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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.

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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Authors:
Philippa Clarke↗

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

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

GeoCFNet: Geometry-Aware Confidence Field Network for Robot-Assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Authors:
Rui Tang↗Guankun Wang↗Long Bai↗Haochen Yin↗Huxin Gao↗Jiewen Lai↗Jiazheng Wang↗Hongliang Ren↗

Advanced surgical robotics has made robot-assisted endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) a promising approach for the en-bloc resection of large lesions, with the potential to reduce recurrence and improve long-term outcomes. However, the technical complexity and risk of complications in ESD demand stable and precise visual guidance to maintain an accurate dissection corridor and a safe tissue margin. Dense confidence fields provide an effective representation for this purpose by describing both the preferred dissection region and its spatial transition to surrounding tissue. However, reliable confidence field estimation remains challenging in dynamic endoscopic scenes due to smoke, specular highlights, tissue deformation, weak texture, and the thin geometric structure of the target region. To address these challenges, we formulate dissection guidance as a geometry-aware confidence field estimation problem and propose GeoCFNet, a geometry-aware confidence field network built on a pretrained DINOv3 backbone. GeoCFNet integrates a Token-Differentiated Fusion module to aggregate class-token context with dense patch representations, a SegFormer decoder for confidence regression, and Geometry-Aware Spatial Regularization (GASR) to preserve spatial coherence and local geometric transitions. Experimental results show that GeoCFNet achieves RMSE 0.0480, PSNR 27.1995, SSIM 0.3397, and CC 0.2466, indicating accurate and geometrically stable confidence field estimation for robot-assisted ESD guidance.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Response-Aware Multimodal Learning for Post-Treatment Visual Acuity Forecasting

Authors:
Phuoc-Nguyen Bui↗Van-Vi Vo↗Duc-Tai Le↗Junghyun Bum↗Van-Nguyen Pham↗Ki-Young Kim↗Seung-Young Yu↗Hyunseung Choo↗

Long-term visual acuity (VA) forecasting after anti-VEGF therapy is important for counseling and follow-up planning in diabetic macular edema (DME), yet remains challenging when only early post-treatment findings are available. While prior OCT-based methods mainly focus on short-term response or single-endpoint prediction, multi-horizon VA forecasting from early longitudinal data remains insufficiently under-explored. In this study, we assembled a real-world cohort of 188 anti-VEGF–treated DME patients with paired baseline and month-1 OCT scans, along with tabular OCT-derived biomarkers and non-imaging clinical variables. Using only these early data, we formulate a multi-horizon VA forecasting problem aimed at predicting visual outcomes at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months, reflecting clinically meaningful follow-up intervals. We propose ReVA, a response-aware multimodal framework that combines baseline and month-1 OCT features with tabular variables to capture disease status and early treatment response. ReVA integrates spatial OCT attention, dependency-aware tabular encoding, and cross-modal fusion to predict patient-specific long-term VA trajectories. The proposed framework achieves MAE=0.1246, RMSE=0.1621, and R^2=0.6064 for 24-month VA prediction, with consistent performance across all forecast horizons. Our findings show that incorporating early treatment-response signals enables clinically meaningful long-term visual acuity forecasting, supporting data-driven decision support for routine anti-VEGF management. Code and pretrained models will be released on https://github.com/nguyenpbui/ReVA.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Authors:
Yurun Chen↗Tianyuan Gao↗Yizhong Ge↗Shikun Ban↗Yizhou Wang↗Hongkai Xiong↗Wenjun Zeng↗Wentao Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fabricating fiber cavity mirror substrates compatible with high coupling efficiency

Authors:
Michael Caouette-Mansour↗Thomas J. Clark↗Valeria Mosso Tsedilkina↗Jack C. Sankey↗

arXiv:2606.12168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fiber optical cavities offer small mode volumes and correspondingly strong light-matter interactions in an open Fabry-Perot geometry. However, existing fabrication techniques do not reliably produce substrates with surface profiles amenable to high mode matching between the cavity mode and fiber core, thereby limiting the achievable collection efficiency. Here we present a technique to fabricate fiber mirror substrates while using $in situ$ reflectometry to constrain the achievable mode matching prior to coating. By measuring the back-reflection from freshly cleaved fiber tips, we pre-select 138 fibers compatible with 96.5-99.5% mode matching, and after a single CO$_2$ laser ablation pulse, these fibers remained compatible with 95.3-99.2\%. This simple technique provides rapid feedback during each stage of substrate fabrication, greatly enhancing the yield of viable fiber mirror substrates prior to (expensive) coating runs.

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

Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals

Authors:
Octavio Pappalardo↗

arXiv:2601.19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Another Look at Log-PCA for Probability Measures: A Dynamical Formulation and Statistical Convergence

Authors:
Peng Xu↗Changbo Zhu↗Young-Heon Kim↗Xiaohui Chen↗

arXiv:2606.17196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with learning principal variations of random probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^m$ under the Wasserstein geometry. We introduce a new dynamical formulation to interpret the log-PCA, a linearized principal geodesic analysis, as a variational approach. Our differentiable version, termed as the Wasserstein Tangential PCA (WT-PCA), captures the local principal modes of geodesic variations of a (weighted) probability measure on the Wasserstein space via its covariance operator at barycenter. Based on the dynamical perspective and leveraging parallel transport structure of the optimal transport problems, we derive a general statistical convergence rate of the empirical WT-PCA when estimated from data in terms of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the population and empirical barycenter reference measures.

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

KEPLA: A Knowledge-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Authors:
Han Liu↗Keyan Ding↗Peilin Chen↗Yinwei Wei↗Liqiang Nie↗Dapeng Wu↗Shiqi Wang↗

arXiv:2506.13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery. While recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising results, they often rely solely on structural features of proteins and ligands, overlooking their valuable biochemical knowledge associated with binding affinity. To address this limitation, we propose KEPLA, a novel deep learning framework that explicitly integrates prior knowledge from Gene Ontology and ligand properties to enhance prediction performance. KEPLA takes protein sequences and ligand molecular graphs as input and optimizes two complementary objectives: (1) aligning global representations with knowledge graph relations to capture domain-specific biochemical insights, and (2) leveraging cross attention between local representations to construct fine-grained joint embeddings for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets across both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that KEPLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, interpretability analyses based on knowledge graph relations and cross attention maps provide valuable insights into the underlying predictive mechanisms.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

RAGPPI: RAG Benchmark for Protein-Protein Interactions in Drug Discovery

Authors:
Youngseung Jeon↗Ziwen Li↗Thomas Li↗JiaSyuan Chang↗Morteza Ziyadi↗Xiang 'Anthony' Chen↗

Retrieving the biological impacts of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is essential for target identification (Target ID) in drug development. Given the vast number of proteins involved, this process remains time-consuming and challenging. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks have supported Target ID; however, no benchmark currently exists for identifying the biological impacts of PPIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RAG Benchmark for PPIs (RAGPPI), a factual question-answer benchmark of 4,420 question-answer pairs that focus on the potential biological impacts of PPIs. Through interviews with experts, we identified criteria for a benchmark dataset, such as a type of QA and source. We built a gold-standard dataset (500 QA pairs) through expert-driven data annotation. We developed an ensemble auto-evaluation LLM that incorporates expert labeling characteristics, average fact-abstract similarity (F1), and low-similarity fact counts (F2), enabling the construction of a silver-standard dataset (3,720 QA pairs). We are committed to maintaining RAGPPI as a resource to support the research community in advancing RAG systems for drug discovery QA solutions.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

Authors:
Evgenii E. Narimanov↗

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.

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

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

Authors:
Seyed Morteza Ahmadian↗Paolo Monti↗Carlos Natalino↗

arXiv:2606.18000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.

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

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Authors:
Aditya Sharma↗Vinti Agarwal↗Rajesh Kumar↗

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

Authors:
N. L. Diaz↗M. Cerezo↗Paolo Braccia↗

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Authors:
Sai Ashish Somayajula↗Marianne Menglin Liu↗Chuan Lei↗Fjona Parllaku↗Daniel Garcia↗Rongguang Wang↗Syed Fahad Allam Shah↗Ankan Bansal↗Sujeeth Bharadwaj↗Tao Sheng↗Sujith Ravi↗Dan Roth↗…

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

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

REVES: REvision and VErification–Augmented Training for Test-Time Scaling

Authors:
Yuanxin Liu↗Ruida Zhou↗Xinyan Zhao↗Amr Sharaf↗Hongzhou Lin↗Arijit Biswas↗Mohammad Ghavamzadeh↗Zhaoran Wang↗Mingyi Hong↗

Test-time scaling via sequential revision has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, standard post-training methods primarily optimize single-shot objectives, creating a fundamental misalignment with multi-step inference dynamics. While recent work treats this as multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL), conventional approaches optimize over the multi-step trajectories directly, failing to further exploit the high-quality mistakes in intermediate steps that model can learn from correcting them. We propose a two-stage iterative framework that alternates between online data/prompt augmentation and policy optimization. By converting the intermediate steps (``near-miss'' answers) in the successful recovery trajectories into decoupled revision and verification prompts, our approach concentrates training on both effective answer transformation and error identification. This approach enables efficient off-policy data generation and reduces the computational overhead of long-horizon sampling compared to standard multi-turn RL. On LiveCodeBench, using publicly available test cases as feedback, we observe gains of +6.5 points over the RL baseline and +4.0 points over standard multi-turn training. Beyond coding, our approach matches the previously reported SOTA result on circle packing while using the smallest base model (4B) and far fewer rollouts than the much larger evolutionary search systems. Math results under ground-truth verification further confirm improved correction ability. It also generalizes to out-of-distribution constraint-satisfaction puzzles such as n\_queens and mini\_sudoku, where correctness is defined entirely by problem constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/yxliu02/REVES.git.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

THEOBROMA: an aggregated open database of 1.13 million natural products with per-compound license auditing, three-tier classification, and stereochemistry-aware deduplication

Authors:
Klamt↗Jaczkowski↗Franke↗Nejdl↗

Natural products remain one of the most productive sources of pharmacologically active compounds for drug discovery, yet the current open aggregator landscape attributes licenses at database rather than compound granularity, with consequences that have become tangible as the field grows. A recent relicensing event in one constituent source (the September 2024 transition of the Natural Products Atlas to CC BY-NC 4.0) demonstrates how database-level licensing propagates across an aggregate and motivates the per-compound audit framework presented here. The same peer cohort separately leaves classification provenance and stereoisomer-family relations coarser than either layer warrants. THEOBROMA, accessible at url{https://theobroma.l3s.uni-hannover.de}, integrates 1{,}133{,}004 natural products from 29 open sources under a per-compound license audit that resolves each compound's license tier across all attesting sources under a most-restrictive-wins rule, identifying 900{,}170 compounds (79.4%) under open-use licenses and exposing the per-source attestation chain and resolved tier through a dedicated audit endpoint and a query-time license filter. A three-tier classification stratifies 89.3% coverage into 35.1% curated, 43.9% high-confidence inferred, and 10.3% exploratory tiers, with 486{,}215 stereoisomer families preserved by full 27-character InChIKey deduplication and exposed via a dedicated texttt{/api/stereoisomers/} endpoint and a radial-family display. Per-compound license provenance is the primary differentiator. Classification stratification and stereoisomer-family exposure add finer-grained access to two related axes, supporting license-compatible virtual screening and isomer-specific bioactivity analysis at corpus scale. As an evolving open resource, THEOBROMA pairs continuous pipeline maintenance with interactive geographic, taxonomic, and chemical-space exploration.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

Authors:
Soham Gadgil↗Chris Lin↗Su-In Lee↗

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Stochastic Inflation

Authors:
Robson Christie↗Jaewoo Joo↗Greg Kaplanek↗Vincent Vennin↗David Wands↗

arXiv:2606.12636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate stochastic inflation in an open quantum system framework. The field coarse-grained in a patch of fixed physical size, and the total momentum of that patch, form a canonical pair and act on a one-mode Fock space which we identify as the "bulk". At each time step, new comoving modes join the coarse-grained patch and the bulk has to be redefined. This redefinition produces an entangled mode that is traced over, yielding a non-unitary evolution equation for the bulk's density matrix. For a free test field in de Sitter, one obtains GKLS dynamics, generated by an effective Hamiltonian and a single non-Hermitian Lindblad operator, hence diffusion and Hubble friction originate from the same quantum channel. The Wigner-Weyl transform of the GKLS equation leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner function, which matches the one that applies to the classical phase-space distribution of stochastic inflation. We also provide several schemes under which one can unravel the GKLS dynamics into stochastic Schrodinger equations when continuous measurements of the decoupled mode are performed, making contact with Langevin formulations of stochastic inflation. In the light-field regime, an additional overdamped reduction can be performed by integrating out the momentum variable in the Wigner distribution, leading to Starobinsky's slow-roll Fokker-Planck equation. In that regime, the purity of the patch is strongly suppressed. In contrast, for heavy fields, field diffusion is suppressed and the coarse-grained patch remains close to a pure underdamped oscillator, which prevents a classical stochastic treatment.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

Authors:
Xiwen Chen↗Wenhui Zhu↗Jingjing Wang↗Peijie Qiu↗Zhipeng Wang↗Huayu Li↗ZhengXiao He↗Xuanzhao Dong↗Prayag Tiwari↗Mingkun Xu↗Yujian Xiong↗Feng Luo↗…

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

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

Strategic Feature Selection

Authors:
Jivat Neet Kaur↗Pratik Patil↗Divya Shanmugam↗Emma Pierson↗Michael I. Jordan↗Nika Haghtalab↗Meena Jagadeesan↗Ahmed Alaa↗Serena Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

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

Clinically Aware Synthetic Image Generation for Concept Coverage in Chest X-ray Models

Authors:
Amy Rafferty↗Rishi Ramaesh↗Ajitha Rajan↗

Deep learning models for chest X-ray diagnosis are constrained by limited coverage of clinically meaningful concept combinations in publicly available training datasets. While synthetic image generation has been explored to increase data diversity, existing methods rarely enforce clinical or anatomical constraints, limiting utility for improving model reliability. We propose CARPA, a clinically aware and anatomically grounded framework for synthetic chest X-ray generation that applies targeted perturbations to clinical concept vectors while preserving anatomical structure. By producing anatomically faithful synthetic images with controlled concept insertions and deletions, CARPA expands clinically relevant concept coverage. We evaluate CARPA across seven backbone architectures by fine-tuning models on synthetic subsets and testing on a held-out MIMIC-CXR benchmark. Compared to prior concept perturbation approaches, fine-tuning on CARPA-generated images consistently improves precision-recall performance, reduces predictive uncertainty, and improves model calibration. Structural and semantic analyses demonstrate high anatomical fidelity, strong concept alignment, and low semantic uncertainty. Evaluation by two expert radiologists further confirms realism and clinical agreement. Together, these results show that anatomically grounded concept perturbations enable more effective use of synthetic data, improving both performance and reliability of chest X-ray classification models and supporting safer clinical deployment.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MCompassRAG: Topic Metadata as a Semantic Compass for Paragraph-Level Retrieval

Authors:
Amirhossein Abaskohi↗Raymond Li↗Gaetano Cimino↗Peter West↗Giuseppe Carenini↗Issam H. Laradji↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend critically on how documents are chunked and searched. Fine-grained chunks can improve retrieval precision but expand the search space, increasing latency and cost; larger chunks reduce the number of candidates but make dense similarity less reliable, as the representation for each chunk mixes multiple topics and introduces more semantic noise. This trade-off becomes especially limiting in deep research tasks, where retrieval must be both fast and precise across large, heterogeneous corpora. We introduce MCompassRAG, a metadata-guided retrieval framework that uses topic-level signals as a semantic compass for selecting relevant evidence. Instead of relying only on cosine similarity between queries and noisy chunk embeddings, MCompassRAG enriches chunk representations with topic metadata in the same embedding space and trains a lightweight retriever through LLM-teacher distillation. At inference time, MCompassRAG performs topic-aware retrieval without additional LLM calls, improving both efficiency and evidence quality. Across six complex retrieval benchmarks, MCompassRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 8.24% on average with over 5 times lower latency than the strongest efficient RAG baselines. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/MCompassRAG.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PO-PDDL: Learning Symbolic POMDPs from Visual Demonstrations for Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

Authors:
Wenjing Tang↗Xuanjin Jin↗Yuan Liu↗Renming Huang↗Cewu Lu↗Panpan Cai↗

arXiv:2606.15654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robot task planning must operate under both stochastic action execution and partial observability, yet constructing Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) models for real robotics domains remains difficult and labor-intensive. We introduce PO-PDDL, a symbolic formulation of POMDPs that preserves the relational structure and LLM-friendly syntax of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), while explicitly modeling partial observability, stochasticity, and beliefs. Building on this formulation, we propose a demonstration-driven pipeline for learning PO-PDDL models. The proposed method reconstructs latent symbolic state trajectories from real-robot execution videos, identifies partial observability via inconsistencies between inferred states and visual observations, and learns stochastic transition and observation models accordingly. The resulting PO-PDDL domains are reusable across tasks and enable online belief-space planning under both perception and execution uncertainty. Experiments on real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks show that our method consistently outperforms existing PDDL and POMDP model-learning approaches, achieving robust task planning under uncertainty with significantly lower planning cost.

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25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

Authors:
Thibaut Lemoine↗Myl\`ene Ma\"ida↗

arXiv:2511.08288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the large-$N$ asymptotics of the central trace of the heat kernel on compact classical groups. For every classical family $G_N\subset \mathrm{GL}_N(\C)$, we prove a full large-$N$ asymptotic expansion, using a highest weights/partitions correspondence adapted to the large-rank regime, under which the eigenvalues of the Laplace–Beltrami operator stabilize as observables in the algebra of shifted symmetric functions. Then, we prove a random surface representation of the trace in terms of ramified coverings of the torus. We provide two independent applications: an explicit large-rank counting law for the Casimir spectrum, with exponential Hardy–Ramanujan-type growth in contrast with the polynomial behavior of Weyl's law at fixed rank, and a rigorous probabilistic formulation of the Yang–Mills/Hurwitz duality on a two-dimensional torus initiated by Gross and Taylor, completing a previous work of the authors. We also extend this duality to a Yang–Mills/Gromov–Witten duality by expressing the coefficients of the central heat trace as explicit functionals of the generating function of Gromov–Witten invariants.

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