Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Effectiveness and Safety of Bempedoic Acid Across Clinically Relevant Subgroups: Insights from the CLEAR Taiwan Study

Background Despite available lipid-lowering therapies (LLT), many patients fail to achieve low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. This gap persists across clinically relevant subgroups. Bempedoic acid has demonstrated effective LDL-C lowering with a favorable safety profile in the CLEAR Taiwan study; however, its effects across subgroups in Asian populations remains limited. Methods The phase IV CLEAR Taiwan study (NCT06925100) enrolled patients with inadequately controlled hypercholesterolemia who received bempedoic acid for 12 weeks in addition to background LLT. This analysis evaluated changes in lipid parameters, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and safety outcomes in clinically relevant subgroups, including cardiovascular risk, diabetes, age, statin tolerance, and sex. Results A total of 180 patients were included. Bempedoic acid achieved significant LDL-C reductions in all subgroups. Numerically greater LDL-C reductions were observed in primary prevention, statin-intolerant, younger (< 65 years), and female patients, while comparable reductions were observed across diabetes status. Reductions in non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B were consistent with LDL-C findings. Significant decreases in hsCRP were observed in all subgroups, with numerically greater reductions in patients aged < 65 years and those without diabetes. Bempedoic acid was well tolerated, with a low incidence of adverse events and no new safety signals identified. Changes in liver enzymes, renal function, and uric acid were minimal within subgroups. Conclusion Subgroup analyses from the CLEAR Taiwan study demonstrate consistent efficacy and safety of bempedoic acid across clinically relevant subgroups and support its use as a flexible option to address residual gaps in lipid management.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference

arXiv:2606.14743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models, Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

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

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SVoT: State-aware Visualization-of-Thought for Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions. Current studies often leave intermediate states unverified and treat state transitions as implicit processes, which limits reliability in multi-hop spatial reasoning. To address this, we propose State-aware Visualization-of-Thought (SVoT), a reinforcement learning framework that generates interleaved, verifiable intermediate states and visualizations. SVoT integrates transition reasoning chains into the generation processes, enabling the model to verify action preconditions and effects through interleaved textual and visual reasoning. We train SVoT via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), instantiating verification through reward design and evaluating the efficacy of different fine-grained rewards. As existing benchmarks reduce state transitions to single-variable updates, substantially simplifying the problems, we establish five domains by extending classical environments and introducing two novel domains, Pacman and Gather, that require multi-object interactions and numerical reasoning. These domains support systematic evaluation of multi-hop spatial reasoning with quantitative verification of generated intermediate states and transition reasoning. SVoT with transition-aware supervision achieves state-of-the-art performance across the introduced domains, yielding up to a 65% absolute accuracy gain on out-of-distribution test sets.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Tensor-Coord: Algebraic Decomposition of Joint Plan Tensors for Conflict-Free Multi-Agent LLM Planning

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain limited in multi-agent planning because independently generated plans can create coordination failures such as spatial collisions, resource contention, and temporal deadlocks. We introduce Tensor-Coord, a multilinear algebra framework that represents the joint plan of N agents as a third-order tensor \(T \in R^{N \times H \times A}\) over agents, timesteps, and actions. Canonical Polyadic (CP) and Tucker decompositions are used to identify latent coordination structure. The minimal epsilon-approximate CP rank R* defines a computable coordination complexity measure, with \(CC(Pi)=(R*-N)/N\). We prove that R*=N is necessary and sufficient for plan independence. The residual \(E=T-T_{R*}\) defines a conflict score over agent pairs, timesteps, and actions, localizing failures without domain-specific rules. Tucker factors provide interpretable agent roles, temporal phases, and action clusters that are converted into natural language constraints for iterative LLM replanning. Experiments on multi-robot delivery tasks across Easy (2 agents, 5x5 grid), Medium (3 agents, 5x5 grid), and Hard (4 agents, 5x5 grid) settings show convergence to conflict-free plans in 100% of 2-agent cases within 1.4 iterations on average, 80% of 3-agent cases within 3.2 iterations, and 60% of 4-agent cases within 4.0 iterations. CP rank scaled approximately linearly as \(R*(N) = 3.9N + 0.5\), supporting its use as a predictor of coordination complexity.

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

Sharp log-Sobolev inequalities on finite cyclic groups

arXiv:2606.02847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathbb Z_n$ be the cyclic group equipped with the uniform probability measure $\pi$, and let $A_{\psi_n}$ be the Laplacian with word length \[ \psi_n(k) = \min(k,n-k). \] We prove the sharp log-Sobolev inequality \[ Ent_{\pi}(f^2) \le 2\pi(f A_{\psi_n} f), \qquad f:\mathbb Z_n \to [0,\infty), \] for every $n \ge 4$. The proof is inspired by the recent work of Frank and Ivanisvili[FrankIvanisvili2026] on a sharp log-Sobolev inequality for nearest-neighbor simple random walk. We use their cubic-majorant reduction, which turns the problem into a 3rd moment estimate; the new point is a blockwise 3rd moment estimate adapted to the word-length multiplier. The same 3rd moment argument also recovers the log-Sobolev inequality for Poisson-semigroup on the circle, first proved by Weissler[Weissler1980]. The same sharp inequalities were also obtained recently by Yao[Yao2026] by a different method.

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

From Consumption to Reflection: Designing Human-AI Relations for Stable Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed how humans access information, but not how we reason with it. Their fluency accelerates consumption while bypassing the slow, reflective processes that underpin sound judgment. This paper introduces Relational Reflective Intelligence (RRI), an inference-time governance layer that operationalizes reflection through auditable reasoning loops. RRI operates not inside the model but around it, providing a practical structure for stable, auditable reasoning between humans and LLMs. The core premise is that LLMs inherit cognitive vulnerabilities similar to those that shape human thought: reliance on intuitive shortcuts, confusion between representation and reality, and a preference for coherence over falsification. When humans and models share these tendencies, their errors compound. We refer to this as relational drift, a failure that arises from interaction rather than from the model alone. Addressing this requires a shift from modeling relations between words to structuring relations between model outputs and human reasoning. RRI provides this missing layer through three components: the Rose-Frame, which identifies likely breakdowns in reasoning; the Architect's Pen, which introduces targeted reflection steps at critical moments; and an inference-time workflow that embeds these steps without retraining the model. Together, these elements transform human-AI interaction into a joint reasoning system with explicit checkpoints, conflict surfacing, and an auditable trail of assumptions. Rather than making machines think like humans or forcing humans to reason like machines, RRI creates a structured interaction in which both compensate for each other's limitations. It reframes AI safety as a cognitive architecture problem, where reliable decisions depend on embedding reflection directly into the interaction process.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Prior-guided Fusion of Multimodal Features for Change Detection from Optical-SAR Images

Multimodal change detection (MMCD) identifies changed areas in multimodal remote sensing data, demonstrating significant application value in land use monitoring and urban sustainable development. However, literature MMCD approaches exhibit limitations in both cross-modal interaction and exploiting modality-specific characteristics. This leads to insufficient modeling of fine-grained change information, thus hindering the precise detection of semantic changes. To address these problems, we propose STSF-Net, a framework designed for MMCD between optical and SAR images. STSF-Net jointly models modality-specific and spatio-temporal common features to enhance change representations. Specifically, modality-specific features are exploited to capture genuine semantic change signals, while spatio-temporal common features are embedded to suppress pseudo-changes caused by differences in imaging mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce an optical and SAR feature fusion strategy that adaptively adjusts multimodal feature importance based on semantic priors obtained from visual foundation models. Finally, we introduce the novel Delta-SN6 dataset, the first openly-accessible multiclass MMCD benchmark consisting of very-high-resolution fully polarimetric SAR and optical images. Experimental results on Delta-SN6, BRIGHT, and Wuhan datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.21%, 0.87%, and 1.32% in mIoU, respectively.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

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

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

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

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

Authors:

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

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

Linear algebra at exponential scale via tensor network dimension reduction

arXiv:2606.15350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many problems in modern scientific computing are challenging because of a curse of dimension, where their mathematical formulation involves objects whose dimension is exponential in the nominal "size" of the problem. Tensor networks can provide a compact representation for exponentially large vectors and matrices that arise in applications, but these representations do not always lead to reliable algorithms. This paper develops and analyzes techniques for randomized dimension reduction of tensor network data. These techniques support a suite of efficient algorithms for provably solving exponential-scale linear algebra problems, including trace estimation and eigenvalue approximation. The paper includes several stylized illustrations from quantum many-body physics with ambient dimension up to $2^{200}$.

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

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

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

HAARES Half-Split Residual Basis Routing for Deep Transformers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.06564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block-level residual routing makes learned residual aggregation practical by routing over block summaries, but each summary compresses an ordered sequence of attention and MLP updates into one cumulative vector. We propose \method{}, a lightweight residual basis router that keeps the cumulative block source and adds one half-split detail basis, computed as the difference between first-half and second-half residual updates. The detail basis is RMS-matched and updated online, exposing coarse intra-block trajectory information without dense sublayer-level routing. Across OpenWebText, cross-domain character-level benchmarks, and BPE-tokenized OpenWebText, the empirical pattern is depth-dependent: gains are small or mixed at shallow depth and most reliable in 48-layer models. In the 201M 48-layer setting, \method{} improves over Block AttnRes across all three seeds, while a 453M two-seed probe shows the same direction. Ablations rule out source duplication, random signed details, fixed detail-source biases, or block-count changes alone. Cost analysis shows that the method is FLOP-light but not wall-clock-free: it adds memory and routing overhead, yet its relative arithmetic cost is amortized as width grows and earlier convergence can reduce time-to-target.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.