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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

作者:

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Adaptive Domain Models: Bayesian Evolution, Warm Rotation, and Principled Training for Geometric and Neuromorphic AI

arXiv:2603.18104v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prevailing AI training assumes reverse-mode automatic differentiation over IEEE-754 arithmetic. The memory overhead of training relative to inference, optimizer complexity, and structural degradation of geometric properties through training are consequences of this arithmetic substrate. This paper develops an alternative training architecture grounded in three prior results: the Dimensional Type System and Deterministic Memory Management framework (Haynes 2026), which establishes stack-eligible gradient allocation and exact quire accumulation as design-time verifiable properties; the Program Hypergraph (Haynes 2026), which establishes grade preservation through geometric algebra computations as a type-level invariant; and the b-posit bounded-regime design (Jonnalagadda et al. 2025), which makes posit arithmetic tractable across hardware targets conventionally considered inference-only. Their composition enables depth-independent training memory bounded to approximately twice the inference footprint, grade-preserving weight updates, and exact gradient accumulation, applicable uniformly to loss-function-optimized and spike-timing-dependent neuromorphic models. We introduce *Bayesian distillation*, a mechanism by which the latent prior structure of a general-purpose model is extracted through the ADM training regime, resolving the data-scarcity bootstrapping problem for domain-specific training. For deployment, we introduce *warm rotation*, an operational pattern in which an updated model transitions into an active inference pathway without service interruption, with correctness formalized through PHG certificates and signed version records. The result is a class of domain-specific AI systems that are smaller and more precise than general-purpose models, continuously adaptive, verifiably correct with respect to the physical structure of their domains, and initializable from existing models.

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

Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusion

arXiv:2606.15023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a multiscale probabilistic reconstruction framework for hypersonic Couette flow, where near-wall states are inferred from limited top-wall observations using conditional diffusion model. The boundary layer is divided into overlapping wall-normal subdomains, and a single height- and Mach-conditioned Elucidating Diffusion Model (EDM) is trained jointly for M=6,7,8 to sample velocity, density, pressure, and temperature fields conditioned on a top-wall boundary slice. A soft overlap inpainting strategy assembles subdomain predictions into full-volume reconstructions while maintaining inter-subdomain continuity and small-scale variability. To improve the spectral fidelity of the generated fields, we introduce a novel bounded binned spectral power (BSP) loss that preserves high-wavenumber content while remaining numerically stable across the diffusion noise schedule. Validation against direct numerical simulation data shows that the model recovers instantaneous structures, spectra, statistical profiles, correlations, and wall quantities across all training Mach numbers, while providing spatially structured uncertainty estimates. The reconstructed Mach-conditioned profiles also collapse under the Trettel-Larsson transformation, indicating consistency with compressibility scaling. These results establish the domain decomposed conditional diffusion model with a bounded binned spectral loss as an effective probabilistic surrogate for near-wall reconstruction in hypersonic wall-bounded turbulence.

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

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

An LMM for Precisely Grounding Elements in Documents

Visual grounding in documents is a crucial ability for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in areas such as document understanding, deep research and document error detection. However, existing approaches exhibit poor grounding precision in text-rich document images, often failing to accurately locate the critical document elements needed for reliable reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce PreciseDoc, an LMM specifically designed for precise element grounding and can be further optimized for Document VQA tasks. Specifically, to enhance the basic localization capability, we construct challenging training data by two pipelines capable of mass-producing high-quality documents with paired metadata of fine-grained coordinates, including synthetic hand-filled documents with camera effects. The model develops more real-world functions beyond straightforward localization of single text, such as locating personal information from CVs. Furthermore, we introduce a training paradigm for visual grounded reasoning where the grounding and reasoning are supervised jointly with reinforcement learning to improve the contribution of the grounded evidence. A comprehensive evaluation on various benchmarks demonstrates the advantage of the proposed data and methods in document spatial grounding and document understanding.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Cluster sizes in subcritical soft Boolean models

arXiv:2404.13730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the soft Boolean model, a model that interpolates between the Boolean model and long-range percolation, where vertices are given via a stationary Poisson point process. Each vertex carries an independent Pareto-distributed radius and each pair of vertices is assigned another independent Pareto weight with a potentially different tail exponent. Two vertices are now connected if they are within distance of the larger radius multiplied by the edge weight. We determine the tail behaviour of the Euclidean diameter and the number of points of a typical maximally connected component in a subcritical percolation phase. For this, we present a sharp criterion in terms of the tail exponents of the edge-weight and radius distributions that distinguish a regime where the tail behaviour is controlled only by the edge exponent from a regime in which both exponents are relevant. Our proofs rely on fine path-counting arguments identifying the precise order of decay of the probability that far-away vertices are connected.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

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

BioMamba: Domain-Adaptive Biomedical Language Models

Background. Biomedical language models should improve performance on biomedical text while retaining general-language-modeling fluency. For Mamba-based models, this trade-off has not been systematically studied across biomedical literature and clinical text. Methods. We developed BioMamba, a family of biomedical Mamba2 models at five scales obtained by continued pretraining of released public Mamba2 checkpoints on a balanced 80%/10%/10% mixture of PubMed abstracts, the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4), and Wikipedia. The contribution is the adaptation recipe and the accompanying open-weight checkpoints. Results. Across five scales, BioMamba consistently lowered PubMed perplexity, improved Wikipedia-style held-out perplexity by 1.46-4.72 PPL, and left C4 perplexity essentially unchanged. On six out-of-domain multiple-choice benchmarks, BioMamba stayed within +/-3 percentage points of Mamba2 with no systematic regression. After supervised fine-tuning, BioMamba+SFT matched or exceeded Mamba2+SFT on MIMIC-IV note completion and discharge summary generation at every evaluated scale, and improved PubMedQA at every scale. The strongest model (BioMamba-2.7B) reached a PubMed perplexity of 5.28 and accuracies of 90.24% and 73.00% on BioASQ and PubMedQA, respectively. Conclusions. A balanced domain-adaptive continued pretraining recipe strengthens Mamba2 language models on biomedical literature and clinical text while preserving general-language-modeling fluency.

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

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

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

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

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

Structural MRI Synthesis for Alzheimer's Disease via Conditional Diffusion on Anatomical Masks

arXiv:2606.18354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model – originally designed for brain tumor synthesis – to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

SciZoom: A Large-scale Benchmark for Hierarchical Scientific Summarization across the LLM Era

The explosive growth of AI research has created unprecedented information overload, increasing the demand for scientific summarization at multiple levels of granularity beyond traditional abstracts. While LLMs are increasingly adopted for summarization, existing benchmarks remain limited in scale, target only a single granularity, and predate the LLM era. Moreover, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, researchers have rapidly adopted LLMs for drafting manuscripts themselves, fundamentally transforming scientific writing, yet no resource exists to analyze how this writing has evolved. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciZoom, a benchmark comprising 44,946 papers from four top-tier ML venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, EMNLP) spanning 2020 to 2025, explicitly stratified into Pre-LLM and Post-LLM eras. SciZoom provides three hierarchical summarization targets (Abstract, Contributions, and TL;DR) achieving compression ratios up to 600:1, enabling both multi-granularity summarization research and temporal mining of scientific writing patterns. Our linguistic analysis reveals striking shifts in phrase patterns (up to 10x for formulaic expressions) and rhetorical style (23% decline in hedging), suggesting that LLM-assisted writing produces more confident yet homogenized prose. SciZoom serves as both a challenging benchmark and a unique resource for mining the evolution of scientific discourse in the generative AI era. Our code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/janghana/SciZoom) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/hanjang/SciZoom), respectively.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Reachability and optimal-time certificates for quantum control

arXiv:2606.24645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite-time control is central to quantum technologies, yet rigorous limits on reachable targets and optimal control times remain largely unknown. We develop a framework for finite-time reachability and optimal-time certificates in constrained quantum control based on moment relaxations with implicitly time-dependent differential constraints. For fixed control horizons and control constraints, the method yields rigorous upper bounds on achievable terminal fidelities, lower bounds on the optimal control times required to reach them, and certificate gaps for benchmarking explicit control pulses. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework in three use cases: entangled-state preparation in two and three qubits, one-qubit gate synthesis across different control geometries, and excitation transfer in an $N$-qubit $XX$ chain. Our work establishes differential moment hierarchies as a practical tool for certifying reachability limits and optimal control times in quantum control, providing hardware-aware quantum speed limits while highlighting structure exploitation as a key ingredient for scalable certification.

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

Boosting Text-Driven Video Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Distillation

Text-driven Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to locate and segment target objects in videos given natural language. However, existing models are typically trained on 2D image or video datasets with naive segmentation losses, which overlooks the geometric consistency across frames and leads to weak spatial understanding. In this paper, we propose Geometry-enhanced Language-guided Video segmentation (GeoLaV), a two-stage framework that distills 3D geometric knowledge from images to enhance text-driven video segmentation. In the first stage, we perform monocular geometry pretraining with monocular novel-view synthesis, enabling the model to acquire geometry-consistent visual representations via spatial alignment on large-scale single-image datasets. In the second stage, we introduce geometry-aware distillation and fine-tune the model on video segmentation datasets, transferring 3D structural knowledge from a general 3D prior model. This process reinforces 3D awareness and improves both spatiotemporal coherence and language grounding in segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our method using only image segmentation data already provides notable zero-shot generalization in RVOS. When combined with geometry-aware distillation for fine-tuning on videos, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple RVOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Tony1882880/GeoLaV.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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

Intelligence Is Not the Bottleneck: Validating an LLM First-Pass Manuscript Score Against Peer-Review Outcomes

arXiv:2606.15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns. We validate AIPR, which reads a submitted manuscript and emits five 0-100 quality dimensions and a weighted overall score, against the public decision outcomes of a major machine learning venue. AIPR grades by prompting alone, with no fine-tuning on reviews or decisions. Across 300 ICLR submissions with public decision tiers and reviewer ratings, graded under a frozen pipeline with hypotheses pre-registered before any score met any outcome, the overall score separates rejected from accepted submissions (AUROC 0.82, 95% CI 0.78-0.87), rises monotonically across tiers, and tracks the mean reviewer rating. The signal is strongest where we claim it: the lowest-scoring fifth is rejected far above the base rate, with oral papers absent. The validity comes mostly from the model: a one-paragraph prompt on the same model discriminates almost as well as the full pipeline (the small gap favours the pipeline but does not meet the pre-declared criterion, p = 0.09). What the engineering adds is reliability and a grounded review: AIPR's score barely moves across repeated runs (0.7 vs. 2.8 points within-paper SD) where the bare prompt swings, and the same pass returns a rubric-structured, evidence-grounded review rather than a bare number, with the human keeping the decision.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Brain Health for Economic Resilience: a data-driven framework for the brain-positive economic transition

Announced in this Comment and in collaboration with Nature Medicine is the convening of the Brain Health for Economic Resilience Commission, a global, transdisciplinary effort to define, measure and operationalize brain health and cognitive capacity as foundational drivers of economic resilience.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Finding Multiple Interpretations in Datasets

arXiv:2606.12277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose an approach to finding sets of similar-performing models (in terms of loss/accuracy measurements) with highly different context-aware characteristics. Through experiments on the METABRIC dataset, we show that the proposed method finds multiple models with highly different gene expressions than those found by the control methodology without performance penalties. We argue that the proposed methodology is important whenever one aims to analyze any global characteristic of a model to extract insight into the underlying phenomenon being studied.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.