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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The ancestors of eukaryotic cells contained a mix of genes from various microbes

作者: 未知作者

Reconstruction of the ancestral gene repertoire of eukaryotic cells reveals traces of a series of close, long-term interactions with diverse microorganisms, and a role of viruses in gene exchange. The findings challenge the view that eukaryotic cells evolved from a simple merger of just two organisms. A series of gene-transfer events might have taken place in complex microbial communities.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer

arXiv:2606.20094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Sleep regularity outweighs sleep duration as a predictor of disease

Sleep regularity, the consistency of sleep-wake timing from one day to the next, is more strongly associated with longevity than adequate sleep duration. Whether this relationship persists across common diseases is unknown. We compared sleep regularity vs. sleep duration as risk factors for 199 diseases and disorders, using ten million hours of objective sleep-wake data (N=60,998, age[mean{+/-}SD]=62.8{+/-}7.8, 55% female). Multivariable-adjusted risks of incident diseases/disorders for regular/irregular and short/adequate sleepers were compared across 9.5 years of follow-up. Irregular sleep predicted risks for 131 diseases/disorders, more than double the number predicted by short sleep duration (63). Irregular sleep was a superior predictor than short sleep duration for 90 diseases/disorders, including circulatory, metabolic, digestive, renal, infectious, neurological, and musculoskeletal conditions, and mental disorders, whereas short sleep duration was the superior predictor for only 9 diseases/disorders. For models where short sleep duration explained disease risks, 83% were improved by adding sleep regularity. Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of diseases/disorders than sleep duration in this cohort and should be considered an essential dimension of sleep health.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mask Proposal Voting Based on Geodesic Framework for Robust Image Segmentation

Despite great advances, finding accurate segmentation remains a challenging task, especially in scenarios with cluttered backgrounds, complex intensity variations and topology appearance. Minimal path models have exhibited their strong ability in addressing image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of minimal paths-based segmentation approaches is heavily influenced by model initialization, hence limiting their application scope in practice. In this work, we propose a novel mask proposal voting framework that overcomes the major drawback of classical approaches, allowing robust segmentation even in complicated scenarios. Firstly, we introduce an efficient method for constructing adaptive domain cuts as a constraint for initializing the region-based min-cut evolution, by which diverse and reliable mask proposal candidates can be generated, substantially increasing the possibility of accurately covering the objective region by these proposals. Secondly, we propose a new mask voting scheme to build a voting score map encoding the final segmentation information. In contrast to classical path voting methods, our model allows incorporating priors to assign different importance to each individual mask. As a consequence, the proposed segmentation model is capable of accurately delineating object boundaries under complex scenarios, and is insensitive to initialization. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art minimal path-based approaches in both accuracy and robustness.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Sanjeevani: A manually curated anti-cancerous phytochemical database integrated with downstream analysis tools.

Background: Cancer continues to pose a massive global health burden. While plant-derived phytochemicals offer promising therapeutic leads, existing natural product databases often lack cancer specificity, dataset downloadability, and integrated screening tools. Methods: We developed Sanjeevani, an integrative web platform cataloguing 4,823 curated anticancer phytochemicals. Using a balanced dataset of 9,646 molecules, we trained Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers using a hybrid feature representation of RDKit descriptors and 2048-bit ECFP4 fingerprints. The platform also integrates AutoDock Vina for web-based molecular docking for binding affinity, poses prediction and ADMET-AI for pharmacokinetics estimation. Results: The SVM model demonstrated the strongest predictive capability, achieving a top test accuracy of 0.966 and a ROC-AUC of 0.992. Benchmarking across five docking tools confirmed that AutoDock Vina successfully balanced computational automation with literature-consistent binding affinity replication. The final architecture provides rapid interactive 2D/3D visualizations integrated with downstream analysis tools. Conclusion: Sanjeevani provides an open-access, one-stop pipeline that bridges the gap between raw natural product data and actionable computational screening, accelerating natural product-based oncology drug discovery.

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

Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Blind Face Restoration with Reduced Uncertainty

Blind face restoration remains a persistent challenge due to the inherent ill-posedness of reconstructing holistic structures from severely constrained observations. Current generative paradigms, while capable of synthesizing realistic facial details, remain limited by the under-constrained nature of blind restoration, where severely degraded inputs can be mapped to plausible yet identity-inconsistent outputs. To address this issue, we present Pref-Restore, a hierarchical framework for BFR with reduced restoration uncertainty. Our design is organized around three complementary principles: (1) Semantic Information Augmentation, where an auto-regressive semantic branch converts image and text cues into structured tokens that provide a stable high-level anchor; (2) Texture-level Fidelity Alignment, where the diffusion generator is trained under this anchor to recover identity-relevant details; and (3) Fidelity-constrained Preference Optimization, where a face-aware reward refines the diffusion trajectory while controlling the quality–fidelity trade-off. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that Pref-Restore achieves state-of-the-art performance, with stronger identity-sensitive fidelity and lower restoration uncertainty across repeated sampling. Systematic ablations further attribute these gains to the proposed hierarchical design, showing the necessity of staged training, the robustness and quality dependence of the text pathway, and the benefit of fidelity-constrained preference optimization.

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

Understanding Latent Diffusability via Fisher Geometry

arXiv:2604.02751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models often degrade in latent spaces, yet the formal causes remain poorly understood. We quantify latent-space diffusability via the rate of change of the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) along the diffusion trajectory. Our framework decomposes this MMSE rate into contributions from Fisher Information (FI) and Fisher Information Rate (FIR). We demonstrate that while global isometry ensures FI alignment, FIR is governed by the interplay between encoder and data geometries. Our analysis decouples diffusion degradation into four penalties: dimensional compression, tangential distortion, high-frequency encoder curvature, and intrinsic data curvature. We derive theoretical conditions for FIR preservation to ensure stable diffusability. Experiments across diverse autoencoding architectures demonstrate the implications of our theoretical bounds. We establish FI and FIR as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding latent diffusability.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MOCHA: Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment

arXiv:2509.14001v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalized object detection aims to adapt a general-purpose detector to recognize user-specific instances from only a few examples. Lightweight models often struggle in this setting due to their weak semantic priors, while large vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong object-level understanding but are too computationally demanding for real-time or on-device applications. We introduce MOCHA (Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment), a distillation framework that transfers multimodal region-level knowledge from a frozen VLM teacher into a lightweight vision-only detector. MOCHA extracts fused visual and textual teacher's embeddings and uses them to guide student training through a dual-objective loss that enforces accurate local alignment and global relational consistency across regions. This process enables efficient transfer of semantics without the need for teacher modifications or textual input at inference. MOCHA consistently outperforms prior baselines across four personalized detection benchmarks under strict few-shot regimes, yielding a +10.1 average improvement, with minimal inference cost.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

When Renormalisation Remembers: UV/IR Mixing as an Entanglement Bridge

作者:

arXiv:2606.17147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Renormalisation is traditionally understood to be a Wilsonian memoryless process in which ultraviolet (UV) degrees of freedom gradually decouple, leaving an autonomous infrared (IR) description. However this need not be the case: in UV/IR mixed theories correlations between widely separated scales can persist. In this work I recast UV/IR mixing as a Hilbert-space phenomenon, realised as correlations across renormalisation scales. This formulation is implemented using the Born-Reciprocal Tensor Network (BRTN), a new configuration of tensor network that is globally symmetric under phase-space reciprocity. On this network I prepare the vacuum and reproduce the expected radiative corrections. The resulting renormalisation geometry exhibits memory, with a bridge linking reciprocal representations of IR physics, whose cross-bridge entanglement provides a precise criterion for the viability of an effective description. I analyse when this criterion is met, and show that there is a large-volume limit, with the fundamental scale held fixed, in which the obstruction to a local description scales away: Wilsonian behaviour is restored and renormalisation forgets. The BRTN therefore provides a concrete and calculable platform for UV/IR mixing.

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

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

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

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quest for quantum advantage: Monte Carlo wave-function simulations of the Coherent Ising Machine

arXiv:2501.02681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a quantum network of optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) intended to find ground states of the Ising model. This is an NP-hard problem, related to several important minimization problems, including the max-cut graph problem. In order to enhance its potential performance, we analyze the coherent coupling strategy for the CIM in a highly quantum regime. To explore this limit, without assuming gaussianity, we employ accurate numerical simulations. Due to the inherent complexity of the system, the maximum network size is limited. While master equation methods can be used, their scalability diminishes rapidly for larger systems. Instead, we use Monte Carlo wave-function methods, which scale as the wave-function dimension, and use large numbers of samples. These simulations involve Hilbert spaces exceeding $10^{7}$ dimensions. To evaluate success probabilities, we use quadrature probabilities. We demonstrate the potential for quantum computational advantage by reducing the time required to reach maximum success probability in a low-dissipation regime enabled by initial quantum superpositions and entanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that tailored time-dependent couplings can amplify these quantum effects. Comparisons with classical CIM models give evidence that quantum tunneling effects in this strong coupling limit can overcome trapping in false minima. This can greatly increase success rates, indicating a potential for quantum advantage. Finally, we perform a coherence analysis based on the state purity to examine the role of quantum coherence in CIM performance and to determine how state purity correlates with improved optimization outcomes.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Introducing corpora Hlava Cor and Hlava AD: Human Label Variation in Coreference and Discourse Relations

As previous research on annotator disagreement in discourse phenomena has shown, understanding text coherence varies considerably from one individual to another. To explore this phenomenon, we created two corpora with multiple annotations of Czech texts, accompanied by annotators' explanations of their choices. The first corpus consists of 1,024 contexts annotated in parallel by three annotators. It captures differences in the identification of coreference across various text types and grammatical-semantic categories, including pronouns, full noun phrases, and anaphoric adverbials. The second corpus comprises 512 contexts, annotated in parallel by five annotators, and focuses on identifying discourse relations in attributive and non-attributive constructions. Both corpora achieve a comparable inter-annotator agreement of approximately 60-65%. For coreference annotation, agreement tends to be lower in cases where automatic coreference resolution models disagree, suggesting that when the models disagree, the examples tend to be more difficult or ambiguous for human annotators to interpret. The annotators' comments, both for coreference and discourse relations, further reveal differences in interpretation, varying levels of confidence in text understanding, and individual reading strategies.

16.
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.

17.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

作者: 未知作者

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

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

ThinkDeception: A Progressive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Deception Detection

arXiv:2606.18988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal deception detection is critical for identifying fraudulent intentions, yet existing approaches predominantly rely on end to end black–box paradigms. These methods suffer from a severe lack of interpretability failing to provide transparent reasoning trajectories and struggling to explicitly capture the subtle, cross modal inconsistencies inherent in deceptive behaviors. To transcend these limitations, we propose ThinkDeception, a novel and interpretable multimodal deception detection framework. As a pioneering effort, it introduces Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into this domain, transforming deception detection from a traditional binary classification task into an explicit cognitive reasoning process. Facilitated by the first meticulously annotated step–by–step multimodal Chain of Thought (CoT) dataset, we develop a foundational model, ThinkDeception Base, empirically validating the critical role of modal inconsistency in decoding deception. Building upon this foundation, our core innovation lies in proposing Visual-Audio Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization(VAC–GRPO) equipped with a progressive training strategy. Distinct from standard GRPO, we stratify the training data into four progressive difficulty tiers, guiding the model through a psychologically grounded easy–to–hard cognitive transition. By innovatively coupling this dynamic curriculum scheduler with a multi dimensional, process aware reward mechanism and a reflective learning paradigm, we significantly elevate the model's overall reasoning quality. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkDeception establishes a new SOTA, significantly outperforming existing methods in both detection accuracy and rationale quality. Ultimately, this work successfully drives the field of deception detection toward interpretable, multimodal cognitive reasoning.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation

In the context of novel view synthesis, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an efficient and competitive counterpart to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), enabling high-fidelity photorealistic rendering in real time. Beyond novel view synthesis, the explicit and compact nature of 3DGS enables a wide range of downstream applications that require geometric and semantic understanding. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in 3DGS applications. It first reviews the reconstruction preliminaries of 3DGS, followed by the problem formulation, 2D foundation models, and related NeRF-based research areas that inform downstream 3DGS applications. We then categorize 3DGS applications into three foundational tasks: segmentation, editing, and generation, alongside additional functional applications built upon or tightly coupled with these foundational capabilities. For each, we summarize representative methods, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms, highlighting shared design principles and emerging trends. Commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols are also summarized, along with comparative analyses of recent methods across public benchmarks. To support ongoing research and development, a continually updated repository of papers, code, and resources is maintained at https://github.com/heshuting555/Awesome-3DGS-Applications.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Metabolic quantum limit to the information capacity of magnetoencephalography

arXiv:2511.06401v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Magnetoencephalography measures the magnetic fields generated by neural currents using quantum sensors such as superconducting quantum interference devices and atomic magnetometers. Here we combine the energy resolution limit of magnetic sensing with the metabolic power available to neural currents to derive a technology-independent bound on the information capacity of MEG. The bound factorizes into geometry, metabolism, and Planck's constant, and gives an estimated maximum information rate of 2.2~Mbit/s for representative human-brain parameters. Further, we show that the externally measurable magnetic field has a finite angular bandwidth, with high multipole components being geometrically attenuated and falling below the quantum-limited noise floor. This yields an information-limited spatial scale of order $1~cm$ and renders the accessible measurement space effectively finite-dimensional. The energy resolution limit therefore defines an information-theoretic Nyquist scale for magnetoencephalography, beyond which denser spatial sampling provides redundant measurements rather than additional recoverable information. Since the energy resolution limit also makes the noise variance grow linearly with measurement bandwidth, temporal and spatial bandwidths compete, producing a fundamental spatio-temporal trade-off. These results show how quantum-limited measurements constrain the observable complexity and information content of noninvasive brain imaging, providing a quantitative link between fundamental physics and neuroscience.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

An Analysis of Posterior Collapse, Parameterization and Initialization in Variational Deep Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.25882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: DGPs are probabilistic models with remarkable prediction performance that concatenate GPs across several layers. Exact inference in DGPs is intractable, and variational inference is often used to approximate the posterior with a parametric distribution tuned by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Moreover, finding a good VI approximation is challenging. In particular, a problem of VI is posterior collapse, where VI converges to a variational posterior that matches the prior. In variational DGPs, this implies explaining the data as noise. This work studies posterior collapse in DGPs and identifies its connection to the DSVI algorithm and the widely used linear prior mean function employed in all but the last layer. We show that the benefit of the linear prior mean does not arise from avoiding the non-injective pathology in very deep DGPs, as previously believed, but from improving the conditioning of the optimization problem at initialization. Thus, we propose an alternative initialization of a zero prior mean DGP that mimics a DGP with a linear prior mean at initialization. This enables successful training of DGPs without imposing optimization-driven constraints on the prior, allowing to choose the prior based on modeling assumptions rather than optimization convenience. Our analysis considers three common parameterizations of DGPs and shows that not all of them benefit from a linear prior mean. We also explain why a whitened parameterization of the \operatorname{DGP} provides more stable convergence, something often assumed from experience, but lacking a rigorous analysis. Furthermore, we show that this stability is also beneficial to avoid the posterior collapse problem. Extensive experiments validate our findings: the proposed initialization prevents posterior collapse, improves stability, and achieves performance comparable to (and sometimes better than) DGPs with a linear prior mean.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

作者:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Tracking Large-scale Shared Bikes with Inertial Motion Learning in GNSS Blocked Environments

arXiv:2605.07412v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a general solution for bike tracking outdoors, there still exist complex riding environments where only inertial navigation systems work, such as urban canyons. Despite decades of research, localization using only low-cost inertial sensors still faces challenges such as cumulative drifts and poor robustness caused by filtering methods. Furthermore, sensors such as visual and LiDAR could provide reliable measurements, but they are not suitable for large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an inertial tracking framework that integrates bicycle mechanical constraints with a mixture-of-experts model. Specifically, we leverage multiple expert modules to capture shared representations and weight them through the gating mechanism, thus improving multi-task learning performance and enabling uncertainty-aware trajectory estimation. Furthermore, based on the mechanical transmission between the pedal and the rear wheel of a bike, we explore the intrinsic relationship between the rider's periodic pedalling behaviors and acceleration variations, and convert such patterns into bike's wheel speed for dynamic calibration. Experiments with real-world riding data from shared bikes of the DiDi ride-hailing platform demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of baselines by at least 12%, with wheel speed errors below 0.5 m/s at 95-percentile.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

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