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.CV) 2026-06-16

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

作者:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

Machine-learned particle flow as a foundation model for collider physics

arXiv:2606.14373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The workflow from particle collision to physics analysis passes through a series of reconstruction steps that are traditionally modular and disconnected, with no shared representation linking low-level detector data to high-level analysis tasks. We show that casting event reconstruction as a machine learning problem naturally produces such a shared representation. We repurpose a machine learning model trained for particle-flow reconstruction (MLPF) to perform three distinct analysis tasks: jet flavor identification, jet energy regression, and missing momentum regression. By appending the per-particle latent representations learned during reconstruction as additional input features, we substantially improve over baselines that use kinematic features alone. We further demonstrate that a single linear layer trained using only the latent representations achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baseline architectures, and outperforms the baseline for missing momentum regression with approximately 35 times fewer parameters. These results demonstrate that the latent representations learned during reconstruction encode essential physics information needed for downstream analysis, establishing MLPF as a foundation model and offering a concrete step toward an end-to-end pipeline from detector data to physics analysis.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature Environments

arXiv:2606.20235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agentic academic paper search. ScholarQuest is constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and four representative research intents, including method-oriented, setting-anchored, comparison-based, and scope-controlled queries. It further provides scalable answer construction and a shared retrieval backend ScholarBase for reproducible evaluation. Benchmarking results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing agent only achieves 0.314 Recall@100 and 0.355 Recall@All, indicating substantial room for improvement. In addition, analyses of search efficiency, intent-level robustness, and failure cases further highlight the benchmark's ability to provide multi-dimensional evaluation signals for academic paper search agents.

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

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evaluating Local Explainability Metrics for Machine Learning Models on Tabular Data

arXiv:2605.27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable. An explanation can appear plausible to humans but fail to capture the internal reasoning of a model, particularly when dealing with complex tabular data. This paper studies the trustworthiness of local explainability techniques when applied to complex tabular classification tasks, considering evaluated metrics for three main properties: faithfulness to the model's predictions, robustness to input data variations, and complexity of the explanation itself. A benchmark was performed for Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Feature Ablation techniques, across 32 datasets and different types of machine learning models. Model performance ranges were analyzed to identify two groups: consensus-correct, which are samples that all models predicted correctly, and consensus-wrong, samples that all models predicted incorrectly. The obtained results demonstrate that that the explanations are not always correlated with a model's predictive performance. Instead, dataset complexity and feature distributions seem to be the main factors affecting explanation quality and reliability.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

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

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Atypical Decay Rates for Atypical Heights in Random Recursive Trees

arXiv:2604.20139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We establish the large deviation probabilities for the height of random recursive trees, revealing polynomial upper-tail decay and stretched-exponential lower-tail decay. Remarkably, the lower tail features an atypical prefactor that grows to infinity more slowly than any $n$-fold iterated logarithm.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning-based multipoint optimization of fluidic injection parameters for improving nozzle performance

arXiv:2409.12707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fluidic injection offers a promising solution to improve the performance of the overexpanded single expansion ramp nozzles (SERNs) during vehicle acceleration. However, determining the injection parameters that yield the best overall performance across multiple nozzle operating conditions remains a challenge. The gradient-based optimization method requires gradients of injection parameters at each design point, which can lead to high computational costs when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This paper uses a pretrained neural network to replace CFD during optimization, enabling quick calculation of the nozzle flow field at multiple design points. Considering the physical characteristics of the nozzle flow field, a prior-based prediction strategy is adopted to enhance the model's accuracy. In addition, the neural network's back-propagation algorithm computes gradients quickly by running the computation only once, thereby greatly reducing gradient computation time compared to the finite difference method. As a test case, the average nozzle thrust coefficient of an SERN at seven design points is optimized, resulting in a 1.14\% improvement. The time cost is greatly reduced compared with traditional optimization methods, even when the time required to establish the training database is included.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

作者:

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.

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

GF-DiT: Scheduling Parallelism for Diffusion Transformer Serving

arXiv:2606.13501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for image and video generation, creating growing demand for efficient DiT serving. Existing systems assign each request a fixed parallel configuration throughout its lifetime. However, DiT workloads exhibit substantial heterogeneity across requests, execution stages, and system conditions, making static parallelism inefficient and often leading to poor GPU utilization and degraded service quality. This paper argues that DiT serving should treat GPU parallelism as a first-class schedulable resource. We present GF-DiT, a policy-programmable runtime for elastic DiT serving that dynamically adapts the parallelism of running requests according to workload demands and service objectives. GF-DiT introduces an asynchronous execution abstraction that decomposes requests into independently schedulable trajectory tasks and enables online GPU reallocation. To make elastic parallelism practical, GF-DiT further proposes group-free collectives, a lightweight communication abstraction that supports low-overhead online formation and reconfiguration of arbitrary execution groups. We implement GF-DiT in vLLM-Omni and evaluate it on representative image and video diffusion workloads. Compared with fixed-pipeline execution with static parallelism, GF-DiT improves throughput by up to 6.01$\times$, reduces mean latency by up to 95%, lowers SLO violation rates by up to 90%, and reduces communication-group setup overhead from 778 ms to approximately 60 $\mu$s.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose REST-TS (Residual-Exclusive Supervision for Text in Time Series), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Combining machine learning and iterative experiments to keep pace with emerging viral variants of concern

by Thomas Sheffield, Ryan C. Bruneau, Stephen Won, Kenneth L. Sale, Brooke Harmon, Le Thanh Mai Pham Modeling and predicting viral mutations before they emerge plays a crucial role in pandemic preparedness, enabling the early identification of emerging variants of concern (VOCs) and guiding timely updates to vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic strategies. However, existing machine learning models and large-scale experiments lose their predictive power as viral variants evolve further from the original strains in sequence space. Here, we present a scalable framework that integrates random forest and neural network machine learning models with targeted high-throughput experimentation to anticipate and evaluate emerging SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) variants. Using public datasets, we trained predictive models for binding to human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), RBD expression, and antibody escape, and refined these models through iterative integration of experimental data focused on over 200 variants derived from wild-type (WT) and Omicron strains. Through an indirect transfer learning approach, our machine learning models achieved high accuracy having correlation coefficients of up to 0.79 for antibody binding. The models were also generalizable across diverse antibody types including heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs) by encoding complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) as input features. This dynamic approach enables rapid assessment of emerging variants, facilities prioritization of the therapeutic strategies, and supports a proactive, data-driven response to evolving viral threats.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Two modes of aversive control in suicidality: joint computational modelling exposes regime-specific clinical signatures invisible to symptom-based stratification

Suicidal thoughts and behaviours (STBs) are heterogeneous in their proximal dynamics, planning, and stress-sensitivity, yet most subtyping efforts remain symptom-driven and rarely validated across independent datasets. Computational mixture modelling offers a principled alternative: by fitting explicit models of learning and action selection and partitioning individuals by their latent parameter profiles, it can identify mechanistically distinct control strategies invisible to cross-sectional symptom measurement. We applied this approach to aversive Go/NoGo performance, jointly clustering two independently collected STB-enriched samples (N = 50 and N = 184) using tasks with the same structure but different duration, reversal timing, and clinical instrumentation. Two recurrent behavioural regimes emerged: a fast/adaptive regime characterised by rapid policy updating and elevated feedback reactivity, and a slow/perseverative regime characterised by slow updating, high choice determinism, and a pronounced cost following contingency reversal. These regimes were stable across initialisations, recovered more parsimoniously in joint than independent solutions, and were largely orthogonal to symptom-based stratification. Critically, stratification by regime exposed clinical-computational coupling structures substantially attenuated in pooled analyses. Pooled, population-level associations were modest and anchored by a broad affective burden axis. Within the slow/perseverative regime, coupling reorganised around learning dynamics and internalizing burden (depression, hopelessness, and active suicidal ideation) with markedly larger effect sizes. Within the fast/adaptive regime, a dissociation between anxious-compulsive and antisocial-disinhibitory profiles emerged along the same computational axis, invisible at the population level. These findings support a view of suicidality heterogeneity in which clinically similar individuals differ in the control strategies they recruit under aversive uncertainty - variation that symptom measurement alone cannot capture.