Forskningsradar

Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56239 artiklar

Will AstroForge Collapse the PGM Market?
arXiv:2607.06806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AstroForge seeks to mine platinum group metals (PGM) from asteroids. Asteroid reserves appear to be unlimited, and at current market price the gross margin of asteroid mining would be very high. It is natural to ask: when AstroForge successfully demonstrates economic space mining of PGM, will they cause the PGM market to collapse? We answer the question with a non-steady system dynamics model of the PGM market. We find that the market price for PGM will eventually drop towards the much lower cost of asteroid mining, but only after the entire supply has shifted off-world. In the meanwhile, huge fortunes will be made. And everybody on Earth will benefit from new applications of lower-price PGM.
VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting
arXiv:2507.05116v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large-scale Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown superior performance in robotic manipulation tasks guided by natural language. However, current VLA models suffer from two drawbacks: (i) generation of massive tokens leading to high inference latency and increased training cost, and (ii) insufficient utilization of generated actions resulting in potential performance loss. To address these issues, we develop a training framework to finetune VLA models for generating significantly fewer action tokens with high parallelism, effectively reducing inference latency and training cost. Furthermore, we introduce an inference optimization technique with a novel voting-based ensemble strategy to combine current and previous action predictions, improving the utilization of generated actions and overall performance. Our results demonstrate that we achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art VLA models, achieving significantly higher success rates and 39$\times$ faster inference than OpenVLA with 46 Hz throughput on edge platforms, demonstrating practical deployability. The code is available at https://github.com/LukeLIN-web/VOTE.
Enforcing Speech Content Privacy in Environmental Sound Recordings using Segment-wise Waveform Reversal
arXiv:2507.08412v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Environmental sound recordings often contain intelligible speech, raising privacy concerns that limit analysis, sharing and reuse of data. In this paper, we introduce a method that renders speech unintelligible while preserving both the integrity of the acoustic scene, and the overall audio quality. Our approach involves reversing waveform segments to distort speech content. This process is enhanced through a voice activity detection and speech separation pipeline, which allows for more precise targeting of speech. In order to demonstrate the effectivness of the proposed approach, we consider a three-part evaluation protocol that assesses: 1) speech intelligibility using Word Error Rate (WER), 2) sound sources detectability using Sound source Classification Accuracy-Drop (SCAD) from a widely used pre-trained model, and 3) audio quality using the Fr\'echet Audio Distance (FAD), computed with our reference dataset that contains unaltered speech. Experiments on this simulated evaluation dataset, which consists of linear mixtures of speech and environmental sound scenes, show that our method achieves satisfactory speech intelligibility reduction (97.9% WER), minimal degradation of the sound sources detectability (2.7% SCAD), and high perceptual quality (FAD of 1.40). An ablation study further highlights the contribution of each component of the pipeline. We also show that incorporating random splicing to our speech content privacy enforcement method can enhance the algorithm's robustness to attempt to recover the clean speech, at a slight cost of audio quality.
Trexplorer Super: Topologically Correct Centerline Tree Tracking of Tubular Objects in CT Volumes
arXiv:2507.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tubular tree structures, such as blood vessels and airways, are essential in human anatomy and accurately tracking them while preserving their topology is crucial for various downstream tasks. Trexplorer is a recurrent model designed for centerline tracking in 3D medical images but it struggles with predicting duplicate branches and terminating tracking prematurely. To address these issues, we present Trexplorer Super, an enhanced version that notably improves performance through novel advancements. However, evaluating centerline tracking models is challenging due to the lack of public datasets. To enable thorough evaluation, we develop three centerline datasets, one synthetic and two real, each with increasing difficulty. Using these datasets, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and compare them with our approach. Trexplorer Super outperforms previous SOTA models on every dataset. Our results also highlight that strong performance on synthetic data does not necessarily translate to real datasets. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/RomStriker/Trexplorer-Super.
L-GTA: Latent Generative Modeling for Time Series Augmentation
arXiv:2507.23615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data augmentation is becoming increasingly important across various areas of time series analysis, including forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection. We introduce the Latent Generative Temporal Augmentation (L-GTA) model, a generative approach based on a Variational Autoencoder with a Bi-LSTM backbone and temporal self-attention. The model learns a latent representation for each timestep and applies controlled perturbations such as jittering, magnitude warping, or drift. We define an equivariance objective to further encourage consistency between latent space and data space transformations. As a result, the augmented samples show predictable and interpretable transformation signatures. We evaluate L-GTA on several real-world datasets against SOTA generative methods, including TimeGAN, TimeVAE, and Diffusion-TS, as well as direct transformation approaches. Across experiments on downstream forecasting, distribution fidelity, and controllability of transformation intensity, L-GTA consistently outperforms competing approaches. In downstream forecasting, it reduces prediction error by up to 26% compared to the strongest generative method and 27% relative to using the original data without augmentation.
A Study of Commonsense Reasoning over Visual Object Properties
arXiv:2508.10956v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspired by human categorization, visual reasoning about object properties, such as physical attributes and functions, involves identifying and recognizing low-level details and higher-level abstractions. While current visual question answering (VQA) studies consider multiple object properties, such as size, they typically blend perception and reasoning and lack representativeness with respect to reasoning levels and image categories, making it unclear whether and how vision-language models (VLMs) recognize and reason about depicted objects. To this end, we introduce a systematic evaluation framework comprising images of three representative types, three reasoning levels of increasing complexity, and four object property dimensions, informed by prior work on commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning. We develop a procedure to instantiate this framework in two VQA object-reasoning benchmarks: OPTICS-CNT, comprising 360 images paired with 1,080 multi-level, count-based questions, and OPTICS-CMP, comprising 2.1k comparison questions. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero-shot settings reveal significant limitations relative to humans, with the best-performing model achieving below 40% counting and 70% comparison accuracy. While newer reasoning models perform better, a 20% gap to human performance remains. VLMs struggle particularly with photographic images, counterfactual reasoning, physical and functional properties, and higher counts. We make the OPTICS benchmark data and code available to support future scalable benchmarking methods, generalized annotation guidelines, and advanced reasoning VLMs.
Causal evidence of racial and institutional biases in accessing paywalled articles and scientific data
arXiv:2509.08299v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to access and build upon the work of others. Yet, much published work remains behind expensive paywalls, and even accessible articles often rest on datasets shared only "upon reasonable request" to the authors. Researchers can try to overcome these barriers through informal channels, such as emailing authors directly, but whether such channels are hindered by racial or institutional biases remains unknown. Here we combine survey data, semi-structured interviews, large-scale observational analysis, and two randomized audit experiments to examine disparities in access to scientific knowledge. Surveyed researchers in the Global South report markedly lower institutional access to the literature and depend more heavily on informal channels to obtain papers and data; interviews elaborate the workarounds and racialized frictions they encounter. Our analysis of 250 million articles reveals that Global South researchers cite paywalled papers at significantly lower rates than Global North counterparts--a gap associated with reduced knowledge breadth and scholarly impact. Using citation-context classification, we further find that papers whose data is available only upon request are less likely to be cited for reusing their data, a penalty falling disproportionately on the Global South. To probe mechanisms, we conduct two email audit studies in which fictional PhD students differing in racial background and institutional affiliation request paywalled articles (N = 18,000) and datasets (N = 16,000). Racial identity influences response rates to both requests, whereas institutional affiliation influences access to datasets. These findings reveal how informal gatekeeping can perpetuate structural inequities in science, highlighting the need for stronger data-sharing mandates and more equitable open-access policies.
Dynamical Low-Rank Approximations for Kalman Filtering
arXiv:2509.11210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a dynamical low rank approximation of the Kalman-Bucy process (DLR-KBP), which evolves the filtering distribution of a partially continuously observed linear SDE on a small time-varying subspace at reduced computational cost. This reduction is valid in presence of small noise and when the filtering distribution concentrates around a low dimensional subspace. We further extend this approach to a DLR-ENKF process, where particles are evolved in a low dimensional time-varying subspace at reduced cost. This allows for a significantly larger ensemble size compared to standard EnKF at equivalent cost, thereby lowering the Monte Carlo error and improving filter accuracy. Theoretical properties of the DLR-KBP and DLR-ENKF are investigated, including a propagation of chaos property. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique.
NonTextual Target Attack
arXiv:2510.02999v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses. However, restricting the objective as inducing fixed targets inherently constrains the adversarial search space, limiting the overall attack efficacy. Furthermore, existing methods typically require numerous optimization iterations to fulfill the large gap between the fixed target and the original LLM output, resulting in low attack efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose NonTextual Target Attack (NTA), the first gradient-based attack that relies on a non-textual constrained objective to maximize the unsafety probability of the LLM output, without enforcing any response patterns. For tractable optimization, we further decompose this objective into two constrained sub-objectives, which can be approximated by two differentiable unconstrained losses, to iteratively optimize the response and the adversarial prompt in the neighborhood of the original prompt, with a theoretical analysis to validate the decomposition. In contrast to existing attacks, NTA first realizes gradient-based prompt optimization on a non-textual target and significantly expands the attack space, enabling more flexible and efficient exploration of LLM vulnerabilities. Extensive evaluations show that \textsc{NTA} achieves an average attack success rate of 96.8\% against recent safety-aligned LLMs with only 100 optimization iterations on AdvBench, outperforming state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks by over 40\%.
Radiation Damage Cascades in Fullerite Using Molecular Dynamics
arXiv:2607.06962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular dynamics is used to study radiation cascades in solid C60 under ambient conditions. Simulations are performed for Primary Knock-On Atom (PKA) energies from 0.1 to 1 keV, and cascades are sampled over many PKA directions to collect statistics. Energies and forces are described using the Environment Dependent Interaction Potential for carbon paired with the Ziegler-Biersack-Littmark potential for short-range interactions, and cascade behaviour is characterized by tracking kinetic energy, hybridization and bond connectivity as a function of time. Compared to most materials, fullerite exhibits an unusual radiation response due to weak thermal transfer between C60 molecules leading to a thermalization phase lasting hundreds of picoseconds. The cascades damage the C60 molecules and link them together, and a linear relation is found between the number of cross-linked molecules and the number of new sp3 atoms. The threshold displacement energy computed is 18 eV, in agreement with experiments
Reliable and Developer-Aligned Evaluation of Agents for Software Engineering
arXiv:2607.06713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are rapidly moving towards closing the development cycle, transitioning from simple assistive companions to autonomous contributors deeply embedded into collaborative development environments. Despite their accelerated adoption, existing evaluation techniques are limited due to their fragmented nature and distorted projection of true model capabilities, often obtained from hypothetical syntactic scenarios. This research aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation methodology for LLM-powered agents that is grounded in real-world software development practice. Our evaluation approach focuses on contamination-awareness, in-the-wild agentic behavior assessment, and trajectory-aware benchmarks and metrics capturing realistic coding contexts, human-aligned behavior, and model failure modes.
The Power of Backdoor Absorption in Community Training
arXiv:2607.06643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backdoor attacks severely threaten large-scale AI models. When model owners delegate training to external compute providers within a decentralized training paradigm, adversaries can craft stealthy, low-frequency triggers to inject malicious behavior while evading standard audits. Traditionally, detecting these attacks requires a full re-computation of the training steps--a prohibitive overhead that directly contradicts the owner's resource constraints. To address this, we investigate the resilience of continuous optimization dynamics under Byzantine perturbations, where adversaries are forced to compete against a continuous influx of honest updates. Under a threat model where an adversary compromises f out of n total trainers, we quantify the minimum auditing overhead required by the model owner to probabilistically bound the attack success rate. We formalize this injection-absorption dynamic as a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC). Using this framework, we prove that the success probability of any bounded adversary asymptotically collapses to zero under a defense strategy combining natural absorption, a randomized scheduler, and lazy verification oracle. Empirical results demonstrate significant backdoor suppression with zero utility degradation even when invoking the verification oracle on merely 10% of the total training steps. This approach yields a provably sound and computationally efficient defense for safety-critical AI.
General Incomplete Multimodal Learning via Dynamic Quality Perception
arXiv:2607.06943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal learning robust to missing modalities is essential for real-world applications. Existing methods mainly focus on inter-modality missing, where entire modalities are absent, while overlooking intra-modality degradation, where modalities are present but severely corrupted. In practice, these two types of missing often coexist, making existing approaches ineffective. To address this limitation, we propose General Incomplete Multimodal Learning (GIML), a unified framework that simultaneously handles both inter-modality missing and intra-modality degradation through dynamic quality perception. Specifically, GIML models heterogeneous missing patterns as continuous modality information degradation, enabling degradation-aware adaptive fusion. To achieve reliable quality perception, we introduce a Noise-aware Quality Estimator that learns the mapping from corrupted features to noise intensity through controlled noise injection. Furthermore, we propose a Noise-Semantic Decoupled module that separates semantic information from noise interference. This improves robustness and generalization to unseen corruption patterns. Extensive experiments across datasets with diverse modality types demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of GIML. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yu-Five/GIML.
Converge to Surprise: Evolutionary Self-supervised Image Clustering
arXiv:2607.06887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most self-supervised image clustering models, actually almost all deep learning approaches, are based on gradient descent: In order to calculate the loss, every optimization step requires a clearly defined target, whether a contrastive split, a masked patch or entity, an EMA-teacher output, a pseudo-label, or a differentiable information-theoretic functional. We propose a self-supervised framework that drops this requirement for image clustering. Without any prior knowledge, we have to assume that each pixel is i.i.d. according to the Principle of Maximum Entropy. Taking this as our null hypothesis H0, we define a "surprise score" that measures how unlikely the model's output representation would be under H0. Maximizing the surprise score forces the deep learning model to reject H0 - equivalently, to discover non-random feature from data. Also, here is our fundamental assumption: a surprise score cannot, in general, be reduced to a per-step loss. Hence, we propose the "converge-to-surprise" scheme to optimize our model: an evolution-strategy (ES) outer loop, which directly maximizes the surprise score without needing its gradient, paired with a periodic gradient-descent inner loop, which uses the surprising clusters already discovered by ES as surrogate targets. On standard image benchmarks, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art results in non-parametric self-supervised image clustering - the strictest deep-clustering setting, in which the number of ground-truth classes is not given to the model.
Evaluating LLM Robustness Under Domain-Specific Prompt Perturbations in Public Health Applications
arXiv:2607.06913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in public health applications, yet their robustness to non-clinical user inputs remains underexplored. We propose a domain specific robustness benchmark that evaluates LLMs under two perturbation types that commonly arise when non-clinical users interact with health AI systems: misinformation framing (MF), where prompt might be injected by false health claims, and layperson rewriting (LR), where patients describe symptoms in everyday language rather than medical terminology. Our goal is to evaluate the stability of LLMs under these perturbation. Experiments show that MF degrades accuracy by 7.2 pp on average with prediction flip rates of 9-38 percent, even when claims are explicitly labelled as unsupported; LR causes only 1.4 pp degradation. These findings highlight two distinct deployment risks in public health settings: models may produce incorrect outputs when users unintentionally carry misinformation into their queries, and may misinterpret clinically relevant details when patients use informal language. Both risks call for perturbation-aware robustness evaluation beyond clean baseline benchmark
Activation Quantization of Vision Encoders Needs Prefixing Registers
arXiv:2510.04547v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large pretrained vision encoders are central to multimodal intelligence, powering applications from on-device vision processing to vision-language models. Since these applications often demand real-time processing of massive visual data, reducing the inference cost of vision encoders is critical. Quantization offers a practical path, but it remains challenging even at 8-bit precision due to so-called outliers. In this work, we propose $\textit{RegCache}$, a training-free algorithm that mitigates outliers in large-scale pretrained vision encoders and serves as a plug-in module that can be applied on top of other quantization methods. RegCache introduces outlier-prone yet semantically meaningless prefix tokens to the vision encoder, which prevent other tokens from having outliers. Notably, we observe that outliers in vision encoders behave differently from those in language models, motivating two technical innovations: middle-layer prefixing and token deletion. Experimental results show that our method consistently improves quantized model performance across various vision encoders, particularly in extremely low-bit regimes (e.g., 4-bit).
Provable Affine Identifiability of Nonlinear CCA under Latent Distributional Priors
arXiv:2510.04758v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we establish the sufficient conditions under which nonlinear Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) recovers ground-truth latent factors up to an affine transformation. By transporting the analysis from the observation space to the source space, we extend classical statistical results on orthogonal polynomial expansions of bivariate distributions to representation learning, proving affine identifiability under specific distributional priors. We formally demonstrate that whitening is strictly necessary to ensure the boundedness and well-conditioning of the learned mappings. Furthermore, we bridge the gap between theory and practice by proving that ridge-regularized empirical CCA converges to its population counterpart in the finite-sample regime. Finally, our findings provide a rigorous theoretical foundation explaining the empirical success of recent correlation-based non-contrastive learning methods. Experiments on synthetic and rendered image datasets, alongside systematic ablations, validate the predicted recovery behavior and illustrate the failure modes that arise when the assumptions are violated.
Constant Weighted Maximin Share Approximations for Chores
arXiv:2510.06581v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the fair allocation of indivisible chores among agents with asymmetric weights. Among the various fairness notions, weighted maximin share (WMMS) stands out as particularly compelling. Despite its appeal, the existence of a constant-factor approximation for WMMS has remained an important open problem in weighted fair division [Aziz et al., 2022, Suksompong, 2025]. Prior to our work, the best known approximation ratio was $O(\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of agents. In this paper, we make significant progress by presenting the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for WMMS. Our main contributions are as follows: [1] We design the first algorithm that guarantees a 12-approximate WMMS allocation, substantially improving upon the previous $O(\log n)$ upper bound. Our approach introduces a novel analytical framework based on canonical instance reductions, agent delegation, and proxy cost functions to effectively bound agents' costs. Additionally, we provide a polynomial-time implementation for any approximate WMMS algorithm, incurring a factor of 2 loss in the approximation ratio. [2] We present an improved worst-case lower bound, showing that no algorithm can achieve better than 2-approximate WMMS, thereby strengthening the previous best lower bound of 1.366. We further construct a general hard instance, which provides lower bounds for an arbitrary number of agents. [3] Beyond worst-case bounds, we precisely characterize the optimal approximation ratio curve for every possible weight distribution in the two-agent case. Notably, our results imply that a WMMS allocation may not exist for any two agents with different weights, in sharp contrast to the symmetric case where an MMS allocation always exists.
LiveOIBench: Can Large Language Models Outperform Human Contestants in Informatics Olympiads?
arXiv:2510.09595v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Competitive programming problems are increasingly used to evaluate the coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) due to their complexity and ease of verification. Yet, current coding benchmarks face limitations such as a lack of exceptionally challenging problems, insufficient test case coverage, and reliance on online platform APIs that limit accessibility. To address these issues, we introduce LiveOIBench, a large-scale competitive programming benchmark featuring 403 expert-curated problems, averaging 60 official test cases each, drawn from 72 contests across 14 Informatics Olympiads held between 2023 and 2025. LiveOIBench has four key features: (1) expert-designed tasks with detailed subtask rubrics and extensive test cases; (2) direct comparison to elite human contestants; (3) continuous updates to reduce contamination risk; and (4) a fully offline, reproducible evaluation system. Benchmarking 34 popular general-purpose and reasoning LLMs, we find that GPT-5 achieves an 81.76th percentile, still falling short of top human contestants, while among the open-weight models, GPT-OSS-120B reaches only the 60th percentile. Reasoning-trace analyses indicate that robust reasoning models prioritize precise problem analysis over excessive exploration. Finally, analyses across release dates, task familiarity, and code similarity find minimal evidence of data contamination in our benchmark. Our leaderboard, code, and data are available at: https://liveoibench.github.io/.
Reliable mechanistic operator recovery with biologically-informed neural networks: principles for architecture and optimisation design
arXiv:2607.07425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many biological processes are governed by complex dynamical mechanisms that remain incompletely understood despite increasing volumes of experimental data. Biologically-informed neural networks (BINNs) seek to address this challenge by embedding mechanistic differential equations into neural network training, enabling interpretable constitutive operators to be recovered directly from sparse and noisy observations. However, reliable operator recovery depends sensitively on network architecture, optimisation strategy, and data informativeness. Here, we present a systematic empirical study of how these factors influence mechanistic inference using BINNs applied to canonical one-dimensional advection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equation models. Across a suite of benchmark problems, we investigate how network expressivity, learning rate, loss weighting, and batch size influence optimisation behaviour and operator recovery. We show that successful mechanistic inference depends on balancing competing objectives rather than maximising any single aspect of the model or optimisation. Moderately expressive architectures outperform overly complex networks, intermediate learning rates improve optimisation stability, balanced data and PDE losses are essential for accurate operator recovery, and intermediate batch sizes provide the best compromise between computational efficiency and reproducibility. We further identify practical diagnostics for recognising common failure modes, including over-fitting, unstable optimisation, and poor mechanistic recovery when the ground truth is unavailable. Together, these findings provide evidence-based guidelines for deploying BINNs as credible tools for biological model discovery.
ContrastiveCFG: Guiding Diffusion Sampling by Contrasting Positive and Negative Concepts
arXiv:2411.17077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has proven effective in conditional diffusion model sampling for improved condition alignment, many applications use a negated CFG term as a Negative Prompting (NP) to filter out unwanted features from samples. However, simply negating CFG guidance creates an inverted probability distribution, often distorting samples away from the marginal distribution. Inspired by recent advances in conditional diffusion models for inverse problems, here we present a novel method to achieve guidance toward the given condition using contrastive loss. Specifically, our guidance term aligns or repels the denoising direction based on the given condition through contrastive loss, achieving a similar guiding effect to traditional CFG for positive conditions while overcoming the limitations of existing negative guidance methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively injects or removes the given concepts while maintaining sample quality across diverse scenarios, from simple class conditions to complex and overlapping text prompts.
Extending Xenakis: From Architectural Geometry to Sonification of the Philips Pavilion
arXiv:2607.06589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Architecture and music have been linked through proportion and temporal structure, yet architectural geometry is rarely viewed as a source of generative music. Revisiting Xenakis' one-directional transformation from string glissandi in Metastaseis to the ruled surfaces of the Philips Pavilion, we invert this workflow and sonify the completed Pavilion as a temporal composition. We reconstruct the Pavilion as nine ruled surfaces, extract their governing ruling lines, and subdivide each surface into structural lines and spatial sampling points. Four evenly spaced ruling lines per surface generate continuous string glissandi, while 3357 sampled points develop five density-based energy blocks and a sparse brass and woodwind subsequence. Implemented in Python, the system produces MIDI rendered in Ableton Live, accompanied by a real-time 3D visualization that reveals architectural motion, stasis, and structural contrast through sound and image. In general, this work paves the way for the transfer of architectural geometry as a performable musical structure, extending Xenakis's architectural and musical thinking to sonification and interactive music practice.
Unconditional Lower Bounds for Degree Fault Tolerant Spanners
arXiv:2607.07576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study multiplicative graph spanners in the $f$-degree fault tolerant ($f$-DFT) model, in which the spanner must approximately preserve distances even after any subset of edges of maximum degree $f$ temporarily "fails" and is removed from the graph. We prove that there are $n$-node lower bound graphs for which any $f$-DFT $(2k-1)$-stretch spanner $H$ must have size $$|E(H)| \ge \Omega\left( f^{1-1/k} n^{1+1/k}\right).$$ This matches a lower bound that was previously only known to hold conditionally, under the 1963 girth conjecture of Erd\H{o}s. It also matches the current upper bounds, up to a factor of $\texttt{exp}(k)$. Our proof is an analysis of the so-called Wenger graphs (J. Comb. Theory 1991), via their recent reinterpretation by Szab\'o and by Conlon (Am. Math. Monthly 2021).
Compensator-based inference for signal detection under unknown background: the binned data case
arXiv:2607.06939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The problem of signal detection under an unknown background can be framed as one of inferring the weight of a mixture model with one misspecified component. Banerjee and Algeri (2026) show that, for this problem, the conservativeness of the inference is entirely determined by one single parameter, called the compensator. They demonstrate that, when the data are independent and identically distributed, an inferential approach based on the compensator circumvents the need to estimate the density of the misspecified component and the associated challenges. The main purpose of this manuscript is to broaden the scope of such an approach and extend it to the case in which, as is often encountered in modern experiments in physics and astronomy, the data consist of Poisson counts observed over a large number of bins.
Blockchain Attacks and Defenses: A Layered and Cross-Domain Survey
arXiv:2607.06593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Blockchains have evolved from simple distributed ledgers into programmable platforms that process complex application logic and carry significant financial value. All modern Web3 systems share a common goal: providing secure, decentralized, and trustworthy execution in an increasingly interconnected environment. However, this evolution has shifted the attack surface from isolated infrastructure disruptions to programmable economic abuse and cross-domain exploits. In this article, we focus on the research of blockchain attacks and defenses. In particular, we categorize the threat landscape and corresponding mitigation strategies according to both a four-tier layered architecture (network, cryptographic, consensus, and application) and cross-domain trust boundaries. We seek to answer these important questions: How has the research in blockchain security evolved over the past decade, especially with the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) and cross-chain interoperability? How do local security assumptions fail when protocols are composed, and what are the driving needs for Web3 security research in the future?