Forskningsradar

Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 58718 artiklar

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable
arXiv:2606.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p<0.001. Reliability gains were largest on the least publicly represented dataset, a Qing-dynasty population register, consistent with a task-based production model with Frechet-distributed output quality. An 80-run ablation suggests that deterministic computation and human gates contribute independently, with exploratory evidence of complementarity. We interpret HLER as a research harness rather than an autonomous AI scientist: it sharply reduces failures, makes residual weaknesses more visible, and prevents unreliable claims from being advanced as publication-ready outputs.
High-Order Spectral Element Methods for Wave Propagation on ARM Multicore CPU with SME: Optimizations and Implications
arXiv:2606.12850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wave propagation based on the spectral element method (SEM) is a representative HPC workload, but existing SEM implementations are not well matched to emerging ARM multicore CPUs with Scalable Matrix Extension (SME). We present an SME-enabled optimization of \textsc{SPECFEM3D} on the emerging LX2 processor that combines an SME-aware batched small-matrix kernel for SEM tensor-product operators, a memory-aware hybrid MPI+OpenMP execution scheme for limited-HBM systems, and a dispersion-based iso-accuracy study of the $(h,p)$ tradeoff. At fixed polynomial order, the optimized implementation improves full-application performance by 4--6$\times$ over the original code and delivers clear gains over optimized non-SME CPU baselines. Beyond these implementation-level gains, our results suggest that SME shifts the performance-favorable operating point toward higher polynomial orders along the dispersion-based iso-accuracy frontier, further reducing time-to-solution and working-set size. These results indicate that SME affects not only kernel efficiency, but also the practical discretization tradeoff for SEM on modern ARM multicore platforms.
SciR: A Controllable Benchmark for Scientific Reasoning in LLMs
arXiv:2606.13020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction. Reliably evaluating LLMs on these in scientific settings is currently out of reach: scientific benchmarks built on human annotations are costly and lack mechanistic ground truth, while synthetic logical-reasoning benchmarks do not resemble real scientific documents. We introduce SciR, a benchmark that combines multi-paradigm reasoning with controllable scientific rendering, anchored on three paradigmatic scientific problems. Tasks are generated from formal objects (deduction tree, inductive rule hypothesis, causal graph) to guarantee verifiable answers, then rendered into multi-document scientific discourse via per-track domain-tuned genres. The construction lets us independently vary two difficulty axes: how hard it is to extract the key information needed for inference, and how hard the principled inference itself is. We test six models. Both axes hurt every model, and their effects compound. The rendering even hurts neurosymbolic pipelines, which hand inference to a verified solver. The two axes yield a per-model extraction-vs-inference profile: for instance, reasoning models like deepseek-r1 mostly surpass non-reasoning instruct models on the inference axis. To our knowledge, SciR is the first multi-paradigm scientific-reasoning benchmark with parametric control on both extraction and inference difficulty.
Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI
arXiv:2606.12713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five ordinal criteria for assessing the adjudicative fitness of candidate definitions and a structured governance audit of authorship, interest, certification, external verification and revision authority. The artifact is demonstrated on five prominent measurement families and one deflationary boundary position in a documented corpus and then stress-tested against a stylized strong arrival claim: that current generative systems constitute AGI because they outperform a well-educated adult on many cognitive tasks. On evidence from the cited 2024-2025 sources, the claim was certifiable only under a performance-based operationalization; capability-ontology, psychometric and skill-acquisition approaches did not certify it, the economic family remains indeterminate and the deflationary position refuses binary adjudication. The contribution is a novel integration and operationalization, not an empirical validation: independent application, inter-rater testing and author-external cases remain necessary. The paper further proposes definitional sovereignty as an enabling component of algorithmic sovereignty: the institutional capacity to contest, certify and revise imported technological categories under public accountability.
A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition
arXiv:2606.13030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.
GeoCFNet: Geometry-Aware Confidence Field Network for Robot-Assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection
arXiv:2606.13032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment
arXiv:2606.13035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.
Radiology-Report Semantic Modelling and Host-Response Laboratory Biomarkers for Multimodal Survival Prediction in Lung Cancer
arXiv:2606.13043v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: TNM staging is essential for lung cancer management, but patients within the same anatomic stage often show heterogeneous survival outcomes. We developed a multimodal adaptive risk score (AMRS) that integrates radiology-report semantics with routinely available clinical laboratory biomarkers. In a retrospective two-center cohort, 1129 patients diagnosed between December 2017 and February 2026 were screened; 574 patients were included after exclusion for short follow-up or missing imaging reports and were split into training (n = 459) and test (n = 115) cohorts. Radiology reports were encoded with a domain-adapted MC-BERT branch to capture imaging-derived semantic information, while clinical and laboratory variables were modeled after Mahalanobis-distance-based imputation using random survival forests. Weighted risk fusion generated the final patient-level score. AMRS achieved C-index values of 0.920 in training and 0.849 in testing, and separated survival trajectories across clinical subgroups and TNM-related strata. SHAP analysis identified hematologic, inflammatory, coagulation, nutritional, tumor-marker, organ-function, and age-related contributors. AMRS may complement TNM staging in imaging-centered oncology workflows, but prospective validation, calibration, ablation testing, and clinical-utility assessment are required before deployment.
Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606.13106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.
Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning
arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.
An Extensible and Lightweight Unified Architecture for Demosaicing Pixel-bin Image Sensors
arXiv:2606.13136v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.
Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment
arXiv:2606.13176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.
LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset
arXiv:2606.13184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.
Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance
arXiv:2606.13240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.
A $q$-analogue of the rational normal curve and linearized Reed-Solomon codes
arXiv:2606.13246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The relationship between linear codes in the Hamming metric and projective algebraic varieties has led to deep interactions between coding theory and algebraic geometry, with classical examples such as Reed-Solomon codes and the rational normal curve. On the other hand, the sum-rank metric has recently gained attention due to applications in network coding, distributed storage, and post-quantum cryptography, with linearized Reed-Solomon codes emerging as optimal constructions. Despite recent advances, their structural and geometric properties are still not fully understood, and existing distinguishers remain limited. In this paper, we develop a geometric framework for linearized Reed-Solomon codes by considering a $q$-analogue of the rational normal curve. This yields a geometric characterization for certain parameter choices and reveals that the corresponding sets of points satisfy unexpectedly many $(q+1)$-degree hypersurface conditions. Our approach extends Schur-product-based techniques from the Hamming and rank-metric settings to the sum-rank metric case. Finally, we study the Hilbert function of the associated coordinate ring, providing a detailed description of its behavior and identifying its regularity, which also sheds new light on Gabidulin codes.
Arch\^e, an orbital-free molecular dynamics code for fast production of equations of state
arXiv:2606.13283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Arch\^e, an orbital-free molecular dynamics (OFMD) code designed to produce equations of state (EOS) in the plasma state. Unlike in other OFMD codes, Arch\^e uses a self-consistent field (SCF) approach to compute the electronic density. This allows us to implement two algorithms that accelerate SCF convergence by a factor of up to six. First, the density is initialized using the results from the previous MD timestep to define a one-center profile, which is then applied to the new nuclei positions. Second, the initial and final densities are mixed at each SCF iteration in a proportion that minimizes an approximate free energy. We validate the code by comparing the calculated aluminum EOS to results obtained with the Kohn-Sham density functional theory software Abinit. Achieving agreement in the internal energy requires adding a correction related to the norm-conserving pseudopotential derived from an average-atom model. Performance is compared across CPU and GPU architectures, demonstrating an order-of-magnitude speedup for a single GPU compared to 256 CPUs. Arch\^e exhibits an overall linear computational complexity with respect to the number of atoms, as well as the number of real and reciprocal grid points. Execution time is weakly dependent on density; however, interestingly, it decreases as temperature increases -- in contrast to simulations based on Kohn-Sham orbitals.
Error Probability Analysis of Quantum Communication with Phase-squeezed M-PSK
arXiv:2606.13286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the symbol error probability (SEP) of phase-squeezed M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK). Since the relevant observable for M-PSK detection is the optical phase, we adopt the adaptive Mark-II receiver which is a physically realizable phase measurement. First, we develop a theoretical analysis based on the phase probability operator measure (POM) of the Mark-II scheme in the Fock basis. Then, we develop two SEP methods based on the statistics of the received PSK symbol and the error introduced by the Mark-II measurement. The first method derives the phase probability density induced by the squeezed state noise and incorporates the additional Mark-II phase uncertainty through an angular convolution. Since this convolution does not admit a simple closed form, we also introduce an effective tangential-variance model, which yields a closed form SEP expression in terms of the Owen's T-function. Numerical results show that phase squeezing substantially reduces the SEP of M-PSK compared to coherent state transmission, with greater gains for higher constellation orders. Notably, for the investigated scenario, squeezing can almost double the photon efficiency of M-PSK as the mean number of transmitted photons increases. Finally, the proposed approximations closely follow the Mark-II POM analysis, typically within an accuracy of 2-4 photons, and therefore provide accurate and computationally efficient tools for analyzing phase squeezed quantum M-PSK communication.
LingxiDiagBench: A Multi-Agent Framework for Benchmarking LLMs in Chinese Psychiatric Consultation and Diagnosis
arXiv:2602.09379v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mental disorders are highly prevalent worldwide, but the shortage of psychiatrists and the inherent subjectivity of interview-based diagnosis create substantial barriers to timely and consistent mental-health assessment. Progress in AI-assisted psychiatric diagnosis is constrained by the absence of benchmarks that simultaneously provide realistic patient simulation, clinician-verified diagnostic labels, and support for dynamic multi-turn consultation. We present LingxiDiagBench, a large-scale multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on both static diagnostic inference and dynamic multi-turn psychiatric consultation in Chinese. At its core is LingxiDiag-16K, a dataset of 16,000 EMR-aligned synthetic consultation dialogues designed to reproduce real clinical demographic and diagnostic distributions across 12 ICD-10 psychiatric categories. Through extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs, we establish key findings: (1) although LLMs achieve high accuracy on binary depression--anxiety classification (up to 92.3%), performance deteriorates substantially for depression--anxiety comorbidity recognition (43.0%) and 12-way differential diagnosis (28.5%); (2) dynamic consultation often underperforms static evaluation, indicating that ineffective information-gathering strategies significantly impair downstream diagnostic reasoning; (3) consultation quality assessed by LLM-as-a-Judge shows only moderate correlation with diagnostic accuracy, suggesting that well-structured questioning alone does not ensure correct diagnostic decisions. We release LingxiDiag-16K and the full evaluation framework to support reproducible research at https://github.com/Lingxi-mental-health/LingxiDiagBench.
HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers
arXiv:2606.13289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.
Formulation of stress-gradient models describing three-dimensional non-local medium
arXiv:2606.13297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on one-dimensional Eringen stress-gradient non-local model, by considering non-locality vector and nabla operator instead of non-locality scalar parameter and second order derivative, eight three-dimensional Eringen non-local models are formulated and classified into two groups: three scalar- and five tensor-type non-local models, according to the type of used non-locality operator which is obtained via various vector products of non-locality vector and nabla operator. The compatibility conditions ensuring symmetricity of Cauchy stress tensor in the case of the tensor-type model are derived. Furthermore, using the Fourier integral transform with respect to spatial coordinates, non-locality kernels (Green's functions), reflecting non-locality character of the material, are derived for each of the proposed models. Except for the one scalar-type model, all other models account for both local and non-local contributions to Cauchy stress tensor. Additionally, the isotropy of proposed models, as well as their non-local isotropy properties, both depending on non-locality kernel, are examined. All scalar-type models are isotropic, such that one of them is non-locally isotropic and two of them correspond to a non-locally anisotropic body, while all tensor-type models are anisotropic, such that there are two models that do not prefer direction of non-locality, thus corresponding to a non-locally isotropic body, whereas three models correspond to a body exhibiting non-locality along a specific direction(s), thus corresponding to a non-locally anisotropic body.
ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance
arXiv:2606.13304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.
Snake Polyominoes of Maximal Area in a Rectangle
arXiv:2606.13155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a discrete rectangle R of dimensions h x w, let W be the set of snake-like polyominoes contained in R represented as binary matrices, i.e. polyominoes whose underlying simple graph is a chain with respect to the 4-adjacency relation. We present an algorithm that generates W for any h and w. Also, let a be the maximal area that can be realized by an element of W. We provide exact formulas of a for h <= 5 and any w.
Emo-LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization for Fine-Grained Emotion Intensity Control in LLM-based Text-to-Speech
arXiv:2606.13006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems enable prompt-conditioned emotional control but struggle with fine-grained emotion intensity due to the semantic -- acoustic gap between text and speech. To address this challenge, we formulate emotion intensity control in LLM-based TTS as a learning-to-rank problem and propose Emo-LiPO, a listwise preference optimization framework that aligns prompt-conditioned speech generation with relative emotion intensity expressed in text. Emo-LiPO explicitly models global intensity ordering within each emotion under fixed transcripts, enabling more faithful and continuous emotional expression. We further construct ESD-plus, a multi-speaker dataset with explicit emotion intensity variations, to support fine-grained emotion modeling and evaluation. Experiments on ESD-plus demonstrate that Emo-LiPO significantly improves emotion accuracy and intensity controllability over both supervised- and DPO-based LLM TTS baselines, with particularly pronounced gains at high intensity levels.
Coupling Scenario-Based Grid Simulations with State Estimation: Measurement Requirements for Low-Voltage Networks under the German Energy Transition Pathway
arXiv:2603.28945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Increasing penetration of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and rooftop photovoltaics is creating thermal and voltage stress in low-voltage distribution grids. This work links the German Federal Government energy transition pathway (2025-2045) with state estimation performance requirements, evaluated on two SimBench reference networks across three equipment quality levels (good, medium, poor) and three VDE Forum Netztechnik/Netzbetrieb (VDE FNN) measurement constellations that differ in the availability of transformer and feeder-level instrumentation. Within this work's analysis, congestion is caused exclusively by transformer overloading and voltage-band violations. No individual line exceeds its thermal rating (maximum: 89.5%). Equipment quality governs congestion onset for a given deployment trajectory: under good equipment, congestion remains absent through 2045, under medium equipment it emerges from 2035 (3/6 scenarios), under poor equipment from 2025 (6/6). Without transformer instrumentation, median voltage estimation errors reach 6-42% regardless of smart meter penetration. Adding a single transformer measurement reduces errors by an order of magnitude, achieving median errors of 0.5-1.7%. In urban networks, transformer-level instrumentation meets the VDE FNN voltage accuracy target (99th percentile voltage error below 2%) in all configurations. In rural networks under poor equipment, the target is approached but not met. These findings motivate prioritizing transformer instrumentation as an effective first step for grid observability and supplementing the current consumption-driven metering rollout with risk-based deployment criteria linked to local congestion exposure.
From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence
arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.