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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Fast and Parallel High-Rate STAR Architecture for Megaquop Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2606.25011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum simulation is approaching a phase where encoding overhead, logical Clifford operations, magic-state preparation, and rotation synthesis must be optimized together for efficient implementation. Space-Time efficient Analog Rotation (STAR) architectures reduce two of these costs by preparing small-angle rotation magic states directly, and the transversal STAR variant further lowers the Clifford overhead. Existing concrete implementations, however, largely inherit the low $O(1/d^2)$ encoding rate of the surface code, while high-rate codes have not yet been integrated into comparably explicit architectures. Here, we introduce a high-rate STAR architecture for local lattice Hamiltonian simulation based on a symmetry-driven co-design of the algorithm, QEC code, and neutral-atom hardware. Translation symmetries of the target lattice determine the choice of bicycle chain codes, a tunable family of self-dual bivariate bicycle codes that natively implement Clifford gates required for lattice simulation. Disjoint logical representatives allow STAR injections to be performed in parallel on all $k$ logical qubits in a code block, amortizing resource state preparation and enabling practical post-selection rates. On neutral-atom platform, the same translation symmetry compiles the key logical operations into low-depth, hardware-native acousto-optic-deflector shifts. End-to-end estimates show that an $8 \times 8$ transverse-field Ising simulation to $T^* \approx 8 (zJ)^{-1}$ requires $2240$ physical qubits and $\sim 200$ s per shot, a $\sim 5.5\times$ space reduction relative to a surface code STAR baseline at comparable speed; for Fermi-Hubbard dynamics to $T^* \approx 4 (zt)^{-1}$, the corresponding estimates are $\sim 6300$ physical qubits and $\sim 200$ s per shot. These results provide a concrete route toward early fault-tolerant quantum simulation with high-rate codes.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

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

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Current Observation: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Controllable Non-Markov Games

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

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

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Moonlight in Latent Space: Chirality and Structural Correspondence Between Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 2 and Machine Learning Mechanisms

arXiv:2606.14612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the three movements of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27 No. 2) instantiate three distinct machine learning architectures – not by analogy, but by structural correspondence. Through computational analysis of the score (entropy, Jensen-Shannon divergence, dissonance, hand distributional overlap, self-similarity matrices, temporal memory decay, and contextual pitch embeddings), we establish four counterintuitive findings: (1) perceived musical "temperature" is governed by throughput, not distributional width; (2) the lightest movement carries the highest dissonance; (3) the movements implement streaming, recurrent, and periodic positional encoding memory architectures; and (4) the same pitch class acquires different contextual identities across movements, analogous to contextual vs.static embeddings in NLP – and unsupervised clustering recovers the tonal structure without music-theoretic input. We construct a reverse sonification (decoding analytical features back into MIDI) and quantify the chirality of the encode-decode cycle: what distributions preserve and sequential ordering destroys. Prompted by a listener's observation that the decoded piece sounds like "mirror isomers that can't be superimposed," the chirality measurement reveals reconstruction loss increasing monotonically with n-gram order. Bootstrap baselines and subsample checks confirm all movements carry sequential information above noise, though raw values are confounded by sample size. Cross-domain comparison shows natural language has higher chirality than music, reflecting stronger sequential constraints.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

A statistical framework for comparing epidemic forests

Authors:

by Cyril Geismar, Peter J. White, Anne Cori, Thibaut Jombart Inferring who infected whom in an outbreak is essential for characterising transmission dynamics and guiding public health interventions. However, this task is challenging due to limited surveillance data and the complexity of immunological and social interactions. Instead of a single definitive transmission tree, epidemiologists often consider multiple plausible trees forming epidemic forests. Various inference methods and assumptions can yield different epidemic forests, yet no formal test exists to assess whether these differences are statistically significant. We propose such a framework using a chi-square test and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA). We assessed each method’s ability to distinguish simulated epidemic forests generated under different offspring distributions. While both methods achieved perfect specificity for forests with 100+ trees, PERMANOVA consistently outperformed the chi-square test in sensitivity across all epidemic and forest sizes. Implemented in the R package mixtree, we provide the first statistical framework to robustly compare epidemic forests.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Matrix Product States for Modulated Symmetries: SPT, LSM, and Beyond

arXiv:2603.19189v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matrix product states (MPS) provide a powerful framework for characterizing one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of matter and for formulating Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM)-type constraints. Here we generalize the MPS formalism to translationally invariant systems with general modulated symmetries. We show that the standard symmetry "push-through" condition for conventional global symmetry must be revised to account for symmetry modulation, and we derive the appropriate generalized condition. Using this generalized push-through structure, we classify one-dimensional SPT phases with modulated symmetries and formulate LSM-type constraints within the same MPS-based framework.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

GEOAgent: An AI-driven Autonomous Framework for Intelligent GEO Data Retrieval and Standardized Preprocessing

Datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) remain difficult to reuse at scale because sample annotations are heterogeneous and raw sequencing data require assay-specific preprocessing. We present GEOAgent, an AI-driven autonomous framework designed for intelligent dataset retrieval and standardized preprocessing by coupling autonomous semantic governance with an automated Nextflow pipeline named bioStream. Metadata from 181,760 sequencing series and 84,756 associated PubMed records were organized in a relational database and semantic index to support natural-language dataset retrieval. The framework automatically determines assay modalities, resolves experimental design pairings, and standardizes sample naming to minimize manual curation overhead. Based on these parsed attributes, the framework generates deployment-ready manifests to automatically execute containerized workflows across bulk and single-cell omics modalities. In expert-curated benchmarks, the workflow achieved 96% retrieval precision alongside 100% accuracy in assay classification and sample relationship resolution. The web platform is publicly accessible, while the source code and associated databases are openly available via GitHub and Zenodo.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Itô's Formula for It\^{o} processes defined with respect to a cylindrical-martingale valued measure

arXiv:2407.16086v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the authors' recently developed stochastic integration [Stoch PDE: Anal Comp, 2024], we prove an It\^{o} formula for Hilbert space-valued It\^{o} processes defined with respect to a cylindrical martingale-valued measure. We develop some tools from stochastic analysis, as are the predictable and optional quadratic variation of a stochastic integral, the continuous and purely discontinuous parts of an integral process, and a Riemann representation formula. As an application of our It\^{o} formula, we prove a Burkholder inequality for the stochastic integral defined with respect to a cylindrical martingale-valued measure. Finally, we derive It\^{o} formulas for Hilbert space-valued martingale-valued measures and for cylindrical square integrable martingales.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Authors:

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Quantitative Oppenheim Conjecture for Random Quadratic Forms and Optimal Variance Bounds in Function Fields

arXiv:2606.16699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a quantitative version of Oppenheim's conjecture in the function field setting. In order to do so, we compute the higher moments of the Siegel transform. In particular, we find an optimal bound on the variance of the number of lattice points in a set. Moreover, we compute the exact variance of the number of lattice points in a ball, which is of independent interest.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification

Deep learning has become an important tool in computational pathology, enabling automated analysis of histopathological images. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have traditionally dominated this field, transformer-based and hybrid architectures have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, comprehensive comparisons of these approaches for colorectal histopathology remain limited. This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset containing 5,000 image tiles from eight tissue classes. All models were trained using a standardized transfer-learning and fine-tuning protocol and assessed using multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, Cohen's kappa, and Matthews correlation coefficient. All evaluated models achieved high classification performance, with accuracies ranging from 93.2% to 97.1%. EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16. Among CNNs, ResNet34 and ConvNeXt-Tiny demonstrated highly competitive performance, achieving accuracies of 96.4% and 96.3%, respectively. Transformer architectures generally produced the strongest results across evaluation metrics, although the performance gap between the best transformer and CNN models was relatively small. Per-class analysis showed consistently strong classification performance across all tissue categories, with Complex Stroma representing the most challenging class. Overall, transformer-based architectures achieved the highest predictive performance, whereas modern CNNs provided a favorable balance between accuracy and model complexity. These findings provide a comprehensive benchmark of major deep learning paradigms for colorectal histopathology classification.

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

Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet their internal visual representations remain difficult to interpret. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a scalable way to decompose dense model activations into sparse, interpretable features. However, existing SAE architectures primarily recover flat feature dictionaries and are less suited for explicit multi-level concept organization. In this paper, we introduce cascaded sparse autoencoders (CSAEs) for learning hierarchical visual concepts in MLLMs. Rather than nesting or stacking SAE sparse activation codes, CSAEs train a second-level SAE directly on the decoder weights of the first-level SAE, treating learned low-level feature directions as inputs for higher-level abstraction. This design enables CSAEs to learn "concepts of concepts" while avoiding drawbacks from the shared-prefix coupling of nesting, Matryoshka-style hierarchies and the bottlenecks of naively stacked SAEs. Experiments across Qwen3-VL, Gemma-3, and LLaVA on multiple visual datasets show that CSAEs improve interpretability in terms of hierarchical concept coherence over state-of-the-art SAE baselines. Results on concept steering further demonstrate that the learned concept groups support effective group-level interventions in MLLM outputs.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Cluster sizes in subcritical soft Boolean models

arXiv:2404.13730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the soft Boolean model, a model that interpolates between the Boolean model and long-range percolation, where vertices are given via a stationary Poisson point process. Each vertex carries an independent Pareto-distributed radius and each pair of vertices is assigned another independent Pareto weight with a potentially different tail exponent. Two vertices are now connected if they are within distance of the larger radius multiplied by the edge weight. We determine the tail behaviour of the Euclidean diameter and the number of points of a typical maximally connected component in a subcritical percolation phase. For this, we present a sharp criterion in terms of the tail exponents of the edge-weight and radius distributions that distinguish a regime where the tail behaviour is controlled only by the edge exponent from a regime in which both exponents are relevant. Our proofs rely on fine path-counting arguments identifying the precise order of decay of the probability that far-away vertices are connected.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-24

The transcriptional gradient in negative-strand RNA viruses suggests a common RNA transcription mechanism

by Connor R. King, Casey-Tyler Berezin, Brian Munsky, Jean Peccoud Nonsegmented negative-strand RNA viruses (NNSV) are a diverse class of medically relevant viruses which display a conserved attenuation gradient in the transcription of their genomes. This gradient has been traditionally explained by the Stop-Start model which attributes attenuation to polymerase behavior at gene junctions. In this article, we evaluate an alternative explanation where the gradient arises from polymerase dynamics during transcription. We introduce the RNA Polymerase Association Mechanism (RAM) model, a coarse-grained stochastic framework that describes transcription using two parameters related to polymerase processivity and the ability of the polymerase to backtrack. The RAM model accurately reproduces transcriptional gradients across diverse NNSVs as well as in gene-shuffled VSV variants. Additionally, the inferred polymerase processivity appears correlated to the length of the viral genomes suggesting a conserved constraint on transcription across these viruses. While the RAM model does not account for all known molecular features of NNSV transcription, it provides a parsimonious and predictive framework for relating genome architecture and transcription. These results support the view that, in tandem with the traditional junction-centric mechanisms governing transcription, nonspecific attenuation mechanisms contribute to the NNSV transcriptional gradient and warrant closer inspection in future studies which could lead to better rational genome design in viral studies and biomedical applications.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond Bayer: Task-Optimal Sensor Co-Design for Robust Autonomous-Driving Segmentation

arXiv:2606.24096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust perception underpins autonomous driving, and most recent progress comes from scaling the model-larger backbones, foundation models, and cooperative multi-agent fusion. We pursue a complementary, upstream question: what should the camera itself measure? Using a differentiable RAW-to-task pipeline, we decompose which sensor degrees of freedom benefit dense prediction. Learning the spectral colour-filter-array (CFA) weights is the dominant lever, improving mIoU by +0.017 (KITTI-360) and +0.023 (ACDC) over a fixed camera. In contrast, point-spread-function (optics) co-design is net-negative (-0.020 mIoU on KITTI-360) - a consequence of the data-processing inequality, which also bounds the task information that any downstream model, however large or cooperative, can recover. Noise co-optimisation is marginal, and counter to intuition enlarging the CFA tile beyond 2x2 consistently hurts, as the filters are confined to the rank three sRGB input. Because the intervention is at the sensor, the gains are model-agnostic; we validate robustness on ACDC's fog, night, rain, and snow, and conclude with a simple recipe: learn the 2x2 CFA weights and keep an identity PSF.