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 (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

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

Graph-ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of Graphical PLCopen XML Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCopen XML defines two encoding formats for IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram programs: a textual encoding using elements, and a graphical encoding that represents rung logic as a directed graph of localId/refLocalId connections. ESBMC-PLC supported the textual format but parsed graphical exports from CONTROLLINO, Beremiz, and OpenPLC Editor into an empty GOTO intermediate representation, causing vacuous verification success. This paper presents Graph-ESBMC-PLC, which closes this gap with a DFS-based graphical LD resolver. The resolver traverses the connection graph from leftPowerRail to each coil, extracts rung paths as Boolean contact conjunctions, and applies a three-tier I/O inference scheme. Ordering coils by rightPowerRail connectionPointIn sequence ensures SET coils process before RESET coils, matching IEC scan-cycle semantics. The graphical-to-IR conversion leaves the ESBMC backend unchanged. Validation on 3 graphical LD programs from CONTROLLINO/OpenPLC Editor shows all produce full GOTO IR with nondeterministic inputs and rung logic, versus the empty IR previously. All 3 verify SAFE at k=2 under 70ms. The 11 textual LD benchmarks are fully preserved, with no regression. Two Beremiz examples with no LD content or unsupported timer semantics are reported as discovered limitations. Artifact at Zenodo (DantasCordeiro2026graphical, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20699856).

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Scaling limits of multitype Bienaymé trees

arXiv:2507.23241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider critical multitype Bienaymé trees that are either irreducible or possess a critical irreducible component with attached subcritical components. These trees are studied under two distinct conditioning frameworks: first, conditioning on the value of a linear combination of the numbers of vertices of given types; and second, conditioning on the precise number of vertices belonging to a selected subset of types. We prove that, under a finite exponential moment condition, the scaling limit as the tree size tends to infinity is given by the Brownian Continuum Random Tree. Additionally, we establish strong nonasymptotic tail bounds for the height of such trees. Our main tools include a flattening operation applied to multitype trees and sharp estimates regarding the structure of monotype trees with a given sequence of degrees.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark

Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensing enables time-resolved photon measurements with extreme sensitivity, offering unique potential for active 3D perception in photon-starved scenarios.However, real-world single photon perception remains fundamentally challenging due to unique measurement noise and complex multi-return transient phenomena, which jointly complicate geometric reconstruction and semantic scene understanding. Despite growing interest in SPAD-based sensing, existing studies are largely limited to simulated data or small-scale controlled captures. As a result, systematic evaluation of real-world single photon perception across depth estimation, multi-view reconstruction, and 3D semantic understanding remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SP-TransientBench (STB), a real-captured multi-task benchmark for single photon perception. SP-TransientBenc comprises 10 diverse scenes and 10,297 views captured using a solid-state single-photon LiDAR at $256\times192$ resolution. Each view provides full time-of-flight histograms with multi-return behavior,standardized metadata, and calibrated camera poses for multi-view evaluation. We further provide 13-class 3D semantic annotations for selected scenes. By providing dedicated data splits and evaluation protocols for each task, STB enables consistent and reproducible benchmarking of real-world single photon perception across multiple 3D vision problems. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators

arXiv:2606.12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved are qualitatively different from those studied classically. Mutations are no longer random; an ML algorithm mutates a solution with the goal of improving an objective. Similarly, recombination is not based on random collages of parent solutions. Instead, it is an ML optimization-based operator whose goal is to synthesize improved solutions from its inputs. Thus, these mutation and recombination operators are more likely to improve the objective, but their computational cost is much higher. We introduce a general model of genetic algorithms and formulating optimization in this model as a query-complexity problem, using the language of reinforcement learning. We then study specialized models. We show that some optimization problems require generation, mutation, and recombination to be solved. We then obtain qualitatively tight algorithms for a family of problems within this framework that captures the nontrivial role of diversity in the solution pool, a key feature of practical ML genetic algorithms.

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

Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems

arXiv:2606.15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse. Existing vetting usually evaluates each skill in isolation, while real agent tasks often invoke multiple skills in a shared execution context. This creates Skill Composition Risk (SCR): a skill that appears benign alone can become harmful when its outputs, trust signals, authorization cues, or side effects influence later invocations along an activated path. We introduce SCR-Bench to evaluate this risk in controlled, sandboxed skill environments. Rather than relying only on textual intent or surface behavior, SCR-Bench records downstream state changes and path-level outcomes across composed skill executions. It contains three sub-benchmarks: SCR-CapFlow for capability-flow composition, SCR-TrustLift for trust-transfer composition, and SCR-AuthBlur for authorization-confusion composition. Across SCR-Bench, composed paths expose risks that are largely absent under isolated evaluation. In SCR-CapFlow, attack success rate reaches 33.6 percent under composition, compared with near-zero isolated baselines. In SCR-TrustLift, attack success rate exceeds 96.5 percent on four of five backends. In SCR-AuthBlur, the risky-approval rate increases by 71.8 percent relative to the L0 isolated baseline under the L1 context setting. These results show that agent skill security should be assessed at the level of activated paths rather than isolated artifacts. SCR and SCR-Bench provide a foundation for path-aware risk evaluation and defense in LLM agent skill ecosystems. Benchmark: https://github.com/saint-viperx/SCR_Bench.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

EDoF-NeRF: extended depth-of-field neural radiance fields using a coded aperture camera

We propose a method for extending the depth-of-field (DoF) to construct high-fidelity neural radiance fields (NeRF) – an emerging technique for rendering photorealistic novel views from a dataset of images captured at different viewpoints, based on implicit neural representations. The trade-off between DoF and light quantity is inherent not only in conventional cameras but also in NeRF, since the datasets used by NeRF are captured by these cameras. To address this issue, we introduce a coded aperture placed at the camera pupil, preserving spatial frequency components under defocused conditions. We develop a camera model incorporating coded apertures into NeRF, allowing direct input of coded images and enabling the generation of novel views with an extended DoF. We validate the proposed method, termed extended DoF-NeRF (EDoF-NeRF), through simulations and experiments, demonstrating its superior performance compared to conventional aperture cameras.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Robust Point Cloud Analysis Framework Inspired By Primary Visual Cortex

Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.

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

Do we have the knowledge we need? Rethinking human-AI decision-making in corporations

arXiv:2606.15575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizational knowledge is fragmented across a variety of software systems, tacit expertise, and manual documents that have traditionally been designed for human consumption. As AI systems are increasingly deployed and granted decision-making roles, they require access to this knowledge. This raises two questions: how should organizations store and maintain knowledge so that it remains accessible to both humans and future AI systems, and how should agency be allocated between humans and AI across tasks with different risks and levels of uncertainty? In this position paper, we describe how organizational knowledge evolves and contribute a framework that maps task attributes and knowledge availability to recommended agency allocations and control mechanisms. We illustrate the applicability of the framework on two different manufacturing tasks: a routine operation (visual quality inspection) and a one-off strategic decision (factory location), and conclude with opportunities for future research.

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

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance. However, RL-based approaches still struggle with complex queries due to two key limitations: insufficient stepwise execution-aware reasoning grounded in database feedback, and the lack of process-level rewards for guiding reasoning optimization. To address these issues, we propose CoCTE, a divide-and-conquer and execution-aware reasoning framework that progressively composes SQL queries through intermediate view validation and structured Common Table Expressions (CTEs), improving both accuracy and interpretability. To realize a CoCTE reasoning process, we develop Reward-SQL, a unified approach with three stages: (1) model initialization, which equips LLMs with structured CoCTE reasoning capabilities; (2) process reward design, which delivers fine-grained, execution-aware supervision; and (3) process-supervised RL and inference, which integrates process rewards into training and guides the inference stage by process rewards. This paper addresses the core challenges in Reward-SQL and makes the following contributions. We introduce a process reward model (PRM) that combines execution-aware trajectory scoring with entropy-based step weighting, providing dense and interpretable supervision across reasoning steps. We integrate PRM into both RL training and inference stages, stabilizing optimization and improving trajectory exploration with process-level signals. Experiments show that Reward-SQL significantly outperforms baselines with comparable model sizes, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization.

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

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

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

Medical world models: representing medical states, modelling clinical dynamics and guiding intervention policies

arXiv:2606.16721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical diagnosis and treatment are dynamic processes in which patient states evolve over time and clinical interventions alter future outcomes. Although current medical AI can detect disease, estimate risk and generate reports, many systems still return static labels or scores, offering limited insight into how illness may progress or how alternative interventions may reshape its trajectory. Medical world models adapt the world-model idea from artificial intelligence to healthcare by learning internal simulators of patient-state dynamics. Their long-term goal is to help clinicians anticipate deterioration, compare treatment-conditioned futures and tailor care to individual patients. Yet relevant work remains scattered across foundation models, longitudinal modelling, disease simulation, treatment-effect estimation, reinforcement learning and digital twins. To bridge this gap, this review outlines a roadmap for advancing medical AI from isolated diagnosis and prediction toward medical world models that simulate disease evolution and support intervention decisions. This roadmap is organized around three coupled capabilities: patient-state construction, clinical dynamics modelling and intervention decision support. Across representative systems, the comparison highlights what each capability contributes and how partial components can be integrated into more mature perception–dynamics–planning systems. Finally, we identify the challenges involved in turning plausible rollouts into clinically useful simulators. Related literature is available at https://github.com/1999kevin/awesome_medical_world_models.

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

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

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

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

On real-time calibrated prediction for complex model-based decision support in pandemics: Part 2

by Trevelyan J. McKinley, Daniel B. Williamson, Xiaoyu Xiong, James M. Salter, Robert Challen, Leon Danon, Ben Youngman, Doug McNeall Calibration of complex stochastic infectious disease models is challenging. These often have high-dimensional input and output spaces, with the models exhibiting complex, non-linear dynamics. Coupled with a paucity of necessary data, this results in a large number of non-ignorable hidden states that must be handled by the inference routine. Likelihood-based approaches to this missing data problem are very flexible, but challenging to scale, due to having to monitor and update these hidden states. Methods based on simulating the hidden states directly from the model-of-interest have an advantage that they are often more straightforward to code, and thus are easier to implement and adapt in real-time. However, these often require evaluating very large numbers of simulations, rendering them infeasible for many large-scale problems. We present a framework for using emulation-based methods to calibrate a large-scale, stochastic, age-structured, spatial meta-population model of COVID-19 transmission in England and Wales. By embedding a model discrepancy process into the simulation model, and combining this with particle filtering, we show that it is possible to calibrate complex models to high-dimensional data by emulating the log-likelihood surface instead of individual data points. The use of embedded model discrepancy also helps to alleviate other key challenges, such as the introduction of infection across space and time. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges remaining and key areas for future work.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Same-Origin Policy for Agentic Browsers

Agentic browsers integrate autonomous AI agents into web browsers, enabling users to accomplish web tasks through natural-language instructions. The same-origin policy (SOP) is a fundamental browser security mechanism that prevents unauthorized automated cross-origin data flows induced by scripts. However, whether SOP remains effective in agentic browsers is an open question that has not been systematically studied. In this work, we bridge this gap. We first observe that an agentic browser can itself serve as an automated channel for cross-origin data flows, potentially leading to SOP violations. To investigate this phenomenon, we construct SOPBench, a benchmark for evaluating SOP violations in agentic browsers. Our evaluation shows that existing agentic browsers frequently violate SOP, both in benign settings and under attacks. To address this problem, we propose SOPGuard, an SOP enforcement mechanism tailored to agentic browsers. We implement SOPGuard in BrowserOS, an open-source agentic browser. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SOPGuard effectively enforces SOP while preserving utility and incurring only a small runtime overhead. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wxl-lxw/BrowserOS-SOPGuard.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The ancestors of eukaryotic cells contained a mix of genes from various microbes

作者: 未知作者

Reconstruction of the ancestral gene repertoire of eukaryotic cells reveals traces of a series of close, long-term interactions with diverse microorganisms, and a role of viruses in gene exchange. The findings challenge the view that eukaryotic cells evolved from a simple merger of just two organisms. A series of gene-transfer events might have taken place in complex microbial communities.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.