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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

A Pathwise Approach to the Strong Feller Property and Irreducibility of Nonlinear Branching Processes

arXiv:2606.24821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the strong Feller property and irreducibility for continuous-state nonlinear branching processes defined as solutions to stochastic differential equations with jumps. Due to boundary degeneracy and discontinuous jump coefficients, classical methods do not apply. We develop a pathwise approach combining state-dependent time change, truncated auxiliary processes, and localized coupling to establish these two properties. As applications, we obtain exponential convergence to a unique quasi-stationary distribution in the absorbing case, and uniform exponential ergodicity in the non-absorbing case. This pathwise approach is flexible and can be adapted to a broader class of jump-diffusions without relying on specific coefficient structures.

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

UniECG: Understanding and Generating ECG in One Unified Model

Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation is a fundamental skill in medical education, yet students often need more than static examples to connect waveform evidence with diagnostic reasoning. This paper presents UniECG as a step toward interactive ECG education. UniECG supports two complementary learning interactions: given an ECG signal or image, it generates an evidence-based explanation; given a textual learning objective, it generates a corresponding ECG signal example for case-based learning. The model follows a two-stage design. First, it learns grounded ECG explanation from ECG signal–image–text data. Second, it introduces special ECG generation tokens and aligns their hidden representations with a pretrained text-conditioned ECG diffusion model, enabling controllable signal-level ECG generation. We evaluate UniECG through grounded ECG explanation and generation-oriented qualitative analysis, examining its potential to support explanation and case-based learning. UniECG is intended as an educational aid and a research step toward interactive AI-assisted ECG learning, rather than a clinically validated diagnostic system.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

STAR-NT: Spatiotemporal Acceleration of Real-Time Neural Transparency Rendering

arXiv:2606.16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural order-independent transparency delivers high-quality rendering of overlapping transparent surfaces, but its geometry passes and network input generation remain costly, particularly on mobile and legacy hardware. We present a spatiotemporal acceleration framework that exploits spatial and temporal coherence to reduce this overhead while preserving visual quality. Spatially, we use adaptive quadtree-based screen-space subdivision to scale geometry pass resolution according to local color variance. Temporally, selected frames reuse the previous transparency result through depth-based reprojection instead of full rendering. Together, these optimizations reduce rendering cost and integrate efficiently into existing real-time rendering pipelines.

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

FlowState: Sampling-Rate-Equivariant Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2508.05287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing time series foundation models (TSFMs), often based on transformer variants, lack adaptability to different sampling rates, struggle with generalization across varying context and target lengths, and are computationally inefficient. We introduce FlowState, a novel TSFM architecture that achieves sampling-rate-equivariant forecasting through a unified design that pairs a state space model (SSM) encoder with a functional basis decoder (FBD). This design enables continuous-time modeling and dynamic time-scale adjustment, allowing FlowState to inherently generalize across all possible temporal resolutions, and dynamically adjust the forecasting horizons without retraining. We further propose an efficient pretraining strategy that improves robustness and accelerates training. Despite being one of the smallest TSFMs, FlowState achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used GIFT-Eval benchmark, while demonstrating superior adaptability to unseen sampling rates. Our detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components, and we demonstrate its unique ability to adapt to varying input sampling rates.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Informed Potential Energy Surface for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery. Recent geometric deep learning methods have achieved promising performance by representing protein-ligand complexes as three-dimensional graphs. However, most existing approaches mainly rely on static interaction geometry from a single bound conformation, while neglecting molecular flexibility and binding-induced conformational changes. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-informed potential energy surface (CPES) graph neural network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, which incorporates physics-informed curvature representations to model conformational flexibility. CPES first derives curvature spectral descriptors from the Hessian of the potential energy surface evaluated at equilibrium configurations, whose eigenvalues define the local principal curvatures of the potential energy surface. It then uses spectral cross-attention to compare the unbound ligand and protein with the bound complex, thereby capturing binding-induced changes in conformational dynamics. In parallel, hierarchical protein-ligand interaction representations are learned from static structural features through geometry-aware message passing, soft clustering, and bidirectional cross-attention. Finally, CPES fuses the curvature-informed dynamic representations with static interaction representations for affinity regression. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPES achieves improved predictive performance and offers physical interpretability.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Continuum Neural Momentum Eigenstate for Variationally Solving Quasiparticles

arXiv:2606.12928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design the first neural quantum state for continuum particles that, for any chosen allowed momentum $\mathbf{k}$, is by construction an exact eigenstate of total momentum with eigenvalue $\mathbf{k}$. Our architecture, EVE, enables off-the-shelf VMC to solve for momentum-sector ground states. We test EVE on 2D bosons with mutual $1/r$ interactions, finding that a single unified ansatz is capable of describing four qualitatively different states: superfluid, roton, crystal, and phonon. At different densities, we extract the underlying phase of matter from the dispersion's shape. At $r_s = 20.0$, we see the roton minimum at finite $k$ expected of a superfluid. At $r_s = 100.0$, we see striking zone folding indicative of crystalline order, with periodically spaced minima representing floating crystals connected by phonon arcs in between. Using density-density correlation functions, we confirm the phase diagnoses and probe the excitations' correlation structures. Finally, we analyze the roton's phase texture and find unexpected multi-particle phase strings, formed when several vortex dipoles merge, leaving two vortices connected by a phase slip.

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

Brownian Kernel Ladders

arXiv:2606.15812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constructing mathematically tractable function spaces that capture hierarchical compositional representations remains a central challenge in statistical learning theory. We introduce Brownian kernel ladders (BKLs), a recursively defined hierarchy of integral reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces generated through Brownian-kernel integral constructions. Starting from linear functionals, each layer is obtained by integrating Brownian kernels over probability measures supported on subsets of the previous layer, yielding a recursive function-space model in which depth is encoded directly through the hierarchy. Based on this framework, we define canonical BKL spaces together with an associated complexity functional. We establish several analytical and statistical properties of these spaces. In particular, we show that BKL spaces form quasi-Banach spaces, satisfy depth-dependent Hölder regularity estimates, and exhibit strict monotonicity with respect to depth. We further prove existence results for regularized empirical risk minimization and derive Gaussian complexity bounds that remain uniformly controlled with respect to both the ambient dimension and the hierarchy depth. A key ingredient of the analysis is a combinatorial proof technique based on recursive subset decompositions and Brownian-kernel threshold representations. These estimates yield excess-risk guarantees of near-parametric order for regularized empirical risk minimization over BKL spaces. Our results provide a mathematically tractable hierarchical function-space framework for studying compositional representations in deep learning.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Spherical-to-ERP Epipolar Rectification for Single-Axis Disparity in 360 Stereo

Omnidirectional stereo images provide full-surround perception but violate the geometric assumptions of classical disparity estimation: in spherical or fisheye views, epipolar correspondences follow curved great-circle paths, producing two-dimensional displacements that cannot be treated as single-axis disparity before geometric rectification. In this work, we adopt a standard spherical-to-equirectangular (ERP) projection as a preprocessing step, which straightens epipolar curves and restores a one-dimensional disparity structure - horizontal for left-right rigs and vertical for top-bottom rigs. Building on our previously introduced RAFT + Epipolar-Aligned Channel Selection (EACS) framework, originally developed for rectilinear and ERP stereo, we examine whether the same modular pipeline remains accurate when the input originates from spherical stereo imagery. After ERP projection, dense optical flow from RAFT is reduced to disparity by retaining only the baseline-aligned flow component. Experiments on synthetic fisheye stereo datasets show that this spherical-to-ERP-to-RAFT+EACS pipeline produces accurate, smooth, and structurally consistent disparity maps at real-time speed. These findings confirm that established ERP preprocessing can be effectively combined with our earlier RAFT+EACS method to enable practical, interpretable, and efficient disparity estimation from spherical stereo, providing a straightforward pathway for extending conventional stereo pipelines to 360 imaging.

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

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

arXiv:2505.13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with $98\%$ accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.

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

Schattor: Schatten-family methods for deep learning optimization

arXiv:2606.15702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning optimization features heterogeneous parameter structures, noisy gradients, and highly nonconvex landscapes, posing significant challenges for both algorithm design and theoretical analysis. Motivated by the limitations of SGD and the success of adaptive optimizers, we propose {\it Schattor}, a family of adaptive first-order methods based on Schatten norms. Schattor unifies SGD and the recently proposed matrix-variate adaptive optimizer Muon within a single Schatten-norm-based framework. We establish dimension-free stationarity guarantees for methods in the Schattor family for stochastic matrix optimization problems via a novel matrix martingale moment bound. We also develop multi-block extensions that adaptively balance block-wise optimization progress and prove dimension-free stationarity guarantees in this more general setting.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GraspLLM: Towards Zero-Shot Generalization on Text-Attributed Graphs with LLMs

Research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention recently due to its broad applications across various real-world data scenarios, such as citation networks, e-commerce platforms, social media, and web pages. Inspired by the remarkable semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been numerous attempts to integrate LLMs into TAGs. However, existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse graphs and tasks, and their ability to capture transferable graph structural patterns remains limited. To address this, we introduce the GraspLLM, a framework that combines Graph structural comprehension with semantic understanding prowess of LLMs to enhance the cross-dataset and cross-task generalizability. Specifically, we represent node texts from different graphs in a unified semantic space with a frozen general embedding model, on top of which we perform motif-aware contrastive learning across multiple motif-induced adjacency matrices to extract dataset-agnostic structural information. Then, with our proposed optimal contextual subgraph, we extract the most contextually relevant subgraph for each target node and align these subgraphs to the token space of LLM via an alignment projector. Extensive experiments on TAG benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains reveal that GraspLLM consistently outperforms previous LLM-based methods for TAGs, especially in zero-shot scenarios, highlighting its strong generalizability across different datasets and tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heinz217/GraspLLM.

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

Multi-LCB: Extending LiveCodeBench to Multiple Programming Languages

arXiv:2606.20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LiveCodeBench (LCB) has recently become a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on code-generation tasks. By curating competitive programming problems, constantly adding fresh problems to the set, and filtering them by release dates, LCB provides contamination-aware evaluation and offers a holistic view of coding capability. However, LCB remains restricted to Python, leaving open the question of whether LLMs can generalize across the diverse programming languages required in real-world software engineering. We introduce Multi-LCB, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs across twelve programming languages, including Python. Multi-LCB transforms Python tasks from the LCB dataset into equivalent tasks in other languages while preserving LCB's contamination controls and evaluation protocol. Because it is fully compatible with the original LCB format, Multi-LCB will automatically track future LCB updates, enabling systematic assessment of cross-language code generation competence and requiring models to sustain performance well beyond Python. We evaluated 24 LLMs for instruction and reasoning on Multi-LCB, uncovering evidence of Python overfitting, language-specific contamination, and substantial disparities in multilingual performance. Our results establish Multi-LCB as a rigorous new benchmark for multi-programming-language code evaluation, directly addressing LCB's primary limitation and exposing critical gaps in current LLM capabilities.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reliable Error Estimation for PINNs: Lower and Upper A Posteriori Bounds

arXiv:2606.12050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) combine machine learning with physical laws to solve differential equations. While existing results provide rigorous a posteriori upper bounds for PINN prediction errors, complete certification also requires complementary lower information in order to obtain computable two-sided error enclosures. In this paper, we derive computable a posteriori lower bounds for PINN errors in ordinary differential equations on suitable certified state-space domains under a localized strong monotonicity condition. We combine these estimates with complementary localized upper bounds under a one-sided Lipschitz condition, which is weaker than the global Lipschitz assumption used in previous work and can yield sharper upper error bands. The resulting bounds depend only on the neural-network approximation, the ODE residual, and local monotonicity and growth constants, and therefore do not require access to the exact solution. For linear time-invariant and time-varying systems, we further derive explicit formulas in terms of the minimal and maximal eigenvalues of the symmetric part of the system matrix. We also discuss the distinction between soft and hard enforcement of initial conditions in PINNs and explain why exact enforcement can make the scalar lower certificate uninformative. To recover nontrivial lower information in the linear setting, we use a signed-residual finite-probe certificate based on coordinate unit vectors. We also formulate a certificate-informed training strategy in which the propagated upper certificate is used as an auxiliary regularizer, while lower certificates remain post-training diagnostics. Altogether, the proposed framework provides rigorous and practically computable error certificates for PINN approximations of ODEs, while making explicit the domains and model classes for which the assumptions can be verified.

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

A Multi-Level Architecture for Reusable Materials Ontologies – The OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO) as Reference Implementation

arXiv:2606.14814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Materials Science and Engineering ontology landscape is fragmented along multiple axes simultaneously. Horizontally: a recent survey identified 94 ontologies of which over 40 are structurally incompatible; each new application domain – ceramics, polymers, batteries, smart materials – typically restarts ontology design from scratch. Vertically: EU regulation (CSRD, CSDDD, PPWR, CBAM, R2R, AI Act, ESPR) forces material, manufacturing, supply-chain, and lifecycle data into integrated digital product passports, leaving ontologies that only address horizontal fragmentation incomplete for any contemporary consumer. And mechanistically: a vocabulary that records that BNT-BT has $d_{33} \approx 580$ pC/N stores a fact but cannot surface why – Bi-6s$^2$ lone-pair stereo-activity, anomalous Born effective charges, soft modes, defect chemistry – without a systematic explanation skeleton. We propose a multi-level modular architecture with two independent classification axes – level of abstraction (L0 bridges, L1 material-agnostic laboratory-notebook, L2 material-class-specific, L3 categorical reasoning) and consumer audience (material vs. compliance) – in which the material-specific level is internally organised by a seven-tier mechanistic-explanation skeleton (Symmetry, Energy/DFT, Thermo/CALPHAD, Kinetics, Microstructure, Defect chemistry, Bonding) applicable to any crystalline ionic oxide. The level-and-audience modularity dissolves the horizontal fragmentation, the compliance audience absorbs the vertical regulation pressure, and the seven-tier organisation of Level 2 delivers the mechanistic explanation depth. We instantiate the architecture as the OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO v0.94): 5,196 classes across 44 modules; 167,348 OWL axioms (40,454 logical); 1,674 properties; 829 cross-ontology bridge mappings; 1,172 SHACL shapes; 163 published competency questions.

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

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

scGTN: Deep Siamese Graph Transformer Network for Single-cell RNA Sequencing Clustering

arXiv:2606.18672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) serves a pivotal role in characterizing gene expression at the cellular level, enabling the identification of cell types and advancing the understanding of cellular heterogeneity. Despite the significant progress in scRNA-seq data clustering, we argue that current methods always ignore the sparsity and noise, as well as the complex intercellular structural information inherent in scRNA-seq data. Toward this end, in this paper, we propose a novel single-cell RNA-seq clustering framework via deep Siamese Graph Transformer Network (termed scGTN), which explicitly integrates gene expression profile and intercellular structural dependencies for cell clustering. In particular, we formulate scRNA-seq data as a graph and construct two augmented graph views that serve as dual views to capture complementary intercellular information. Then, a Siamese graph transformer network is employed to explicitly incorporate shortest-path information and node-wise distances for capturing richer structural relationships between cells. Finally, we employ an optimal transport strategy to guide the cell clustering in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate that our scGTN consistently outperforms existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/W-RMSL/scGTN.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.