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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Cancer cells adopt unprecedented strategies to produce a molecule that protects them from iron-dependent death

The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer. The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer.

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

Transformer Field Theory: A Response-Theoretic Approach to Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605.25225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability often studies Transformer behavior by intervening on internal activations through activation patching, causal tracing, path patching, and steering directions. This paper develops Transformer Field Theory: a response-theoretic framework in which the residual stream of a fixed forward pass is treated as a Transformer field over layer depth and token position. In this formulation, patching becomes a localized source insertion into the Transformer field, first-order sensitivity fields predict patch effects, Green functions describe downstream propagation, and patch selection is posed as an adjoint inverse problem. Empirically, we test the theory's forward response objects in GPT-2-style autoregressive Transformers. Localized Transformer-field interventions exhibit a bounded local linear regime; first-order sensitivities predict patch effects across layer-token sites; localized sources generate structured anisotropic Transformer-field propagation; high-sensitivity sites and sliced Green operators provide reduced response descriptions; and prompt-induced Transformer-field displacements partially transfer answer behavior. These results establish sensitivities, Transformer-field responses, and sliced Green operators as practical objects for organizing patching experiments, while providing the forward mathematical basis for patch-site inference and cross-scale response transfer.

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

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

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

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Probabilities

arXiv:2601.18853v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Probabilities is the English translation of the book Probabilités Tome 1 and Tome 2. The mathematic content is authored by Prof. Jean-Yves Ouvrard. The English version has been done by his eldest son Dr. Xavier Ouvrard. This probability theory book covers not only an introduction to this field, but also advanced concepts based on measure theory. The first part introduces the fundamentals of probability theory across 7 chapters, targeting bachelor level, including event algebras, random variables, independence, conditional probabilities, moments of discrete and continuous random variables, generating functions, and limit theorems. The second part contains 10 chapters and corresponds to master level. Following a brief introduction to measure theory, this part develops more advanced topics: probability measures and their complements, distributions and moments of random variables, modes of convergence, laws of large numbers, conditional expectation, Fourier transforms and characteristic functions, Gaussian random variables, convergence of measures, convergence in distribution, discrete-time stochastic processes, martingales, and Markov chains. The reader's work is greatly facilitated by the inclusion, in every chapter, of numerous exercises, all accompanied by detailed solutions that often provide substantial extensions to the theoretical material.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Decoherence as Defence and the Magnitude of Noise Regularisation: A Rigorous N -Qubit Theory of Stochastic Quantum Neural Networks for Adversarially Robust Network Intrusion Detection

Stochastic quantum neural networks (SQNNs) encode neuronal activations as qubits, synaptic topology as entanglement, and neural noise through a Lindblad master equation. A recent conference study applied a ring-entangled SQNN to collaborative intrusion detection and reached three conclusions: ring entanglement is essential for non-local anomaly detection; an adversarial-resilience bound holds but is conservative; and the depolarising channel fails to act as a dropout-style regulariser, behaving instead as output noise. It left open whether a per-gate stochastic deactivation (``true quantum dropout'') could regularise where the depolarising channel could not, and whether the loose robustness bound could be replaced by a predictive theory. This paper resolves both and extends the framework to real data and to neutral-atom hardware. We give an $N$-qubit formulation through the stochastic master equation and its vectorised Liouvillian, and prove a decoherence-contraction theorem: a depolarising channel of strength $\gamma$ over $L$ entangling layers contracts every weight-$w$ Pauli read-out by a factor $(1-4\gamma/3)^{wL}$ (for the weight-$1$ read-out used here, $(1-4\gamma/3)^{L}$); building on the general noise-as-defence result of Du et al., we make this quantitative and operational for intrusion detection. On the real NSL-KDD dataset under white-box FGSM and PGD attacks, a depolarising SQNN trained with the channel is, over seven seeds under strong $\ell_\infty$/$\ell_2$ attacks, significantly more robust than the noiseless circuit ($\ell_\infty$ PGD-$20$, $p=0.04$, large effect) and, critically, never suffers the catastrophic robustness collapse that the noiseless model and gradient-trained classical detectors (which fall from $95\%$ to $47\%$) do, cutting robustness variance roughly twofold; we show this robustness arises from a noise-reshaped training boundary rather than from attack-time gradient contraction. For generalisation, we derive an adaptive-penalty formula showing that per-gate dropout implements a curvature-weighted $L_2$ penalty $\tfrac{p(1-p)}{2}\sum\theta^2\partial^2_\theta L$ in weight space, maximised at $p=1/2$, whereas depolarising noise implements an output-space penalty. A $30$-seed study confirms the formula's quantitative prediction: both mechanisms reduce the train-test gap by a small but statistically significant margin ($\approx\!0.01$; $p

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The biological clock of multimorbidity: temporal dynamics of disease co-occurrence in primary care

Multimorbidity is the dominant clinical reality of primary care, yet the temporal dynamics governing when and how persistent comorbidity associations emerge remain poorly characterised. Most large-scale comorbidity studies adopt a single observation window after an index diagnosis, implicitly assuming that associations detectable at one year are equally detectable at five. Using 11 years of electronic health records from 5,821,197 individuals in Catalan primary care, we applied a matched cohort design across nine complementary follow-up windows, five cumulative (0-1 to 0-5 years) and four conditional (1-2 to 4-5 years), to 1,315 index diseases, identifying 144,030 significant directed comorbidity associations in the five-year network. We found that 60.1% of these associations required at least three years of follow-up and were undetectable in shorter-window analyses, demonstrating that observation window length is a primary determinant of which comorbidities can be observed. To organise this temporal heterogeneity, we introduce the biological clock of multimorbidity: a two-dimensional framework that positions ICD-10 disease categories according to their rates of cumulative signal attenuation and the persistence of conditional risk. This framework identifies four reproducible temporal patterns (episodic, chronic stable, chronic progressive, and transient-persistent) that are robust under bootstrap resampling, leave-one-disease-out sensitivity analysis, and alternative clustering approaches. The biological clock is systematically modulated by sex, with Blood/Immune and Musculoskeletal disorders showing the largest sex differences in temporal dynamics. Network analysis identified 19 disease "initiators" that generate broad downstream comorbidity burdens and 21 "sinks" representing convergent endpoints of multiple disease trajectories. Comparison with hospital-based Danish data from 6,909,676 individuals showed that shared associations were 2.7-fold enriched over chance expectation (hypergeometric test, p

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

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

Exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks: the effect of residual connections

arXiv:2606.17013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The well known phenomenon of exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks is analyzed using multiplicative ergodic theory. The effect of adding a residual connection is explained in this context. Specifically, a characterization of Liapunov exponents due to Furstenberg and Kifer is exploited in order to make a precise statement about the Liapunov spectrum and the effect of residual connections on it.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Time-multiplexed layer reuse for physical neural networks

arXiv:2511.00044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physical neural networks (PNNs) are promising candidates for next-generation computing, but existing demonstrations remain several orders of magnitude smaller than modern digital neural networks, whose recent advances have been driven by rapid growth in trainable parameters. This situation resembles the constraints of early digital neural networks, which led to ideas around parameter reuse. We investigate what similarly efficient hardware architectures may look like, focusing specifically on the common bottleneck of slow re-adjustment of the weights in PNNs. We propose the Time-Indexed Deep Alternating Layers Network (TIDAL-Net), which occupies an intermediate regime between recurrent and deep neural networks, specifically aimed at the scales and restrictions of common PNN prototypes. TIDAL-Net leverages the timescale separation found in many PNNs between fast forward dynamics and slowly trainable weights and biases, using layer-by-layer time multiplexing to increase effective depth while limiting implementation cost. Numerical experiments on image classification and natural language processing tasks show that TIDAL-Net improves performance with only minor modifications to conventional PNNs.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

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

Excursion Fluctuations and Spectral Universality in Gaussian Fields

arXiv:2606.15630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the large-scale spatial fluctuations of excursion volumes for a class of smooth stationary Gaussian fields. In the case of Berry's random wave model in dimension $d \geq 2$, we show that the spatial fluctuations for fixed $u>0$ converge to the fractional Gaussian field $(-\Delta)^{-1/4}W$ in the space of tempered distributions $\mathcal S'(\mathbb{R}^d)$, where $W$ is the $d$-dimensional Gaussian white noise. This explains the long-range correlations in the apparent filament structure of the Random Plane Wave model. For a class of smooth planar Gaussian fields whose spectral density has a power-law singularity at the origin, we prove convergence to fractional Gaussian fields with an index determined by the singularity exponent. More generally, the results illustrate that, for stationary random measures, large-scale spatial fluctuations are determined by the behaviour of the spectral measure density exponent near zero.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Squeezing Enhancement in Lossy Multi-Path Atom Interferometers

arXiv:2409.04091v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the sensitivity gains afforded by spin-squeezed states in atom interferometry, in particular using Bragg diffraction. We introduce a generalised input-output formalism that accurately describes realistic, non-unitary interferometers, including losses due to velocity selectivity and scattering into undesired momentum states. This formalism is applied to evaluate the performance of one-axis twisted spin-squeezed states in improving phase sensitivity. Our results show that by carefully optimising the parameters of the Bragg beam splitters and controlling the degree of squeezing, it is possible to improve the sensitivity of the interferometer by several dB with respect to the standard quantum limit despite realistic levels of losses in light pulse operations. However, the analysis also highlights the challenges associated with achieving these improvements in practice, most notably the impact of finite temperature on the benefits of entanglement. The results suggest ways of optimising interferometric setups to exploit quantum entanglement under realistic conditions, thereby contributing to advances in precision metrology with atom interferometers.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

From Task-Guided Conversational Graphs to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtimes

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.

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

A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that attracts increasing attention within the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages across various application scenarios, numerous 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods with diverse skeleton modeling and learning paradigms have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of recent SRID advances. First of all, we define the SRID task and provide an overview of its origin and major advancements. Secondly, we formulate a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing methods into three categories centered on hand-crafted, sequence-based, and graph-based modeling. Then, we elaborate on the representative models along these three types with an illustration of foundational mechanisms. Meanwhile, we provide an overview of mainstream supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised SRID learning paradigms and corresponding common methods. A thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art SRID methods is further conducted over various types of benchmarks and protocols to compare their effectiveness, efficiency, and key properties. Finally, we present the key challenges and prospects to advance future research, and highlight interdisciplinary applications of SRID with a case study.

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

Experiments with Optimal Model Trees

arXiv:2503.12902v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model trees provide an appealing way to perform interpretable machine learning for both classification and regression problems. In contrast to ``classic'' decision trees with constant values in their leaves, model trees can use linear combinations of predictor variables in their leaf nodes to form predictions, which can help achieve higher accuracy and smaller trees. Typical algorithms for learning model trees from training data work in a greedy fashion, growing the tree in a top-down manner by recursively splitting the data into smaller and smaller subsets. Crucially, the selected splits are only locally optimal, potentially rendering the tree overly complex and less accurate than a tree whose structure is globally optimal for the training data. In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of constructing globally optimal model trees for classification and regression with linear support vector machines at the leaf nodes. To this end, we present mixed-integer linear programming formulations to learn optimal trees, compute such trees for a large collection of benchmark data sets, and compare their performance against greedily grown model trees in terms of interpretability and accuracy. We also compare to classic optimal and greedily grown decision trees, random forests, and support vector machines. Our results show that optimal model trees can achieve competitive accuracy with very small trees. We also investigate the effect on the accuracy of replacing axis-parallel splits with multivariate ones, foregoing interpretability while potentially obtaining greater accuracy.

22.
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.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Predicting optimal growth temperatures of bacteria using learned structural information from a single protein

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species are most likely to thrive. Although the OGTs for most bacteria remain unknown, the increasing availability of genomes from uncultivated and cultivated taxa has made it advantageous to build genomic, cultivation-independent models to infer OGT. However, pre-existing genomic models often lack the generalizability and mechanistic grounding required for robust inferences of OGT. We propose a novel framework for predicting bacterial OGT which uses learned protein structural signatures of thermal adaptation. We hypothesize that biophysical tradeoffs which dictate enzymatic functions across variable temperatures provide a more robust empirical basis for OGT prediction than broad genomic features. Our OGT-predicting model, ROSEATE, is based on a single gene, adenylate kinase (ADK), that encodes for a ubiquitous enzyme essential for energy homeostasis. ROSEATE uses high-dimensional latent space encoding via MSA Transformer, a protein language model which embeds ADKs in a manner which preserves biophysical information about embedded proteins. We show that the accuracy of the ROSEATE model is on par with other genome-based models, has a high degree of phylogenetic generalizability, and the ESM embeddings effectively capture key temperature-adaptive enzyme characteristics derived from AlphaFold structures. Because ROSEATE is based on analyses of a single ubiquitous protein, it can be used with metagenomic data to infer the community-level variation in bacterial OGTs. We demonstrate this feature of ROSEATE by reconstructing ADK sequences from over 500 environmental and host-associated metagenomes, successfully distinguishing community-wide thermal preferences across diverse habitats, from polar oceans to mammalian guts. By transitioning from genomic proxies to informationally dense protein structural features, this work provides an efficient, interpretable tool for predicting bacterial OGTs across taxa and whole communities.

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

Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive real-time rendering, it frequently struggles to synthesize high-frequency textures, a limitation heavily exacerbated in memory-constrained and rate-distortion-optimized (RDO) pipelines. To address this, we propose a versatile 2D perceptual wrapper that enhances the rendered outputs of existing 3DGS representations in a content- and view-dependent manner. Our method leverages a lightweight synthesis network conditioned on pseudo-random Gaussian noise to synthesize perceptually plausible textures. Supervised by Wasserstein Distortion, the network learns to match local feature statistics rather than strictly enforcing pixel-wise reconstruction fidelity, effectively mitigating the blurriness inherent in standard frameworks. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our plug-and-play approach across vanilla, memory-constrained, and RDO 3DGS methods. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments confirm that our method significantly improves over existing baselines, yielding superior perceptual quality at sharply reduced file or model sizes.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Statistical tests for bivariate spatial association across multi-omics data with disjoint coordinates

Spatial biology has entered a new era of multimodal profiling, with multiple, high-dimensional spatial omics types being measured on consecutive tissue slices, or co-assayed on the same slice. Interest then lies in statistical testing for spatial association between the features of the different modalities, to gain insight in biological processes. One major challenge is the multitude of bivariate combinations, leading to high computational demands. Another difficulty is the difference in spatial resolution between technologies, implying no one-to-one matching between the measurement spots of the two modalities, even after alignment. As a result, common statistical measures such as joint distributions and correlations are not defined, and tests need to rely on spatial vicinity only. Moreover, we argue that many existing bivariate association tests address an inappropriate null hypothesis, or make inappropriate assumptions, both implying absence of spatial autocorrelation in any of the features and leading to misleading conclusions. As a remedy, we modify tests for the detection of spatially variable genes (Moran's I, Gaussian processes and generalized additive models (splines)) to derive bivariate tests across modalities with non-overlapping coordinate sets and provide variance estimators that do account for spatial autocorrelation. We develop inference methods for single sections as well as for replicated experiments with multiple sections, and compare their performance in nonparametric and parametric simulations. Finally, we apply the newly developed methods to two co-assayed spatial transcriptomics and metabolomics datasets from mouse and human. The full suite of tests is available from github.com/sthawinke/sbivar as the R-package sbivar.