface, Scientific Visualization, Structured Graphics, and Frontier Tasks and Frameworks. This taxonomy connects mature artifact-generation problems to emerging agentic and unified settings and allows us to compare how different tasks treat evidence of correctness. Looking ahead, we argue that future research may benefit from four verification-centered directions. Multi-signal validation can combine complementary evidence of correctness, multi-state verification can test behavior across execution trajectories, cross-task transfer testing can probe reusable visual-code skills, and verifiable agent traces can reveal whether agent actions are grounded in visual evidence. Together, these directions may move multimodal code generation from single-output imitation toward evidence-grounded executable systems.

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

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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

Knowing When to Ask: Self-Gated Clarification for Hierarchical Language Agents

arXiv:2606.11349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In hierarchical reasoning, failures often originate at intermediate decision points where the agent commits to a wrong branch without recognizing that it lacks critical information. Rather than treating clarification as an external uncertainty trigger, we propose ACTION-RATING, a formulation that places it inside the agent's action space on a shared ordinal scale with navigation, so that asking competes directly with acting at every decision point and help-seeking becomes observable at intermediate states. Two structurally distinct information-seeking modes emerge from the agent's own ratings: mandatory (no viable branch) and opportunistic (residual uncertainty despite a leading candidate). On Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification (30,000-node taxonomy, three benchmarks, 9~LLMs across 4 families), we observe a regime shift from mandatory to opportunistic clarification, with Information-Seeking Effectiveness (ISE), a local diagnostic defined as the fraction of help interactions followed by a correct next navigation step (not a final-task metric), rising from 50% to 74%. Three diagnostic contrasts fail to reproduce this structure. A separability test shows that the information-seeking pattern (mode split, ISE ranking) persists when answer quality is degraded (-18.8% accuracy), supporting an empirical separation between where an agent seeks help and the quality of the help it receives. Under the controlled answer channel, accuracy gains reach +16.2% at 10-digit; we read this as an upper bound on what better localization could unlock, not a deployment estimate.

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

Distribution-Agnostic Robust Trajectory Optimization via Chance-Constrained Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a distribution-agnostic robust trajectory-optimization framework based on chance-constrained reinforcement learning. The uncertainty is represented here through initial conditions and process noise, with the only requirement being that it can be sampled. A deterministic nominal trajectory is first computed offline, and reinforcement learning is then used only to robustify that baseline through a structured affine closed-loop correction law comprising a feedforward control adjustment and time-varying feedback gains. Probabilistic feasibility is enforced empirically through rollout-based upper-tail quantiles, while terminal dispersion is regulated through covariance-feasibility penalties. The framework is assessed on two materially different trajectory design problems. The flagship case study is a three-dimensional multi-impulse Earth-Mars transfer, where the learned policy is benchmarked against a recent robust trajectory-optimization reference under Gaussian uncertainty and then evaluated under bounded uniform uncertainty and under process disturbances not seen during training. The second case study is a stochastic atmospheric pinpoint rocket landing problem, used to assess portability to a short-horizon continuous-thrust setting with drag, mass depletion, and glide-slope constraints. The results show that the proposed framework can remain competitive in upper-tail fuel cost while preserving probabilistic feasibility, and that the same robustification scaffold can be carried across heterogeneous spacecraft trajectory planning problems without redesign of its core stochastic-control structure.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Sparsity, Superposition, and Forgetting: A Mechanistic Study of Representation Retention in Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.20431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) systems often forget previously acquired knowledge, yet the mechanisms driving forgetting remain hard to isolate in practice because real datasets entangle many factors. We present a controlled, toy-world framework that makes these mechanisms observable and testable. Using a synthetic generator-separator pipeline, we define ground-truth latent features, build tasks with tunable sparsity and overlap, and introduce measurable quantities for representation strength and superposition (directional overlap among features). We then study retention dynamics-the temporal change of representation strength by fitting sparse dynamical relations (via SINDy) between retention, superposition, and exposure history. A complementary task-level analysis based on effective rank characterizes how representational capacity is allocated across tasks. Our controlled experiments yield three takeaways. (1) Superposition tends to increase over time with transient dips at task boundaries, suggesting boundary-specific interference rather than steady drift. (2) Higher feature sparsity induces more superposition yet does not inevitably cause forgetting; when representations remain strong, forgetting can be reduced despite overlap. (3) Task-level effective rank grows with sparsity, indicating broader capacity usage under sparse regimes. Together, these results nuance the common intuition that more superposition leads to more forgetting by showing that overlap interacts with representation strength and capacity allocation. Our toy analysis provides falsifiable hypotheses and diagnostic tools for CL.

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

Equivariant Graph Neural Networks Improve Optical Spectra Prediction for Materials Screening

arXiv:2606.19133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalable prediction of optical spectra is a critical component of high-throughput materials screening for optoelectronic applications such as solar cells. Existing surrogate models are trained on spectra computed from lower levels of theory or rely on rotation-invariant scalar features, limiting their geometric expressiveness. We explore the use of equivariant graph neural networks for optical spectra prediction, adapting GotenNet to this task and evaluating it on multiple datasets including a recently published collection of 10,533 structures with spectra computed at the level of the random phase approximation (RPA). The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art, with the largest gains in the 0-8 eV range and on predicting the static real permittivity, both of particular relevance for thin-film optics.

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

Mirror Descent on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2603.17527v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we develop a Riemannian Mirror Descent (RMD) framework via reparameterization and further propose a stochastic variant of RMD. We also establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both RMD and stochastic RMD. As an application to the Stiefel manifold, our RMD framework reduces to the Curvilinear Gradient Descent (CGD) method proposed in [26]. Moreover, when specializing the stochastic RMD framework to the Stiefel setting, we obtain a stochastic extension of CGD, which effectively addresses large-scale manifold optimization problems.

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

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GraspLLM: Towards Zero-Shot Generalization on Text-Attributed Graphs with LLMs

Research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention recently due to its broad applications across various real-world data scenarios, such as citation networks, e-commerce platforms, social media, and web pages. Inspired by the remarkable semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been numerous attempts to integrate LLMs into TAGs. However, existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse graphs and tasks, and their ability to capture transferable graph structural patterns remains limited. To address this, we introduce the GraspLLM, a framework that combines Graph structural comprehension with semantic understanding prowess of LLMs to enhance the cross-dataset and cross-task generalizability. Specifically, we represent node texts from different graphs in a unified semantic space with a frozen general embedding model, on top of which we perform motif-aware contrastive learning across multiple motif-induced adjacency matrices to extract dataset-agnostic structural information. Then, with our proposed optimal contextual subgraph, we extract the most contextually relevant subgraph for each target node and align these subgraphs to the token space of LLM via an alignment projector. Extensive experiments on TAG benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains reveal that GraspLLM consistently outperforms previous LLM-based methods for TAGs, especially in zero-shot scenarios, highlighting its strong generalizability across different datasets and tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heinz217/GraspLLM.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

作者:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum optical photoelectron interferometry

arXiv:2606.13447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a general theoretical framework for multiphoton processes driven by quantum light fields, establishing a direct link between photon statistics and photoelectron observables. Our results show that the autocorrelation and cross-correlation functions, which quantify the underlying photon statistics, are directly mapped onto the resulting photoelectron spectra. Although our framework is broadly applicable, we demonstrate specifically in the example of reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions (RABBIT) the influence of the light statistical properties. In this approach, the amplitude, contrast and phase of the oscillations of the sideband signal as a function of pump-probe delay reveal the quantum nature of light. We analyze these observables across several quantum configurations, including correlated infrared and harmonic modes, as well as the uncorrelated case with non-classical harmonic statistics, thereby establishing a general framework for quantum-light RABBIT spectroscopy. We compare the analytical theory with numerical simulations for the case of classical harmonics and an infrared field in a squeezed coherent state, obtaining excellent agreement. Our results reveal how the interplay between classical and quantum correlations dictates the coherence of the photoemission process, providing a new window into the quantum-optical foundations of attosecond science.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

UniDexTok: A Unified Dexterous Hand Tokenizer from Real Data

Dexterous hands are essential for fine-grained manipulation, but their hardware designs vary substantially across embodiments. Differences in kinematics, joint definitions, and degrees of freedom make it difficult to define a shared state representation compared with parallel grippers. As a result, dexterous-hand data remains fragmented and difficult to use for joint training. In this work, we propose the Unified Dexterous Hand Model (UDHM), which maps human and robot hand states into a shared 22-DoF semantic interface. Based on UDHM, we introduce UniDexTok, a retargeting-free state tokenizer that learns embodiment-conditioned discrete tokens from standardized real joint states. UniDexTok provides a unified representation for heterogeneous dexterous hands without relying on retargeting or simulation data. Compared with the recent baseline UniHM, UniDexTok reduces MPJAE from 15.63 degrees to 0.16 degrees and MPJPE from 18.51 mm to 0.18 mm, corresponding to error reductions of 98.98% and 99.03%, respectively. These results improve reconstruction from centimeter-scale to sub-millimeter accuracy. Experiments further show that data from other embodiments improves target-embodiment reconstruction accuracy, demonstrating the benefit of cross-embodiment tokenization. UniDexTok also shows strong zero-shot and few-shot reconstruction ability when new dexterous hands are introduced.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Generativism: Toward a Learning Theory for the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.12441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The four dominant learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism show significant conceptual limitations as generative artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates in educational settings. These frameworks were formulated before the emergence of AI systems capable of generating, synthesizing, and reasoning about knowledge. This article critically examines each learning theory and identifies assumptions challenged by generative AI's affordances. Drawing on research in distributed cognition, extended mind, human-AI collaboration, AI literacy, cognitive offloading, and metacognition, the article proposes Generativism as a learning theory for the generative AI age. Generativism posits that learning increasingly occurs through the iterative co-construction of knowledge between human learners and AI systems. The proposed framework is organized around four principles: epistemic partnership, distributed agency, generative literacy, and adaptive metacognition. The framework offers a foundation for rethinking instructional design, learning, assessment, and expertise development in contexts where generative AI plays an integral role in cognition.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Matrix Product States for Modulated Symmetries: SPT, LSM, and Beyond

arXiv:2603.19189v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matrix product states (MPS) provide a powerful framework for characterizing one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of matter and for formulating Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM)-type constraints. Here we generalize the MPS formalism to translationally invariant systems with general modulated symmetries. We show that the standard symmetry "push-through" condition for conventional global symmetry must be revised to account for symmetry modulation, and we derive the appropriate generalized condition. Using this generalized push-through structure, we classify one-dimensional SPT phases with modulated symmetries and formulate LSM-type constraints within the same MPS-based framework.

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

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

作者:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.