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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Multidimensional motivation in aging: a person-centred framework spanning goal-directed behaviour, social reward and pleasure

Motivational changes are determinants of healthy aging, social engagement, and functional independence, and may signal early neurodegenerative risk. Existing assessment approaches in aging typically treat motivation as a unitary construct. Here, we introduce MotDem, an age-appropriate measure of motivation co-designed with people living with dementia, carers, and clinicians. Across a broad adult lifespan sample (18-80 years), MotDem revealed a robust three-domain motivational architecture encompassing goal-directed behaviour, social reward, and pleasure, with a fourth satiety factor retained as exploratory. This structure was replicated in an independent older cohort (45-80 years) from a different national context. MotDem showed strong convergence with established measures of apathy and anhedonia, alongside more modest associations with depressive symptomatology. Together, these findings show that motivational aging is multifaceted and poorly captured by traditional unitary assessment. MotDem provides a multidimensional framework for measuring distinct motivational drivers of heterogeneous aging trajectories, with implications for resilience, wellbeing, and neurodegenerative risk.

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

Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks for Solving High-Frequency PDEs

arXiv:2605.31027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a novel neural network architecture, termed Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks (MS-SFNN), for the accurate and efficient solution of linear and nonlinear high-frequency partial differential equations (PDEs). MS-SFNN exploits a separable representation: given a $d$-dimensional input, it employs $d$ independent subnetworks – each acting on a single coordinate – and constructs basis functions via element-wise multiplication of their outputs. The PDE solution is approximated as a linear combination of these basis functions, with coefficients determined by least squares. Critically, all network weights and biases are randomly initialized once, from a uniform distribution with unit variance, and remain fixed thereafter. To enhance expressivity, a tunable scaling factor is introduced in each subnetwork to modulate the frequency content of the resulting basis functions. Fourier features are explicitly embedded through cosine activations, endowing the method with strong spectral approximation capabilities. To mitigate the memory bottleneck associated with dense collocation in high-frequency or three-dimensional problems, we replace automatic differentiation with analytically derived basis function derivatives and develop a memory-efficient batched QR decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale least-squares systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MS-SFNN achieves unprecedented accuracy across a range of challenging PDEs, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) and Separated-Variable Spectral Neural Networks (SV-SNN).

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

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

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

Rescaling Confidence: What Scale Design Reveals About LLM Metacognition

arXiv:2603.09309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0–100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is not neutral. Across six LLMs and three datasets, verbalized confidence is heavily discretized, with more than 78\% of responses concentrating on just three round-number values. To investigate this phenomenon, we systematically manipulate confidence scales along three dimensions: granularity, boundary placement, and range regularity, and evaluate metacognitive sensitivity using $meta-d'$. We find that a 0–20 scale consistently improves metacognitive efficiency over the standard 0–100 format, while boundary compression degrades performance and round-number preferences persist even under irregular ranges. These results demonstrate that confidence scale design directly affects the quality of verbalized uncertainty and should be treated as a first-class experimental variable in LLM evaluation.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Long-Context Modeling via GSS-Transformer Hybrid Architecture with Learnable Mixing

Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Transformer architectures achieve strong performance via self-attention but scale quadratically ($O(N^2)$) with sequence length, while State Space Models (SSMs) scale linearly ($O(N)$) but suffer from a selective recall bottleneck, struggling to retrieve precise information from compressed states. This creates a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency and perplexity. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Parallel Hybrid Architecture (PHA), which runs Gated State Spaces (GSS), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) as independent parallel branches fused by a learnable mixing mechanism. Instead of forcing SSMs to approximate attention or serializing the two paradigms, PHA allows each branch to specialize: GSS captures global context, while attention performs selective retrieval, with FFN providing complementary processing. On WikiText-103, PHA achieves 16.51 PPL at 125M parameters, outperforming Hedgehog (16.70) and H3-125M (23.70). Scaling to 180M parameters yields 16.42 PPL, which gives comparable results with the pure attention baseline while delivering 24\% higher throughput and up to 40\% lower memory usage at long contexts. On OpenWebText, our 125M model achieves 19.72 PPL, outperforming standard Transformers (20.60) and GSS hybrid baselines (19.80). These results demonstrate that separating sequence modeling paradigms into parallel specialists enables Transformer-level perplexity with substantially improved efficiency for long-context language modeling.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

作者:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

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

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tight $L_\infty$ Sample Complexity for Low-Degree and Sparse Boolean Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the optimization of bounded binary black-box functions, we study the problem of learning polynomial surrogates over the Boolean hypercube. To ensure that optimizing the surrogate yields good solutions for the underlying objective, we require uniform $L_\infty$-error guarantees rather than the usual $L_2$-type guarantees. We characterize the minimax sample complexity of uniform estimation under subgaussian noise for two classes of bounded polynomials. First, for polynomials of degree at most $d$ on $n$ variables, the sample complexity scales as $n^{d+1}$. Second, for $s$-sparse Fourier-Walsh polynomials with $s \leq n$, it scales as $ns^2$. These rates differ structurally from the noiseless setting, where uniform exact recovery scales as $n^d$ and $ns$, respectively. Our lower bounds hold even for arbitrary adaptive learners, showing that the additional factors are intrinsic to the noisy cases. Standard Fourier-analysis tools for the $L_2$-norm do not naturally extend to the $L_\infty$-setting in a way that yields uniform guarantees. Our proofs overcome this difficulty by relying on suitably chosen auxiliary norms that serve as proxies for controlling the $L_\infty$-error. Together, our results provide a tight characterization of the sample complexity of learning optimization-safe polynomial surrogates.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HandwritingAgent: Language-Driven Handwriting Synthesis in Scalable Vector Space

Teaching machines to emulate natural handwriting styles remains an open challenge, as it requires synthesizing stroke sequences that dynamically vary in shape, texture, pressure and script - not only across individuals, but also within a single person's handwriting. Attempts at this challenge have largely explored deep learning methods in both online and offline settings. However, these approaches are often constrained by style-specific architectural choices, heavy reliance on large datasets, high compute costs, and a lack of flexible control over writing styles through natural language. To this end, we introduce HandwritingAgent, a language-driven agent that can synthesize natural handwriting sequences directly in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format with no need for style-specific training. The agent leverages a large reasoning model to geometrically analyse and autoregressively generate target handwritten glyphs as stroke sequences in a discrete grid canvas environment. Generation is conditioned on texts provided in either conversational or non-conversational mode, along with a reference handwriting-style image. Experiments on diverse handwriting tasks spanning imitation, recognition, multi-lingual handwriting synthesis, and generation of complex handwritten maths and science expressions indicate substantial improvement in performance, with HandwritingAgent matching or surpassing state-of-the-art generative handwriting models, while providing a more efficient, controllable, and generalizable synthesis method.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Islamic Large Language Models: From Knowledge Acquisition to Trustworthy and Hallucination-Resistant AI

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for knowledge-intensive question answering, including religious and legal questions. Islamic knowledge is a particularly demanding setting: answers are expected to be grounded in authoritative sources, citations must be exact, Arabic varieties differ substantially from the language of classical sources, and legitimate jurisprudential disagreement must be represented rather than collapsed into a single answer. This survey reviews the emerging field of Islamic LLMs and trustworthy Islamic AI. We organize the literature around Arabic NLP and Arabic-centric LLMs, Islamic NLP resources, Qur'anic question answering, Islamic knowledge benchmarks, retrieval-augmented generation, Islamic legal reasoning, inheritance reasoning, hallucination evaluation, and trustworthiness. We argue that fluency in Arabic is not sufficient for Islamic AI. Reliable systems require curated sources, retrieval and verification modules, citation-aware generation, madhhab-aware reasoning, human expert evaluation, and benchmarks that measure not only answer accuracy but also faithfulness, source validity, and reasoning quality. The survey concludes with a research agenda for hallucination-resistant Islamic AI systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation in Superposition

arXiv:2606.14673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether the Compressed Computation (CC) toy model (Braun et al., 2025) is an instance of computation in superposition. The CC model appears to compute 100 ReLU functions with just 50 neurons, achieving a better loss than expected from only representing 50 ReLU functions. We show that the model mixes inputs via its noisy residual stream, corresponding to an unintended mixing matrix in the labels. Splitting the training objective into the ReLU term and the mixing term, we find that performance gains scale with the magnitude of the mixing matrix and vanish when the matrix is removed. The learned neuron directions concentrate in the subspace associated with the top 50 eigenvalues of the mixing matrix, suggesting that the mixing term governs the solution. Finally, a semi-non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF) baseline derived solely from the mixing matrix reproduces the qualitative loss profile and improves on prior baselines, though it does not match the trained model. These results suggest CC is not a suitable toy model of computation in superposition.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Physics-Constrained Neural Networks for Improved Short-Term Weather Forecasting: A Case Study over the South Pacific

arXiv:2606.17659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study introduces enhancements to physics-constrained neural networks (PCNNs) that improve the accuracy and stability of hybrid short-term weather forecasting models. Building on the WeatherGFT architecture, three innovations are proposed. First, an upgraded numerical solver, combining a fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme (WENO-5), a beta-plane approximation, and subgrid-scale viscosity, permits a fourfold increase in the integration time step to 1200 s while reducing the daily mean squared error by up to 26%. Second, a unified autoregressive hybrid block replaces the original chain of 24 specialised modules, eliminating overfitting to specific lead times. Third, the physical core is integrated with two state-of-the-art neural backbones, resulting in PI-PredFormer and PI-IAM4VP. Evaluation on the WeatherBench South Pacific subset from 2000 to 2004 shows that these hybrids reduce root mean squared error at 1-12 h lead times by 8-22% compared to purely neural counterparts, while better preserving physical consistency. These results demonstrate that incremental refinement of hybrid components offers a practical route toward more accurate and efficient short-range weather forecasting.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining, making machine unlearning (MU) crucial. Existing methods typically evaluate unlearning effectiveness based on output deviations, while overlooking the generation quality after unlearning. This can easily lead to hallucinated or rigid responses, thereby affecting the usability and safety of the unlearned model. To address this issue, we propose ASRU, a controllable multimodal unlearning framework that incorporates generation quality as a core evaluation objective. ASRU first induces initial refusal behavior through activation redirection, and then optimizes fine-grained refusal boundaries using a customized reward function, thereby achieving a better trade-off between target knowledge unlearning and model utility. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that ASRU significantly improves unlearning effectiveness (+24.6%) on average and generation quality (5.8X) on average while effectively preserving model utility, using only a small amount of retained supervision data.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

作者: 未知作者

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Kinematic properties of the Pauli equation

arXiv:2606.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on the Wigner-Vlasov formalism, this paper investigates the kinematic properties of the Pauli equation. It is shown that the probability current associated with the Pauli equation can be represented as a superposition of two currents with certain expansion coefficients. Each of these currents corresponds to a particular component of the spinor. The expansion coefficients effectively serve as weighting functions that determine the probability contribution of the corresponding spinor component. Therefore, each spin projection corresponds to its own probability flux. A new system of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations and also a system of motion equations in electromagnetic fields are obtained, taking into account the interaction between the spin and the magnetic field. To illustrate how these equations can be applied we have investigated the quantum system kinematics in detail using an exact solution of the Pauli equation in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and an asymmetric quadratic potential.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.