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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Transfer-matrix functions for algebraically decaying interactions in variational infinite matrix product states

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational infinite matrix product state (iMPS) calculations usually make Hamiltonians with algebraically decaying interactions compatible with standard MPO algorithms by first replacing the target Hamiltonian with a finite-pole sum-of-exponentials surrogate, thereby introducing a Hamiltonian-representation residual. We formulate the fixed-$D$ variational energy without introducing such a surrogate. For a fixed finite-$D$ MPS, the algebraic tail can be summed directly through the connected transfer matrix: the tail $e^{\mathrm{i} Qr}/r^\alpha$ is represented by the matrix function $F_{\alpha,Q}(\widetilde{T}_A)$, with $F_{\alpha,Q}(z)=\operatorname{Li}_\alpha(e^{\mathrm{i} Q}\,z)/z$. We evaluate the resulting matrix-function action using a Krylov method and obtain stable gradients by combining a Fréchet adjoint with implicit fixed-point differentiation. Benchmarks on long-range free fermions and the inverse-square Heisenberg family, including the Haldane–Shastry point, validate the transfer-matrix-function formulation. A long-range Ising-chain calculation illustrates a practical consequence of avoiding a finite-pole Hamiltonian representation. At a fixed, independently known critical field, finite-pole surrogate Hamiltonians can bias a critical diagnostic away from criticality, whereas the matrix-function calculation retains the expected critical signatures of the target algebraic Hamiltonian.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Stochastic dominations for FK percolation and sharp thinning thresholds for the Ising energy field

arXiv:2606.13648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: At first glance, one would imagine that the energy field of the Ising model, the set of edges whose endpoints share the same spin, is stochastically monotone as a function of the coupling constants. However, this is not generally the case. In this paper, we introduce two weaker notions of stochastic domination that make this result true: $p$–weak and $p$–weak$^\dagger$ domination. Both of these notions depend on a parameter $p$ and we find the optimal values $p$ and $p^\dagger$ so that these dominations hold. One of the key ingredient to obtain some of the results is a new stochastic domination relating FK percolations with different parameters $q,\tilde{q}\geq 1$ that is of independent interest.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

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

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

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

ViT-Up: Faithful Feature Upsampling for Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant architecture for visual representation learning, providing exceptionally strong and broadly reusable backbone features. However, ViTs are commonly operated on relatively small patch-token grids due to the quadratic cost of global self-attention, which creates a persistent bottleneck for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. This has motivated the development of task-agnostic feature upsamplers. While recent state-of-the-art methods produce visually sharp dense representations, their reliance on shallow image encoders for guided upsampling can introduce feature leakage, fragmentation, and blur. We introduce ViT-Up, an implicit feature upsampling framework that replaces external image guidance with layer-wise query construction from intermediate ViT hidden states. This enables feature prediction at arbitrary continuous image coordinates while preserving alignment with the backbone feature space. Experiments demonstrate that ViT-Up consistently outperforms state-of-the-art image-guided upsamplers across dense prediction and semantic correspondence. On DINOv3-S+, ViT-Up improves over prior methods by up to +2.07 mIoU on Cityscapes and +4.17 PCK@0.10 on SPair-71k. With the larger DINOv3-B backbone, these gains increase to +3.36 mIoU and +8.09 PCK@0.10, demonstrating that ViT-Up scales favorably with backbone capacity.

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

A ribbon ZX calculus for gauge theory

arXiv:2606.13551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZX calculus provides a graphical formalism for reasoning about quantum processes, built from two interacting Frobenius algebras associated with the Z and X bases of a qubit. While it has found widespread application in quantum information and computing, its relationship to quantum field theory has only recently begun to be explored. In this work, we further develop this connection by providing a generalization of ZX calculus to two-dimensional Yang Mills theory with a compact gauge group. The key observation is that both frameworks can be organized around the Hopf Frobenius algebraic structure associated with a group algebra, which can in turn be described by the diagrammatics of two dimensional topological quantum field theory. Given the well known relationship between gauge theory and gravity in two and three dimensions, our work paves the way for applications of ZX to low dimensional gravity.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

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

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clustering Node Attributed Networks with Graph Neural Networks and Self Learning

arXiv:2606.13444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph clustering - partitioning the node set of a graph into disjoint subsets that reflect some latent information - is a fundamental problem as it finds applications in a myriad of different scenarios. While this classic problem has been tackled for decades by different communities, a recent variation of the problem driven by real data considers the scenario where nodes have attributes that are also informative. This has triggered novel methods that simultaneously leverage network information (edges) and node information (attributed) in the design of novel clustering algorithms. This work proposes a novel framework that builds on prior works that have applied graph neural networks (GNN) to graph clustering. The proposed framework operates in rounds of self learning in a fully unsupervised setting. In each round, a GNN generates representations for nodes that are used to cluster the nodes. This clustering influences the graph used to generate the node representation in the next round. Moreover, a context graph built in each round using the original graph is used to generate the node representations. Empirical results show that the proposed methodology extracts information from both network edges and node attributes in synthetic data, outperforming algorithms focused solely on the network or attributes when neither are very informative. Multiple rounds of learning also improve the performance and always outperforms a long single round of training (i.e., classic GNN graph clustering). When considering real datasets, empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive to state-of-the-art methods when cluster sizes are balanced.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes. However, existing identifiability and extrapolation guarantees are largely model-specific, with separate analyses in nonlinear ICA, causal representation learning, perturbation modeling, and related conditional latent variable models. We introduce concept modulation models (CMMs), an attribute-indexed class of conditional generative models with structure $A\to \Lambda \to C\to X$, where attributes select modulators, modulators induce latent concept laws, and concepts generate observed features. CMMs lift transition-based identifiability to conditional settings by showing that feature agreement on observed attributes induces a latent concept transition constrained by the CMM class. We express these constraints through attribute potentials, log-density ratios between attribute-conditioned concept laws, separating the generic lifting step from model-specific rigidity arguments. The same potentials control extrapolation: agreement at unseen attributes holds exactly when the transported attribute-potential identities extend to those attributes. This yields algebraic extrapolation criteria, identifies the common potential-based proof objects behind several existing identifiability and extrapolation results, and, when combined with the model-specific rigidity arguments in those works, recovers their stated conclusions.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

scLLM-DSC: LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

arXiv:2606.13007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is fundamental to scRNA-seq analysis, serving as a cornerstone for identifying cell populations and resolving tissue heterogeneity. However, existing methods focus on mining numerical statistical patterns, suffering from semantic agnosticism by neglecting the intrinsic biological functions encoded by genes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising semantic capabilities, their direct adaptation to cell clustering is hindered by the structural mismatch between generative pre-training objectives and discriminative downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose scLLM-DSC, a novel LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering framework. Diverging from data-driven paradigms, scLLM-DSC establishes a semantically-grounded representation by synergizing two views: a Knowledge-Driven Semantic View derived from NCBI gene priors and contextualized Cell2Sentence embeddings, and a Structure-Aware Topological View extracted via a graph-guided encoder. Crucially, we introduce a cross-modal contrastive alignment mechanism to enforce consistency between biological semantics and transcriptomic features within a unified latent space. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that scLLM-DSC significantly outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines in clustering accuracy.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning from Biased and Costly Data Sources: Minimax-optimal Data Collection under a Budget

arXiv:2602.17894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data collection is a critical component of modern statistical and machine learning pipelines, particularly when data must be gathered from multiple heterogeneous sources to study a target population of interest. In many use cases, such as medical studies or political polling, different sources incur different sampling costs. Observations often have associated group identities - for example, health markers, demographics, or political affiliations - and the relative composition of these groups may differ substantially, both among the source populations and between sources and target population. In this work, we study multi-source data collection under a fixed budget, focusing on the estimation of population means and group-conditional means. We show that naive data collection strategies (e.g. attempting to "match" the target distribution) or relying on standard estimators (e.g. sample mean) can be highly suboptimal. Instead, we develop a sampling plan which maximizes the effective sample size - the total sample size divided by $D_{\chi^2}(q\mid\mid\overline{p}) + 1$, where $q$ is the target distribution, $\overline{p}$ is the aggregated source distribution, and $D_{\chi^2}$ is the $\chi^2$-divergence. We pair this sampling plan with a classical post-stratification estimator and upper bound its risk. We provide matching lower bounds, establishing that our approach achieves the budgeted minimax optimal risk. Our techniques also extend to prediction problems when minimizing the excess risk, providing a principled approach to multi-source learning with costly and heterogeneous data sources.

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

Context-Aware Markov VAE for CSI Compression in Wireless Systems

arXiv:2606.16607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers neural channel state information (CSI) compression for time-varying massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback resources. The main challenge lies in obtaining a compact and efficient representation of the CSI given that it exhibits strong temporal correlation across successive snapshots. Existing memoryless compression models do not exploit this property, while simple temporal extensions often incorporate multiple observations without explicitly modeling the latent dynamics. We propose a context-aware compression framework based on a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder (k-MMVAE), which uses a finite temporal window to capture the evolution of CSI in the latent space. The model introduces Markov-structured latent dynamics with finite memory, enabling efficient use of temporal dependencies for compression. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves target CSI reconstruction performance compared to memoryless and weakly sequential baselines, particularly at low and moderate compression rates. These results suggest that explicit latent temporal modeling can provide an effective mechanism for CSI compression under limited feedback constraints.

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

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Long-term exposure to PM2.5 components and lipid profiles in WTC Health Program general responders

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was found to be associated with elevated blood lipids, but fewer studies have examined the associations with specific constituents of PM2.5. We studied the associations between exposure to annual PM2.5 and its 14 constituents, and repeated blood lipid measurements among general responders enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program between 2003 and 2019 (n = 44,876). We used generalized additive mixed effect models to investigate the single-pollutant associations with repeated measures of blood total cholesterol (TC), high and low-density lipoprotein (HDL-C and LDL-C) levels. We then used linear generalized weighted quantile sum regression with a random intercept for participant ID to account for the clustering of repeated measures and evaluate the combined associations with the component mixture. A decile increase in the mixture of 14 PM2.5 chemical components was associated with 0.375 mg/dL increase in TC levels (95% confidence Interval (CI): 0.174-0.577) and 0.302 mg/dL increase in LDL-C (95% CI: 0.063, 0.540). Lead, organic carbon, and iron were major drivers of both associations. Component-specific models also show higher TC and LDL levels associated with interquartile range increases in organic carbon (0.472, 95% CI [0.027, 0.918] and 0.648 95% CI [0.136, 1.160]) and iron exposure (1.081, 95% CI [0.630, 1.532] and 0.748, 95% CI [0.318, 1.178]). In conclusion, we found PM2.5 exposure to be associated with elevated lipid levels. The associations differed by PM2.5 composition, highlighting organic carbon, lead, and iron and major drivers. These findings are highly significant for a population exposed to extreme air pollution event and susceptible to lipid alterations that might trigger cardiovascular events.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sectional Curvature for Kantorovich-Wasserstein and Hellinger-Kantorovich Geometries

arXiv:2606.14318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive an explicit formula for the sectional curvature of the space ${\cal M}(M)$ of finite measures on a Riemannian manifold M. The space ${\cal M}(M)$ is equipped with the Hellinger-Kantorovich metric $HK$. Even in the case M=R^n, the curvature is comprised of two parts: the `lifted part' is negative, and the `twisted part' is positive. It will be analyzed in detail for the multidimensional torus. Our general approach to sectional curvature in geodesic spaces also leads to new insights into the curvature of the space $P_2(M)$ of probability measures on M equipped with the Kantorovich-Wasserstein metric $W_2$.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fabricating fiber cavity mirror substrates compatible with high coupling efficiency

arXiv:2606.12168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fiber optical cavities offer small mode volumes and correspondingly strong light-matter interactions in an open Fabry-Perot geometry. However, existing fabrication techniques do not reliably produce substrates with surface profiles amenable to high mode matching between the cavity mode and fiber core, thereby limiting the achievable collection efficiency. Here we present a technique to fabricate fiber mirror substrates while using $in situ$ reflectometry to constrain the achievable mode matching prior to coating. By measuring the back-reflection from freshly cleaved fiber tips, we pre-select 138 fibers compatible with 96.5-99.5% mode matching, and after a single CO$_2$ laser ablation pulse, these fibers remained compatible with 95.3-99.2\%. This simple technique provides rapid feedback during each stage of substrate fabrication, greatly enhancing the yield of viable fiber mirror substrates prior to (expensive) coating runs.

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

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

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.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

DAQplugin: Deep Learning based Real-time Model Evaluation Plugin for ChimeraX

Although an increasing number of protein structures are determined by cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), protein structure modeling frequently suffers from residue misassignments and sequence register shifts, particularly in regions with ambiguous density. Here, we present DAQplugin, a ChimeraX plugin that performs real-time evaluation of protein models against cryo-EM density maps using the deep-learning-based residue-wise model quality (DAQ) score. Unlike existing validation tools that are typically applied after model construction, DAQplugin enables real-time deep-learning-based validation during model building and refinement. To our knowledge, DAQplugin is the first tool that provides real-time deep-learning based validation of protein models for cryo-EM map within an interactive modeling environment. In addition to identifying potential modeling errors, DAQplugin also provides guidance for correcting sequence register shifts by suggesting alternative residue placements along the backbone. The computation in this plugin is designed to run efficiently on general CPUs without requiring GPU hardware. Using DAQplugin, users can perform deep-learning-based validation on standard laptops during interactive model building, model-map fitting, and refinement. DAQplugin is able to facilitate more accurate interpretation of cryo-EM density maps and improve the reliability assessment of protein structure models.