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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution

Long-horizon LLM agents generate traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy, local, and hard to govern. Agent Skills offer a structured artifact for combining procedural guidance, executable resources, and applicability boundaries. Yet open skill ecosystems contain redundant, uneven, environment-sensitive artifacts, and indiscriminate updates can pollute future context. We present SkillsVote, a lifecycle-governance framework for Agent Skills across collection, recommendation, attribution, and evolution. SkillsVote profiles a million-scale open source corpus for environment requirements, quality, and verifiability, and synthesizes tasks for verifiable skills. Before execution, it performs agentic library search over structured skill folders to expose instructional context. After execution, it decomposes trajectories into skill-linked subtasks, attributes outcomes to skill-guided execution, agent exploration, environment, and result signals, and admits only successful reusable discoveries to evidence-gated updates. Experiments on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Pro show that SkillsVote improves agent performance on challenging agentic coding benchmarks. The gains arise from two complementary pathways: online evolution over task streams at test time and offline transfer via frozen libraries built from either historical trajectories or curated open source skills.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

Authors:

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

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

Speaking the Language of Science: Toward a General-Purpose Generative Foundation Model for the Natural Sciences

In this report, we present LOGOS (Language Of Generative Objects in Science), a scientific generative language model that unifies heterogeneous tasks across the natural sciences within a single autoregressive framework based on a shared scientific grammar. It encodes diverse scientific objects and their spatial interactions as token sequences over a common vocabulary. By representing spatial contact and constraint patterns as discrete tokens, the model captures complex structural interactions in a purely sequential manner, without relying on explicit coordinates or geometric neural networks. This unified representation enables a wide range of downstream tasks to be formulated consistently as next-token prediction in the same grammar space, creating strong alignment between continued multi-domain pre-training and downstream objectives. Across diverse tasks, LOGOS consistently matches or outperforms domain-specific baselines, providing preliminary evidence for the feasibility of "one model fits all" in the natural sciences. We train LOGOS models at different scales (1B, 3B, and 8B parameters) and find a consistent positive correlation between model size and performance. This suggests that the future of AI for Science (AI4S) may not lie in building an independent technical stack that is separated from large language models (LLMs). Instead, it may depend on deeply aligning scientific foundation models with LLMs through shared architectures, shared training paradigms, and shared inference infrastructure, so that LLMs can truly become a new entry point for AI4S. We release the model weights and associated resources to facilitate further research.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

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

Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity and real-time 3D scene reconstruction, but scaling training to large-scale scenes requires optimizing hundreds of millions of Gaussians across multiple GPUs. Existing distributed approaches either partition scenes into isolated regions, causing global inconsistency, or rely on global Gaussian-level exchanges, which lead to substantial growth in inter-GPU communication and quickly dominate iteration time. We propose Splaxel, a communication-efficient distributed 3DGS training framework based on pixel-level local rendering and global composition. Instead of synchronizing Gaussians, each GPU renders its local subset and exchanges only partial pixel values, maintaining mathematical consistency while keeping communication cost stable as the scene size increases. Splaxel further reduces pixel-level redundancy through geometric and transmittance visibility prediction and improves GPU utilization via conflict-free camera-view consolidation. Evaluated on large-scale datasets with up to 120M Gaussians, Splaxel achieves up to 7.6$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art distributed 3DGS framework while preserving high reconstruction quality.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

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

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.

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

M-CTX: Exact and Scalable Spatial Context Retrieval for Trajectory Analytics

arXiv:2606.15244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern trajectory predictors increasingly condition on external spatial context, such as map geometry, signed distance fields (SDFs), and nearby moving agents. While this context improves prediction quality, constructing it for every training anchor has become a hidden systems bottleneck. In a representative maritime AIS pipeline, spatial context construction requires roughly 17 CPU-days for a 5.48M-anchor corpus, dominating the cost of the downstream predictor. We present M-CTX, an exact and scalable spatial context-retrieval framework for trajectory analytics. M-CTX recasts context construction as an ingest-once, query-many spatial database workload and replaces three brute-force stages – OSM range retrieval, SDF computation, and moving-vessel neighbour lookup – with composable, index-backed operators. Its learned range-index backend, BR-LZ, provides recall-complete MBR-overlap range retrieval and reduces candidate amplification by 1.1x–2.7x relative to global-expansion one-curve baselines. Across four maritime regions, eight baseline systems, synthetic workloads with up to 40M spatial features, and 10^7-record AIS streams, M-CTX reproduces the reference context exactly. On the 5.48M-anchor corpus, it reduces context construction from about 17 CPU-days to 1.8 hours, a measured 226x end-to-end speed-up. An optional storage mode further compresses SDF context by 64x with only a 0.04 m ADE change. These results establish exact spatial context retrieval as a first-class database problem in modern trajectory analytics. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mark000071/M-CTX-Traj.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

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

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between mechanical oscillators revealed through SU(1,1) interferometry

arXiv:2606.18202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum correlations are essential for achieving quantum advantage in computing, communication and sensing. Moreover, their observation challenges and constrains our fundamental understanding of nature. Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime provide an appealing platform for preparing and investigating quantum correlations at macroscopic scales. Despite substantial progress, however, continuous-variable quantum correlations stronger than entanglement have not yet been observed in this macroscopic regime. Here, we report the experimental observation of continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between two spatially-separated mechanical oscillators with an effective mass of $\sim 16 \,\mu g$ each. This is achieved by coupling them to a superconducting qubit which allows for engineering a two-mode squeezing interaction when parametrically driven. Crucially, we show that this interaction can be used to witness quantum correlations through the realization of a mechanical SU(1,1) interferometer. Our results expand the toolbox of operations in circuit quantum acoustodynamics and demonstrate that quantum correlations stronger than entanglement can also be observed in macroscopic systems, thereby shedding light on the boundary between quantum and classical regimes.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

GCH1 p.Ser80Asn Confers Risk for Parkinson's Disease in East Asian Populations

Introduction: GCH1 has been implicated in Parkinson's disease (PD), but its risks variants and associations are not well defined. Objectives: To investigate the clinical relevance and PD risk associated with the GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant. Methods: We first identified a segregating GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant in a Malaysian Chinese PD family via whole genome sequencing (WGS). We assessed its risk association using multi-ancestry WGS data from the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2) (n=22,372PD vs n=8,826Controls) and meta-analysis of East Asian (EAS) cohorts (n=4,712PD vs 38,733Controls). Clinico-demographic details of affected variant carriers were collated. Results: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant was enriched in GP2 EAS PD populations (n=9/2,757; 0.33%) but not detected in other ancestries. Meta-analysis revealed increased PD risk in EAS populations (odds ratio:5.1; 95%CI:2.3-10.7; p=2.89x10-5). Affected carriers (mean age at onset:56.3+-12.5 years) had additional occurrence of dystonia, while dementia was rare. Conclusions: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant is a rare, EAS-enriched risk variant for PD.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Lighting-aware Unified Model for Instance Segmentation

Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently degrade under diverse real-world illumination, particularly for instance segmentation. In this work, we address this limitation by developing Lighting Convolutional-Attention (\lca{)}, an adapter module that enhances segmentation robustness without fine-tuning the heavy backbone. \lca{} employs a dual-branch architecture to process RGB features alongside contrast maps, enabling physically motivated sensitivity to structural changes rather than illumination artifacts. We optimize \lca{} through a pairwise training strategy, introducing a targeted loss term that explicitly penalizes discrepancies between clean images and their corresponding illumination variants. To evaluate and support this architecture, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across multiple existing benchmarks and present a novel Unity-based synthetic dataset specifically designed to accurately replicate complex real-world lighting conditions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully bridges the domain gap, delivering superior lighting-robust segmentation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

Authors:

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sharp log-Sobolev inequalities on finite cyclic groups

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

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

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

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.