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

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Approximately Decoding the Colour Code

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently we showed that minimum weight decoding in the (6.6.6 planar) colour code is NP-hard. However, it remained an open question as to whether it was possible to approximate the minimum weight decoding arbitrarily closely in polynomial time. In this paper we prove that it is possible: for any $\varepsilon>0$ there is an polynomial time algorithm that, given a syndrome, can find an error-set generating that syndrome whose weight is at most $1+\varepsilon$ times the weight of the minimum weight decoding. As a consequence we see that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there is a polynomial time algorithm that can correct all errors of weight up to $(1-\varepsilon)d/2$ in the distance $d$ colour code (so almost up to the theoretical $d/2$ limit). The polynomial we give is impractically large, but it does open the door for sensible polynomial time algorithms that approximate minimum weight decoding and, in particular, shows that approximate decoding is not NP-hard.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Hyper3D-lite: count-preserving representation auditing for long-read multi-contact genome data

Authors:

Long-read and single-molecule sequencing technologies are rapidly increasing molecule-level data, with platforms such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio HiFi, and Roche sequencing-by-expansion advancing at different technology readiness levels. In the specific context of Pore-C and HiPore-C multi-contact chromatin-conformation assays, long-read multi-contact 3D genome assays preserve molecule-level contact context, but common downstream pairwise projections can expand one multi-contact molecule into many pair records. This creates a representation problem: apparent contact evidence can increase through the counting frame before biological interpretation begins. Hyper3D-lite addresses this problem as a representation-first audit tool for read-to-fragment-style long-read multi-contact inputs. It compares all-pair projection with CPB, a count-preserving statistical accounting reference point, and separates broad software outputs from conservative higher-order candidate calls.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Digital Twin Driven Textile Classification and Foreign Object Recognition in Automated Sorting Systems

The increasing demand for sustainable textile recycling requires robust automation solutions capable of handling deformable garments and detecting foreign objects in cluttered environments. This work presents a digital twin driven robotic sorting system that integrates grasp prediction, multi modal perception, and semantic reasoning for real world textile classification. A dual arm robotic cell equipped with RGBD sensing, capacitive tactile feedback, and collision-aware motion planning autonomously separates garments from an unsorted basket, transfers them to an inspection zone, and classifies them using state of the art Visual Language Models (VLMs). We benchmark nine VLM s from five model families on a dataset of 223 inspection scenarios comprising shirts, socks, trousers, underwear, foreign objects (including garments outside of the aforementioned classes), and empty scenes. The evaluation assesses per class accuracy, hallucination behavior, and computational performance under practical hardware constraints. Results show that the Qwen model family achieves the highest overall accuracy (up to 87.9 %), with strong foreign object detection performance, while lighter models such as Gemma3 offer competitive speed accuracy trade offs for edge deployment. A digital twin combined with MoveIt enables collision aware path planning and integrates segmented 3D point clouds of inspected garments into the virtual environment for improved manipulation reliability. The presented system demonstrates the feasibility of combining semantic VLM reasoning with conventional grasp detection and digital twin technology for scalable, autonomous textile sorting in realistic industrial settings.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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

Coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors using a single photon source made of a colour center

arXiv:2602.14736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photonic quantum memristors provide a measurement-induced route to nonlinear and history-dependent quantum dynamics. Experimental demonstrations have so far focused on isolated devices or simple cascaded devices configurations. Here, we experimentally realize and characterize a network of two coupled photonic quantum memristors with crossed feedback, implemented on a silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit and fed by a room-temperature single-photon source based on a silicon-vacancy color center SiV$^-$ in a nanodiamond. Each memristor consists of an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer whose transfer function is adaptively updated by photon detection events on another memristor, thus generating novel non-Markovian input-output dynamics with an enhanced memristive behaviour compared to single devices. In particular, we report inter-memristor input-output hysteresis curves exhibiting larger form factors and displaying self-intersecting loops, respectively revealing marked bistability and self-intersecting hysteresis geometry. Furthermore, numerical simulations show how these features emerge from the interplay between memory depth and relative input phase, for both intra- and inter-memristor input-output relations. We experimentally test the performance of our system in the NARMA task. Our results establish coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors as scalable nonlinear building blocks and highlight their potential for implementing compact quantum neuromorphic and reservoir computing architectures.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Constrained Diffusion Models with Primal-Dual Inference

arXiv:2606.17192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops constrained diffusion models with primal-dual inference (PDI) to sample from optimal distributions of entropy-regularized optimization problems with average constraints. We formalize constrained sampling in the Lagrangian dual domain, where the optimal distribution takes the form of a Gibbs distribution indexed by the optimal dual variable. Rather than estimating this dual multiplier before sampling and freezing it throughout generation, PDI jointly infers the optimal primal distribution and its parametrizing dual variable. Each reverse diffusion step denoises using the score field associated with the current multiplier and then updates the multiplier through dual ascent using the estimated constraint violation of the denoised samples. To enable this conditional score field, we train a single dual-conditioned score network over the family of Gibbs distributions induced by the dual variables encountered during inference. We prove that the time average of the dual variables generated along the inference trajectory converges to a neighborhood of the dual optimum and bound the effect of residual dual mismatch on the terminal distribution through schedule-dependent stability factors. We evaluate PDI on constrained sampling from a mixture of Gaussians, wireless resource allocation, and portfolio management.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

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

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

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

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

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

Latent space mapping of interpretable structural coordinates from stochastic single-molecule signals

arXiv:2606.16950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nanopores are versatile single-molecular sensors, but their utility is fundamentally constrained by stochastic translocation dynamics warping any encoded information. We resolve it by shifting from time-domain analysis to a learned latent-space mapping via a contrastive encoder trained exclusively on simulated signals from a physics-informed model. This encoder maps solid-state nanopore signals of engineered DNA barcodes into an interpretable molecular coordinate system. The learned representation is responsive to structural barcode parameters while remaining invariant to acquisition conditions and translocation conformation, allowing data pooling across devices. Molecule identification requires a single pass through the encoder, reducing computational cost by three orders of magnitude relative to alignment-based methods. We experimentally validate through mixture quantification, rare-variant detection, consensus barcode reconstruction, and real-time signal acquisition. This shift from temporal analysis to mapping structural coordinates into a latent space changes the paradigm behind analyzing stochastic sensor signals by linking classification to interpretable encoded molecular information.

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

Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Reliable pixel-level uncertainty quantification holds the potential to transform clinical workflows by enabling high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring and distinguishing true pathological changes from artifacts. Ideally, these models provide the stability required for critical treatment planning and surgical intervention. However, standard deep learning models often suffer from miscalibration, yielding overconfident predictions that mask underlying vulnerabilities at subtle pathological boundaries. To address this, we propose QUAM-SM, a post-hoc framework using targeted adversarial search to identify "adversarially fragile" pixels. By actively seeking perturbations that expose predictive instability, our method highlights regions where decisions are most vulnerable to being flipped. Importantly, the framework disentangles epistemic uncertainty from aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on two public datasets with multiple expert annotations demonstrate that QUAM-SM outperforms both standard and recent uncertainty estimation approaches in terms of reliability and boundary sensitivity. Code is available at https://github.com/HanaJebril/quam_sm

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

PRISM: A 3D Probabilistic Neural Representation for Interpretable Shape Modeling

arXiv:2602.11467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how anatomical shapes evolve in response to developmental covariates - and quantifying their spatially varying uncertainties - is critical in healthcare research. Existing approaches typically rely on global time-warping formulations that ignore spatially heterogeneous dynamics. We introduce PRISM, a novel framework that bridges implicit neural representations with uncertainty-aware statistical shape analysis. PRISM models the conditional distribution of shapes given covariates, providing spatially continuous estimates of both the population mean and covariate-dependent uncertainty at arbitrary locations. A key theoretical contribution is a closed-form Fisher Information metric that enables efficient, analytically tractable local temporal uncertainty quantification via automatic differentiation. Experiments on three synthetic datasets and one clinical dataset demonstrate PRISM's strong performance across diverse tasks - from modeling shape evolution to personalized shape prediction and anomaly detection - within a unified framework, while providing interpretable and clinically meaningful uncertainty estimates.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Reinforcement learning-driven unified generative framework for multi-objective RNA codon design

Current RNA codon design methods are limited by inefficient long-sequence processing and poor generalizability, often relying on a decoupled "generate-or-optimize" paradigm. We introduce RNARL, a reinforcement learning-driven framework that unifies sequence generation with multi-objective optimization. RNARL directly learns to generate high-performance sequences, effectively optimizing sequences over 3,900 nucleotides and demonstrating superior performance and universality across six species and five RNA types. RNARL thus establishes an effective and generalizable framework for RNA codon design. Finally, a user-friendly web platform is freely available to facilitate its application for RNA therapeutic design.