Do not leave fungi out of impact assessments
Letter to the Editor
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Letter to the Editor
arXiv:2606.20523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have advanced rapidly thanks to large optical benchmarks, but comparable resources for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remain limited. Existing SAR–optical datasets largely rely on low-resolution, intensity-only Ground Range Detected~(GRD) products and do not preserve complex-valued SAR measurements or native acquisition geometry, which restricts physically grounded multimodal learning. In particular, large-scale public datasets combining very-high-resolution (VHR) SAR SLC, aligned optical imagery, and natural-language descriptions are still lacking. We present a VHR SAR–optical–text dataset built from open-access Umbra spotlight acquisitions distributed as Sensor Independent Complex Data (SICD). From around 2,500 worldwide scenes (VV/HH, 20cm–2m native resolution), we standardize all SAR data to an 80cm slant-range grid via band-limited FFT resampling and tile the imagery into 1024 by 1024 patches. For each SAR patch, we retrieve a high-resolution optical tile and warp it into the SAR grid using local coordinate correspondences for local pixel-level alignment. We further generate three caption variants (SHORT/MID/LONG) per sample to support vision–language training and evaluation. Our dataset contains 119,566 triplets (complex and amplitude slant-range SAR patch, aligned optical patch, natural-language description) covering 257 locations across 72 countries and a broad range of land types and infrastructures. We release fixed train/validation/test splits and the full preprocessing and baseline code to enable reproducible benchmarks for multimodal alignment on cross-modal retrieval and conditional generation in native SAR geometry. The dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ONERA/SARLO-80.
Genomic epidemiology workflows typically require expert curation of multiple specialized tools, extensive manual parameter tuning, and access to heterogeneous compute infrastructure. While standard generative AI models often hallucinate in complex biological domains, we introduce biomeStat: an autonomous AI agent that functions as a strict deterministic orchestrator. By automatically writing code to execute established bioinformatics tools in sandboxed environments, biomeStat dynamically provisions compute resources (CPU and GPU) and guarantees reproducibility, making it immediately useful for scientists without requiring command-line expertise. To demonstrate the platform, we performed a fully autonomous genomic epidemiology and structural analysis of 1,000 Dengue virus (DENV) genomes sampled from 16 Asian countries between 2000 and 2025. The agent seamlessly orchestrated phylogenetic reconstruction (IQ-TREE, TreeTime), Bayesian phylodynamics (BEAST2 via NVIDIA H200 GPU), selection pressure analysis (HyPhy), and structural mapping (PyMOL). The analysis was completed in under 24 hours of wall-clock time, revealing endemic stability (R_e ~1.0) and identifying 1,869 candidate immune escape sites structurally colocalized with B-cell and T-cell epitopes. Furthermore, the agent validated 176 highly conserved drug target residues across the viral replication complex, confirming that resistance-associated positions for emerging antivirals JNJ-1802 and NITD-688 remain absolutely conserved across all four serotypes. By bridging the gap between natural language intent and deterministic computational execution, biomeStat reduces weeks of expert effort into a single-session analysis with full methodological transparency.
arXiv:2509.23248v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled an emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with powerful reasoning and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This integration with edge computing has led to the development of Mobile Edge General Intelligence (MEGI), which brings real-time, privacy-preserving reasoning to the network edge. However, deploying LLM-based agentic AI reasoning in MEGI environments poses significant challenges due to the high computational demands of reasoning and the limited resources of edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework for efficient LLM reasoning deployment in MEGI. First, we systematically review enhancement methods to identify mechanisms suitable for edge adaptation. Subsequently, we present a distributed framework that synergizes reasoning enhancement via adaptive CoT prompting with scalable deployment through a distributed MoE architecture. An important innovation of this approach involves modeling reasoning depth as a dynamic network resource variable, which is optimized jointly with expert activation and transmission power. This mechanism allows the system to dynamically regulate expert networks and reasoning complexity according to task requirements and device capabilities. Experimental evaluations in mobile edge environments demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances reasoning quality and resource efficiency. The results show that with less than one second of additional inference time, both accuracy and latency satisfaction rate can reach 90\%, validating the practical viability of deploying sophisticated LLM reasoning in resource-constrained MEGI systems.
arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.
arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.
arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.
arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.
arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.
Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC 0.84 (q < 10-13).
arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.
Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video temporal grounding, yet real-world applications routinely require localizing every event that satisfies compositional temporal and spatial conditions. Existing benchmarks fall short: they localize only a single moment per query, count without temporal conditions, or treat grounding and counting as disjoint tasks. We introduce CoMET-Bench for Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in long-form video, comprising 2789 queries over 600 videos averaging 33.8 minutes across five real-world domains, with each query composed from 4 temporal conditions, 3 spatial conditions, and a dedicated negative-query subset. We further propose a unified evaluation protocol jointly measuring counting, grounding, and negative-query recognition, including a new Rejection-F1 metric that prevents trivial gaming by lazy "always-empty" models. Benchmarking a broad suite of MLLMs, agent-based, and grounding-specialized methods reveals that existing approaches remain far from solving this task. Building on these findings, we propose CoMET-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that reformulates the task as structured search-and-aggregate, improving F1@0.5 by 6.1% over GPT-5 purely through structural reasoning. Failure analysis further surfaces three open directions: fine-grained entity tracking, position-uniform retrieval, and causal event pairing.
arXiv:2606.14108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI.
arXiv:2510.18003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The convergence of LLM-powered research assistants and AI-based peer review systems creates a critical vulnerability: fully automated publication loops where AI-generated research is evaluated by AI reviewers without human oversight. We investigate this through BadScientist, a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. Our generator employs presentation-manipulation strategies requiring no real experiments. We develop a rigorous evaluation framework with formal error guarantees (concentration bounds and calibration analysis), calibrated on real data. Our results reveal systematic vulnerabilities: fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to . Critically, we identify concern-acceptance conflict – reviewers frequently flag integrity issues yet assign acceptance-level scores. Our mitigation strategies show only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. Despite provably sound aggregation mathematics, integrity checking systematically fails, exposing fundamental limitations in current AI-driven review systems and underscoring the urgent need for defense-in-depth safeguards in scientific publishing.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.
Learning soft continuum robot (SCR) dynamics from video offers flexibility but existing methods lack interpretability or rely on prior assumptions. Model-based approaches require prior knowledge and manual design. We bridge this gap by introducing: (1) The Attention Broadcast Decoder (ABCD), a plug-and-play module for autoencoder-based latent dynamics learning that generates pixel-accurate attention maps localizing each latent dimension's contribution while filtering static backgrounds, enabling visual interpretability via spatially grounded latents and on-image overlays. (2) Visual Oscillator Networks (VONs), a 2D latent oscillator network coupled to ABCD attention maps for on-image visualization of learned masses, coupling stiffness, and forces, thereby enabling mechanical interpretability. We validate our approach on single- and double-segment SCRs, demonstrating that ABCD-based models significantly improve multi-step prediction accuracy with 5.8x error reduction for Koopman operators and 3.5x for oscillator networks on a two-segment robot. VONs autonomously discover a chain structure of oscillators. This fully data-driven approach yields compact, mechanically interpretable models with potential relevance for future control applications.
Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.
We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.
Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when the precision prior is heavy-tailed (Theorem 2.6.1), and under a Descending Dominance condition, is sample-wise identical to take-the-best (Theorem 2.7.4). Fast-and-frugal heuristics and active inference are, then, two descriptions of the same computation. The prediction is that on high-meta-uncertainty items, longer CoT should degrade accuracy. We score the regime per item (simulate-and-recover rho > 0.96), build FEH-79, a benchmark of Knightian frames with matched controls, and run a pre-registered study across seven models (five open-weight 3B-32B, two frontier), five CoT lengths, and 7,875 responses. The gate, fixed before any data, required a negative interaction with posterior probability above 0.95 and an accuracy drop of more than 6 points. It held. The high-regime drop is 17.3 points (95% CI [7.7, 25.5]); matched items with definite answers show no cost. The effect is regime-dependent: decisive in capable mid-to-large models, directional in the two frontier systems, absent-to-reversed in the weakest. The framework answers when CoT helps and unifies the Bayesian and fast-and-frugal traditions: less-is-more effects are evidence about the meta-uncertainty regime, not against Bayesian cognition.
High-grade gliomas integrate into neural circuits through functional synapses with neurons, raising the question of which noncoding elements shape synaptogenic gene expression in tumor cells. The regulatory program written across the dark genome, what we call the $dark regulome$, is the natural substrate to probe, and sequence foundation models offer a zero-shot route through in-silico mutagenesis (ISM); yet likelihood-based scoring is tautologically coupled to local sequence predictability, leaving the regulatory interpretation underdetermined. Across three architecturally distinct foundation models (Caduceus-Ph, HyenaDNA, Enformer) and 30,448 dark genome elements at 92 glioma-relevant loci, we introduce a residualization-and-permutation diagnostic that separates predictability-driven from regulation-driven RIS variance. A sharp 10kb proximal-regulatory horizon survives every control we apply, but the LM-derived element-class hierarchy does not: a six-feature linear baseline matches Caduceus top-decile membership at AUC $= 0.985$. Cross-architecture decomposition cleanly separates a sequence-predictability layer (the two language models co-rank long well-predicted transposable elements) from a regulatory-output layer (Enformer alone retains residual cCRE-discriminative signal), with literally zero overlap between the two top-100 lists. Conservation, brain cis-eQTL, and STRING-PPI cross-checks then anchor what biology survives: top-100 elements across all three models are $3.3\times$ enriched per model for matching brain eQTLs ($p_\mathrm{emp} < 5\times 10^{-3}$), while a tempting transposable-element regulatory layer and a striking NRXN1+NLGN1 protein-pair convergence both fail proper permutation tests once those tests are constructed. We deliver the diagnostic as a general methodological tool for any ISM-based regulatory study.
Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.
arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.
Unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) decomposes visual scenes into distinct entities. Slot attention is a popular approach that represents individual objects as latent vectors, called slots. Current methods obtain these slot representations solely from the last layer of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT), ignoring valuable, semantically rich information encoded across the other layers. To better utilize this latent semantic information, we introduce MUFASA, a lightweight plug-and-play framework for slot-attention-based approaches to unsupervised object segmentation. Our model computes slot attention across multiple feature layers of the ViT encoder, fully leveraging their semantic richness. We propose a fusion strategy to aggregate slots obtained on multiple layers into a unified object-centric representation. Integrating MUFASA into existing OCL methods improves their segmentation results across multiple datasets, setting a new state of the art while simultaneously improving training convergence with only minor inference overhead.
arXiv:2606.14613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor networks provide a powerful framework for efficiently representing high-dimensional data and many-body quantum states. Endowing tensor networks with a Riemannian manifold structure provides a natural setting for numerical optimization and analysis. A central feature of tensor networks is their gauge freedom, whose characterisation (captured by so-called fundamental theorems) underlies both their intrinsic structure and the design of numerical algorithms. In this work, we study the interaction between the Riemannian manifold structure and the gauge freedom for several families of tensor networks. Using group actions and Riemannian submersions, we establish a Riemannian fundamental theorem for the tensor network families studied.
arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.