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

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

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

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Next-Generation LLM Agent Systems: A Cross-Provider Empirical Extension

arXiv:2605.29874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do next-generation LLM agents inherit the cooperative biases documented in their predecessors, or does scale and provider diversity reshape equilibrium behaviour in competitive multi-agent settings? Willis et al. established a benchmark for this question using evolutionary game theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), finding consistent cooperative biases in ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We extend this benchmark to four frontier models released in 2025-2026 - Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4 Mini - applying the identical protocol across three prompting styles (Default, Prose, Self-Refine) and four population compositions (balanced and biased, with and without noise). Cooperative bias persists across providers (H1): ten of twelve model-prompt combinations favour cooperative equilibria in balanced noiseless conditions. Cross-provider divergence is substantial (H3): Gemini 2.5 Flash reaches up to 77% aggressive equilibria under biased conditions, while GPT-5.4 Mini reaches 70% cooperative equilibria under Self-Refine. Support for aggressive capability parity is partial (H2): Self-Refine raises ICD in all models and Gemini 3.1 Pro Refine achieves the highest ICD in the dataset (0.925), but Default and Prose prompts show no systematic narrowing. Evidence on noise robustness is directionally positive but not robustly confirmed (H4): with n=500 Moran iterations per condition, average noise sensitivity is about 6 percentage points for Claude Sonnet 4.6 versus 13 pp for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but this cross-study gap is not statistically significant once the predecessor's unreported sampling error is propagated. Provider identity, rather than model generation, is the strongest correlate of equilibrium outcomes; noise remains a universal challenge regardless of model size or vintage.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Formalizing Numerical Analysis: An Agent Pipeline and Quality Audit Beyond Kernel Acceptance

arXiv:2606.14000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that coding agents can formalize entire advanced mathematics textbooks in Lean 4, yet existing efforts concentrate on branches of mathematics already well-represented in mathlib and measure success solely through kernel acceptance. We address both limitations by applying a coding agent to formalize Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations, a textbook in numerical analysis that is largely absent from mathlib, stressing the agent's capacity to develop new theory from scratch. We further introduce a systematic, reproducible three-dimensional framework for evaluating the quality of agent-produced formalizations beyond compilation: semantic correctness, Mathlib reuse, and cross-file reuse via LLM-as-judge methods. Applying this framework to our own formalization and to the released outputs of RepoProver and M2F, we uncover recurring unfaithful formalization patterns, including incomplete multi-part statements, added weakening hypotheses, and parameter restrictions, that kernel acceptance entirely obscures. Our results suggest that compilation-based metrics substantially overstate formalization quality, and we provide a reproducible audit methodology to support more rigorous evaluation of future autoformalization systems.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

OracleScreen-LILRB4: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Myeloid Immune Checkpoint Binders Validated in Patient-Derived Cells

The identification of small molecule modulators of immune checkpoint proteins remains a significant challenge in drug discovery due to the flat, featureless nature of protein-protein interaction interfaces and the characteristically low hit rates observed in conventional high-throughput screening campaigns. Here we report OracleScreen-LILRB4, an ensemble machine learning framework trained on quantitative biophysical screening data from two structurally diverse compound libraries (19,800 compounds total) screened against the myeloid immune checkpoint leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor B4 (LILRB4/ILT3). By formulating binding prediction as a regression task targeting continuous {Delta}Fnorm values rather than binary hit classifications, OracleScreen-LILRB4 achieved a mean Spearman R of 0.61 and ROC-AUC of 0.86 under scaffold-aware cross-validation. Prospective virtual screening of a 45,760-member compound library and experimental validation of the top 200 predictions yielded a 28.5% hit rate, representing a 15.0-fold enrichment over baseline, with 16 compounds demonstrating nanomolar-affinity LILRB4 (ILT3) engagement. Lead compounds ORS-22 and ORS-14 restored anti-tumor immune activity across patient-derived colorectal cancer and acute myeloid leukemia co-culture systems, reversing SCG2-mediated immunosuppression and recovering cytotoxic T-cell function. These findings establish OracleScreen-LILRB4 as an effective computational framework for accelerating small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Isotropic random walks and Brownian diffusion on complex projective space

arXiv:2606.11438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that isotropic random walks on the complex projective space provide a canonical and analytically tractable stochastic-geometric framework for the exploration of quantum-state space. The approach combines harmonic analysis on compact rank-one symmetric spaces with stochastic pure-state evolution and yields explicit analytical expressions for transition kernels, fidelity statistics, and geometric observables associated with the Fubini–Study metric. In particular, the framework provides a solvable reference model for isotropic depolarization and Haar equilibration, reproducing Haar-random fidelity statistics and the invariant measure on projective Hilbert space without specifying a microscopic Lindblad generator. In the short-time regime, the stochastic evolution converges to Brownian diffusion generated by the Fubini–Study Laplace–Beltrami operator, while the long-time limit exhibits concentration-of-measure behaviour characteristic of high-dimensional random quantum states. We further derive analytical and asymptotic results for the first-passage-time problem, including closed-form expressions in the Brownian limit for the mean first passage time and the long-time tail of the first-passage-time distribution. For high-fidelity target states, the mean first passage time exhibits a strong dimension-dependent divergence originating from the concentration properties of the Fubini–Study geometry.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

09.
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.

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

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

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

Mixtures of Subspaces for Bandwidth Efficient Context Parallel Training

arXiv:2606.16384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretraining language models with extended context windows enhances their ability to leverage rich information during generation. Existing methods split input sequences into chunks, broadcast them across multiple devices, and compute attention block by block which incurs significant communication overhead. While feasible in high-speed clusters, these methods are impractical for decentralized training over low-bandwidth connections. We propose a compression method for communication-efficient context parallelism in decentralized settings, achieving a remarkable compression rate of over 95\% with negligible overhead and no loss in convergence. Our key insight is to exploit the intrinsic low-rank structure of activation outputs by dynamically constraining them to learned mixtures of subspaces via efficient reparameterizations. We demonstrate scaling billion-parameter decentralized models to context lengths exceeding 100K tokens on networks as slow as 300Mbps, matching the wall-clock convergence speed of centralized models on 100Gbps interconnects.

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

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Reliable are Fairness Audits with Unreliable Data?

arXiv:2506.23033v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness audits are a key component of responsible machine-learning deployment. Yet, audit-recommendation reliability under incomplete protected-label access is still poorly understood. In this work, we focused on protected-label missingness in fairness mitigation audits. We introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement already present under complete labels. Across ACS/Folktables tasks, missingness settings that retain some protected labels usually do not move selected mitigation methods beyond a complete-label seed-to-seed baseline. At $0%$ protected-label access, candidates collapse to an empirical-risk-minimization baseline and deterministic tie-breaking rather than revealing a broad missingness effect. We also found that threshold optimization can turn fairness gains on a single protected axis into intersectional harm above a seed baseline, and this threshold-optimizer finding persists under random-forest validation. Overall, our results highlight that protected-label missingness should be reported with seed-null calibration, candidate-set context, and intersectional consequences before it is treated as evidence of audit fragility.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Formalization for Automatic Proof Verification

arXiv:2605.20531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable verification of proofs remains a bottleneck for training and evaluating AI systems on hard mathematical reasoning. Fully formal proofs, in languages like Lean, are easy to verify because they are unambiguous and modular. Most proofs, particularly those written by AI systems, have neither property, and translating them into formal languages remains challenging in many frontier math settings. We propose Pseudo-Formalization (PF), a proof format that captures the modularity and precision of formal proofs while retaining the flexibility of natural language. A Pseudo-Formal proof is decomposed into self-contained modules, each stating its premises, conclusion, and proof in natural language. To verify the correctness of a regular natural language proof, an LLM translates it to Pseudo-Formal and then verifies each module independently, an algorithm we call Block Verification (BV). We evaluate PF+BV on two benchmarks spanning olympiad and research-level mathematics, where it pareto-dominates LLM-as-judge baselines on error-finding precision and recall. To support future work, we release our research-level proof verification benchmark ArxivMathGradingBench.

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

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion: Networked HIV Testing with Diffusion-Driven Network Samples

arXiv:2601.16233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and the University of Witwatersrand, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual deployment, directly supporting progress toward UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.3. While prior work has demonstrated the promise of intelligent algorithms for sequential, network-based HIV testing, existing approaches rely on assumptions that are impractical in our real-world implementations. Here, we study sequential testing on incrementally revealed disease networks and introduce Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion (PEGE), a novel framework that directly embeds a generative distribution over graph expansions into the decision-making policy rather than attempting explicit topological reconstruction. We further propose Dynamics-Driven Branching (DDB), a diffusion-based graph expansion model that supports decision making in PEGE and is designed for data-limited settings where forest structures arise naturally, as in our real-world referral process. Experiments on real HIV transmission networks show that the combined approach (PEGE + DDB) consistently outperforms baselines (e.g., 17.3% improvement in discounted reward and 15.4% more HIV detections with 25% of the population tested) and explore key tradeoffs that drive solution quality.

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

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Structure-Aware Text Recognition for Ancient Greek Critical Editions

Recent advances in visual language models (VLMs) have transformed end-to-end document understanding. However, their ability to interpret the complex layout semantics of historical scholarly texts remains limited. This paper investigates structure-aware text recognition for Ancient Greek critical editions, which have dense reference hierarchies and extensive marginal annotations. We introduce two novel resources: (i) a large-scale synthetic corpus of 185,000 page images generated from TEI/XML sources with controlled typographic and layout variation, and (ii) a curated benchmark of real scanned editions spanning more than a century of editorial and typographic practices. Using these datasets, we evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in current VLM architectures when confronted with highly structured historical documents. In zero-shot settings, most models significantly underperform compared to established off-the-shelf software. Nevertheless, the Qwen3VL-8B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a median Character Error Rate of 1.0\% on real scans. These results highlight both the current shortcomings and the future potential of VLMs for structure-aware recognition of complex scholarly documents.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation for Parameterized Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2603.13751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have achieved notable success in modeling dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). To avoid computationally expensive retraining under new physical conditions, parameterized PINNs (P$^2$INNs) commonly adapt pre-trained operators using singular value decomposition (SVD) for out-of-distribution (OOD) regimes. However, SVD-based fine-tuning often suffers from rigid subspace locking and truncation of important high-frequency spectral modes, limiting its ability to capture complex physical transitions. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods appear to be promising alternatives, applying conventional adapters such as LoRA to P$^2$INNs introduces a severe Pareto trade-off, as additive updates increase parameter overhead and disrupt the structured physical manifolds inherent in operator representations. To address these limitations, we propose Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation (MODE), a lightweight micro-architecture designed for physics operator adaptation. MODE decomposes physical evolution into complementary mechanisms including principal-spectrum dense mixing that enables cross-modal energy transfer within frozen orthogonal bases, residual-spectrum awakening that activates high-frequency spectral components through a single trainable scalar, and affine Galilean unlocking that explicitly isolates spatial translation dynamics. Experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks including the 1D Convection–Diffusion–Reaction equation and the 2D Helmholtz equation demonstrate that MODE achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization while preserving the minimal parameter complexity of native SVD and outperforming existing PEFT-based baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

What Uncertainties Do We Need for Dynamical Systems?

arXiv:2606.11988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has received considerable attention in machine learning research, mainly in the context of supervised learning but also in other settings such as generative modeling. In this paper, we offer a machine learning perspective on uncertainty modeling for dynamical systems, which has been studied much less so far. In particular, we ask: what uncertainties do we need for dynamical systems? We discuss sources of uncertainty, clarify their nature (aleatoric or epistemic), and consider how the objectives of representing and quantifying uncertainty vary across different tasks.

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

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Identification of Altered Potassium Channels for Drug Repurposing in Long COVID Patients

Long COVID (LC) is a complex condition characterized by persistent, chronic multisystem manifestations, with a significant proportion of patients exhibiting neurological symptoms. Human ion channels (HICs), particularly potassium channels, are abundantly expressed in the nervous system and linked to key metabolic processes, making them potential candidates for understanding LC pathophysiology and drug repurposing. Meta-analysis of RNA-Seq datasets from COVID-19 recovered and LC patients was performed to identify altered HICs in LC. Differential gene expression analysis, functional enrichment analysis, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) were performed to uncover key genes, pathways, and co-expression modules consisting of HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes. Drug-gene interaction analysis was performed to identify approved drugs targeting potential HICs. A total of 715 dysregulated genes, including eighteen HICs were identified, among which seven were potassium channels. Three significant modules containing HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes were identified and found to be associated with antigen processing and presentation, complement and coagulation cascades, and cytokine-related pathways. Approved drugs targeting KCNA6, KCNJ10, KCNN3, and KCNH4 were identified. With further experimental validation, these dysregulated potassium channels, supported by their co-expression networks and pathway associations, may act as potential candidates for drug repurposing in LC patients.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TAROT: Task-Adaptive Refinement of LLM-prior Graphs for Few-shot Tabular Learning

arXiv:2606.11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult. Existing Traditional and LLM-based methods have demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot scenarios. However, traditional methods need additional training on unlabeled or generated data, which incur significant computational overhead. In addition, LLM-based methods that directly feed raw tabular data into LLMs raise privacy and compliance concerns. More importantly, both paradigms largely overlook the semantic relationships between features, which provide structural and semantic prior for constructing a semantic graph. Semantic graph is essential for modeling meaningful feature interactions in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose TAROT, a GNN-based framework that encodes the structural and semantic prior by constructing and refining a task-adaptive semantic graph from this prior, thereby improving predictive performance in few-shot tabular learning. TAROT first encodes heterogeneous tabular data into unified node semantic representations via a Unified Semantic Tabular Node Encoder (USTNE). Then, it prompts LLMs to infer the semantic relationship between features based on the task description and feature names to construct a semantic graph. To mitigate structural noise introduced by the hallucination of LLMs, TAROT introduces Task-adaptive Semantic Graph Refinement that prunes spurious or task-unrelated edges and adds missing task-related ones, aligning the graph structure with the downstream objective. Finally, a GNN performs message passing over the refined graph to capture task-related semantic dependencies for prediction. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TAROT, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain.

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

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.