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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Crude oil turns cheap porous membrane into a sieve to refine itself without heat

Authors: Unknown Author

An inexpensive, porous polymer membrane helps to separate raw crude oil, without heat or selective coating. Heavy hydrocarbons self-assemble inside the pores to create channels that are likely to be less than 2 nanometres wide, enriching the resulting permeate mix into light, ‘naphtha range’ hydrocarbons with 30% less energy cost and carbon dioxide emissions than conventional distillation. Long hydrocarbons are deposited on pore walls, narrowing channels until only smaller molecules can pass through.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific Hemostatic Responses and Diagnostic Potential of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-Dimer in Mild COVID-19, Malaria, and Co-Infection in a Tropical Setting: A Case-Control Study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Background: In malaria-endemic tropical regions, the overlapping coagulopathy in COVID-19 and malaria poses diagnostic and prognostic challenges, particularly with potential sex differences. This study evaluated sex-specific variations in platelet indices and fibrinolytic markers and assessed the utility of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-dimer in mild/asymptomatic cases. Methods: A case-control study was conducted with 220 participants (55 each in healthy controls, malaria-positive, COVID-19-positive, and COVID-19+malaria co-infected groups), aged 20-65 years, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Platelet indices were analysed using Sysmex XP-300 haematology analyser, while D-dimer and fibrinogen were measured by ELISA. Data were analysed using SAS 9.4 with ANOVA, Tukey's HSD, Pearson correlation, and sex-stratified comparisons. Results: PDW was significantly elevated in all infected groups compared to controls (malaria: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; COVID-19: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; co-infection: 15.61 +/- 0.21 fL vs. control: 13.26 +/- 0.17 fL; F=25.850, p < 0.001). D-dimer levels were highest in the co-infected group (553.42 +/- 59.74 ng/ml, F=2.816, p = 0.040). No significant changes were observed in other platelet indices or fibrinogen across groups. No significant correlation existed between platelet indices and the fibrinolytic markers. Males exhibited significantly higher D-dimer levels across all infected groups (p < 0.05) and higher fibrinogen in COVID-19 subjects (p = 0.036). Sex exerted a stronger influence on parameters than age. Conclusion: Males show heightened fibrinolytic activation in COVID-19 and malaria co-infection. PDW and D-dimer are promising, cost-effective biomarkers for screening mild infections in resource-limited tropical settings.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Exposing the Illusion of Erasure in Knowledge Editing for LLMs

arXiv:2606.23276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge Editing (KE) has emerged as a frontier for updating specific facts in LLMs without costly retraining, but its reliability and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we examine KE from an adversarial elicitation perspective, revealing that edited knowledge is often not fully erased and continues to surface, with consistent failures observed across diverse model architectures. To explain this behavior, we conduct a mechanistic analysis of popular KE methods. We show that low-rank updates do not overwrite existing knowledge but instead redistribute it within the model's representation space. Furthermore, we find that these methods act as targeted suppression mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of expressing original facts, rather than removing them from the model. Analysis of the loss landscape reveals that edited knowledge lies in narrow, anisotropic regions that are highly sensitive to perturbations, making them highly vulnerable to indirect prompting and adversarial attacks. By exposing these profound architectural vulnerabilities, our work proves that KE algorithms are inherently bypassable and motivates a fundamental reevaluation of how we deploy post-hoc updates in several LLM applications.

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.CL) 2026-06-16

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score

arXiv:2606.13300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Trajectory-based Quantization Sensitivity Score (TQS), a metric that reframes post-training quantization (PTQ) through the lens of dynamical-systems stability. By modeling the network's rollout as a discrete-time dynamical system, TQS characterizes how quantization-induced errors propagate and amplify over the rollout horizon. Unlike conventional PTQ methods, where sensitivity analysis is often coupled to the quantization procedure, TQS enables a priori sensitivity estimation decoupled from quantizer selection and bit-width assignment. This separation allows for quantization budget planning even for black-box or compiled networks with fused operators. Building on this, we present TQS-PTQ, a flexible mixed-precision framework that requires no calibration data or costly second-order approximations. Our experiments show that a dynamical-systems perspective provides a robust, high-performing pathway for low-precision deployment in resource-constrained settings.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Suppressing Self-Discharging of Quantum Batteries by Cavity Interactions

arXiv:2606.23999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyse a two-cavity architecture, in which a lossy cavity hosting $N$ qubits is coherently coupled to an auxiliary cavity, as a resource for the storage phase of an open quantum battery at non-zero temperature. Within a local Lindblad treatment in the resonant configuration, we find that the inter-cavity coupling enhances the suppression of self-discharging across every initial preparation, battery size, and temperature we examine, with the protection degrading smoothly as the mean thermal occupation increases. For a single qubit, the energy-basis coherence of a pure superposition leads to better long-time retention than fully excited state, highlighting the beneficial role of quantum coherence in protecting stored energy against thermal degradation. For two-qubit batteries, Bell-state preparations exhibit enhanced long-time ergotropy retention compared with the fully excited state, while the inclusion of qubit-qubit interactions produces only a weak dependence on the interaction type and strength within the parameter regime considered. Extending the analysis to multi-qubit GHZ-charged batteries with all-to-all Heisenberg interactions, we find that the normalized retained ergotropy increases monotonically with the number of qubits. This behavior is consistent with the collective enhancement of the qubit-cavity coupling in the symmetric Dicke manifold, indicating that larger quantum batteries can benefit from improved protection against self-discharge. These findings establish cavity-assisted protection as a promising strategy for mitigating self-discharging and realizing of long-lived quantum batteries in experimentally accessible platforms.

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

SpecLoR: Spectral Lookahead Rectification for Motion-Coherent Text-to-Video Generation

Flow Matching has enabled robust text-to-video generation via latent ODE sampling. However, velocity approximation and numerical discretization errors inevitably accumulate, causing sampling trajectories to drift. Consequently, generated videos often suffer from severe spatiotemporal inconsistencies. Nevertheless, directly correcting these drifted, noisy latents is challenging: (i) timestep-dependent noise obscures reliable structural cues; (ii) spatial interventions risk disrupting intricate local geometry while incurring heavy computational costs. To address this, we propose Spectral Lookahead Rectification (SpecLoR), a plug-and-play inference method that bypasses noise via lookahead prediction, and circumvents spatiotemporal entanglement by shifting corrections to the frequency domain, where universal statistical priors of natural videos are readily available. First, during early sampling stages, SpecLoR looks ahead to estimate the clean latent $z_{t,0}$ and computes its 3D spatiotemporal spectrum. Next, SpecLoR rectifies the amplitude spectrum to match the prior, leaving the phase intact. Finally, the corrected state is re-noised to resume ODE integration. Experiments on Wan2.2 demonstrate that SpecLoR significantly reduces physical artifacts and enhances motion coherence across multiple benchmarks with minimal computational overhead (4 additional NFEs).

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Are We Ready For An Agent-Native Memory System?

Memory for large language model (LLM) agents has rapidly evolved from simple retrieval-augmented mechanisms into a data management system that supports persistent information storage, retrieval, update, consolidation, and dynamic lifecycle governance throughout agent execution. Despite this evolution, existing evaluations still benchmark agent memory mainly through end-to-end task success metrics (e.g., F1, BLEU), while treating the underlying system as a monolithic black box. As a result, critical system-level concerns, including operational costs, architectural trade-offs across memory modules, and robustness under dynamic knowledge updates, remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present a systematic experimental study of agent memory from a data management perspective. We propose an analytical framework that decomposes agent memory into four core modules: memory representation and storage, extraction, retrieval and routing, and maintenance. Under this framework, we evaluate 12 representative memory systems and two reference baselines across five benchmark workloads spanning 11 datasets. Our extensive end-to-end evaluation shows that no single architecture dominates across all scenarios; instead, effectiveness depends heavily on how well the memory structure aligns with the workload bottleneck. Furthermore, through fine-grained ablation studies, we quantify their individual effects on representation fidelity, retrieval precision, update correctness, and long-horizon stability. Finally, we reveal cost-performance trade-offs under realistic workloads, showing localized maintenance is more cost-efficient than global reorganization. Based on these findings, we identify promising directions towards building truly agent-native memory systems. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/MemoryData.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Sleep Classification via EEG Signal Criticality: A Passive BCI Approach for Sleep-Improvement Neurofeedback

arXiv:2606.13017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated sleep staging is a fundamental application of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCI), decoding spontaneous neural states to enable closed-loop interventions independent of user intent. This study evaluates criticality features derived from Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for the specific identification of deep sleep (N3). We analyzed $347,232$ EEG epochs from $290$ older women using UMAP manifold learning to visualize state transitions. Subsequently, six classifiers were benchmarked via 10-fold cross-validation, using balanced accuracy to determine the optimal "state-sensing" engine for neurofeedback.Naive Bayes achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy ($87.17\% \pm 0.24\%$), significantly outperforming a fully connected deep neural network (FNN: $81.58\%$) and Random Forest ($80.97\%$). Linear models (LDA: $57.21\%$; SVM: $51.01\%$) performed poorly, indicating that DFA-derived criticality features reside on a distinct, non-linear manifold. Probabilistic decoding of EEG criticality provides a high-accuracy sensing mechanism for pBCIs. This robust classification pipeline supports the development of state-dependent neurofeedback, such as targeted auditory stimulation, to enhance cognitive recovery.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Infinitesimal Causality

arXiv:2606.24621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a categorical account of infinitesimal causality in Frobenius Markov categories equipped with tangent-bundle semantics. IDC captures the infinitesimal layer in which interventions act as tangent deformations of copy/discard structure. Two distinct Frobenius structures interact: (1) the categorical Frobenius algebra on classical variables encoding copying, comparing, and discarding; and (2) the geometric Frobenius integrability condition, namely involutive closure of the intervention distribution, distinct from the algebraic Frobenius structure. Categorical causal sufficiency is defined as the compatibility of these two notions. A key observation is that, for structural causal models, infinitesimal causality is most naturally formulated in the slice of deterministic mechanisms over exogenous variables, with visible stochastic kernels obtained only after pushforward. Interventions are tangent vectors that deform the Frobenius copy/discard operations; their Lie brackets measure whether this deformation preserves classical information-flow structure. Pearl's do-calculus is used as a guiding example of intervention identities: ignoring irrelevant interventions corresponds to counit invariance, action/observation exchange to coproduct compatibility with pushforward, and independence to involutive bracket closure of the visible intervention distribution.

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

You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Atom–photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom

arXiv:2605.28968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate atom–photon entanglement using a single cesium atom trapped in an optical tweezer. Entanglement is generated by resonant excitation and subsequent spontaneous decay, which entangles the atomic Zeeman state with photon polarization. The photon is collected with a high numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.55) and coupled into a single-mode fiber, enabling atom photon measurements and measurement of the Bell-state fidelity. We obtain raw entanglement fidelity of ${\mathcal F} = 0.942(16)$ and inferred fidelity of ${\mathcal F}_inf = 0.962(26)$ after correcting independently characterized atom measurement errors. Compared with related free-space experiments using $^{87}$Rb, the multilevel structure of the relevant excited state in $^{133}$Cs requires the use of a single short excitation pulse in each entanglement attempt in order to suppress unwanted re-excitation. These results establish a free-space Cs atom–photon interface and provide a step toward dual-species Rb–Cs quantum networking.

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

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

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

Neural network surrogates with uncertainty quantification for inverse problems in partial differential equations

arXiv:2606.20417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse problems for differential equations arise throughout science and engineering, where one seeks to infer unknown model parameters from noisy or incomplete observations. Traditional numerical methods for these problems are often computationally expensive, particularly in Bayesian settings where evaluating the likelihood becomes costly for complex forward models and high-dimensional parameter spaces. To address this challenge, we introduce DeepGaLA, a neural-network surrogate for differential equation solvers that provides uncertainty-aware predictions, reducing overconfident inference when training data are limited. To evaluate the fidelity of the surrogate-induced posterior approximations in practice, we show that a short run of delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo can serve as an effective diagnostic. Across a range of numerical experiments, DeepGaLA delivers forward-model approximations with accuracy comparable to established Gaussian-process surrogates, while better maintaining efficiency as parameter dimension grows. Moreover, it can incorporate differential-equation constraints, including in nonlinear settings. Overall, these results indicate that uncertainty-quantified neural surrogates can enable scalable and reliable Bayesian inference for inverse problems in complex systems.

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

Adversarial Bandit Optimization with Globally Bounded Perturbations to Convex Losses

arXiv:2606.19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study adversarial bandit optimization in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner selects an action and observes only the loss incurred at that action. The loss consists of an underlying convex and $\beta$-smooth component and an adversarial perturbation that may be chosen after observing the learner's action. The perturbations are subject to a global budget controlling their cumulative magnitude over time. This framework extends the globally budgeted, post-action perturbation model from underlying linear losses to general convex and $\beta$-smooth losses. For this broader class, we establish expected regret guarantees that explicitly characterize the effect of the perturbation budget. To establish these guarantees, we modify a standard bandit optimization algorithm and develop an analysis that controls the additional regret caused by the perturbations. In the absence of perturbations, our results reduce to regret guarantees for the standard bandit convex optimization setting with $\beta$-smooth losses.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FedReLa: Imbalanced Federated Learning via Re-Labeling

Federated learning has emerged as the foremost approach for decentralized model training with privacy preservation. The global class imbalance and cross-client data heterogeneity naturally coexist, and the mismatch between local and global imbalances exacerbates the performance degradation of the aggregated model. The agnosticism of global class distribution poses significant challenges for data-level methods, especially under extreme conditions with severe class absence across clients. In this paper, we propose FedReLa, a novel data-level approach that tackles the coexistence of data heterogeneity and class imbalance in federated learning. By re-labeling samples with a feature-dependent label re-allocator, FedReLa corrects biased global decision boundaries without requiring knowledge of the global class distribution. This modular, model-agnostic approach can be integrated with algorithmic methods to deliver consistent improvements without additional communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, our method significantly improves the accuracy of minority classes and the overall accuracy on stepwise-imbalanced and long-tailed datasets, outperforming the previous state of the art.

22.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

arXiv:2312.01265v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the class of randomised monotone functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with values in $[0,1]$, and let $U_{\mathcal{M}}\colon \mathbb{R}_+\to \mathbb{R}_+$ be the minimal function for which $$ \mathbb{P}\left\{ \sqrt{\eta_f}\, \sup_{t\in\mathbb{R}} \left| f_Z(t) - \Exf{f_Z(t)} \right| \ge \varepsilon\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(\eta_f)} \right\} \le 2\e^{-2\varepsilon^2} $$ holds for every member $f_Z$ of $\mathcal{M}$ with finite effective sample size $\eta_f$ and every positive $\varepsilon$. We prove that for every $x> 1$, $$ \left| \sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)} - \sqrt{\log_4 x} \right| \le 2 \min\!\left\{ 1,\, \frac{2 \ln(\e + \ln x)}{\sqrt{\ln x}} \right\}\,. $$ The optimal adjustment $\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)}$ matches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln 2}}\sqrt{\ln x}$ for all $x>1$, with residuals bounded as above.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

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

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.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Router: On the Feasibility of Hijacking MLLMs via a Single Adversarial Perturbation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in stateless systems, such as autonomous driving and robotics. This paper investigates a novel threat: Semantic-Aware Hijacking. We explore the feasibility of hijacking multiple stateless decisions simultaneously using a single universal perturbation. We introduce the Semantic-Aware Universal Perturbation (SAUP), which acts as a semantic router, "actively" perceiving input semantics and routing them to distinct, attacker-defined targets. To achieve this, we conduct theoretical and empirical analysis on the geometric properties in the latent space. Guided by these insights, we propose the Semantic-Oriented (SORT) optimization strategy and annotate a new dataset with fine-grained semantics to evaluate performance. Extensive experiments on three representative MLLMs demonstrate the fundamental feasibility of this attack, achieving a 66% attack success rate over five targets using a single frame against Qwen.