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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks Using Proximity Graphs for Dust Source Emission Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of these phenomena. In this paper, we demonstrate that proximity graphs enable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively model the intricate spatial and temporal relationships between data points. Specifically, we use proximity graphs–such as Delaunay triangulation, Gabriel graph, k-Nearest Neighbor graph, and Yao graph–as the input for GNNs (including GraphSAGE, Graph Convolutional Networks, and Graph Attention Networks) to perform message passing. Our approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating proximity graphs with GNNs for robust and accurate dust source forecasting. To emphasize the importance of proximity graph representations, we compare our method against GNNs using random graphs for message passing. The results show that GNNs with proximity graphs significantly outperform those with random graphs and are also far superior to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in dust source emission forecasting.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Machine Learning for Biomedical Raman Spectroscopy: From Spectral Acquisition to Clinical Translation

arXiv:2606.14169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Raman spectroscopy provides label-free, chemically specific characterization of biological systems and has become an important tool for cancer diagnosis, molecular subtyping, microbiological identification, and intraoperative decision support. Biomedical Raman spectra are, however, high-dimensional, noisy, and affected by fluorescence background, acquisition variability, and biological heterogeneity, making robust computational analysis essential. This review examines the role of machine learning across the biomedical Raman spectroscopy pipeline, from preprocessing and signal correction to unsupervised structure discovery, supervised diagnosis and molecular stratification, representation and transfer learning, explainability, biomarker discovery, and multimodal integration with imaging, pathology, and molecular profiling. Emphasis is placed on the use of machine learning not only for diagnostic classification, but also for biologically interpretable and clinically actionable analysis. We also discuss the main barriers to clinical translation, including limited dataset sizes, inter-instrument variability, inconsistent preprocessing, insufficient external validation, reproducibility concerns, and limited sharing of software, data, and metadata. We argue that progress will require methodological advances together with standardization, robust validation, explainability, and deployment-ready analytical frameworks. By integrating methodological, biomedical, and translational perspectives, this review outlines key directions for developing reliable and clinically deployable Raman-AI systems.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Cosmological Pseudo-Entropy

arXiv:2606.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study pseudo entropy $\mathcal{S}$, a recent generalization of entanglement entropy, for scalar cosmological perturbations in de Sitter space with sound speed $0.024 \leq c_s \leq 1$, and in expanding and contracting FLRW backgrounds with varying equation-of-state parameter $w$. In de Sitter space, $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ grows after horizon exit while $c_s$ controls its onset and saturates at late times. A similar saturation occurs in expanding-accelerating and contracting-decelerating backgrounds. In contrast, expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds show large early-time $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ followed by oscillations after horizon re-entry. This happens because while the squeezing freezes, the squeezing angle doesn't. Unlike entanglement entropy, pseudo entropy possesses an imaginary part, $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$, as well, which can encode the relative phase. $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$ decays to zero in de Sitter and expanding-accelerating cases, but forms dense sub-Hubble oscillation bands in expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds. Compared with entanglement entropy, Krylov complexity, and Nielsen circuit complexity, pseudo entropy captures otherwise hidden phase information; in the unsaturated regime, its slope is $\sqrt{2}$ times that of Nielsen complexity. Unlike circuit complexity, whose saturation bound is $w$-independent, pseudo entropy is sensitive to $w$ during the transition regime, making it a finer information theoretic diagnostic of cosmological dynamics.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

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

Diffuse AI Control on Fuzzy Tasks

arXiv:2606.08892v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI models deployed in critical domains, such as AI safety research, may subtly sabotage our efforts due to misalignment. Diffuse AI Control is a subfield of AI safety concerned with mitigating risks from AI sabotage distributed over long deployment horizons (diffuse threats). These risks are particularly pernicious on fuzzy tasks, i.e. tasks which are hard to grade or require intuition. To understand diffuse threats on fuzzy tasks, we introduce a framework that considers AI control as an adversarial game between a blue team and a red team. The blue team uses a weak trusted model to construct a weak score against which they would train a strong, potentially subversive model to remove the subversion propensity if it were present. The red team then tries to find model behaviors that are rated highly by the weak score, and thus might not be trained out, but actually correspond to poor performance. We test our framework on the task of writing experimental proposals for research questions from recent ML papers. We use a language model with access to the original paper as a proxy "ground-truth" scorer. Our red team discovers subversive behaviors using multi-objective evolutionary prompt optimization. We show that Opus~4.6 can write proposals that are worse according to the ground truth proxy than those of GPT-OSS-20B, while the weak scorer rates them as highly as the best proposals from Opus 4.6. We then propose an adversarial optimization algorithm for the blue team that discovers more robust prompts for the weak model. This algorithm produces a blue team prompt that our red team optimization fails to exploit.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.

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

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Activity-dependent adaptive deep brain stimulation improves gait in Parkinson’s disease

Authors:

Parkinson’s disease leads to a spectrum of locomotor deficits that vary in severity with the nature of daily activities and the fluctuating physiology of patients. Many of these deficits remain inadequately addressed by existing deep brain stimulation therapies that rely on activity-agnostic parameters optimized for cardinal motor symptoms. By contrast, therapies embedding activity-specific parameters have the potential to better address the entire range of symptoms. Here we expose physiological principles that enable real-time decoding of ongoing locomotor activities across motor fluctuations from the neural dynamics of the subthalamic nucleus. This decoding steered activity-dependent adaptations of deep brain stimulation therapies that improved locomotor deficits while preserving efficacy for cardinal motor symptoms across activities of daily living. Our activity-dependent framework provides a blueprint for next-generation neuromodulation therapies that continuously select parameters optimized to the behavioral context and fluctuating physiology of each patient. ClinicalTrials.gov registration NCT06791902 . Neural decoding algorithms that leverage physiological principles of locomotor encoding support activity-dependent deep brain stimulation therapies that improve locomotor deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease.

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

Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

arXiv:2606.14219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.

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

PACT: Privileged Trace Co-Training for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

Multi-turn tool-use agents must reason, call tools, and adapt to observations across several interaction turns. Post-training such agents is challenging, as reinforcement learning often suffers from sparse rewards and weak credit assignment despite matching the prompt-only inference setting, while supervised fine-tuning on expert traces provides dense process supervision but can over-constrain the model to fixed trajectories. To tackle this, we propose PACT, a Privileged trAce Co-Training framework for multi-turn tool-use agents. The key idea is to use expert traces only as training-time optimization signals rather than rollout-time hints. PACT keeps rollout generation prompt-only, then uses expert traces to guide optimization through two complementary signals: a trace-conditioned RL surrogate that evaluates prompt-only rollouts under expert-trace context, and a component-aware SFT loss that supervises reasoning prefixes and tool-calls with annealed strength. To reduce over-reliance on the training-only trace context, PACT further introduces a prompt-only anchoring. We also provide a latent-trace view that connects the two trace-based objectives and explains how expert traces can guide optimization without being used during rollout generation. Experiments on FTRL, BFCL, and ToolHop show that PACT consistently improves over strong SFT- and RL-based baselines, highlighting the value of privileged trace co-training for multi-turn tool-use learning.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

High Demand, Low Possession: Dilemmas and Strategies for Research Capability Cultivation in Clinical Medicine Postgraduates

Most previous studies have examined medical postgraduate research training from a single dimension, lacking a full-chain analysis that integrates capability demand, actual possession, obstacles, and output. Consequently, the measurement of capability gaps and the analysis of underlying training model deficiencies remain insufficient. To address this gap, we administered a self-designed multidimensional questionnaire to 86 clinical medicine postgraduates at a medical school, covering research cognition, interest, capability demand and possession, participation pathways, difficulties, and outputs. The aim was to systematically characterize the current situation, identify problems, and propose optimization strategies. Over 90% of participants expressed interest in research, yet only 1.16% self-rated as very knowledgeable. The largest demand-possess gap was for writing and publication (86.05% vs. 16.28%), followed by independent research capability (75.58% vs. 11.63%). A total of 59.30% cited lack of foundational knowledge, making experiments very difficult, as the greatest challenge, and 66.28% had no research achievements. The primary source of research topics was supervisor assignment (54.65%), with only 4.65% choosing topics independently. No statistically significant differences were found across grades or training types (P > 0.05). These findings reveal a structural high demand, low possession gap in medical postgraduate research training, with early research experience deficit and a passive research model as key constraining factors. Accordingly, an integrated bachelor-postgraduate progressive research competency training system is proposed.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

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

Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment for Domain Adaptive Retrieval

arXiv:2512.04524v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting class-level semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606.20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes. Wall-to-wall, annually updated maps are a persistent need for effective forest management. Many planning systems and data collections combine disparate data sources with different purposes, vintages, and prediction quality, which leads to confounding behavior in operational planning systems. We introduce the VibrantForests framework, developed and applied to map forest attributes and provide a coherent foundation for effective forest and wildfire planning. VibrantForests includes a satellite-based forest structure model trained on lidar-derived samples and applied across the contiguous United States to concurrently generate estimates of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground live tree biomass, basal area, and quadratic mean diameter at 10-meter resolution. We demonstrate predictive capability spanning the full spectrum of forest conditions ranging from sparse-canopy/low-biomass to dense-canopy/high-biomass. Results show that our model extends the range at which saturation is commonly encountered in comparable passive-sensor models, and reduces regression-to-mean behavior that commonly produces overestimation of forest attributes in small/sparse conditions and underestimation in large/dense conditions. The VibrantForests framework addresses a key limitation in large-area forest and wildfire planning by delivering coherent wall-to-wall estimates of management-relevant attributes at annual cadence and 10m resolution.

21.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Unknown Author

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Energy Teleportation under Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Environments

arXiv:2511.01518v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum energy teleportation (QET), implemented via local operations and classical communication, enables carrier-free energy transfer by exploiting quantum resources. While QET has been extensively studied theoretically and validated experimentally in various quantum platforms, enhancing energy output for mixed initial states, as the system inevitably interacts with environments, remains a significant challenge. In this work, we study QET performance in a two-qubit system coupled to equilibrium or nonequilibrium reservoirs. We derive an analytical expression for the energy output in terms of the system Hamiltonian eigenstates, enabling analysis of energy output for mixed states. Using the Redfield master equation, we systematically examine the effects of qubit detuning, nonequilibrium temperature difference, and nonequilibrium chemical potential difference on the energy output. We find that the energy output for mixed states often follows that of the eigenstate with the highest population, and that nonequilibrium environments can enhance the energy output in certain parameter regimes.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.