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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scaling Learning-based AEB with Massive Unlabeled Data

arXiv:2606.18864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies how to scale learning-based automatic emergency braking (AEB) with massive unlabeled fleet data under production constraints. Our approach is based on meta-feedback semi-supervised learning (MF-SSL), where a teacher generates pseudo labels for unlabeled driving data and is updated using a small labeled anchor set as safety-critical feedback. In production, anchor ambiguity and labeled-unlabeled mismatch can amplify systematic pseudo-label errors, leading to spurious triggers. We propose a stabilized MF-SSL framework with (i) Noise-Aware Decoupling, which removes ambiguity-prone anchors from the teacher's supervised update path, and (ii) kinematics-gated pseudo-labeling with a teacher conflict penalty to suppress mismatch-induced risk hallucinations on unlabeled data while maintaining broad coverage. Extensive experiments show consistent gains as unlabeled data scale from 1M to 1B windows, improving safety while keeping comfort stable. The 1B-trained student model is deployed to hundreds of thousands of vehicles and validated over \$10^9$ km of driving, achieving a positive-to-false activation ratio exceeding 100:1 and a 35% improvement in accident-free driving mileage over a production rule-only baseline.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Electrical-Circuit Simulation of the Uhlmann Phase

arXiv:2606.24559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Uhlmann phase extends the concept of geometric phases to mixed quantum states through a parallel-transport condition on purification amplitudes, but its experimental realization has so far required sophisticated quantum platforms with carefully engineered auxiliary degrees of freedom. In this work, we reformulate the Uhlmann parallel-transport condition as a linear matrix differential equation and vectorize it to obtain an effective dynamical generator. This generator can be directly mapped onto the admittance matrix of a classical RC circuit, thereby translating the Uhlmann dynamics into the evolution of circuit node voltages. We illustrate the mapping using the equatorial-loop model and, via a rotating-frame transformation followed by a real decomposition, derive a time-independent, real-valued dynamical system suitable for analog implementation. LTspice simulations of the resulting active RC network faithfully reproduce the Uhlmann geometric phase and its topological transition at the critical purity, demonstrating that classical electrical circuits offer a simple and accessible platform for probing mixed-state geometric phases.

06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

Authors: Unknown Author

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Upper airway disease in primary ciliary dyskinesia: Clinical management and factors influencing decision-making, a multicentre analysis

Background Upper airway disease is common in primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), but management evidence is limited. We aimed to describe management practices and identify factors influencing management decisions. Methods Using data from the Ear-Nose-Throat (ENT) Prospective International Cohort of patients with PCD (EPIC-PCD) and an ENT-specialist survey across participating centres, we described management practices recorded at routine follow-up. We assessed clinical factors associated with practices via mixed-effects logistic regression models. In a subgroup of patients, we assessed factors associated with initiation or discontinuation of practices. Results We included 579 patients: median age 15 years, 46% female. Nasal rinsing (54%) and nasal corticosteroids (22%) were most frequently prescribed. Among 466 patients with available data, 47 had grommets (10%) and 42 hearing aids (9%). Nasal corticosteroids and rinsing were more frequently prescribed in patients with polyps (odds ratio [OR] 3.74, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.80-7.76; OR 3.39, 95% CI 1.37-8.37) or turbinate hypertrophy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.03-3.47; OR 2.89, 95% CI 1.55-5.38), and upper airway nebulisation in patients with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 2.86, 95% CI 1.11-7.39). Management practices differed between centres, as seen also by the specialists survey responses. In 177 patients with multiple visits, initiation of nasal rinsing was associated with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 3.18, 95% CI 1.24-8.18) and turbinate hypertrophy (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.20-8.59). Conclusion Upper airway disease management in PCD varies and is partly guided by symptom burden and clinical findings. This variation across centres highlights the need for care standardisation and PCD-specific management guidelines.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

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

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies (Jones et al. (2026); Zeng et al. (2026)) reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether LVLMs can coordinate on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when explicitly prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more implicit prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

Authors:

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

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

Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving

arXiv:2512.22420v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load, compute-bound environments due to verification overhead. Existing speculative decoding methods use fixed lengths and cannot adapt to workload changes or decide when to stop speculation. The cost of restarting speculative inference also remains unquantified. Under high load, the benefit of speculation diminishes, while retaining the draft model reduces KV cache capacity, limiting batch size and degrading throughput. To overcome this, we propose Nightjar, a resource-aware adaptive speculative framework. It first adjusts to the request load by dynamically selecting the optimal speculative length for different batch sizes. Crucially, Nightjar proactively disables speculative decoding when the MAB planner determines that speculation is no longer beneficial, and during the disabled phase, offloads the draft model to the CPU only under GPU memory pressure. This reclaims memory for the KV cache, thereby facilitating larger batch sizes and maximizing overall system throughput. Experiments show that Nightjar achieves up to 14.76% higher throughput than standard speculative decoding and up to 20.18% lower latency in the main benchmark suite under dynamic request arrival rates for real-time LLM serving scenarios.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin-orbit coupling by design in quantum state engineering of atomically defined quantum dots

arXiv:2606.14487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tuning spin-orbit coupling is essential in controlling both spin and charge in confined semiconductor nanostructures, yet it is rarely a truly controllable parameter. Here, we show control over the spin-orbit Hamiltonian in quantum dots and the resulting quantum states by tailoring the confinement potential with atomic-scale precision. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, we pattern individual Cs ions into designer quantum dot structures on the surface of indium antimonide, in which electrons from a two-dimensional electron gas are confined with chosen in-plane electric-field gradients. We then quantify the atomic level structure, both spatially resolving the orbital character of the electronic states and their magnetic-field evolution. We demonstrate that the level structure, including the induced zero-field splitting, can be tailored by the designed geometry of the local electric fields. These effects can be described using a Hamiltonian that allows consistent treatment of the confinement-induced spin-orbit coupling beyond the conventional Bychkov-Rashba description. This Hamiltonian is derived from a multiband k.p model and takes the energy dependence of the relevant physical parameters into account. Such precise control of spin-orbit coupling in semiconductor quantum dots is relevant to quantum and spintronic technologies.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Twin-beam advantage in quantum LiDAR under correlated noise

arXiv:2606.17908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum light promises improved precision in optical remote sensing, but its practical advantage depends critically on whether nonclassical resources remain useful under realistic noise and experimentally accessible detection. This question becomes especially relevant for LiDAR systems, where a quantum advantage has been demonstrated for target detection and joint range-velocity estimation, but mostly under idealized conditions or simple noise models, such as optical loss and thermal background. A key open point is whether entanglement provides an operational advantage when the dominant disturbance is not independent noise, but structured interference across sensing modes. Here, we address this question by studying the joint estimation of target range and velocity with bright two-mode Gaussian probes and homodyne detection, comparing coherent, separable squeezed, and twin-beam states at a fixed resource budget. Our results reveal a hierarchy of quantum resources set by the noise structure: separable squeezing provides a robust advantage over coherent illumination under loss and thermal background, whereas twin-beam probes become superior under correlated jamming when the receiver is adaptively optimized. These results establish correlated noise as the operational regime in which entanglement provides a robustness advantage beyond local squeezing, opening a receiver-aware route to quantum-enhanced LiDAR in realistic and potentially adversarial environments.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

The impact of generative artificial intelligence on academic development of Chinese students in humanities and social sciences

arXiv:2606.24104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is reshaping learning in higher education, with particularly pronounced implications for the humanities and social sciences(HSS), where learning outcomes are commonly expressed through written and interpretive forms that align closely with GenAI's capabilities. Yet, systematic evidence on the educational impacts of GenAI on HSS students remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study draws on a large-scale survey of HSS students in China to examine its role in academic development. Guided by relevant learning theories, this study focuses on four dimensions: patterns of use, effects on learning processes and academic performance, challenges associated with GenAI use, and preferred approaches to curricular integration. We found that more than half perceived enhanced learning motivation, independent thinking and creativity, although a substantial minority reported little change or even decline. Comparatively, a notably larger majority reported academic performance gains, although these gains may partly reflect limitations in conventional assessment practices. The study identifies variations in perceived learning and performance improvements among students with differing durations of GenAI experience, along with observable disciplinary differences and modest gender differences. While an overwhelming majority valued the importance of ethical considerations, only slightly more than half were satisfied with privacy protection. Limited accuracy and overreliance emerged as the most pressing concerns reported by students. Students favored partial or optional curricular integration supported by practice-oriented training, and widely recognized GenAI's significance for their future professional development. Grounded in student perspectives, this study offers evidence-based recommendations for the responsible and pedagogically meaningful integration of GenAI

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.