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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization

Consumer-level applications require fast optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with high-fidelity novel view rendering. However, existing 3DGS acceleration approaches still incur substantial computation on redundant pixels while sacrificing fine details. In this paper, we present TurboGS, an error-guided training framework that accelerates 3DGS by concentrating optimization on perceptually informative pixels. TurboGS is built upon four core components: (1) a tile-wise sparse pixel sampling, which, driven by multi-view reconstruction errors during training, prioritizes challenging regions and skips well-reconstructed ones to avoid redundant gradient computation; (2) a tile-wise structure-aware loss with sparse Normalized Cross-Correlation, which provides sparse yet effective supervision to preserve fine details and stabilize training; (3) an error-driven Gaussian density control strategy, which dynamically allocates model capacity and removes redundant primitives; and (4) a tailored hybrid optimizer that couples Hessian-informed updates with Adam moment damping to stabilize and improve convergence under sparse supervision. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TurboGS can deliver on par or superior rendering quality within 100 seconds on a single RTX 5090 GPU card (up to 10x training speedup over vanilla 3DGS).

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Parent and physiotherapist perceptions about movement skills of young children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Objective: The onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) in the early years ([≤]5 years) may negatively impact movement skill (encompassing related concepts of gross motor skills, fundamental movement skills, and functional ability) development. Few studies have explored the perceptions and needs of parents and physiotherapists towards children's difficulty with these movement skills, essential to identify potential areas for added support. The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards movement skills of children with JIA. Methods: Seventeen parents and 24 physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire consisting of multiple choice and open-ended questions about the movement skills of young children with JIA. Demographic and multiple choice questions were quantitively analysed using descriptive statistics. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Results: About half (47%) of parents perceived their children to have movement difficulties, and 75% of physiotherapists described the movement skills of children with JIA as worse than other children of the same age. Our qualitative analysis revealed three general themes including: functional task difficulties; clinical variability in movement skills; and psychosocial components of movement skill difficulties. Conclusion: This study provides an analysis of perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards the movement skills of young children with JIA. A significant proportion of parents and physiotherapists identify movement difficulties among children with JIA that impact daily life. Future interventions co-designed with both parents and care providers targeting movement skills are needed.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

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

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exploring Variational Entanglement Hamiltonians

arXiv:2505.10530v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in analog and digital quantum-simulation platforms have enabled exploration of the spectrum of entanglement Hamiltonians via variational algorithms. In this work we analyze the convergence properties of the variationally obtained solutions and compare them to numerically exact calculations in quantum critical systems. We demonstrate that interpreting the cost functional as an integral permits the deployment of iterative quadrature schemes, thereby reducing the required number of measurements by more than an order of magnitude even in the presence of noise. We further show that a modified ansatz captures deviations from the Bisognano-Wichmann form in lattice models, improves convergence, improves trainability and provides a cost-function-level diagnostic for quantum phase transitions. Finally, we establish that a low cost value does not by itself guarantee convergence in trace distance. Nevertheless, it faithfully reproduces degeneracies and spectral gaps, which are essential for applications to topological phases.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4\% to 11.3\%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8\% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Adaptive Domain Models: Bayesian Evolution, Warm Rotation, and Principled Training for Geometric and Neuromorphic AI

arXiv:2603.18104v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prevailing AI training assumes reverse-mode automatic differentiation over IEEE-754 arithmetic. The memory overhead of training relative to inference, optimizer complexity, and structural degradation of geometric properties through training are consequences of this arithmetic substrate. This paper develops an alternative training architecture grounded in three prior results: the Dimensional Type System and Deterministic Memory Management framework (Haynes 2026), which establishes stack-eligible gradient allocation and exact quire accumulation as design-time verifiable properties; the Program Hypergraph (Haynes 2026), which establishes grade preservation through geometric algebra computations as a type-level invariant; and the b-posit bounded-regime design (Jonnalagadda et al. 2025), which makes posit arithmetic tractable across hardware targets conventionally considered inference-only. Their composition enables depth-independent training memory bounded to approximately twice the inference footprint, grade-preserving weight updates, and exact gradient accumulation, applicable uniformly to loss-function-optimized and spike-timing-dependent neuromorphic models. We introduce *Bayesian distillation*, a mechanism by which the latent prior structure of a general-purpose model is extracted through the ADM training regime, resolving the data-scarcity bootstrapping problem for domain-specific training. For deployment, we introduce *warm rotation*, an operational pattern in which an updated model transitions into an active inference pathway without service interruption, with correctness formalized through PHG certificates and signed version records. The result is a class of domain-specific AI systems that are smaller and more precise than general-purpose models, continuously adaptive, verifiably correct with respect to the physical structure of their domains, and initializable from existing models.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Repurposing a Speech Classifier for Guided Diffusion-Based Speech Generation

arXiv:2606.20457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifier guidance is a way to control diffusion generation by using a noise-conditioned classifier to steer the sampling process toward a target class. One drawback of classifier guidance is that it requires two separately trained models: a classifier and a diffusion model. We therefore study a more compact alternative in which a conventionally trained speech classifier is repurposed as the backbone for diffusion generation. Starting from a frozen noise-conditioned classifier in log-Mel space, we attach a lightweight subnetwork that reuses intermediate classifier representations and train only this subnetwork under a Denoising Score Matching objective. Our work shows that a pretrained classifier can be repurposed for conditional generation, providing an appealing bridge between discriminative modeling and conditional speech synthesis resulting in high speech quality within a single-backbone model, with reduced memory footprint and computational cost.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

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

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

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

A deep learning framework for jointly solving transient Fokker-Planck equations with arbitrary parameters and initial distributions

arXiv:2604.06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE) is central to analyzing complex parameterized stochastic systems. However, current numerical methods lack parallel computation capabilities across varying conditions, severely limiting comprehensive parameter exploration and transient analysis. This paper introduces a deep learning-based pseudo-analytical probability solution (PAPS) that, via a single training process, simultaneously resolves transient FPE solutions for arbitrary multi-modal initial distributions, system parameters, and time points. The core idea is to unify initial, transient, and stationary distributions via Gaussian mixture distributions (GMDs) and develop a constraint-preserving autoencoder that bijectively maps constrained GMD parameters to unconstrained, low-dimensional latent representations. In this representation space, the panoramic transient dynamics across varying initial conditions and system parameters can be modeled by a single evolution network. Extensive experiments on paradigmatic systems demonstrate that the proposed PAPS maintains high accuracy while achieving inference speeds four orders of magnitude faster than GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulations. This efficiency leap enables previously intractable real-time parameter sweeps and systematic investigations of stochastic bifurcations. By decoupling representation learning from physics-informed transient dynamics, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for probabilistic modeling of multi-dimensional, parameterized stochastic systems.

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

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

MIRATS framework: Normative multiscale characterization of brain regulatory systems across sex and age using multimodal MRI

Authors:

Deep brain systems involved in arousal, autonomic regulation, sensory integration, and homeostatic control remain underrepresented in conventional whole-brain neuroimaging frameworks. In particular, diencephalic and brainstem nuclei are often insufficiently represented in cortex-centered analyses, limiting the normative references needed to interpret systems-level variation in health and disease. To address this gap, we developed a unified multiscale framework with explicit representation of deep nuclei. By integrating cerebral, cerebellar, diencephalic, and brainstem atlases in standard space, we constructed a 220-region whole-brain parcellation and extracted complementary features at three analytical scales: nodal properties, edge-wise connectivity, and persistent-homology-based topological descriptors. We applied this framework to healthy adults from the Human Connectome Project-Aging cohort to characterize normative multiscale organization and test sex- and age-related variation. Applied to this cohort, our framework revealed pronounced heterogeneity across anatomical systems. Brainstem and diencephalic nuclei showed multiscale feature profiles distinct from those of cerebral and cerebellar regions across nodal, edge-wise, and higher-order topological scales. Sex comparisons identified selective differences across different scales, whereas age modeling revealed widespread but feature- and system-dependent variation across adulthood. Together, these findings show that normative whole-brain organization in this deep-system-aware space is structured by system-specific rather than globally uniform patterns. These findings establish a normative multiscale framework for characterizing brainstem-diencephalic-cerebellar-cerebral organization in healthy adults and provide a quantitative reference for future translational studies of disease-related abnormalities in deep regulatory systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

‘Hidden hero’ peptides guard crops against sudden cold

Authors: Unknown Author

A protein signal remains silent under normal conditions but is activated under cold stress to protect developing pollen. This ‘on-demand’ resilience mechanism could enable the development of ‘climate smart’ crops that maintain high yields in good years and food security under climate stress. A peptide signal ensures that, in cold conditions, developing pollen receives nutrients at the right time.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

arXiv:2606.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable semantic reasoning about program behavior, but applying LLMs to repository-scale security analysis introduces challenges related to context management, cost, and verification. We present OpenAnt, an open-source vulnerability discovery system that integrates static program analysis with LLM-based reasoning in a multi-stage pipeline. OpenAnt introduces three key techniques. First, codebases are decomposed into self-contained analysis units filtered by reachability from external entry points, reducing the analysis surface by up to 97% while preserving attack-relevant code. Second, candidate vulnerabilities undergo adversarial verification through constrained attacker simulation, where the model evaluates exploitability under realistic attacker capabilities. Third, findings are validated through dynamic verification, in which exploit environments are generated automatically, executed in sandboxed containers, and discarded after use. Evaluation on widely used open-source projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise shows that this architecture can identify previously unknown vulnerabilities while maintaining manageable analysis cost and substantially reducing false positives. Our results suggest that closed-loop vulnerability discovery pipelines, combining semantic reasoning with exploit validation, provide a practical path toward scalable automated security analysis. OpenAnt is released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/knostic/OpenAnt.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.