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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

BioVid: Autoregressive Video Generation with Biological Behavior Semantic Comprehension

Video generation for biological behavior requires more than visually plausible motion: the duration of an action is itself a semantic property. Existing models usually rely on fixed temporal windows, external continuation, or prompt-driven stories, so length is specified externally rather than learned from behavior. To address this gap, we propose BioVid, a data-driven autoregressive framework for adaptive-length biological behavior generation. BioVid uses a 2D-encode/3D-decode tokenizer: a two-dimensional FSQ-R3GAN encoder converts each frame into discrete visual tokens, preserving single-frame information suited for next-token prediction and EOS-based termination, while a temporally inflated and video-finetuned three-dimensional decoder reconstructs generated tokens with temporal context to reduce flickering. A causal Transformer then models the frame-wise token sequence and, conditioned only on the first frame, stops generation when it emits an End-of-Sequence token, allowing duration to emerge from the learned behavior distribution. We evaluate BioVid on the A001 drinking action from NTU RGB+D. On 94 held-out clips, BioVid achieves a Wasserstein-1 distance of 1.24 frames from the real duration distribution. In comparison, fixed-length baselines yield distances of approximately 6-7 frames even when configured to the available length closest to the dataset mean, and approximately 15 frames when using the conventional 16-frame generation length. These results demonstrate the ability of BioVid to learn and reproduce the intrinsic duration distribution of biological behavior.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Optical cooling by interfacial charge transfer in 2D heterostructures

Authors:

Optical refrigeration, or laser cooling of solids1, offers a cryogen-free route to temperature control for quantum and electronic systems. Existing progress2–8 relies on a phonon-assisted up-conversion photoluminescence approach, which remains constrained by stringent material and excitation requirements. Here we demonstrate a distinct route, interfacial-charge-transfer-driven optical cooling, in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. Photo-excited carriers in WSe2 cross a type-II junction into MoSe2 or WS2, extracting lattice energy nonradiatively—through a phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer process. Raman and photoluminescence measurements show prominent low-temperature signatures in the WSe2 layer, with transient absorption spectroscopy identifying a phonon-assisted, barrier-activated interlayer charge transfer. Molecular dynamics simulations show a prominent interfacial thermal resistance sustaining the temperature gradient. This barrier-mediated phonon extraction bypasses the need for near-unity quantum efficiency or resonant excitation, offering a promising strategy for cryogen-free refrigeration and thermal management in quantum, optoelectronic and nanoscale systems. Optical cooling in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures is demonstrated through phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer, enabling cryogen-free thermal management without stringent quantum-efficiency requirements.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

A network approach to DNA methylation clocks

Biological age predicts health and lifespan better than chronological age, but remains difficult to measure. One leading molecular proxy for biological age is DNA methylation, which underlies age predictors known as "clocks". These clocks use penalized linear regression to predict chronological age from methylation levels using selected cytosine–guanine pairs (CpGs) along DNA. Although they predict chronological age within a few years and track mortality risk, there are several issues. Different clocks share a vanishingly small number of CpG sites, many of which show weak associations with age. Also, the clocks often do not transfer across methylation array platforms. This paper takes a network approach to better understand these issues. By using 12 public datasets from human blood, we build a co-methylation network of the sites that show the strongest age correlation. After pruning weak links, we find that it has a small number of large modules of covarying CpGs surrounded by many small modules and singleton sites. These modules are biologically interpretable, as they are associated with CpG island contexts and enriched for distinct Gene Ontology functions. We also map five established clocks onto this network (Horvath, Hannum, AltumAge, Skin & Blood, and Han) and find that they select some CpGs from the same module. This suggests that they are more similar than they appear. The network structure also suggests new ways to build clocks. A simple clock that retains one CpG per module matches the performance of established clocks. A second one, built from module-level principal components, outperforms all five established clocks in three validation cohorts and is transferable across array platforms (Illumina Infinium Methylation 450K or EPIC arrays). Overall, the network perspective shifts attention from individual CpG sites to modules of covarying sites. This perspective helps explain why DNA methylation clocks perform so well despite their differences and provides a more systematic approach for developing the next generation of aging biomarkers.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Posterior-calibrated multimodal motor states reveal longitudinal and imaging-associated heterogeneity in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) motor heterogeneity is commonly summarized by hard subtype labels, although clinical states vary longitudinally, severity can dominate unsupervised structure, and model uncertainty is rarely calibrated. We developed a posterior and refit-stability calibrated multimodal motor state framework that assigns probabilistic MDS-UPDRS-III motor states, aggregates them at the patient level, separates global burden from residual tremor-axial profile, and tests whether imaging can recover the resulting posterior distribution. In 29,366 aligned PPMI motor-posterior visits spanning 4,773 participant identifiers, patient-level state families were stable on average (modal-family fraction 0.925; 95% CI 0.921 - 0.930), but 25.5% of patients transitioned state over follow-up (95% CI 24.1 - 26.7%). PD-only cohort definitions produced smaller denominators and are reported as sensitivity cohorts with rerun calibration and imaging-posterior checks. Severity and covariates explained substantial motor-domain variance, especially bradykinesia (rsecond=0.850), but residual profile modeling retained five active components across total-severity, principal-component, leave-one-domain, non-target-burden, and clinical-only severity axes. Refit-stability calibration with 250 patient-blocked bootstrap refits showed high nominal posterior confidence (0.989) but lower empirical label consistency (0.849), quantifying overconfidence rather than hiding it. Patient-held-out temporal modeling predicted future axial burden (best XGBoost rsecond=0.605) and future state transition (XGBoost AUC=0.830; 95% CI 0.822 - 0.837). DaTSCAN plus FreeSurfer ROI features predicted patient-level soft motor posterior vectors (RF jsd=0.209; 95% CI 0.199 - 0.220; macro-AUROC=0.692), while severity/demographic-adjusted imaging features further improved soft posterior recovery (jsd=0.188). BioFIND transfer reproduced clinically meaningful endpoint gradients after state assignment in 225 external patients, supporting external face validity rather than definitive transportability. These results support PD motor phenotypic states as calibrated, dynamic, clinically interpretable profiles with convergent imaging associations, not as definitive biological subtypes.

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

When Plausible Is Not Realistic: Evaluating Human Mobility in LLM-Based Urban Simulation

LLM-based generative agents are increasingly used in urban simulators, yet it remains unclear whether they reproduce empirically realistic human mobility patterns or merely generate plausible mobility narratives. We introduce a validation framework for evaluating the mobility of generative agents of LLM-based urban simulators against real-world mobility data. For this, we use mobility laws, temporal rhythms, network motifs, semantic activity transitions, and behavioral mobility profiles. Using datasets from the Greater Paris region and Shanghai, we evaluate AgentSociety and CitySim across multiple dimensions of mobility realism. Our analysis reveals a substantial gap between narrative plausibility and empirical mobility realism. Although the simulators capture some high-level semantic activity distributions, they struggle to reproduce core spatial and temporal constraints, including realistic trip-length distributions, origin-destination flows, dwell times, and transition dynamics. We further observe that realistic mobility diversity is unstable across default prompting configurations and may require explicit profile-aware initialization. To support reproducible evaluation, we also contribute scalable and open LLM-driven infrastructure for regional-scale map generation, observability-enhanced simulation, mobility-metric computation, and traffic simulation. Our findings highlight the need for rigorous empirical validation of LLM-based urban simulators and provide practical tools for building more realistic and reproducible urban simulation systems.

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

On the Smallness of the Large Language Models Scaling Exponents

arXiv:2606.24504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We discuss reasons why the scaling exponents of current Large Language Models (LLMs) applications are indicating an unsustainable regime in terms of energy resources. We further show that attributing the smallness of such exponents to a numerical bias due to the neglect of a non-zero value of the loss function in the limit of infinite data (``pedestal effect") does not remove the unsustainability issue. Finally, the effects of the smoothness (roughness) of the data on the scaling exponents is commented upon based on an analogy with phenomenological models of fluid turbulence.

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

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

UC-Search: Risk-Aware Test-Time Search for Delayed Constrained Time-Series Control

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time-series models are usually scored as forecasters, yet deployed systems often require delayed decisions under uncertainty and hard feasibility constraints. UC-Search is a model-agnostic test-time wrapper: a backbone emits forecasts or action scores, a feasibility automaton rolls candidate paths forward, and bounded search returns the first action of a risk-adjusted feasible trajectory. We instantiate UC-Beam and a UCT-style UC-MCTS diagnostic, using epistemic, aleatoric, and propagated uncertainty mainly as path-risk terms. A myopic-collapse/separation theorem states when search reduces to one-step risk-greedy and when delayed feasible-set coupling can create non-myopic value. Primary evidence comes from a predeclared public $9$-family, $33$-series delayed-control suite with six held-out starts per series: UC-Pareto is positive versus validation-selected CEM, MPPI, and risk-aware random at the normalized threshold ($+3.1675/+2.3328/+2.5038$), and remains positive in a compute-matched audit ($+2.8466/+2.7418/+2.7429$). ETT/LTSF delayed-inventory validation supports the same compute-frontier claim. A 48-series raw M4 standard periodic-review lost-sales inventory audit is positive versus the strongest classic base-stock control ($+13556.7547$), CEM ($+64900.2207$), and risk-random ($+52881.6042$), while MPPI remains family-mixed. FI-2010, official-forecast adapters, SB3/FQI controls, direction/capacity/intervention checks, and synthetic mechanism tests are reported as boundary or mechanism evidence rather than broad dominance claims.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modeling. Existing methods for uncertainty modeling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous connections between their specific objectives and epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework grounded in possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, project it to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximate the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that DAPPr achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance over state-of-the-art second-order predictors while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Computationally tractable robust differentially private mean estimation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a new, differentially private mean estimator called the balloon mean. The main features of the balloon mean are that it is computationally tractable and enjoys robustness to outlying observations. It is based on an iterative clipping procedure over expanding Mahalanobis balls, or ``balloons.'' The method satisfies zero-concentrated differential privacy and depends on a small number of interpretable tuning parameters. We provide theoretical guarantees under heavy-tailed and contaminated elliptical models, characterizing its statistical performance and robustness to outliers. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the balloon mean is robust to heavy-tailed and contaminated data, and outperforms existing differentially private mean estimators in contaminated settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.22775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E[Y\mid X]$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

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

Beyond Reward Engineering: A Data Recipe for Long-Context Reinforcement Learning

Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving this ability, yet existing work largely focuses on reward engineering while diverse training data remains scarce. We revisit this problem from a data-centric perspective and show that a simple yet effective data recipe alone, paired with a minimal outcome-based GRPO setup, suffices to substantially improve long-context reasoning. Our recipe targets three complementary task families – retrieval, multi-evidence synthesis, and reasoning – for which we construct and curate eight datasets totaling ~14K examples. Experiments on three models (Qwen3-4B/8B/30B-A3B) yield average gains of +7.2/+3.2/+6.4 points across seven long-context benchmarks, surpassing prior RL training sets. We further demonstrate that these gains transfer to agentic tasks, where continuing RL training on an agent-tuned model with our data recipe improves GAIA by +4.8 and BrowseComp by +7.0 points. We will release our datasets to facilitate future research.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Hormonal Contraceptives Drive Genital Lipid Metabolism Reprogramming and Susceptibility to HIV Infection

Heterosexual genital HIV transmission is a major driver of new infections, particularly in women, making them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition. Previous studies have associated injectable hormonal contraceptives (HC) with increasing susceptibility to HIV. Yet, the underlying molecular mechanism remains incompletely understood. Given the structural and signaling role of lipids in the female genital tract, cervicovaginal lipidomic profiling has the potential to reveal the mechanistic interplay among HC, lipidome, and HIV susceptibility in the female genital tract. We conducted untargeted cervicovaginal lipidomics study in a cohort of high-risk, HIV-negative, Kenyan sex workers who were using injectable depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), oral contraceptive pill (OCP), or no hormonal contraception (NH). Genital lipids were quantitatively analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and bioinformatics platforms. A total of 1045 lipid species were identified in the cervicovaginal lavage samples. Injectable DMPA significantly downregulated major structural and signaling membrane lipids, including phospholipids, ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids (p

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

arXiv:2601.03509v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)~\opreflect for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2)~progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3)~canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.

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

Sustainability assessment using multimodal AI agents

arXiv:2507.17012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reducing the rapidly growing environmental impact of the computing industry requires assessing the emissions of electronics at scale. However, a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) of an electronic device, which maps materials and processes to environmental impacts, often requires proprietary or unavailable data. Here, we reimagine conventional sustainability assessment by introducing a multimodal multi-agent AI system that emulates the collaborative process between LCA professionals and stakeholders (such as product managers and engineers) to automatically estimate the carbon footprint of electronic devices. The agents iteratively construct a complete life-cycle inventory by leveraging a structured data abstraction and software tools that mine information from the public internet, including repair communities and government regulatory databases. This reduces data gaps and data collection from weeks or months of expert time to under one minute. The system can calculate carbon footprint within 19% of expert LCAs with zero proprietary data (typical of the variation between human LCAs). We also show that by encoding domain-specific knowledge, environmental impact estimation can be reframed as a data-driven prediction task, in which both unknown products and emission factors are represented as weighted combinations of similar ones with known emissions.

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

Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?

arXiv:2606.16313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-tail scenarios remain a major bottleneck for autonomous driving evaluation, even as datasets grow by orders of magnitude. Existing evaluation pipelines are rarely human-aligned, safety-aware, verifiable, and explainable at the same time: closed-loop metrics often saturate among strong planners, while unstructured human ratings can be noisy without a carefully designed protocol. We formulate planning evaluation as additional-threat detection: given a planner trajectory and an expert reference, does the planner's displacement introduce new unsafe driving behavior? We propose FluidTest, an evaluation pipeline with three components: a pairwise WebUI protocol for reliable human annotation; a taxonomy of 32 semantic threats with evidence-grounded decision graphs; and a three-agent verification system with reflection for precision and auditability. Experiments on the WOD-E2E dataset show that FluidTest produces consistent labels among trained annotators and identifies additional threats in 65% of Poutine trajectories and 51% of RAP trajectories. These results show that state-of-the-art planners can still exhibit substantial safety-relevant failures despite high Rater Feedback Scores (RFS) and low Average Displacement Error (ADE). Additional details, guidance, and code are available at https://fluidtest.web.app.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

Authors:

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Genetic technologies to enhance crop nutritional value under climate change

At present, more than 700 million people live with caloric hunger, and more than two billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, known as ‘hidden hunger’. From an agricultural viewpoint, three major objectives need to be worked towards simultaneously to achieve zero hunger (the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2): (1) enhanced yield; (2) higher vitamin and mineral density to sustain recommended daily intake (multi-biofortification); and (3) enhanced climate-change resilience. Although the Green Revolution increased global calorie production, it exacerbated hidden hunger by prioritizing high yield over nutritional quality. Stress from global climate change has been shown to reduce the densities of several micronutrients. CRISPR–Cas, which allows genome editing with extremely high precision, has emerged as a groundbreaking breeding technology that has already been adopted by many countries. Here we examine how CRISPR–Cas-based approaches could be used to achieve biofortification targets by enhancing micronutrient densities to the levels necessary to alleviate dietary vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Given the limited time frame available to achieve zero hunger, we argue that CRISPR–Cas technologies should be combined with metabolic engineering based on transformation and other technologies. We also consider untapped resources beyond metabolic pathways and current CRISPR–Cas methodologies to address one of the most important societal issues of the twenty-first century. This Review reflects on the joint power of genetic technologies, including untapped CRISPR–Cas techniques to combat hidden hunger and improve crop resilience, and argues in favour of their combined use to overcome these societal challenges.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Critical Erd{\H o}s-Rényi digraph: all eigenvectors away from zero are delocalized

arXiv:2606.24887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the adjacency matrix of the directed Erd{\H o}s-Rényi graph. As long as the expected degree is larger than the logarithm of the number of vertices, the graph is connected, we show that all eigenvectors are completely delocalized. Below this critical scale, we prove eigenvector delocalization if the corresponding eigenvalue is away from zero. This contrasts the undirected or Hermitian setting, where large eigenvalues have localized eigenvectors [arXiv:2005.14180]. Our results also hold for sparse random matrices with independent entries, which can be viewed as weighted Erd{\H o}s-Rényi digraphs.

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

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Measuring Biological Capabilities and Risks of AI Agents

arXiv:2606.19899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper addresses a rapidly emerging policy challenge: how to generate and interpret credible evidence about the biological capabilities and risks of AI scientists, or agentic AI systems capable of autonomously or collaboratively performing multi-step scientific tasks. As these systems enter real research workflows, decision-makers increasingly face evaluation results whose meaning depends on underlying design choices that are often implicit or under-documented. We synthesize current evidence on AI-enabled biological risks and introduce biological agentic evaluations as a promising, but interpretation-sensitive, tool for assessing these systems. Our central contribution is a set of practical, experience-grounded considerations – drawing from our own evaluations – that show how choices around defining, designing, running, scoring, and documenting evaluations materially shape what results do and do not imply about risk. The analysis is intended to help policymakers interpret biological evaluation outputs with appropriate caution; guide public and private funders toward high-leverage investments in AI-biology evaluation research; and support biosecurity practitioners assessing emerging AI systems. A secondary audience includes researchers designing or conducting agentic evaluations within frontier AI labs, AI providers, scientific institutions, and third-party evaluation organizations.