@phdthesis{22735, author = {Lin, Peipeng}, isbn = {978-3-99078-088-6}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {88}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Calibrating the teacher synapse: Mechanisms and functional significance of presynaptic inhibition at hippocampal mossy fiber synapses}}, doi = {10.15479/AT-ISTA-22735}, year = {2026}, } @article{21762, abstract = {Bacteria, like eukaryotes, use conserved cytoskeletal systems for intracellular organization. The plasmid-encoded ParMRC system forms actin-like filaments that segregate low–copy number plasmids. In multicellular cyanobacteria such as Anabaena sp., we found that a chromosomally encoded ParMR system has evolved into a cytoskeletal system named CorMR with a function in cell shape control rather than DNA segregation. Live-cell imaging, in vitro reconstitution, and cryo–electron microscopy revealed that CorM formed dynamically unstable, antiparallel double-stranded filaments that were recruited to the membrane by CorR through an amphipathic helix conserved in multicellular cyanobacteria. CorMR filaments were regulated by MinC, which excluded them from the poles and division plane. Comparative genomics indicated that the repurposing of ParMR and Min systems coevolved with cyanobacterial multicellularity, highlighting the evolutionary plasticity of cytoskeletal systems in bacteria.}, author = {Springstein, Benjamin L and Javoor, Manjunath and Megrian, Daniela and Hajdu, Roman and Hanke, Dustin M. and Zens, Bettina and Weiss, Gregor L. and Schur, Florian Km and Loose, Martin}, issn = {1095-9203}, journal = {Science}, number = {6795}, publisher = {AAAS}, title = {{Repurposing of a DNA segregation machinery into a cytoskeletal system controlling cell shape}}, doi = {10.1126/science.aea6343}, volume = {392}, year = {2026}, } @phdthesis{22744, author = {Javoor, Manjunath}, isbn = {978-3-99078-090-9 }, issn = {2663-337X}, keywords = {Actin cytoskeleton, Cell migration, cryo-electron tomography}, pages = {121}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria }, title = {{Large-scale imaging of cellular actin networks at single filament resolution using montage cryo-electron tomography}}, doi = {10.15479/AT-ISTA-22744}, year = {2026}, } @phdthesis{22667, author = {Vijatovic, David}, isbn = {978-3-99078-082-4}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {172}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Dissecting the molecular and functional basis of motor control in the frog Xenopus laevis}}, doi = {10.15479/AT-ISTA-22667}, year = {2026}, } @misc{22777, author = {Tong, Xin}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Towards a deeper understanding of meroblastic cleavage - supplementary movies}}, doi = {10.15479/AT-ISTA-22777}, year = {2026}, } @article{18706, abstract = {We prove discrete-to-continuum convergence for dynamical optimal transport on Zd -periodic graphs with cost functional having linear growth at infinity. This result provides an answer to a problem left open by Gladbach, Kopfer, Maas, and Portinale (Calc Var Partial Differential Equations 62(5), 2023), where the convergence behaviour of discrete boundary-value dynamical transport problems is proved under the stronger assumption of superlinear growth. Our result extends the known literature to some important classes of examples, such as scaling limits of 1 -Wasserstein transport problems. Similarly to what happens in the quadratic case, the geometry of the graph plays a crucial role in the structure of the limit cost function, as we discuss in the final part of this work, which includes some visual representations.}, author = {Portinale, Lorenzo and Quattrocchi, Filippo}, issn = {1469-4425}, journal = {European Journal of Applied Mathematics}, keywords = {optimal transport, discrete-to-continuum, homogenisation, linear growth, gamma-convergence}, number = {3}, pages = {614--642}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, title = {{Discrete-to-continuum limits of optimal transport with linear growth on periodic graphs}}, doi = {10.1017/s0956792524000810}, volume = {37}, year = {2026}, } @inproceedings{22007, abstract = {Truncation of cryptographic outputs is a technique that was recently introduced in Baldimtsi et al. [Foteini Baldimtsi et al., 2022]. The general idea is to try out many inputs to some cryptographic algorithm until the output (e.g. a public-key or some hash value) falls into some sparse set and thus can be compressed: by trying out an expected 2^k different inputs one will find an output that starts with k zeros. Using such truncation one can for example save substantial gas fees on Blockchains where storing values is very expensive. While [Foteini Baldimtsi et al., 2022] show that truncation preserves the security of the underlying primitive, they only consider a setting without preprocessing. In this work we show that lower bounds on the time-space tradeoff for inverting random functions and permutations also hold with truncation, except for parameters ranges where the bound fails to hold for "trivial" reasons. Concretely, it’s known that any algorithm that inverts a random function or permutation with range N making T queries and using S bits of auxiliary input must satisfy S⋅ T ≥ Nlog N. This lower bound no longer holds in the truncated setting where one must only invert a challenge from a range of size N/2^k, as now one can simply save the replies to all N/2^k challenges, which requires S = log N⋅ N /2^k bits and allows to invert with T = 1 query. We show that with truncation, whenever S is somewhat smaller than the log N⋅ N /2^k bits required to store the entire truncated function table, the known S⋅ T ≥ Nlog N lower bound applies.}, author = {Pietrzak, Krzysztof Z and Wang, Pengxiang}, booktitle = {6th Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography}, isbn = {9783959773850}, issn = {1868-8969}, keywords = {Time-Space Lower Bounds, Blockchains}, location = {Santa Barbara, CA, United States}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Time-space tradeoffs of truncation with preprocessing}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2025.4}, volume = {343}, year = {2025}, } @article{12662, abstract = {Modern machine learning tasks often require considering not just one but multiple objectives. For example, besides the prediction quality, this could be the efficiency, robustness or fairness of the learned models, or any of their combinations. Multi-objective learning offers a natural framework for handling such problems without having to commit to early trade-offs. Surprisingly, statistical learning theory so far offers almost no insight into the generalization properties of multi-objective learning. In this work, we make first steps to fill this gap: We establish foundational generalization bounds for the multi-objective setting as well as generalization and excess bounds for learning with scalarizations. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of the relation between the Pareto-optimal sets of the true objectives and the Pareto-optimal sets of their empirical approximations from training data. In particular, we show a surprising asymmetry: All Pareto-optimal solutions can be approximated by empirically Pareto-optimal ones, but not vice versa.}, author = {Súkeník, Peter and Lampert, Christoph}, issn = {1433-3058}, journal = {Neural Computing and Applications}, pages = {24669–24683}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Generalization in multi-objective machine learning}}, doi = {10.1007/s00521-024-10616-1}, volume = {37}, year = {2025}, } @inproceedings{20820, abstract = {The high computational costs of large language models (LLMs) have led to a flurry of research on LLM compression, via methods such as quantization, sparsification, or structured pruning. A new frontier in this area is given by dynamic, non-uniform compression methods, which adjust the compression levels (e.g., sparsity) per-block or even per-layer in order to minimize accuracy loss, while guaranteeing a global compression threshold. Yet, current methods rely on estimating the "importance" of a given layer, implicitly assuming that layers contribute independently to the overall compression error. We begin from the motivating observation that this independence assumption does not generally hold for LLM compression: pruning a model further may even significantly recover performance. To address this, we propose EvoPress, a novel evolutionary framework for dynamic LLM compression. By formulating dynamic compression as a general optimization problem, EvoPress identifies optimal compression profiles in a highly efficient manner, and generalizes across diverse models and compression techniques. Via EvoPress, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for dynamic compression of Llama, Mistral, and Phi models, setting new benchmarks for structural pruning (block/layer dropping), unstructured sparsity, and quantization with dynamic bitwidths.}, author = {Sieberling, Oliver and Kuznedelev, Denis and Kurtic, Eldar and Alistarh, Dan-Adrian}, booktitle = {42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, issn = {2640-3498}, location = {Vancouver, Canada}, pages = {55556--55590}, publisher = {ML Research Press}, title = {{EvoPress: Accurate dynamic model compression via evolutionary search}}, volume = {267}, year = {2025}, } @inproceedings{20821, abstract = {Modern deep neural networks exhibit heterogeneity across numerous layers of various types such as residuals, multi-head attention, etc., due to varying structures (dimensions, activation functions, etc.), distinct representation characteristics, which impact predictions. We develop a general layer-wise quantization framework with tight variance and code-length bounds, adapting to the heterogeneities over the course of training. We then apply a new layer-wise quantization technique within distributed variational inequalities (VIs), proposing a novel Quantized Optimistic Dual Averaging (QODA) algorithm with adaptive learning rates, which achieves competitive convergence rates for monotone VIs. We empirically show that QODA achieves up to a 150% speedup over the baselines in end-to-end training time for training Wasserstein GAN on 12+GPUs.}, author = {Nguyen, Anh Duc and Markov, Ilia and Wu, Frank Zhengqing and Ramezani-Kebrya, Ali and Antonakopoulos, Kimon and Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Cevher, Volkan}, booktitle = {42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, issn = {2640-3498}, location = {Vancouver, Canada}, pages = {46026--46072}, publisher = {ML Research Press}, title = {{Layer-wise quantization for quantized optimistic dual averaging}}, volume = {267}, year = {2025}, } @article{20839, abstract = {For every couple of Hausdorff functions ψ and φ verifying some mild assumptions, there exists a compact subset K of the Baire space such that the φ-Hausdorff measure and the ψ-packing measure on K are both finite and positive. Such examples are then embedded in any infinite dimensional Banach space to answer positively a question of Fan on the existence of metric spaces with arbitrary scales.}, author = {Helfter, Mathieu}, issn = {2308-1317}, journal = {Journal of Fractal Geometry}, publisher = {EMS Press}, title = {{Sets with arbitrary Hausdorff and packing scales in infinite dimensional Banach spaces}}, doi = {10.4171/jfg/177}, year = {2025}, } @misc{20842, abstract = {Probing the possibility of entanglement generation through gravity offers a path to tackle the question of whether gravitational fields possess a quantum mechanical nature. A potential realization necessitates systems with low-frequency dynamics at an optimal mass scale, for which the microgram-to-milligram range is a strong contender. Here, after refining a figure-of-merit for the problem, we present a 1-milligram torsional pendulum operating at 18 Hz. We demonstrate laser cooling its motion from room temperature to 240~microkelvins, surpassing by over 20-fold the coldest motions attained for oscillators ranging from micrograms to kilograms. We quantify and contrast the utility of the current approach with other platforms. The achieved performance and large improvement potential highlight milligram-scale torsional pendulums as a powerful platform for precision measurements relevant to future studies at the quantum-gravity interface.}, author = {Agafonova, Sofya}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Research Data for: 'One-milligram torsional pendulum toward experiments at the quantum-gravity interface'}}, doi = {10.15479/AT-ISTA-20842}, year = {2025}, } @inproceedings{20845, abstract = {We develop new attacks against the Evasive LWE family of assumptions, in both the public and private-coin regime. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the first attacks against Evasive LWE in the public-coin regime, for any instantiation from the family. Our attacks are summarized below. Public-Coin Attacks. 1.The recent work by Hseih, Lin and Luo [17] constructed the first Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) for unbounded depth circuits by relying on the “circular” evasive LWE assumption. This assumption has been popularly considered as a safe, public-coin instance of Evasive LWE in contrast to its “private-coin” cousins (for instance, see [10, 11]). We provide the first attack against this assumption, challenging the widely held belief that this is a public-coin assumption. 2. We demonstrate a counter-example against vanilla public-coin evasive LWE by Wee [26] in an unnatural parameter regime. Our attack crucially relies on the error in the pre-condition being larger than the error in the post-condition, necessitating a refinement of the assumption. Private-Coin Attacks. 1. The recent work by Agrawal, Kumari and Yamada [2] constructed the first functional encryption scheme for pseudorandom functionalities (PRFE) and extended this to obfuscation for pseudorandom functionalities (PRIO) [4] by relying on private-coin evasive LWE. We provide a new attack against the assumption stated in the first posting of their work (subsequently refined to avoid these attacks). 2. The recent work by Branco et al. [8] (concurrently to [4]) provides a construction of obfuscation for pseudorandom functionalities by relying on private-coin evasive LWE. We provide a new attack against their stated assumption. 3. Branco et al. [8] showed that there exist contrived, “self-referential” classes of pseudorandom functionalities for which pseudorandom obfuscation cannot exist. We extend their techniques to develop an analogous result for pseudorandom functional encryption. While Evasive LWE was developed to specifically avoid “zeroizing attacks”, our work shows that in certain settings, such attacks can still apply.}, author = {Agrawal, Shweta and Modi, Anuja and Yadav, Anshu and Yamada, Shota}, booktitle = {23rd International Conference on Theory of Cryptography}, isbn = {9783032122926}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Aarhus, Denmark}, pages = {259--290}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Zeroizing attacks against evasive and circular evasive LWE}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-12293-3_9}, volume = {16269}, year = {2025}, } @inproceedings{20846, abstract = {CVRFs are PRFs that unify the properties of verifiable and constrained PRFs. Since they were introduced concurrently by Fuchsbauer and Chandran-Raghuraman-Vinayagamurthy in 2014, it has been an open problem to construct CVRFs without using heavy machinery such as multilinear maps, obfuscation or functional encryption. We solve this problem by constructing a prefix-constrained verifiable PRF that does not rely on the aforementioned assumptions. Essentially, our construction is a verifiable version of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF. To achieve verifiability we leverage degree-2 algebraic PRGs and bilinear groups. In short, proofs consist of intermediate values of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF raised to the exponents of group elements. These outputs can be verified using pairings since the underlying PRG is of degree 2. We prove the selective security of our construction under the Decisional Square Diffie-Hellman (DSDH) assumption and a new assumption, which we dub recursive Decisional Diffie-Hellman (recursive DDH). We prove the soundness of recursive DDH in the generic group model assuming the hardness of the Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem and a new variant thereof, which we call MQ+. Last, in terms of applications, we observe that our CVRF is also an exponent (C)VRF in the plain model. Exponent VRFs were recently introduced by Boneh et al. (Eurocrypt’25) with various applications to threshold cryptography in mind. In addition to that, we give further applications for prefix-CVRFs in the blockchain setting, namely, stake-pooling and compressible randomness beacons.}, author = {Brandt, Nicholas and Cueto Noval, Miguel and Günther, Christoph Ullrich and Ünal, Akin and Wohnig, Stella}, booktitle = {23rd International Conference on Theory of Cryptography}, isbn = {9783032122896}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Aarhus, Denmark}, pages = {478--511}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Constrained verifiable random functions without obfuscation and friends}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-12290-2_16}, volume = {16271}, year = {2025}, } @article{20847, abstract = {We report on an experimental active matter system with motion restricted to four cardinal directions. Our particles are magnetite-doped colloidal spheres driven by the Quincke electrorotational instability. The absence of a magnetic field (|𝑩|=0) leads to circular trajectories interspersed with short spontaneous runs. Intermediate fields (|𝑩|≲20mT) linearize the motion along the axis perpendicular to 𝑩. At high magnetic fields, we observe the surprising emergence of a second, distinct linearization along the axis parallel to 𝑩. With numerical simulations, we show that this behavior can be explained by anisotropic magnetic susceptibility.}, author = {Fitzgerald, Eavan and Clavaud, Cécile and Das, Debasish and Lenton, Isaac C and Waitukaitis, Scott R}, issn = {2470-0053}, journal = {Physical Review E}, number = {6}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Rolling at right angles: Magnetic anisotropy enables dual-anisotropic active matter}}, doi = {10.1103/1ss8-31rb}, volume = {112}, year = {2025}, } @article{20848, abstract = {Genetic variation that influences complex disease susceptibility is introduced into the population by mutation and removed by natural selection and genetic drift. This mutation–selection–drift balance (MSDB) shapes the prevalence of a disease and its genetic architecture. To date, however, MSDB has been modeled only for monogenic (Mendelian) diseases. Here, we develop an MSDB model for complex disease susceptibility: we assume that genotype relates to disease risk according to the canonical liability threshold model and that the selection on variants affecting risk stems from the fitness cost of the disease. We focus on diseases that are highly polygenic, entail a substantial fitness cost, and are neither extremely common in the population nor exceedingly rare. The comparison of model predictions with genome-wide association studies and other observations in humans indicates that common genetic variation affecting complex disease susceptibility is little affected by directional selection and instead shaped by pleiotropic stabilizing selection on other traits. In turn, directional selection may exert a more substantial effect on rare, large-effect variants. Our results also suggest that current estimates of disease heritability are likely biased. The model thus provides a better understanding of the evolutionary processes that shape the architecture and prevalence of complex diseases.}, author = {Berg, Jeremy J. and Li, Xinyi and Riall, Kellen and Hayward, Laura and Sella, Guy}, issn = {1943-2631}, journal = {Genetics}, number = {4}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, title = {{Mutation–selection–drift balance models of complex diseases}}, doi = {10.1093/genetics/iyaf220}, volume = {231}, year = {2025}, } @article{20857, abstract = {Evolutionary games provide a flexible mathematical framework for many problems in biology and social evolution. Prisoners’ dilemma, and in particular, the important special case of donation games, represents social dilemmas where cooperation is mutually beneficial, yet defection is preferred by selfish agents. In evolutionary games on networks, the agents interact over a population structure. The existence of population structures that promote cooperative behavior is a fascinating and active research topic. Previous research establishes structures promoting cooperation in the limit of weak selection where the benefit-to-cost ratio β exceeds 1.5. The existence of such structures for medium and strong selection for 1 < ß < 2 and for weak selection for 1 < ß < 1.5 has been a long-standing open question. First, we answer the open questions in the affirmative: For every selection strength and every ß > 1, we construct networks promoting cooperation. Second, we present a robustness result with respect to β and selection strength: Our structures promote cooperation for a range of these parameter values rather than specific parameter values. Finally, we supplement our theoretical results with simulation results on small population structures that show the effectiveness of our construction over well-studied population structures.}, author = {Svoboda, Jakub and Chatterjee, Krishnendu}, issn = {1091-6490}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences}, number = {51}, pages = {e2524109122}, publisher = {National Academy of Sciences}, title = {{Promoters of cooperation in evolutionary games}}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.2524109122}, volume = {122}, year = {2025}, } @article{20864, abstract = {Studies of the distant Universe are providing key insights into our understanding of the formation of galaxies. The advent of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has significantly enhanced our observational capabilities, leading to an expanded redshift frontier, providing unprecedented detail in the characterisation of early galaxies and enabling the discovery of new populations of accreting black holes. This review aims to provide an introduction to the basic processes and components that shape the observed spectra of galaxies, with a focus on their relevance to techniques with which high-redshift galaxies are selected. The review further introduces specific topics that have attracted significant attention in recent literature, including the discovery of highly efficient galaxy formation in the early Universe, the relation between galaxies and the process of reionization, new insights into the formation of the first stars and the enrichment of interstellar gas with heavy elements, and breakthroughs in our understanding of the origins of supermassive black holes.}, author = {Matthee, Jorryt J}, issn = {1366-5812}, journal = {Contemporary Physics}, number = {1-4}, pages = {116--151}, publisher = {Taylor & Francis}, title = {{JWST provides a new view of cosmic dawn: Latest developments in studies of early galaxies}}, doi = {10.1080/00107514.2025.2586370}, volume = {66}, year = {2025}, } @article{20866, abstract = {In this work, we present hypernode automata as a specification formalism for hyperproperties of systems whose executions may be misaligned among themselves, such as concurrent systems. These automata consist of nodes labeled with hypernode logic formulas and transitions marked with synchronizing actions. Hypernode logic formulas establish relations between sequences of variable values among different system executions. This logic enables both synchronous and asynchronous analysis of traces. In its asynchronous view on execution traces, hypernode formulas establish relations on the order of value changes for each variable without correlating their timing. In both views, the analysis of different execution traces is synchronized through the transitions of hypernode automata. By combining logic’s declarative nature with automata’s procedural power, hypernode automata seamlessly integrate asynchronicity requirements at the node level with synchronicity between node transitions. We show that the model-checking problem for hypernode automata is decidable for specifications where each node specifies either a synchronous or an asynchronous requirement for the system’s executions, but not both.}, author = {Bartocci, Ezio and Chalupa, Marek and Henzinger, Thomas A and Nickovic, Dejan and Oliveira da Costa, Ana}, issn = {1432-0525}, journal = {Acta Informatica}, number = {4}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Hypernode automata}}, doi = {10.1007/s00236-025-00509-8}, volume = {62}, year = {2025}, } @article{20867, abstract = {We discuss the embeddability of subspaces of the Gromov–Hausdorff space, which consists of isometry classes of compact metric spaces endowed with the Gromov–Hausdorff distance, into Hilbert spaces. These embeddings are particularly valuable for applications to topological data analysis. We prove that its subspace consisting of metric spaces with at most n points has asymptotic dimension n(n−1)∕2. Thus, there exists a coarse embedding of that space into a Hilbert space. On the contrary, if the number of points is not bounded, then the subspace cannot be coarsely embedded into any uniformly convex Banach space and so, in particular, into any Hilbert space. Furthermore, we prove that, even if we restrict to finite metric spaces whose diameter is bounded by some constant, the subspace still cannot be bi-Lipschitz embedded into any finite-dimensional Hilbert space. We obtain both nonembeddability results by finding obstructions to coarse and bi-Lipschitz embeddings in families of isometry classes of finite subsets of the real line endowed with the Euclidean–Hausdorff distance.}, author = {Zava, Nicolò}, issn = {1472-2739}, journal = {Algebraic & Geometric Topology}, number = {8}, pages = {5153--5174}, publisher = {Mathematical Sciences Publishers}, title = {{Coarse and bi-Lipschitz embeddability of subspaces of the Gromov–Hausdorff space into Hilbert spaces}}, doi = {10.2140/agt.2025.25.5153}, volume = {25}, year = {2025}, }