When drug discovery fails: scientists share their frustrations with the process
In clinical trials, there are many times (and ways) a therapeutic can come up short. In clinical trials, there are many times (and ways) a therapeutic can come up short.
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In clinical trials, there are many times (and ways) a therapeutic can come up short. In clinical trials, there are many times (and ways) a therapeutic can come up short.
Unsupervised building change detection aims to learn building-change masks from unlabeled bi-temporal remote sensing images. Existing label-free methods often follow a discrepancy-to-mask paradigm, directly using temporal differences, frozen foundation-model responses, prompt-based outputs, or post-processing results as final change maps. Although these strategies provide annotation-free cues, they do not learn a task-specific building-change detector and remain vulnerable to the gap between generic temporal discrepancies and building-defined structural changes. In practice, such discrepancies are often noisy and task-irrelevant, as appearance shifts, registration errors, and non-building modifications can produce strong but misleading responses. To address this problem, we propose SST-CD, a spatially selective self-training framework that reformulates fully label-free building change detection as end-to-end detector learning under noisy pseudo supervision. SST-CD uses temporal discrepancies as candidate pseudo labels and trains the detector only on spatially reliable pixels, whose reliability is estimated by a local consistency criterion that filters inconsistent regions from supervision. To further stabilize noisy self-training, a lightweight feature adapter recalibrates bi-temporal features, while a prototype-based decoder produces compact change and no-change representations. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD show that SST-CD achieves F1 scores of 83.08%, 91.69%, and 86.60%, respectively, outperforming existing unsupervised and label-free baselines.
Coherent Point Drift (CPD) is widely used for rigid point cloud registration because of its soft correspondences and closed-form parameter updates. However, CPD's target-side marginal constraint forces every observation, including outliers, to receive exactly unit probability mass. This assumption degrades registration accuracy under heavy outliers and partial overlap. Optimal transport (OT) methods can handle missing mass through unbalanced formulations, but require hand-tuned annealing schedules. In this paper, we propose Sinkhorn-CPD, which replaces CPD's target-side marginal constraint with dual Kullback-Leibler penalties, allowing the algorithm to discard outliers on both sides. The resulting formulation is a fully unbalanced entropic optimal transport problem, which can be efficiently solved by generalized Sinkhorn iterations. Moreover, Sinkhorn-CPD preserves the closed-form Procrustes and variance updates of CPD. In our method, the variance sigma^2 plays the role of the entropic regularization parameter, which induces an automatic annealing schedule from diffuse to sharp correspondences without manual temperature tuning. Experiments on synthetic, cross-category, and scan-to-CAD benchmarks show that Sinkhorn-CPD achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, with strong robustness to outliers and partial overlap.
Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, demands novel therapeutic strategies that overcome the toxicity and limited efficacy of current treatments. To address this need, herein we report an integrative, target-centric strategy that combines parasite proteome mining, structural modeling, and experimental validation. Functional enrichment and druggability analyses identified phosphopyruvate hydratase (PPH) as a promising candidate due to its essential metabolic role and limited similarity to human homologs. Notably, proteome mining revealed the presence and conservation of PPH across kinetoplastid parasites, including Leishmania donovani, supporting its evaluation beyond T. cruzi. For the selected PPH sequences, AlphaFold-derived three-dimensional models underwent extensive molecular dynamics refinement, yielding stable conformational ensembles suitable for structure-based studies. Using this validated model, virtual screening of the Latin American Natural Products Database - LANaPDB - identified aptosimon as a top-ranked compound candidate. Molecular dynamics simulations further showed ligand-dependent binding behavior, suggesting alternative binding modes distinct from the canonical substrate configuration. In vitro assays demonstrated consistent antiparasitic activity against intracellular T. cruzi amastigotes (IC50 = 3.52 ug/mL) and Leishmania donovani promastigotes (IC50 = 13.06 ug/mL), supporting the biological relevance of the aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, hinokinin, across two kinetoplastid parasite models. Together, these results support PPH as a structurally tractable and biologically relevant candidate target, while identifying an aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, represented experimentally by hinokinin, as a cross-species antiparasitic scaffold that warrants further biochemical target-validation studies.
Background: Aging has a critical role in lung changes and the outcome of lung disease. Several lung aging equations have been proposed to measure deviation from physiological aging of the respiratory system. In this study, we aimed to develop a single measure of accelerated lung aging and show its application as a measure of lung aging. Method: We used a pre-bronchodilator pulmonary function test (PFT) from NHANES adult participants recruited from 2007 to 2011. We applied Klemera-Dubal Method (KDM) to four PFT measurements, FEV1, FVC, FEF25-75, and PEF, to calculate a measure of lung biological aging. Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS) was calculated from the residual method vs. chronological age. We tested the construct validity of PARS by measuring its association with risk factors of lung health. The prognostic validity was measured using a survival analysis. Sampling weights were applied to all analyses. Results: In 14,123 adult participants, the mean (SD) of accelerated lung age (PARS) was 0 (8.2) years. Participants with a history of asthma and emphysema had 4- and 10-year higher PARS. Cigarette smoking, lower socioeconomic status, black race, higher serum cadmium, and lower serum selenium and magnesium were associated with higher PARS. During 116 months of follow-up, PARS was associated with a higher mortality (HR = 1.06, 95%CI: 1.05-1.07 per year). Females with higher PARS had a higher risk of death (P for interaction < 0.001). Results were consistent across different subgroups and sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: PARS is a noninvasive lung aging marker and can be applied as a single measure of lung accelerated aging in the adult population. Its strong construct and predictive validity support its future application among different populations with and without lung disease.
arXiv:2606.17859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the diffusion process \begin{equation*} dX_{\epsilon}(t) = \mss b(X_{\epsilon}(t)) \, dt + \sqrt{2\, \epsilon\, \mss a(X_\epsilon(t))} \, dW_{t}, \end{equation*} on the one-dimensional torus $\bb T = [0,1)$. Here $\epsilon$ is the temperature, $W_{t}$ a Brownian motion on $\bb T$ and $\mss a$, $\mss b$ functions of class $C^{2}(\bb T)$ satisfying further conditions. Denote by $\mss P(\bb T)$ the set of probability measures on $\bb T$ equipped with the weak topology, and by $\ms I_{\epsilon}\colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty)$ the level two large deviation rate functional of the diffusion $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$. We derive a full $\Gamma-$expansion of $\ms I_{\epsilon}$, as $\epsilon \to 0$, expressing it as \begin{equation*} \ms I_{\epsilon} = \frac{1}{\epsilon} \;\ms J^{(-1)} \; +\; \ms J^{(0)} \;+\; \sum_{p=1}^{\widehat{\mf q}}\frac{1}{\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}}\;\ms J^{(p)}\,, \end{equation*} where $\ms J^{(-1)}$, $\ms J^{(0)}$, $\ms J^{(p)} \colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty]$ represent rate functionals, independent of $\epsilon$, and $\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}$ are the time-scales at which the Markov process $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$ exhibits a metastable behaviour.
arXiv:2606.15805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models enable parallel token generation, offering a pathway to low-latency decoding. However, selecting tokens independently by marginal confidence limits effective parallelism: tokens that appear reliable in isolation can form incompatible configurations when several positions are updated at once. We introduce a training-free decoding framework that coordinates these parallel updates. At each forward pass, the method assigns a commit score to each masked position and refines these scores using pairwise interactions derived from the model's predictive distributions. A variational relaxation yields a simple fixed-point update that suppresses conflicting simultaneous commitments within a single forward pass. This mechanism allows the decoder to commit more tokens in parallel while maintaining competitive generation quality. The method is lightweight, requires no auxiliary model or retraining, and drops into existing diffusion decoding pipelines without modification. Experiments on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks show consistent improvements in the quality-latency trade-off.
arXiv:2606.17173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed entanglement across multi-node quantum networks is essential for a wide range of quantum technologies, including modular quantum computers, distributed sensing and metrology, and multi-party secure communication protocols. Such large-scale quantum networks will require photonic interconnects to generate and sustain entangled states across localized nodes. Previously, three-node distributed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states have been generated between solid-state qubits and atomic ensembles, but not yet in the platform of individual atomic qubits, which can be replicated, detected, and individually controlled with high fidelity. Here we report the first fully-distributed GHZ state of qubits across a three-node quantum network of single atomic memories, using photonic interconnects. We achieve a bounded fidelity of $0.841(17) \leq \mathcal{F} \leq 0.881(17)$ at an entanglement generation rate of 0.095(5)/sec and measure a clear violation of Mermin's inequality while closing the detection loophole for the first time in a fully-distributed multipartite entangled state.
With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.
arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.
arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.
arXiv:2402.00094v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a new class of deep neural networks (DNNs) with multilayered tree-like architectures. The architectures are codified using numbers from the ring of integers of non-Archimdean local fields. These rings have a natural hierarchical organization as infinite rooted trees. Natural morphisms on these rings allow us to construct finite multilayered architectures. The new DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued functions defined on the mentioned rings. We also show that the DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued square-integrable functions defined in the unit interval.
With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.
arXiv:2604.17583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the combined effects of a brane intersecting the AdS boundary and background gravitational field on the local characteristics of the electromagnetic vacuum. Two types of boundary conditions on the brane are considered, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the perfect electric (PEC) and perfect magnetic (PMC) boundary conditions in Maxwell's electrodynamics. The brane-induced contributions to the Wightman functions of the vector potential and field tensor are explicitly extracted. Simple expressions in terms of elementary functions are provided. The behavior of the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) is mimicked by a scalar field with a negative effective mass squared determined by the radius of the AdS spacetime. The expectation values of the electric and magnetic fields squares and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated as local characteristics of the vacuum state. The brane-induced contributions to these VEVs have opposite signs for the PEC and PMC conditions. For the PMC condition, this contribution is negative for the electric field squared and positive for the magnetic field squared. The VEV of the energy-momentum tensor has a nonzero off-diagonal component. The brane-induced vacuum energy density is positive for PMC condition, whereas the normal and parallel stresses change sign as functions of the distance from the brane. Unlike the problem involving a planar boundary in the Minkowski bulk, the vacuum energy-momentum tensor does not vanish in (3+1)-dimensional AdS spacetime.
by Tiffany A. Timbers, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
arXiv:2508.10076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TensorKit$.$jl is a Julia-based software package for tensor computations, especially focusing on tensors with internal symmetries. This paper introduces the design philosophy, core functionalities, and distinctive features, including how to handle abelian, non-abelian, and anyonic symmetries through the ``TensorMap'' type. We highlight the software's flexibility, performance, and its capability to extend to new tensor types and symmetries, illustrating its practical applications through select case studies.
arXiv:2606.11831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose Diff-prior, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.
arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.
arXiv:2606.19315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enhancing the formal math reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a key focus in both mathematical and computer science communities in recent years. While significant progress has been made in using state-of-the-art Auto-Regressive (AR) LLMs for formal theorem proving, these models suffer from inherent limitations. Their next-token prediction generation methods may yield suboptimal performance due to the challenges of long-range coherence and the compounding of errors over long sequences. Recent advancements in diffusion LLMs (dLLMs), which generate text through iterative denoising of a multi-token block, offer a promising alternative. However, the application of dLLMs to formal mathematics, where maintaining long-range coherence is critical, remains largely understudied. To address the challenges above, we propose **Diffusion-Proof**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to train and apply dLLMs for formal theorem proving. Our frameworks contain training and inference methods for two models. The first one is *dLLM-Prover-7B*, which performs whole-proof writing with long-range coherent tactic usage. The second one is *dLLM-Corrector-7B*, which is a novel large block diffusion-based correction model. It leverages the in-filling capabilities of dLLMs to perform local proof correction using bi-directional information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Diffusion-Proof** relatively significantly outperforms the AR LLM baseline trained under the same dataset. **Diffusion-Proof** achieves an absolute improvement of **1.61%** on ProofNet-Test and **6.14%** on MiniF2F-Test benchmarks compare to the baseline. Notably, **Diffusion-Proof** successfully resolves one IMO problem that more advanced thinking model DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B could not solve, showcasing the unique advantage of dLLMs in formal theorem proving.
Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Responsive neurostimulation (RNS) is an implanted device that delivers direct brain stimulation for drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Individual responses are highly variable, and no validated framework exists to predict outcome or guide lead placement before implantation. We hypothesized that this variability is partly explained by lead placement in relation to patterns of functional connectivity in brain networks. Fourty-nine patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy who underwent pre-implantation intracranial EEG (iEEG) and RNS implantation across three independent epilepsy centers were retrospectively studied. We developed a composite functional connectivity score, based on simple Spearman correlation, combining the standard deviation and kurtosis of interictal iEEG connectivity distributions to predict the response outcome in a training cohort (HUP, n=18) and validated in two independent cohorts (NYU, n=17; UCSF, n=14). We accounted for a spatial mismatch between iEEG and RNS electrodes with a distance-based correction. The score was extended to generate patient-specific 3D maps of predicted RNS efficacy across 200 simulated, or virtual RNS, lead configurations. Accuracy of the score in predicting clinical outcome was 72% at the group level, 61% at the individual patient level, and, after distance-based optimization, 100% in patients with RNS electrodes placed close to location of iEEG electrodes. Applied to the validation cohort, the same score reached 68% accuracy (71% balanced accuracy, 55% sensitivity, 88% specificity). The spatial combination of the scores at different SEEG contacts localization gives a spatial score for each patient. Responders showed significantly higher spatial scores than non-responders, supporting that actual RNS lead placement in responders was located in map-identified favorable regions. Interictal iEEG functional connectivity predicts individual RNS response across independent epilepsy centers, and patient-specific 3D maps derived from this biomarker could prospectively guide lead implantation toward favorable network regions, opening a promising avenue toward network-informed RNS surgical planning.
arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.
arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.
arXiv:2606.17551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we propose a new off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy based on prior data. Our idea starts from the "expanded" Markov decision process (MDP) framework, which treats individual flow refinement steps as separate actions in an MDP. To enable off-policy RL within this framework, we apply two techniques: we generate virtual on-policy trajectories (by "reversing" flows) to make this framework compatible with prior data, and we apply a bias-and-variance reduction technique to mitigate the curse of horizon in off-policy RL. We call the resulting algorithm Reversal Q-learning (RQL). RQL has several advantages over previous flow-based RL methods: it does not suffer from backpropagation through time, makes better use of the learned value function, and directly trains the full, expressive flow policy. Through our experiments on 50 challenging simulated robotic tasks, we show that RQL leads to the best average offline RL performance compared to state-of-the-art flow-based offline RL algorithms.
Split learning provides a practical paradigm for resource-constrained users to train Large Language Models (LLMs) by offloading computation-intensive layers to a server while keeping raw data local. However, existing privacy-preserving split learning methods still face a difficult trade-off among utility, privacy, efficiency, and stability. Specifically, these methods often suffer from substantial utility degradation, remain vulnerable to advanced data reconstruction attacks, incur prohibitive computational and communication overhead, or exhibit unstable performance across different tasks. In this paper, we propose MIXGUARD, a novel mixup-based privacy-preserving split learning framework for LLMs. MIXGUARD introduces token-level obfuscation, representation-level obfuscation, and adaptive gradient perturbation mechanisms, which operate jointly to preserve useful learning signals while preventing privacy leakage to the server. Technically, MIXGUARD first constructs a lightweight calibration model on a public dataset to refine the approximated target representation, and then applies this model during privacy-preserving fine-tuning on private data. We conduct extensive experiments on four classification tasks and four text generation tasks across multiple LLM families, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that MIXGUARD preserves model utility comparable to non-split training baselines, consistently achieves stronger privacy protection than existing split learning defense methods against state-of-the-art data reconstruction attacks, and remains robust under adaptive attack settings.