A tough scaffold for bacterial therapy
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arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.
arXiv:2606.19899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper addresses a rapidly emerging policy challenge: how to generate and interpret credible evidence about the biological capabilities and risks of AI scientists, or agentic AI systems capable of autonomously or collaboratively performing multi-step scientific tasks. As these systems enter real research workflows, decision-makers increasingly face evaluation results whose meaning depends on underlying design choices that are often implicit or under-documented. We synthesize current evidence on AI-enabled biological risks and introduce biological agentic evaluations as a promising, but interpretation-sensitive, tool for assessing these systems. Our central contribution is a set of practical, experience-grounded considerations – drawing from our own evaluations – that show how choices around defining, designing, running, scoring, and documenting evaluations materially shape what results do and do not imply about risk. The analysis is intended to help policymakers interpret biological evaluation outputs with appropriate caution; guide public and private funders toward high-leverage investments in AI-biology evaluation research; and support biosecurity practitioners assessing emerging AI systems. A secondary audience includes researchers designing or conducting agentic evaluations within frontier AI labs, AI providers, scientific institutions, and third-party evaluation organizations.
arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.
by José Alonso Solís-Lemus, Rosie K. Barrows, Cristobal Rodero, Marina Strocchi, Natalie Montarello, Nishant Lahoti, Cesare Corrado, Abdul Qayyum, Shahrokh Rahmani, Caroline Roney, Gernot Plank, Christoph Augustin, Hao Xu, Alistair Young, Pras Pathmanathan, Ronak Rajani, Steven A. Niederer This work presents a study on how differences in cardiac anatomy attributed to sex and disease can influence cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics using a virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models. Patient anatomy varies across sex and disease. However, capturing this variation in in-silico studies remains poorly accounted for, with studies often using either single representative cases or imbalanced virtual cohorts. Whole-heart electromechanics models incorporate the patient’s anatomy, electrophysiology and mechanics across different scales, from molecular, tissue and whole-heart and circulatory system levels. However, cardiac models are typically built from one or a small number of anatomies, with sex rarely reported and the effects of anatomical variability, which include those due to sex or disease, largely unexplored. This limits clinical translation and reduces regulatory credibility. We developed fifty patient-specific anatomical models of 25 male and 25 female hearts in heart failure and control cases. We ran benchmark passive inflation and paced activation simulations with consistent parameters and boundary conditions across cases to isolate the impact of anatomical variations with sex and disease. Heart failure models exhibited increased chamber volumes, larger volume changes during inflation, and delayed activation times relative to controls. These trends were consistent across sexes, although right ventricular activation showed a significant sex-based difference. Variations in anatomy with sex and disease have a significant impact on cardiac simulations, which support the inclusion of multiple heart anatomical models in in-silico trials. The resulting virtual cohort captures key anatomical variability and is publicly available, along with the underlying code (see Data Availability statement).
arXiv:2606.14613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor networks provide a powerful framework for efficiently representing high-dimensional data and many-body quantum states. Endowing tensor networks with a Riemannian manifold structure provides a natural setting for numerical optimization and analysis. A central feature of tensor networks is their gauge freedom, whose characterisation (captured by so-called fundamental theorems) underlies both their intrinsic structure and the design of numerical algorithms. In this work, we study the interaction between the Riemannian manifold structure and the gauge freedom for several families of tensor networks. Using group actions and Riemannian submersions, we establish a Riemannian fundamental theorem for the tensor network families studied.
arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.
Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.
arXiv:2404.09549v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence of bounds on the expected $p$-Wasserstein distance between a random measure and its mean under the assumption that the $p$-th centered moments of the counting statistics are controlled uniformly in space. The average Wasserstein transport cost is shown to be bounded from above and from below by some multiples of the number of points. $D$-dimensional versions of those results are also obtained. As a corollary, we prove that for any value of $p\geq 1$ the Ginibre point process can be seen as a perturbed lattice with identically distributed perturbations with a finite $p$-th moment.
This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.
arXiv:2606.11391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tensor Product Representations provide the structural fidelity required for symbolic reasoning in models but suffer from exponential dimensionality growth when encoding deep recursive structures. Conversely, Vector Symbolic Architectures maintain constant dimensionality but sacrifice capacity and fidelity due to noisy compression via superposition. In this work, we propose Orthogonal Subspace Carving (OSC), a memory architecture that binds fillers to roles by projecting onto the null space of the role basis before aggregating into a fixed order-p tensor. OSC uses projections to enforce geometric orthogonality between bound structures within a static memory trace. We show that this mechanism decouples the tensor order from the structural depth, enabling deep recursive binding within a constant memory footprint. By performing retrieval via recognition, this construction allows for component vectors that are orders of magnitude smaller than the memory tensor, giving superior memory efficiency in settings involving high superposition. We also show that TPR is a special case of binding in Clifford algebra, and give a Clifford formulation of OSC.
arXiv:2606.17460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators are widely used as surrogate solution maps for partial differential equations (PDEs), but full-size models can be costly to store, deploy, and evaluate in many-query scientific workflows. This work introduces Operator Boosting, a stagewise residual-learning framework for constructing compact neural-operator surrogates directly, rather than training a large model and compressing it afterward. Starting from the empirical mean predictor in normalized output coordinates, the method trains a sequence of tiny same-family neural operators on residual fields and incorporates each correction through validation-selected shrinkage. We instantiate the framework with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), DeepONets, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs), and compare boosted tiny stacks against full-size monolithic baselines across one-, two-, and three-dimensional PDE benchmarks from PDEBench, APEBench, and The Well. Across 30 dataset-architecture pairs, 21 show positive mean accuracy gains and 17 have positive confidence intervals, while all boosted stacks reduce trainable parameter count by approximately 72-95%. Best-model comparisons show empirical Pareto improvements on 7 of 10 completed PDE benchmarks, including two-dimensional Navier-Stokes, shallow-water dynamics, Darcy flow, one-dimensional transport and reaction systems, and three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes. These results show that Operator Boosting often improves the empirical accuracy-parameter Pareto frontier of neural PDE surrogates, while also exposing PDE- and architecture-dependent regimes where residual boosting fails to offset compression.
Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.
by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.
arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.
arXiv:2606.13589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging (SCSB), a mathematically rigorous framework for post-training compression and probability calibration of bootstrap-based bagging ensembles. Standard bagging ensembles (such as Random Forests, Bagged SVMs, and Bagged Neural Networks) assign uniform voting power to all constituent estimators. However, this naive uniform prior ignores the varying local competence of base estimators and contributes to model overconfidence. We formulate ensemble pruning and calibration as a joint optimization problem over the probability simplex by minimizing the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) loss. To induce sparsity, we address the theoretical "L1-simplex paradox" – the mathematical reality that the L1 norm is constant on the simplex and fails to prune – by introducing a concave quadratic penalty. SCSB is model-agnostic and achieves up to 96% ensemble compression, yielding linear inference speedups and superior probability calibration (lowered Expected Calibration Error) while preserving or enhancing generalization accuracy.
arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.
We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.
Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.
arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.
Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.
arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.
arXiv:2604.13301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trusted monitoring, the standard defense in AI control, is vulnerable to adaptive attacks, collusion, and strategic attack selection. All of these exploit the fact that monitoring is passive: it observes model behavior but never probes whether the model would behave differently under different perceived conditions. We introduce the honeypot protocol, which tests for context-dependent behavior by varying only the system prompt across three conditions (evaluation, synthetic deployment, explicit no-monitoring) while holding the task, environment, and scoring identical. We evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 in BashArena across all three conditions in both honest and attack modes. The model achieved 100% main task success and triggered zero side tasks uniformly across conditions, providing a baseline for future comparisons with stronger attack policies and additional models.
Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.