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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Context Modeling

Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens – a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address. KGERMAR addresses this by constructing dynamic, context-specific knowledge graphs from input text during inference, enabling domain-adaptive retrieval that leverages both semantic similarity and explicit entity relationships. The framework performs real-time entity and relation extraction to build contextual knowledge graphs, then integrates graph-structural embeddings with textual semantics through a multi-component memory architecture. Three memory banks – contextual, semantic, and structural – are maintained with retrieval signals fused via learned weights to capture both surface-level semantics and deeper relational patterns. Evaluated on SlimPajama (84.7K training examples), WikiText-103 (4,358 examples), PG-19 (100 examples), and Proof-pile (46.3K examples), KGERMAR achieves up to 8.5\% lower perplexity and 2–2.5x better memory efficiency than memory-augmented baselines across context lengths from 1K to 32K tokens, with superior in-context learning performance across five NLU tasks. The dynamic knowledge graph construction approach advances memory-augmented language modeling by enabling domain-specific knowledge representation that adapts to input contexts rather than relying on fixed knowledge bases.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

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

LESS Is More: Mutual-Stability Sampling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive decoding by iteratively refining masked sequences, enabling parallel token updates and bidirectional conditioning. Their practical efficiency, however, is limited by sampling procedures that execute a fixed number of reverse denoising steps selected before decoding, spending computation on already-stable positions and sometimes committing unstable ones too early. We present \textsc{LESS}, a training-free, model-agnostic adaptive sampler that treats token commitment as an online stopping problem. \textsc{LESS} implements mutual-stability sampling through a joint stability rule that makes a masked position eligible for unmasking only when its top-1 prediction has high confidence, its top-1 token persists across recent reverse steps, and its predictive distribution is stable under top-$K$ inter-step Jensen–Shannon divergence. We evaluate \textsc{LESS} on Dream-7B, LLaDA-8B, and LLaDA-1.5-8B, covering full-sequence diffusion and semi-autoregressive blockwise sampling regimes, across seven benchmarks spanning general knowledge, math, and code. \textsc{LESS} improves average accuracy over strong training-free adaptive samplers while using $72.1\%$ fewer reverse steps than fixed-budget decoding. Since each reverse step requires a Transformer forward pass, these step-count reductions translate into fewer forward evaluations, lower measured wall-clock latency, and lower estimated inference compute.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

AI-assisted continuous-time modelling of metastatic breast cancer reveals subtype-specific spatiotemporal organ interactions

Metastatic breast cancer is one of the leading causes of premature mortality among women worldwide. A major barrier to optimal care is the marked heterogeneity in both the temporal dynamics of metastatic spread and the organ-specific spatial distribution of metastases. Existing analyses do not adequately capture this complexity, as they either neglect temporal dependencies or assume independence between metastasic sites. As a result, it remains unclear how established metastases influence subsequent organ-specific dissemination. We address this question using patient-level longitudinal trajectories from a large multicentre real-world metastatic breast cancer registry, combined with an AI-assisted disease-progression modelling framework based on continuous-time Markov chains that represent combinations of metastatic sites and the non-uniform and practice-driven timing of radiologic response assessments, as encountered in routine clinical care. We present a stochastic model determined by progression rates, which are parameterised to capture baseline organ-specific transition risks, patient-level covariates, and pairwise inter-organ interaction effects. High-dimensional treatment information is incorporated using an large language model based encoding. We find that metastatic spread follows non-independent, subtype-specific spatiotemporal patterns, with subtype-specific inter-organ interaction patterns that shape progression. Visceral metastases, particularly lung and liver metastasis, are associated with an increased hazard of subsequent brain metastasis, with effects varying across hormone receptor-positive, HER2-positive, and triple-negative subtypes. Together, these findings define a clinically relevant spatiotemporal architecture of metastatic progression in breast cancer. This framework enables refined mechanism-informed risk stratification and provides a data-driven rationale for targeted and risk-adapted – rather than symptom-triggered – surveillance strategies.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

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

OneCanvas: 3D Scene Understanding via Panoramic Reprojection

Existing approaches to 3D scene understanding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) either rely on complex, model-specific geometry encoders or large training budgets in pursuit of spatial reasoning. Instead, OneCanvas aggregates patch features from all views onto a single equirectangular panoramic canvas. Namely, each patch is unprojected to a 3D world coordinate using its depth and camera pose, then placed on the canvas at the continuous longitude and latitude of that point as seen from the canvas origin, with no rasterization or aggregation across overlapping views. A 3D position embedding of the patch's metric coordinates is added to its feature, restoring the depth lost when collapsing the world position to an angular canvas coordinate. Patches from all frames thus share one spatial coordinate system with no fusion or major architectural modifications of the backbone. The pretrained VLM consumes this representation as if it were an ordinary image. Because the canvas can be centered on any pose of interest, the same representation directly supports situated reasoning from a specific viewpoint, a common requirement in robotics and embodied AI. Thanks to this representation, we can also introduce a spatial pretraining curriculum: by procedurally placing patch features of objects, drawn from real images, at chosen 3D world positions on an otherwise empty canvas, we generate on-the-fly supervision spanning a broad range of spatial reasoning tasks, with answer distributions controlled to reduce spatial reasoning shortcuts. OneCanvas achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA3D and VSI-Bench, and generalizes to out-of-distribution data on SPBench, using an order of magnitude less training compute than the strongest competing methods.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Exact Linear Attention

Authors:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Ten simple rules for executing an inherited research plan in computational biology

by Sahar Javaheri Tehrani, Toni Ingolf Gossmann Trainees in computational biology frequently inherit research plans whose aims, datasets, analytical strategies, and technical constraints were defined before their arrival. These plans often emerge from grants, collaborations, legacy codebases, shared high-performance computing environments, or partially completed analyses. While such plans provide a useful scaffold, they rarely specify all implementation details, prior assumptions, evaluation criteria, or dependencies needed for reliable execution. The transition from inheriting a partially articulated plan to producing reproducible results therefore creates an execution gap: a phase in which trainees must reconstruct what the project is, which elements are fixed, which remain negotiable, and which technical or organizational assumptions need to be tested before full-scale analysis begins. In this Ten Simple Rules article, we provide a practice-oriented framework for stabilizing inherited computational biology projects before workflows, benchmarks, and decision paths become entrenched. We do not claim that the individual practices described here are novel in isolation. Rather, our contribution is to organize familiar practices into a sequenced framework for a recurrent but under-articulated phase of computational research: inherited-plan execution. Computational biology makes this phase especially important because projects often combine heterogeneous datasets, fragile software environments, undocumented preprocessing choices, benchmarking assumptions, distributed collaborators, and asymmetrical access to contextual knowledge. By making this transition visible and operational, the rules aim to help trainees, supervisors, and collaborators reduce ambiguity, test feasibility, document decisions, and support reproducible and equitable project execution under real-world constraints.

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

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

How LLMs Fail and Generalize in RTL Coding for Hardware Design?

Translating sequential programming priors into the parallel temporal logic of hardware design remains a crucial bottleneck for large language models(LLM). To investigate this, we introduce a new error taxonomy grounded in problem solvability, inspired by cognitive theory. Our taxonomy categorizes failures into syntactic, semantic, solvable functional, and unsolvable functional types. Evaluations reveal a strict empirical ceiling on the VerilogEval benchmark, as frontier models plateau at a 90.8% initial pass rate. These plateaus are defined by unsolvable functional errors, exposing persistent knowledge gaps immune to test time compute scaling. Furthermore, we expose a striking surface convergence gap: optimization readily eliminates syntax errors but concurrently exacerbates deeper functional failures. Our findings demonstrate that alignment techniques merely teach models to compile. While repeated sampling strategies can patch solvable errors, register-transfer level(RTL) coding capacity remains strictly bounded by pretraining knowledge. Addressing challenges in the current LLM based hardware generation pipeline requires more studies in model reasoning rather than alignment interventions.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

What's Old is New Again: Classical Dimensionality Reduction for Efficient Saliency-Guided Biometric Attack Detection

Saliency-guided training is a paradigm in visual recognition that encourages models to focus on the most relevant image regions during learning. While its application in biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) has shown strong benefits in robustness and generalization, adoption is often limited by the high cost, domain specificity, and limited scalability of existing saliency acquisition methods, such as human annotations over a limited dataset. We present a novel, cost-efficient, and highly-scalable approach to saliency acquisition using maps inspired by classical dimensionality reduction techniques: PCA and LDA. Our proposed methods generate saliency maps directly from raw training data, requiring no human annotation nor domain knowledge. We contextualize the effectiveness of these saliency sources in three saliency-explored domains (iris PAD, synthetic face detection, fingerprint PAD) and demonstrate its scalability in two saliency-novel domains (fingerprint vein PAD and ID card PAD). Across all domains tested, models trained using dimensionality reduction-sourced saliency maps exceed baseline and sometimes SOTA saliency methods without any resource investment or domain-specific tooling. Our findings overcome an important yet unaddressed barrier to saliency-guided training for biometric attack detection and beyond.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

SAT, MaxSAT, and SMT for QLDPC Distance Computation: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.12445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact distance computation for quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes plays a central role in validating candidate fault-tolerant quantum-code constructions, yet the computational structure of this problem remains poorly understood. Despite substantial recent progress in QLDPC design, it remains unclear which algorithmic principles govern the practical scalability of exact distance computation and which classes of exact solvers are best suited to this task. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic study of SAT- and MaxSAT-based formulations for exact QLDPC distance computation across representative codes. We further compare these formulations against several established exact-distance approaches in order to better understand the algorithmic landscape of exact QLDPC distance computation. Our study challenges and refines several prevailing intuitions about exact QLDPC distance computation. First, despite the XOR-rich structure of QLDPC parity checks, practical scalability appears to be governed more by the handling of cardinality constraints and optimization bounds than by parity reasoning alone. Accordingly, XOR-aware reasoning does not provide a systematic advantage across our benchmark suite. Second, Brouwer-Zimmermann-style search, long regarded as the benchmark paradigm for exact distance computation in sparse classical codes, no longer maintains its traditional scalability advantage in the QLDPC setting. This finding challenges the expectation that techniques successful for sparse classical codes remain dominant for QLDPC codes. Third, substantial qualitative differences arise even among MaxSAT solvers themselves. Branch-and-bound MaxSAT significantly outperforms unsat-core-based MaxSAT on challenging benchmarks, demonstrating that solver architecture and optimization strategy play a decisive role in practical scalability.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Asymmetric and chiral dynamics of two-component anyons with synthetic gauge flux

arXiv:2512.19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics in a one-dimensional two-component anyon-Hubbard model, which can be mapped to an extended Bose-Hubbard ladder with density-dependent hopping phase and synthetic gauge flux. Through numerical simulations of two-particle dynamics and the symmetry analysis, we reveal the asymmetric transport with broken inversion symmetry and two dynamical symmetries in the expansion dynamics. The expansion of two-component anyons is dynamically symmetric under spatial inversion and component flip, when the sign of anyonic statistics phase or the signs of gauge flux and interaction are changed. In the non-interacting case, we show the dynamical suppression induced by both the statistics phase and gauge flux. In the interacting case, we demonstrate that both chiral and antichiral dynamics can be exhibited and tuned by the statistics phase and gauge flux. The dynamical phase regimes with respect to the chiral-antichiral dynamics are obtained. These findings highlight the rich dynamical phenomena arising from the interplay of anyonic exchange statistics, synthetic gauge fields, and interactions in multi-component anyons.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Panel-level multilocus methylation quantification in native cell-free DNA by PCR-compatible sequential enzymatic processing

DNA methylation is informative for liquid biopsy, but low template abundance, distributed methylation signals and workflow complexity limit implementation. Here we present Delta-HLD, a PCR-compatible methylation assay platform that quantifies methylation directly in native DNA through sequential hybridization, ligation and methylation-sensitive digestion. The assay co-reports methylation-dependent signals from multiple loci through a shared amplification architecture, generating a single panel-level PCR readout. We established the chemistry, optimized panel size and composition through model-guided experiments, and implemented the assay as a triplex qPCR workflow with per-sample internal process controls. Plasma proof-of-concept analyses showed discriminatory signal in CRC and proof-of-concept transferability to hepatocellular carcinoma. Additional platelet-retaining experiments identified a strategy to increase recovery of analyzable circulating templates while reducing genomic DNA recognition. Delta-HLD provides a compact PCR-compatible framework for low-input methylation analysis without base conversion.

18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

<b>PROTEUS trial heralds perioperative therapy for prostate cancer</b>

Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer. Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

Prenatal exposure to asthma medications and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and educational difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Lama A. Shakhshir, Alexia Karain, Jill P. Pell, Claire E. Hastie, Scott M. Nelson, Michael Fleming Background Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy risk maternal and fetal health, continued medication is important. However, some studies have reported adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal exposure to asthma medication. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to collate the existing evidence on the associations between prenatal exposure to asthma medication and neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and the PECO framework. PubMed, Medline and Embase databases were searched for studies investigating prenatal exposure to one or more asthma medication and neurodevelopmental or educational outcomes published, in English, between January 2003 and September 2024, and updated in November 2025. Studies of asthma medication used for other indications were excluded. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Random-effects meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate and heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q and I2 tests.Of 16,824 studies identified by the initial search, seven were eligible for inclusion. All investigated beta-2-adrenergic agonists (B2AA), with one including B2AA as mono- and polytherapy—and one study also investigated inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) exposure. Two reported associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and one with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An updated search identified one additional eligible study, which examined both ADHD and ASD, as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. The included eight studies (n = 3,867,170 participants) comprised cohort (n = 5) and case-control (n = 3) designs and reported inconsistent results. Meta-analysis of three studies (n = 1,380,871) indicated significant associations with ASD for exposure to B2AA both preconception (aOR 1.34, 95% CI [1.19,1.52]) and during pregnancy (aOR 1.29, 95% CI [1.16,1.42]). Heterogeneity was low, with no evidence of significant publication bias. Limitations of the included studies comprised residual confounding and exposure misclassification. Additionally, studies included in the meta-analysis were few in number and did not adequately distinguish between medication effects and underlying maternal asthma. Conclusion Meta-analysis suggested an association between prenatal exposure to B2AA and ASD. An association with ADHD, reported in a single study, requires corroboration. To date, based on our search strategy, no association has been reported with communication skills, motor skills, problem-solving and personal-social skills, or cerebral palsy.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.

21.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-09

Hybrid solid−liquid optics enable scalable, high-resolution light-sheet microscopy across diverse immersion media

Authors:

Many data-driven approaches rely on scalable and affordable three-dimensional (3D) imaging across subcellular to organ scales. Although advances in tissue clearing, expansion microscopy and light-sheet microscopy (LSM) have enabled high-resolution imaging of intact specimens, scalability in sample size, throughput and accessibility remains fundamentally limited by detection optics. Here we introduce hybrid solid−liquid optics (HySIL), a flexible refractive design framework in which a solid optical element and a refractive index (RI)-matched liquid function as a continuous optical system for wavefront correction and numerical aperture enhancement. We implement this framework as SCOPE and Super-SCOPE, enabling submicron-resolution, aberration-corrected LSM using long-working-distance air objectives. We demonstrate high-resolution volumetric imaging across diverse biological contexts, including cleared and expanded mouse, salamander and cavefish brains, human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived brain organoids and large intact human tissues for 3D histopathology. By combining enhanced optical performance with low-cost, long-working-distance and multi-immersion compatibility, HySIL provides an accessible and scalable foundation for next-generation volumetric imaging and data-driven biological discovery. Hybrid solid–liquid optics improve light-sheet imaging of intact biological samples.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

Authors:

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

Authors:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.