Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:9e4cb307a41827c17110a74024906c7d

‘Hidden hero’ peptides guard crops against sudden cold

Authors: Unknown Author

A protein signal remains silent under normal conditions but is activated under cold stress to protect developing pollen. This ‘on-demand’ resilience mechanism could enable the development of ‘climate smart’ crops that maintain high yields in good years and food security under climate stress. A peptide signal ensures that, in cold conditions, developing pollen receives nutrients at the right time.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14933

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

Authors:

Grier M. Jones ↗Maforikan J. Amoussou ↗Maximilian O. Leach ↗Hans-Arno Jacobsen ↗

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

Read & Discuss → View Source →

03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.05014

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Authors:

Boyi Zeng ↗Yiqin Hao ↗Zitong Wang ↗Shixiang Song ↗He Li ↗Feichen Song ↗Yifan Liu ↗Ziwei He ↗Xinbing Wang ↗Zhouhan Lin ↗

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24772

A high-fidelity two-qubit gate for multimode superconducting P-mon qubits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To scale superconducting quantum processors, it is essential to achieve long coherence times while engineering interactions that do not introduce additional decoherence channels. In superconducting qubit systems, this can be realized using multimode circuits that feature a protected qubit mode alongside a distinct mediator mode. Building on this concept, our recently developed P-mon qubit provides intrinsic protection against decoherence from the readout environment. We extend this approach to controlled two-qubit interactions, by exploiting the mediator modes of P-mons for on-demand coupling. Because direct interactions between the qubit modes are strongly suppressed, unwanted $ZZ$-type interactions are significantly reduced to below $3.6(5)~kHz$ in the idle state. When tuning the coupled mediator modes on resonance, the cross-Kerr interaction between the qubit and the hybridized mediator modes leads to a qubit-state dependent frequency shift. By selectively addressing these transitions, we implement a $180~ns$ long CZ gate and determine a fidelity of $99.62(4)~%$. These results represent a significant step toward a scalable superconducting architecture that maintains high performance at scale.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2402.17750

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

Authors:

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

06.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:155baf23fd9ef7ce2e8334dbb1ec475c

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Authors:

Khalid ↗Elliott ↗Obafemi-Ajayi ↗Wunsch ↗Scharf ↗

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14765

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Authors:

Qinwu Xu ↗

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.17006

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

Authors:

Yonghyun Kim ↗Junwon Lee ↗Haiwen Xia ↗Yinghao Ma ↗Junghyun Koo ↗Koichi Saito ↗Yuki Mitsufuji ↗Chris Donahue ↗

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.08402

SceneConductor: 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image with Multi-Agent Orchestration

Authors:

Jeonghwan Kim ↗Yushi Lan ↗Yongwei Chen ↗Hieu Trung Nguyen ↗Chuanyu Pan ↗Xingang Pan ↗

Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14792

Efficient Reinforcement for Visual-Textual Thinking with Discrete Diffusion Model

Authors:

Yoonjeon Kim ↗Yuhta Takida ↗Chieh-Hsin Lai ↗Eunho Yang ↗Yuki Mitsufuji ↗

RL-based post-training has been widely adopted to enable interleaved visual and textual reasoning in unified multimodal models capable of both text and image generation. However, most existing approaches are built upon autoregressive (AR) unified models, which require full image regeneration during visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that multimodal discrete diffusion models are effective alternatives to AR models for reinforcement learning in interleaved reasoning, owing to their ability to perform efficient visual rollouts via localized visual editing rather than full image-token regeneration. This reduces rollout computation during GRPO by 26.9\% compared to AR baselines, with minimal performance drop. Despite the improved efficiency, we find that joint reward assignment, which employs a shared reward signal across modalities, introduces cross-modal interference between unrelated image and text token sequences during RL updates. To address this issue, we propose factorized reward assignment, a strategy that assigns rewards independently to text and vision segments. With factorized reward assignment, our RL approach achieves an 11.2% improvement over joint reward assignment and a 38.04% improvement over the base model.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.05647

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

Authors:

Chin-Cheng Chan ↗Justin P. Haldar ↗

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

Read & Discuss → View Source →

12.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2401.00351

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

Authors:

Rangel Baldasso ↗Alan Pereira ↗Guilherme Reis ↗

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20387

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

Authors:

Alex Gunning ↗Sebastian Schmid ↗Zhengxiao Liu ↗Sridevi Kuriyattil ↗Aydin Deger ↗Andrew J. Daley ↗

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12633

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Authors:

Jiangtao Kong ↗Peijun Zhao ↗Chun-Fu Chen ↗Youngwook Do ↗Shaohan Hu ↗Tianyi Zhou ↗Huajie Shao ↗

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2412.03716

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

Authors:

Noah Shumba ↗Opelo Tshekiso ↗Pengfei Li ↗Giulia Fanti ↗Shaolei Ren ↗

arXiv:2412.03716v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) computing and data centers consume large amounts of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage effectiveness for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our estimates suggest that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume as much as {0.66 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about {59 liters}. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about {0.13 liters} and {2.9 liters} of water, respectively. All the numbers for generative model inference tasks are based on public information available in 2024, when we initially prepared the analysis. Since then, AI inference systems have improved substantially. For example, recent disclosures suggest that energy efficiency improved by more than 30x between May 2024 and May 2025. Accordingly, our 2024 estimates should be interpreted as historical reference values rather than as representative of current performance. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 9 of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

16.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:3e26031ca46986a1e35061f59215bb4b

Breaking The Pain-Stiffness Cycle- Supraclavicular Catheter Facilitated Rehabilitation Of Post-Surgical Elbow stiffness- A Retrospective Observational Study

Authors:

mukundan ↗Arulanandham ↗V. G ↗

ABSTRACT Background: Post-traumatic elbow stiffness is a recognised complication following orthopaedic trauma surgery, occurring in 10-15% of trauma patients sustaining injuries. Pain remains the primary barrier to physiotherapy compliance, with surgical arthrolysis carrying recurrence rates of up to 34%. The supraclavicular brachial plexus block, referred to as the 'spinal of the arm', provides anaesthesia and analgesia to the entire upper limb below the shoulder. A structured non-surgical approach combining continuous catheter analgesia with timed rehabilitation was identified as an unmet need in this patient group. Methods: A single-centre retrospective observational study was conducted on data of patients treated for post-surgical upper limb stiffness between January 2022 and April 2026. Of 30 patients identified, 28 with elbow involvement formed the primary analysis group following exclusion of 2 patients with isolated wrist stiffness and complex regional pain syndrome. Ultrasound- guided supraclavicular brachial plexus catheters were inserted using the Contiplex system. Patients received 0.5% Bupivacaine (10-15ml) for initial blockade, followed by daily top-up doses of 0.2% Ropivacaine(20ml) given 30 minutes prior to structured physiotherapy and CPM sessions for up to 5 days. The primary outcome was change in arc of elbow motion in degrees, measured by the attending orthopaedic consultant using standard goniometry. Results: Complete pre- and post- intervention data were available for all 28 patients. Mean pre-intervention arc of elbow motion was 39.1{degrees}(SD+/-23.2{degrees}), improving to 104.2{degrees}(SD+/- 30.0{degrees}) post-intervention. Mean improvement was 65.1{degrees}(SD+/- 30.6{degrees} ); 95% CI 53.8{degrees} to 76.4{degrees} ; range 10{degrees}-140{degrees} ; paired t-test t=-11.27, p

Read & Discuss → View Source →

17.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.17253

Large Deviations for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Randomized Quasi-Periodic Initial Data in Higher Dimensions: Subcritical Case

Authors:

Fei Xu ↗Yong Li ↗

arXiv:2604.17253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the cubic weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with randomized spatially quasi-periodic initial data in higher dimensions. Under a polynomial decay assumption in Fourier space, we establish a Large Deviations Principle for rogue waves in the so-called subcritical time regime. The proof proceeds in two main steps. We first characterize the distribution of the linear solution and establish the corresponding linear large deviations principle. The lower bound is obtained via pointwise estimates, while the upper bound follows from a combination of truncation and probabilistic arguments. {The method used in this step appears to be new; compare with [GGKS23].} We then perform a detailed combinatorial analysis of the Picard iteration, deriving an effective bound for the Duhamel term and thereby establishing the nonlinear large deviations principle.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

18.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19507

The t-Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond Model

Authors:

Meredith Shea ↗

arXiv:2606.19507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we consider an Aztec diamond model split into two unequal regions which are asymptotically fixed in size. Each region is weighted with a distinct two-periodic weighting. We refer to this model as the t-split two-periodic Aztec diamond, to signify its difference from the previous work title Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond, where the model was split into two equal regions. We derive an integral expression for the correlation kernel of the model and give a partial description of the scaling limit behavior, along with a conjecture for the remainder. We refer to the larger and smaller sides of the model as the dominant and non-dominant sides, and to the location of the weight change as the interface. The dominant side exhibits a limit shape that depends only on its own weighting and is identical to that of the two-periodic Aztec diamond, while the non-dominant side appears to have a novel limit shape that depends on both weightings and the location of the interface. Lastly, we consider the complete limit shape in the case where the dominant side two-periodic parameter goes to 0.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.11219

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

Authors:

Zhikang Shen ↗Jianrong Lu ↗Haiyuan Wan ↗Jianhai Chen ↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

20.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2503.18045

Ergodicity for stochastic 2D Boussinesq equations with a highly degenerate pure jump Levy noise

Authors:

Jianhua Huang ↗Xuhui Peng ↗Xue Wang ↗Jiangwei Zhang ↗

arXiv:2503.18045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study aims to analyze the ergodicity for stochastic 2D Boussinesq equations and explore the impact of a highly degenerate pure jump L\'{e}vy noise acting only in the temperature equation, where this noise could appear on only a few Fourier modes. By leveraging the equi-continuity of the semigroup established through Malliavin calculus and an analysis of stochastic calculus, together with the weak irreducibility of the solution process, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the invariant measure. Moreover, we overcome the main challenge of establishing time asymptotic smoothing properties of the Markovian dynamics corresponding to this system by conducting spectral analysis of the Malliavin covariance matrix.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

21.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:2034abe6c601063b69092e6164731ff1

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Authors:

Segal ↗Levy ↗Ghosheh ↗Wolak ↗Ben-Dov ↗

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20560

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18132

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Yuan Meng ↗Bo Wang ↗Juan de los Rios Ruiz ↗Xiangtong Yao ↗Zhenshan Bing ↗Fuchun Sun ↗Alois Knoll ↗

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12609

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

Authors:

Arthur Bigot ↗Harmon Bhasin ↗Core Francisco Park ↗Eugene Shakhnovich ↗Dianzhuo Wang ↗

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18594

Benchmarking Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation

Authors:

Seyed Alireza Azimi ↗Homayoon Farrahi ↗Abhishek Naik ↗Colin Bellinger ↗A. Rupam Mahmood ↗

arXiv:2606.18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance. In this study, we evaluate pose increment, pose velocity, joint position increment, and joint velocity across two vision-based manipulation tasks: object picking and pushing. We train policies in simulation and deploy them to the real world using sim-to-real transfer. We find that action-space representation indeed significantly affects sim-to-real performance. In particular, we find that the joint velocity action space is best for the vision-based picking and pushing tasks in terms of smoothness and final task performance. We also provide practical guidance for RL practitioners in choosing action spaces for both simulation and real-world experiments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia