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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~300 million tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 4-11 percentage points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at baseline's peak accuracy.

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

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Localized Kernel Projection Outlyingness: A Two-Stage Approach for Multi-Modal Outlier Detection

arXiv:2510.24043v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents Two-Stage LKPLO, a novel multi-stage outlier detection framework that overcomes the coexisting limitations of conventional projection-based methods: their reliance on a fixed statistical metric and their assumption of a single data structure. Our framework uniquely synthesizes three key concepts: (1) a generalized loss-based outlyingness measure (PLO) that replaces the fixed metric with flexible, adaptive loss functions like our proposed SVM-like loss; (2) a global kernel PCA stage to linearize non-linear data structures; and (3) a subsequent local clustering stage to handle multi-modal distributions. Comprehensive 5-fold cross-validation experiments on 10 benchmark datasets, with automated hyperparameter optimization, demonstrate that Two-Stage LKPLO achieves state-of-the-art performance. It significantly outperforms strong baselines on datasets with challenging structures where existing methods fail, most notably on multi-cluster data (Optdigits) and complex, high-dimensional data (Arrhythmia). Furthermore, an ablation study empirically confirms that the synergistic combination of both the kernelization and localization stages is indispensable for its superior performance. This work contributes a powerful new tool for a significant class of outlier detection problems and underscores the importance of hybrid, multi-stage architectures.

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

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

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

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

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

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Law of the Iterated Logarithm for $p$-Walks on $\mathbb{Z}$

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $p$-rotor walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ is a self-interacting walk that interpolates between the simple random walk and the deterministic rotor walk. While the weak convergence of this model to a perturbed Brownian motion is known, its almost sure asymptotic boundaries have not been characterized. In this paper, we establish the exact Law of the Iterated Logarithm (LIL) for the $p$-rotor walk. Utilizing the decomposition of the walk into a martingale perturbed by its running extrema, we obtain first a functional Law of the Iterated Logarithm for the linearly interpolated paths of the $p$-walk. We then obtain the classical LIL constants by solving a calculus of variations problem over the perturbed Strassen set.

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

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Evolution of Conditional Entropy for Diffusion Dynamics on Graphs

arXiv:2510.19441v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The modeling of diffusion processes on graphs is the basis for many network science and machine learning approaches. Entropic measures of network-based diffusion have recently been employed to investigate the reversibility of these processes and the diversity of the modeled systems. While results about their steady state are well-known, very few exact results about their finite-time evolution exist. Here, we introduce the conditional entropy of heat diffusion in graphs, and outline a mathematical framework that contextualizes diffusion and conditional entropy within the theories of continuous-time Markov chains and information theory. In particular, we highlight that this entropic measure satisfies an information-theoretical version of the second law of thermodynamics, thereby providing a parallelism between diffusion dynamics on networks and their physical counterparts. Furthermore, we obtain explicit results for its evolution on complete, path, and circulant graphs, as well as a mean-field approximation for Erdös-Rényi graphs. We also obtain asymptotic results for general networks and provide bounds for the evolution of conditional entropy. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate several properties of conditional entropy for diffusion over random graphs, such as the Watts-Strogatz model.

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

Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart

arXiv:2606.13795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement. We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return. We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates. This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer. Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Before the Labels: How Dataset Construction Shapes Suicidality Detection in Clinical Text

Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media. We argue that this framing obscures how EHR-based suicidality datasets encode a particular operationalization of suicidality, shaped by who authors the data, how episodes are bounded, and how ambiguity is resolved. We ground this argument in a case study of the ScAN dataset, built over MIMIC-III clinical notes. We show how governance constraints, ICD-based cohort selection, single-annotator labeling, and hospital-stay-level aggregation produce labels that reflect clinician-documented judgments, treat suicidality as a bounded episode, and assume that intent can be reliably inferred from documentation. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that identical labels subsume heterogeneous clinical framings differing in temporality, negation, and uncertainty. We argue that clinical NLP should examine the assumptions embedded in suicidality datasets before interpreting their labels as ground truth.

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

Approximate Next Policy Sampling: Replacing Conservative Target Policy Updates in Deep RL

arXiv:2605.05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown and cannot be sampled for the purposes of training the value function. Conservative updates solve this problem, but at the cost of shrinking the policy update. This paper explores an alternative solution, Approximate Next Policy Sampling (ANPS), which addresses the problem by modifying the training distribution rather than constraining the policy update. ANPS is satisfied if the distribution of the training data approximates that of the next policy. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of ANPS, we introduce Stable Value Approximate Policy Iteration (SV-API). SV-API modifies the standard approximate policy iteration loop to hold the target policy fixed while an iteratively updated behavioral policy gathers relevant experience. It only commits to a new policy once a convergence criterion has been met. If certain stability criteria are met, the update is guaranteed to be safe; otherwise, it remains no less safe than standard approximate policy iteration. Applying SV-API to PPO yields Stable Value PPO (SV-PPO), which matches or improves performance on high-dimensional discrete (Atari) and continuous control benchmarks while executing substantially larger target policy updates. These results demonstrate the viability of ANPS as a new solution to this classic challenge in RL.

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

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

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

QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks

arXiv:2606.15573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for decentralized and resource-constrained agentic systems. Our approach embeds multi-modal representations in a shared semantic space and releases differentially private (DP) prototypes to preserve utility while reducing semantic leakage. With the DP guarantee, we design a fair token allocation scheme that rewards effective contributions and remains robust to data heterogeneity and AI resource scarcity. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved contribution-based fairness and QoS compared to standard benchmarks. The improved resistance to image reconstruction attacks indicates enhanced privacy for multi-modal personal data.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins

Authors:

How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered. Unicellular relatives of animals exhibit simple multicellularity through clonal division, formation of multinucleate coenocytes, or aggregation. 1 Therefore, animal multicellularity may have evolved from one (or a combination) of these behaviours. Aggregation has classically been dismissed as a means to complex multicellularity. 2 However, aggregation occurs in many extant animal cells and has also been recently described in three close unicellular relatives of animals (the choanoflagellates Salpingoeca rosetta and Choanoeca flexa, and the filasterean Capsaspora owczarzaki). 3-5 It is unclear whether aggregation in these species is derived or ancestral, and its relevance for animal origins remains unknown. To fill this gap, we investigated whether an additional close unicellular relative of animals can undergo aggregation. We discovered that the marine free-living bacterivorous filasterean Ministeria vibrans 6 forms homogeneous aggregates with reproducible kinetics that have long-term stability, and that improved feeding and mating may be evolutionary drivers of this aggregation. Notably, we found that homologs of many animal multicellularity genes involved in cell adhesion, signalling, and transcriptional regulation were deployed during the aggregation process, indicating that they may have been used for aggregation in the unicellular ancestors of animals before being co-opted into animal multicellular development. Thus, our results imply that aggregative multicellularity was key to the development of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

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

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

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

Decoding Multimodal Cues: Unveiling the Implicit Meaning Behind Hateful Videos

Hateful videos have become prevalent on online platforms, highlighting an urgent need for effective detection. However, existing studies primarily focus on binary classification and fail to provide contextual rationales that reveal the implicit meanings behind these judgments, significantly undermining model explainability. To fill this gap, we aim to achieve explainable hateful video detection, enabling models to provide contextual rationales that integrate relevant evidence and logical reasoning alongside decisions. This approach can comprehensively enhance the understanding of video content and the explainability of the decision-making process. We first introduce two datasets, Ex-HateMM and Ex-ImpliHateVid, for explainable hateful video detection. Each dataset provides fine-grained annotations of multimodal harmful elements, along with contextual rationales. We then propose an Information Augmentation and Reasoning Enhancement (IARE) framework designed for explainable detection. The framework employs an information augmentation phase that leverages the multimodal chain-of-thought to integrate harmful elements, thereby enriching rationale evidence. Additionally, IARE incorporates a reasoning enhancement phase, in which Direct Preference Optimization guides the model toward correct reasoning paths and away from incorrect ones, thereby improving the logical coherence of its justifications. We conduct extensive experiments on the two datasets, comparing multiple baselines with our proposed IARE framework. The results demonstrate that IARE achieves state-of-the-art performance while also generating accurate rationales.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.