arXiv:2606.11355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We define and investigate two families of dual polynomials associated with the Gauss--Legendre polynomials, which have recently found interesting applications in computer graphics. Using the presented results, one can derive representations of the Gauss--Legendre polynomials, construct the dual bases for Lagrange bases and solve certain approximation problems arising, for example, in CAGD.
Science Journals
arXiv:2606.11360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The current study presents a three-dimensional linear stability analysis of particle-laden Couette-Poiseuille flow suspended in a Newtonian fluid between two parallel plates, with the lower plate coated by a porous medium. The influence of suspended particles is examined using a two-domain formulation in which particles are confined to the fluid layer and do not penetrate the porous substrate. The particle-laden suspension is modeled using the dusty-gas framework, while the flow within the porous layer is described by the volume-averaged Navier-Stokes (VANS) equations. In particle-laden flows over impermeable walls, particle inertia may either stabilize or destabilize the flow depending on the governing parameters. In contrast, the presence of a porous layer introduces an additional permeability-dependent destabilizing mechanism that fundamentally modifies these classical trends. Consequently, particle loading can reduce the critical Reynolds number at sufficiently high permeability, even in parameter regimes where particles stabilize the corresponding rigid-wall flow. The coupled formulation also introduces additional disturbance branches associated with fluid-particle coupling near the permeable interface. Although these modes remain stable across the parameter space investigated, they modify the eigenspectrum and influence the dominant instability by altering coupling pathways. Furthermore, unlike impermeable-wall Couette-Poiseuille flow, where increasing the Couette component generally stabilizes the flow, the porous-wall configuration exhibits a monotonic decrease in the critical Reynolds number over the range examined. These results demonstrate that porous boundaries can fundamentally alter established stability behavior in particle-laden shear flows through permeability-dependent coupling between the suspension and the porous substrate.
arXiv:2606.11373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although symmetricity in the converter controller is desirable for robust stability margins, a direct link between system-level asymmetricity and instability has yet to be clearly established. Converter control introduces three-phase asymmetricity through loops such as DC-link voltage control, a phase-locked loop , and a power synchronization loop. Furthermore, the inherently asymmetric topology of the two-level voltage-source converter, which converts a DC voltage into a three-phase balanced set, acts as the underlying origin of the asymmetries that propagate into the control structure. Consequently, establishing a direct relationship between system asymmetricity (rather than control asymmetricity alone) and the stability margin is essential for understanding the underlying instability mechanisms. In this work, asymmetricity is quantified using the Asymmetricity Quantification Index (AQI), derived from the sequence-domain representation of the interconnected converter-grid impedance. Within this domain, symmetricity is identified through the definition of symmetrical matrices, which serve as the benchmark against which asymmetricity is measured. A robust and generalized analysis correlates AQI with the stability margin, including both grid-following and grid-forming control structures connected to the power grid. It is found that instability arises from increased asymmetricity in the combined converter-grid system, which is dominated by asymmetric control loops and operating points. Thus, reducing asymmetricity without compromising controller functionality can improve stability margins. The analysis is validated in both control-hardware-in-the-loop and power-hardware-in-the-loop environments.
arXiv:2606.11399v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed across cultural contexts but often reflect homogenized values inherited from training data. Evaluations of cultural alignment typically rely on direct prompting with survey-style questions, which frequently elicit neutral or safety-aligned responses and fail to capture underlying model preferences. We propose a framework for probing and steering latent cultural representations in LLMs along the two Inglehart--Welzel axes of the World Values Survey (WVS). By translating social value questions into scenario-based behavioral dilemmas, we extract token-level probabilities to measure implicit values and apply activation steering, optionally combined with country-conditioned prompting, to shift model behavior without retraining. Across three open-source LLMs and four target cultures, we find substantial variation in steerability and identify latent entanglement, where interventions along one cultural dimension induce shifts along another. This coupling mirrors correlations in human WVS data and persists across activation, prompt, and hybrid steering. It constrains axis-independent alignment, though general task performance is largely preserved.
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.
arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.
arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.
arXiv:2606.11457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral biometrics offer a promising approach for continuous authentication, but their fairness across demographic groups remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates gender bias in swipe-based authentication using the BBMAS (117 users) and ANTAL (71 users) datasets and evaluates XGBoost and DenseNet classifiers through False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). XGBoost achieved authentication accuracies of 92% and 94% on the BBMAS and ANTAL datasets, respectively, while statistical tests (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Mann-Whitney, and Wasserstein permutation) found no significant gender differences in authentication error rates across almost all experimental settings. These findings suggest that swipe-based authentication can achieve high accuracy while maintaining comparable performance for male and female users, supporting its potential as a fair and reliable behavioral biometric modality.
arXiv:2606.11739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.
arXiv:2606.11606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.
arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.
arXiv:2606.11519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates the utility of the movable antenna (MA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) framework for downlink wireless communications. In the considered scenario, a base station (BS) is equipped with two sub-arrays of MAs transmits signals to the users via the RIS. By jointly exploiting the antenna-positioning flexibility of MAs and the RIS element selection capability, the proposed joint MA-RIS framework introduces additional design degrees of freedom to enhance desired signals and mitigate inter-user interference, thereby maximizing the network sum-rate. To this end, we formulate a joint optimization problem involving MA positioning, sub-array beamforming, and RIS element selection, subject to the minimum antenna separation and transmit power constraints. The resulting problem is highly non-convex and challenging to solve directly. To address this issue, an alternating optimization framework is developed that decomposes the problem into three tractable subproblems. Specifically, zero-forcing beamforming is employed for transmit beamformer design, a low-complexity one-dimensional search is derived for RIS element selection, and the MA positioning problem is solved using block coordinate descent (BCD) and convex optimization techniques implemented via CVX. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint MA-RIS framework significantly improves the achievable sum-rate compared with conventional fixed MAs and benchmark schemes with random configurations.
arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.
arXiv:2606.11531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.
Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems
arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.
arXiv:2606.11821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Veloce EQuilibrium (VEQ) is a compact parametric framework for tokamak modeling workflows that repeatedly query continuous fixed-boundary equilibria at low latency. The VEQPy implementation evaluated here is an axisymmetric fixed-boundary Grad-Shafranov solver whose main solve enforces a variationally induced projected residual. Its active unknowns are MXH-type flux-surface harmonics and shifted-Chebyshev coefficients for radial profile and source closures. Six input routes accept pressure-gradient, toroidal-field-function, poloidal-flux-gradient, enclosed toroidal current, current-density and safety-factor information through route-specific closures, while all routes map to the same finite-dimensional residual operator. Controlled tests show route consistency for smooth, mutually compatible inputs generated from a common reference equilibrium. For Pareto-selected reduced configurations in three G-EQDSK cases, the most accurate selected rows correspond to a D-shaped case (9 active parameters, minor-radius-normalized shape error 1.4e-3, solve-only median 1.6 ms), an H-mode case (65, 1.1e-3, 19 ms), and an X-point case treated as a smoothed fixed-boundary representation of a diverted boundary (94, 1.9e-3, 15 ms). Sampled pointwise strong-form Grad-Shafranov diagnostics show that enriching the active representation mainly improves interior force balance, whereas the global RMS and maximum values for the H-mode and X-point cases remain dominated by near-boundary contributions. In an isolated one-dimensional transport-geometry coupling test against the target geometry read from G-EQDSK, the temperature-profile response remains below about one percent. These results support using VEQ for repeated equilibrium-geometry queries, provided that pointwise diagnostics are retained to screen cases requiring boundary refinement, local correction or higher-fidelity equilibrium solves.
arXiv:2606.11643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.
arXiv:2606.11756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-frequency focused acoustic beams are promising for selective trapping of cells in fluids, but the related acoustic absorption may generate large acoustothermal effect which could cause thermal heating on cells or microparticles and bring extra acoustic body force due to the thermal gradient. The theory of the bulk acoustic streaming and acoustic radiation force in a focused-beam for the three-dimensional selective trapping of a cell has been developed [Li and Gong, Phys. Rev. Fluids, 11, 054201 (2026)], however, the acoustothermal effect and its feedback on the acoustic field at high frequency with strong absorption remain weakly understood. To solve this issue, we develop a theoretical and numerical model that couples acoustic propagation, bulk acoustic streaming, and acoustothermal effect in water. The acoustic body force is decomposed into a viscous-attenuation-induced acoustic body force $\mathbf{f}_{\mathrm{E}}$ and a temperature-gradient-induced acoustic body force $\mathbf{f}_{\mathrm{T}}$, while the temperature field is fed back to the frequency-domain acoustic calculation through the temperature-dependent material properties. Taking the single focused beam for example, within the pressure range constrained by the mechanical index, $\mathbf{f}_{\mathrm{T}}$ remains weaker than $\mathbf{f}_{\mathrm{E}}$, whereas streaming-induced convection can markedly reduce the temperature rise when the thermal Peclet number ($Pe_T$) exceeds unity. This work establishes a theoretical basis for predicting and controlling the intercoupling of bulk acoustic streaming and acoustothermal effec of high-frequency focused beams which will be helpful for the design of single-beam acoustical tweezers.
arXiv:2606.11761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic data pruning techniques aim to reduce computational cost while minimizing information loss by periodically selecting representative subsets of input data during model training. However, existing methods often struggle to maintain strong worst-group accuracy, particularly at high pruning rates, across balanced and imbalanced datasets. To address this challenge, we propose RCAP, a Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic dynamic dataset pruning algorithm for classification tasks. RCAP applies a closed-form solution to estimate the fraction of samples to be included in the training subset for each individual class. This fraction is adaptively adjusted in every epoch using class-wise aggregated loss. Thereafter, it employs an adaptive sampling strategy that prioritizes samples having high loss for populating the class-wise subsets. We evaluate RCAP on six diverse datasets ranging from class-balanced to highly imbalanced using five distinct models across three training paradigms: training from scratch, transfer learning, and fine-tuning. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dataset pruning methods, achieving superior worst-group accuracy at all pruning rates. Remarkably, with only $10\%$ data, RCAP delivers $>1\%$ improvement in performance on class-imbalanced datasets compared to full data training while providing an average $8.69\times$ speedup. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/atif-hassan/RCAP-dynamic-dataset-pruning
arXiv:2606.11736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State root computation dominates (78%) blockchain block processing time. Ethereum's canonical authenticated data structure, i.e., Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), suffers from severe tree-height growth and is vulnerable to \textit{Nurgle attacks} (SP'24), where adversaries inflate path depth via hash collisions and degrade system performance at negligible cost. Existing defenses increase node fanout (span) to bound tree height, but higher span inflates proof size exponentially. Prior work mitigates this trade-off using vector commitments, at the cost of trusted setup or expensive verification. We present \textsc{Mhot}, a height-optimal authenticated data structure for blockchain state commitment that preserves standard hash-based verification without trusted setup. Unlike MPT's fixed-prefix indexing, which couples span and fanout exponentially, \textsc{Mhot} indexes by discriminative bits that actually distinguish keys, achieving adaptive span with linear fanout coupling and provably minimal height. To prevent high fanout from inflating proofs, we introduce hierarchical proofs, a two-layer Merkle construction that reduces per-node proof overhead from O(k) to O(log k). On Ethereum mainnet workloads, \textsc{Mhot} achieves up to 9X higher write throughput, 4X lower write amplification, and 2X smaller proofs than MPT. Under Nurgle attacks, even when the adversary consumes an entire block's gas budget, \textsc{Mhot} maintains a 0% attack success rate (v.s., 99.97% for MPT). Our results, somewhat surprisingly, show that height optimality (not new crypto primitives!) is the key abstraction for scalable and attack-resilient blockchain state commitment.
arXiv:2606.11858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates an analytical Koopman-based nonlinear model predictive control (K-NMPC) approach for tracking control of virtually coupled train systems. A nonlinear train movement model incorporating train dynamics, speed and control input limits, passenger comfort constraints, and collision avoidance is systematically lifted into a finite-dimensional Koopman space through closed-form observable functions. After freezing the affine parameter-varying lifted predictor along the shifted predicted trajectory, the online optimal control problem is solved as a quadratic program that can be solved efficiently. The proposed KNMPC is benchmarked against a time-discrete NMPC scheme, demonstrating comparable control performance with significantly reduced online computation time and strong potential for real-time implementation in practical virtually coupled train control systems.
arXiv:2606.11846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schr\"odinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.
arXiv:2606.11944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Examiner reports from six major UK exam boards published between 2017 and 2025 are analysed using a mixed-methods thematic analysis. Focusing on questions relating to gravity, the objective is to understand where students commonly drop marks. Findings reveal that the source of difficulty is dependent upon topic and question style. Mathematical errors account for the majority of lost marks in calculation-type questions, while a lack of conceptual understanding commonly results in lost marks on questions relating to fields, energy and gravitational potential. Pedagogical strategies for teaching gravity must emphasise algebraic skills for orbital mechanics topics while prioritising qualitative modelling and precise definitions for field theory.
arXiv:2606.12075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) heavily utlize Machine Learning (ML) but ML models can be manipulated via adversarial attacks. These attacks add carefully crafted perturbations to network traffic data that leads to misclassifications. While prior work has demonstrated adversarial vulnerabilities in isolated settings, systematic cross-architecture as well as class and category of attack based comparisons under controlled attack conditions remain limited, leaving practitioners without clear guidance on which models to deploy in adversarial environments. This paper asks a simple question: what type of classifier architectures actually hold up when attackers try to manipulate the systems? We put three popular architectures through their paces: a 1D Convolutional Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and a Random Forest (RF) ensemble. Using the ACI-IoT-2023 dataset (over 1.2 million samples spanning 12 attack types), we subject each model with FGSM and PGD adversarial attacks, which apply gradient-based perturbations in normalized feature space consistent with established adversarial ML evaluation protocols, at perturbation budgets ranging from $\epsilon=0.01$ to $\epsilon=0.1$. Surprisingly, Random Forest achieved near-perfect baseline accuracy (99.98\%), yet collapsed catastrophically under attack, dropping 73 percentage points at the smallest perturbation we tested. CNN, on the other hand, retained 95.5\% accuracy at $\epsilon=0.01$ and degraded gracefully as perturbations increased. LSTM fell somewhere in between. These findings flip the conventional wisdom where high baseline accuracy means nothing if a model shatters at the first sign of adversarial pressure. For practitioners deploying intrusion detection in adversarial environments, we recommend CNN-based architectures and provide scenario-specific deployment guidance.
arXiv:2606.11952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a novel tactile sensor for in-hand manipulation with slip-aware control that integrates velocity, force/torque, and pressure map sensing into a single device with a deformable contact pad. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sensor to combine these sensing modalities within a single compliant structure. The sensor features a deformable contact surface and can robustly track both flat and curved surfaces across a wide range of materials. Its performance is evaluated through a comprehensive set of experiments that highlight both its capabilities and limitations. The sensor is designed for rapid and low-cost fabrication using a combination of standard PCB manufacturing and rapid prototyping techniques.