@article{20929, abstract = {Insulin/insulin-like growth factor signaling inhibits FOXO transcription factors to control development, homeostasis, and aging. Here, we use proximity labeling to identify proteins interacting with the C. elegans FOXO DAF-16. We show that in well-fed, unstressed animals harboring active insulin signaling, DAF-16 forms a complex with the PAR-1/MARK serine/threonine kinase, a key regulator of cell polarity. PAR-1 inhibits DAF-16 accumulation and promotes DAF-16 phosphorylation at S249, at a conserved motif that PAR-1/human MARK2 phosphorylates in vitro. DAF-2 insulin-like receptor signaling stimulates DAF-16 S249 phosphorylation, suggesting DAF-2 activates PAR-1. DAF-2 also promotes PAR-1 expression by inhibiting DAF-16. PAR-1 knockdown, or DAF-16 S249A, prolong lifespan, whereas phosphomimetic DAF-16 S249D suppresses the longevity of daf-2 mutants. At low insulin signaling, DAF-16 proximity labeling highlights transcription factors, chromatin regulators, and DNA repair proteins. One interactor, the zinc finger/homeobox protein ZFH-2/ZFHX3, forms a complex with DAF-16 and prolongs lifespan. Our work provides entry points for hypothesis-driven studies of FOXO function and longevity.}, author = {Artan, Murat and Schön, Hanna and De Bono, Mario}, issn = {2041-1723}, journal = {Nature Communications}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Proximity labeling of DAF-16 FOXO highlights aging regulatory proteins}}, doi = {10.1038/s41467-025-66409-0}, volume = {16}, year = {2025}, } @article{20930, abstract = {Context. Beta Pictoris is an A-type star that hosts a complex planetary system with two massive gas giants and a prominent debris disc. Variable absorption lines in its stellar spectrum have been interpreted as signatures of exocomets – comet-like bodies transiting the star. Stellar flybys can gravitationally perturb objects in the outer comet reservoir, altering their orbits and potentially injecting them into the inner system, thereby triggering exocomet showers. Aims. We assessed the contribution of stellar flybys to the observed exocomet activity by reconstructing the stellar encounter history of β Pictoris in the past and future. Methods. We used Gaia DR3 data, supplemented with radial velocities from complementary spectroscopic surveys, to compile a catalogue of stars currently within 80 pc of β Pictoris. Their orbits were integrated backwards and forwards in time in an axisymmetric Galactic potential (via the GALA package) to identify encounters within 2 pc of the system. Results. We identified 99 416 stars currently within 80 pc of β Pictoris with resolved kinematics. Among these, 49 stars (including the eight components of five binaries) encounter β Pictoris within 2 pc between –1.5 Myr and +2 Myr. For four of the binaries, the centre-of-mass trajectories also pass within 2 pc. We estimated the sample to be more than 60% complete within 0.5 Myr of today. Conclusions. Despite β Pictoris being the eponym of its famous moving group, none of the identified encounters involved its moving group members; all are unrelated field stars. We found no encounter capable of shaping the observed disc structures, although stellar flybys may contribute to the long-term evolution of an Oort Cloud-like structure. Our catalogue constitutes the most complete reconstruction of the β Pictoris encounter history to date and provides a robust foundation for future dynamical simulations.}, author = {Gragera-Más, J. L. and Torres Rodriguez, Santiago and Mustill, A. J. and Villaver, E.}, issn = {1432-0746}, journal = {Astronomy & Astrophysics}, publisher = {EDP Sciences}, title = {{A kinematic history of stellar encounters with Beta Pictoris}}, doi = {10.1051/0004-6361/202555940}, volume = {704}, year = {2025}, } @article{20931, abstract = {Context. Asymmetries in the observed rotational splittings of a multiplet contain information about the star’s rotation profile and internal magnetic field. Moreover, the frequency regularities of multiplets can be used for mode identification. However, to exploit this information, highly accurate theoretical predictions are needed. Aims. We aim to quantify the difference in the predicted mode asymmetries between a 1D perturbative method and a 2D method that includes a 2D stellar structure model, which takes rotation into account. We then place these differences between 1D and 2D methods in the context of asteroseismic measurements of internal magnetic fields. We only focus on the asymmetries and not on possible additional frequency peaks that can arise when the magnetic and rotation axis are misaligned. Methods. We coupled the 1D pulsation codes GYRE and StORM to the 2D stellar structure code ESTER and compared the oscillation predictions with the results from the 2D TOP pulsation code. We focused on zero-age main-sequence models representative of rotating β Cephei pulsators spinning at up to 20 per cent of the critical Keplerian rotation rate. Specifically, we investigated low-radial-order gravity and pressure modes. Results. We find a generally good agreement between the oscillation frequencies resulting from the 1D and 2D pulsation codes. We report differences in predicted mode multiplet asymmetries of mostly below 0.06 d−1. Since the magnetic asymmetries are small compared to the differences in the rotational asymmetries resulting from the 1D and 2D predictions, accurate measurements of the magnetic field are in most cases challenging. Conclusions. Differences in the predicted mode asymmetries of a rotating star between 1D perturbative methods and 2D non-perturbative methods can greatly hinder accurate measurements of internal magnetic fields in main-sequence pulsators with low-order modes. Nevertheless, reasonably accurate measurements could be possible with npg ≥ 2 modes if the internal rotation is roughly below 10 per cent of the Keplerian critical rotation frequency for (aligned) magnetic fields of the order of a few hundred kilogauss. While the differences between the 1D and 2D frequency predictions are mostly too large for internal magnetic field detections, the rotational asymmetries predicted by StORM are in general accurate enough for asteroseismic modelling of the stellar rotation in main-sequence stars with identified low-order modes.}, author = {Mombarg, J. S.G. and Vanlaer, V. and Das, Srijan B and Rieutord, M. and Aerts, C. and Bugnet, Lisa Annabelle and Mathis, S. and Reese, D. R. and Ballot, J.}, issn = {1432-0746}, journal = {Astronomy & Astrophysics}, publisher = {EDP Sciences}, title = {{Is a 1D perturbative method sufficient for asteroseismic modelling of β Cephei pulsators? Implications for measurements of rotation and internal magnetic fields}}, doi = {10.1051/0004-6361/202557247}, volume = {704}, year = {2025}, } @article{20932, abstract = {Identifying Lyman continuum (LyC) leakers at intermediate redshifts is crucial for understanding the properties of cosmic reionizers because the opacity of the intergalactic medium (IGM) prevents the direct detection of LyC emission from sources during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). In this study, we confirm two new LyC candidate leakers at z ∼ 3 in the Abell 2744 cluster field, with absolute escape fractions (fesc) of 0.83−0.80+0.15 and 0.74−0.70+0.23, respectively. The LyC emission was detected using HST/WFC3/F275W and F336W imaging. These two candidate leakers appear to be faint (MUV = −17.61 ± 0.06 and −18.22 ± 0.10), exhibit blue UV continuum slopes (β = −2.43 ± 0.05 and −1.92 ± 0.09), have low masses (M★ ∼ 107.51 ± 0.03 and 107.17 ± 0.15 M⊙) and Lyα equivalent widths of 90 ± 3 Å and 28 ± 12 Å, respectively. These two LyC candidate leakers were detected in a catalog of 91 spectroscopically confirmed sources using public spectra from the JWST and/or MUSE. We also analyzed properties that were proposed as indirect indicators of LyC emission, such as Lyα, the O32 ratio, and M★. We created a galaxy subsample that was selected according to these properties, stacked the LyC observations of this subsample, and assessed the limits of the escape fractions in the stacks. We aim to enhance our understanding of LyC escape mechanisms and improve our predictions of the LyC fesc during the EoR by analyzing the individual candidates and the stacks in the context of the currently limited sample of known LyC leakers at z ∼ 3.}, author = {Liu, Y. and Mascia, Sara and Pentericci, L. and Watson, P. and Alavi, A. and Bergamini, P. and Bradač, M. and Calabrò, A. and Glazebrook, K. and Henry, A. and Llerena, M. and Merlin, E. and Metha, B. and Nanayakkara, T. and Napolitano, L. and Roy, N. and Siana, B. and Vanzella, E. and Vulcani, B. and Wang, X.}, issn = {1432-0746}, journal = {Astronomy & Astrophysics}, publisher = {EDP Sciences}, title = {{A Lyman continuum analysis of ∼100 galaxies at z spec∼ 3 in the Abell 2744 cluster field}}, doi = {10.1051/0004-6361/202556410}, volume = {704}, year = {2025}, } @article{20933, abstract = {Photo-responsive systems based on azobenzenes usually require UV light for E→Z isomerization, limiting their applicability, especially in biomedical contexts. Disequilibration by sensitization of azobenzene under confinement (DESC) has recently emerged as a supramolecular strategy to bypass this limitation without the need to derivatize the azobenzene scaffold. Here, we expand DESC to water-soluble azopolymers obtained by RAFT polymerization and systematically investigate the interplay between the polymer structure and DESC efficiency. Using this approach, we achieved as much as 85% of the direct photoexcitation (UV) switching efficiency, while utilizing low-energy (yellow) light. These results establish general design principles for combining DESC with polymeric systems, opening new opportunities for the development of functional materials driven with low-energy light.}, author = {Meteling, Henning Jörn and Gemen, Julius and Häkkinen, Satu and Klajn, Rafal and Priimagi, Arri}, issn = {1521-3773}, journal = {Angewandte Chemie International Edition}, publisher = {Wiley}, title = {{Sensitized disequilibration of water-soluble azopolymers}}, doi = {10.1002/anie.202523447}, year = {2025}, } @article{20934, abstract = { Supervised learning for causal discovery from observational data often achieves competitive performance despite seemingly avoiding the explicit assumptions that traditional methods require for identifiability. In this work, we analyze CSIvA (Ke et al., 2023) on bivariate causal models, a transformer architecture for amortized inference promising to train on synthetic data and transfer to real ones. First, we bridge the gap with identifiability theory, showing that the training distribution implicitly defines a prior on the causal model of the test observations: consistent with classical approaches, good performance is achieved when we have a good prior on the test data, and the underlying model is identifiable. Second, we find that CSIvA can not generalize to classes of causal models unseen during training: to overcome this limitation, we theoretically and empirically analyze \textit{when} training CSIvA on datasets generated by multiple identifiable causal models with different structural assumptions improves its generalization at test time. Overall, we find that amortized causal discovery still adheres to identifiability theory, violating the previous hypothesis from Lopez-Paz et al. (2015) that supervised learning methods could overcome its restrictions.}, author = {Montagna, Francesco and Cairney-Leeming, Maximilian T and Sridhar, Dhanya and Locatello, Francesco}, issn = {2835-8856}, journal = {Transactions on Machine Learning Research}, publisher = {ML Research Press}, title = {{Demystifying amortized causal discovery with transformers}}, year = {2025}, } @article{20935, abstract = {In situ cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as the method of choice to investigate the structures of biomolecules in their native context. However, challenges remain for the efficient production and sharing of large-scale cryo-ET datasets. Here, we combined cryogenic plasma-based focused ion beam (cryo-PFIB) milling with recent advances in cryo-ET acquisition and processing to generate a dataset of 1,829 annotated tomograms of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which we provide as a community resource to drive method development and inspire biological discovery. To assay data quality, we performed subtomogram averaging of both soluble and membrane-bound complexes ranging in size from >3 MDa to ∼200 kDa, including 80S ribosomes, Rubisco, nucleosomes, microtubules, clathrin, photosystem II, and mitochondrial ATP synthase. The majority of these density maps reached sub-nanometer resolution, demonstrating the potential of this C. reinhardtii dataset as well as the promise of modern cryo-ET workflows and open data sharing to empower visual proteomics.}, author = {Kelley, Ron and Khavnekar, Sagar and Righetto, Ricardo D. and Heebner, Jessica and Obr, Martin and Zhang, Xianjun and Chakraborty, Saikat and Tagiltsev, Grigory and Michael, Alicia and Van Dorst, Sofie and Waltz, Florent and Mccafferty, Caitlyn L. and Lamm, Lorenz and Zufferey, Simon and Van Der Stappen, Philippe and Van Den Hoek, Hugo and Wietrzynski, Wojciech and Harar, Pavol and Wan, William and Briggs, John A.G. and Plitzko, Jürgen M. and Engel, Benjamin D. and Kotecha, Abhay}, issn = {1097-4164}, journal = {Molecular Cell}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Toward community-driven visual proteomics with large-scale cryo-electron tomography of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii}}, doi = {10.1016/j.molcel.2025.11.029}, year = {2025}, } @misc{20936, abstract = {Supplementary material for Mombarg et al. (2025, A&A). Title: "Is a 1D perturbative method sufficient for asteroseismic modelling of ~Cephei pulsators? Implications for measurements of rotation and internal magnetic fields" Content: - Non-rotating ESTER models and associated .GSM models. (Xini = 0.71, Zini = 0.014, vertical/horizonal viscosity 10^7 cm^2/s, vertical chemical diffusion 10^4 cm^2/s for evolution model. More details on the ESTER models can be found in the ESTER manual. - Rotational asymmetries computed with StORM and TOP in 1/d, and the central m=0 frequency from TOP in 1/d. (all_A*_new.pkl) - Magnetic asymmetries in 1/d for different obliquity angles between 0 and 90 deg for ZAMS and MAMS model, for B_0 = 75 kG. *_nu key gives unperturbed mode frequencies, *_npg the radial order (asym_dict.pkl, asym_dict_evol.pkl)}, author = {Mombarg, Joey and Vanlaer, Vincent and Das, Srijan B and Rieutord, Michel and Aerts, Conny and Bugnet, Lisa Annabelle and Mathis, Stephane and Reese, Daniel and Ballot, Jerome}, publisher = {Zenodo}, title = {{Is a 1D perturbative method sufficient for asteroseismic modelling of β Cephei pulsators?}}, doi = {10.5281/ZENODO.17580178}, year = {2025}, } @misc{20940, abstract = {These are the raw data files that supplement our study of mode dispersion with magnetic field of a cavity-magnonics system containing chromium trichloride on coplanar waveguide resonator.}, author = {Mandal, Supriya and Maji, Krishnendu and Kapoor, Lucky and Sasmal, Souvik and Manni, Soham and Jesudasan, John and Raychaudhuri, Pratap and Thamizhavel, Arumugam and Deshmukh, Mandar M.}, publisher = {Zenodo}, title = {{Mode dispersion with magnetic field in a cavity-magnonics system}}, doi = {10.5281/ZENODO.15321721}, year = {2025}, } @article{20960, abstract = {A linker unit was designed and synthesized that can serve both as a hairpin turn in a DNA duplex and anchor point for an aromatic helical foldamer mimicking the shape and surface properties of B‐DNA. Methods were developed to synthesize natural/non‐natural chimeric molecules combining foldamer and DNA segments. The ability of the linker to position the foldamer helix and the duplex DNA so that their rims and grooves are in register, despite their completely different chemical nature, was demonstrated using single crystal X‐ray diffraction, circular dichroism and molecular models. Bio‐layer interferometry confirmed that artificial hairpin DNA duplexes keep their ability to bind to DNA binding proteins. The chimeric molecules may pave the way to competitive inhibitors of protein‐DNA interactions involving sequence‐selective DNA‐binding proteins.}, author = {Loos, Manuel and Xu, Felix and Mandal, Pradeep K and Chakrabortty, Tulika and Douat, Céline and Konrad, David B. and Cabbar, Melis and Singer, Johannes and Corvaglia, Valentina and Carell, Thomas and Huc, Ivan}, issn = {1521-3773}, journal = {Angewandte Chemie International Edition}, number = {31}, publisher = {Wiley}, title = {{Interfacing B‐DNA and DNA mimic foldamers}}, doi = {10.1002/anie.202505273}, volume = {64}, year = {2025}, } @article{20973, abstract = {CuAgSe-based materials are attractive for low-temperature thermoelectric (TE) applications but are limited by bipolar conduction and relatively high thermal conductivity. Herein, we report a ligand-free aqueous synthesis of Te-doped CuAgSe (CuAgSe1-xTex), where structural and electronic modulation improve carrier transport and suppress phonon propagation. Ex-situ time-resolved X-ray diffraction reveals a spontaneous growth mechanism, while density functional theory calculations show that Te-5s and 5p orbitals hybridization generates localized states and an asymmetric density of states, thereby enhancing the Seebeck coefficient. Electron microscopy and strain analyses confirm that Te-doping introduces a high density of lattice dislocations and grain boundaries, leading to a reduced lattice thermal conductivity of 0.11 W m−1K−1 at 443 K. These synergistic effects translate into device-level performance—the first integrated CuAgSe thermoelectric modules, exhibit a maximum cooling temperature difference of 27.3 K, and power density of 0.34 W cm−2 with a conversion efficiency of 3.6% at a modest temperature gradient of 136 K. These results demonstrate that CuAgSe1-xTex enables efficient energy harvesting and localized cooling under small temperature gradient, underscoring the importance of structural and electronic design beyond conventional zT benchmarks.}, author = {Meng, Weite and Li, Mingquan and Wang, Qingyue and Song, Pingan and Yang, Xuan and Wang, Wen Jun and Hong, Min and Ibáñez, Maria and Cabot, Andreu and Zhang, Yu and Liu, Yu and Lim, Khak Ho}, issn = {1613-6829}, journal = {Small}, publisher = {Wiley}, title = {{Efficient near room temperature thermoelectric cooling and power generation with CuAgSe}}, doi = {10.1002/smll.202513035}, year = {2025}, } @article{20976, abstract = {We present an experimental demonstration of an impedance-engineered Josephson parametric amplifier (IEJPA) fabricated in a single-step lithography process. Impedance-engineering is implemented using a lumped-element series LC circuit. We use a simpler lithography process where the entire device—impedance transformer and Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA)—is patterned in a single electron beam lithography step, followed by a double-angle Dolan-bridge technique for Al–AlOx–Al deposition. We observe amplification with 18 dB gain over a wide 400 MHz bandwidth centered around 5.3 GHz with added noise approaching the quantum limit, and a saturation power of −114 dBm. To accurately explain our experimental results, we extend existing theories for IEJPAs to incorporate the full sine nonlinearity of both the JPA and the transformer. Our work provides a route to simpler realization of broadband JPAs and a theoretical foundation for a regime of JPA operation that has been less explored in literature.}, author = {Patel, Lipi and Hawaldar, Samarth and Panikkar, Aditya and Shankar, Athreya and Suri, Baladitya}, issn = {1077-3118}, journal = {Applied Physics Letters}, number = {25}, publisher = {AIP Publishing}, title = {{Impedance-engineered Josephson parametric amplifier with single-step lithography}}, doi = {10.1063/5.0290636}, volume = {127}, year = {2025}, } @article{20977, abstract = {Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SPW-Rs) are high-frequency oscillations critical for memory consolidation. Despite extensive characterization in rodents, their detection in humans is limited by coarse spatial sampling, interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), and a lack of consensus on human ripple localization and morphology. Here, we demonstrate that mouse and human hippocampal ripples share spatial, spectral and temporal features, which are clearly distinct from IEDs. In recordings from male APP/PS1 mice, SPW-Rs were distinguishable from IEDs by multiple criteria. Hippocampal ripples recorded during NREM sleep in female and male surgical epilepsy patients exhibited similar narrowband frequency peaks and multiple ripple cycles in the CA1 and subiculum regions. Conversely, IEDs showed a broad spatial extent and wide-band frequency power. We developed a semi-automated, ripple curation toolbox (ripmap) to separate event waveforms by low-dimensional embedding to reduce false-positive rate in selected ripple channels. Our approach improves ripple detection and provides a firm foundation for future human memory research.}, author = {Maslarova, Anna and Shin, Jiyun N. and Navas Olivé, Andrea C and Vöröslakos, Mihály and Hamer, Hajo and Doerfler, Arnd and Henin, Simon and Buzsáki, György and Liu, Anli}, issn = {2041-1723}, journal = {Nature Communications}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Spatiotemporal patterns differentiate hippocampal sharp-wave ripples from interictal epileptiform discharges in mice and humans}}, doi = {10.1038/s41467-025-66562-6}, volume = {16}, year = {2025}, } @article{20990, abstract = {Modeling the response of material and chemical systems to electric fields remains a longstanding challenge. Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) offer an efficient and scalable alternative to quantum mechanical methods, but do not by themselves incorporate electrical response. Here, we show that polarization and Born effective charge (BEC) tensors can be directly extracted from long-range MLIPs within the Latent Ewald Summation (LES) framework, solely by learning from energy and force data. Using this approach, we predict the infrared spectra of bulk water under zero or finite external electric fields, ionic conductivities of high-pressure superionic ice, and the phase transition and hysteresis in ferroelectric PbTiO3 perovskite. This work thus extends the capability of MLIPs to predict electrical response –without training on charges or polarization or BECs– and enables accurate modeling of electric-field-driven processes in diverse systems at scale.}, author = {Zhong, Peichen and Kim, Dongjin and King, Daniel S. and Cheng, Bingqing}, issn = {2057-3960}, journal = {npj Computational Materials}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Machine learning interatomic potential can infer electrical response}}, doi = {10.1038/s41524-025-01911-z}, volume = {11}, year = {2025}, } @article{21003, abstract = {We extend work of Heath-Brown and Salberger, based on the determinant method, to provide a uniform upper bound for the number of integral points of bounded height on an affine surface, which are subject to a polynomial congruence condition. This is applied to get a new uniform bound for points on diagonal quadric surfaces, and to a problem about the representation of integers as a sum of four unlike powers.}, author = {Browning, Timothy D and Verzobio, Matteo}, issn = {2397-3129}, journal = {Discrete Analysis}, publisher = {Cambridge: Alliance of Diamond Open Access Journals}, title = {{Counting integer points on affine surfaces with a side condition}}, doi = {10.19086/da.143787}, volume = {2025}, year = {2025}, } @article{21007, abstract = {Currently, the best known tradeoff between approximation ratio and complexity for the Sparsest Cut problem is achieved by the algorithm in [Sherman, FOCS 2009]: it computes O(√(log n)/ε)-approximation using O(nε logO(1) n) maxflows for any ε∈[Θ(1/log n),Θ(1)]. It works by solving the SDP relaxation of [Arora-Rao-Vazirani, STOC 2004] using the Multiplicative Weights Update algorithm (MW) of [Arora-Kale, JACM 2016]. To implement one MW step, Sherman approximately solves a multicommodity flow problem using another application of MW. Nested MW steps are solved via a certain "chaining" algorithm that combines results of multiple calls to the maxflow algorithm. We present an alternative approach that avoids solving the multicommodity flow problem and instead computes "violating paths". This simplifies Sherman's algorithm by removing a need for a nested application of MW, and also allows parallelization: we show how to compute O(√(log n)/ε)-approximation via O(logO(1) n) maxflows using O(nε) processors. We also revisit Sherman's chaining algorithm, and present a simpler version together with a new analysis.}, author = {Kolmogorov, Vladimir}, issn = {1549-6333}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Algorithms}, number = {4}, pages = {1--22}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {{A simpler and parallelizable O(√log n)-approximation algorithm for SPARSEST CUT}}, doi = {10.1145/3748723}, volume = {21}, year = {2025}, } @unpublished{21016, abstract = {Motivated by applications in chemistry, we give a homlogical definition of tunnels, or more generally cobordisms, connecting disjoint parts of a cell complex. For a filtered complex, this defines a persistence module. We give a method for identifying birth and death times using kernel persistence and a matrix reduction algorithm for pairing birth and death times.}, author = {Bleile, Yossi and Fajstrup, Lisbeth and Heiss, Teresa and Svane, Anne Marie and Sørensen, Søren Strandskov}, booktitle = {arXiv}, title = {{Identifying cobordisms using kernel persistence}}, doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2505.17858}, year = {2025}, } @article{21017, abstract = {With the growing interest in blockchains, permissioned approaches to consensus have received increasing attention. Unfortunately, the BFT consensus algorithms that are the backbone of most of these blockchains scale poorly and offer limited throughput. In fact, many state-of-the-art BFT consensus algorithms require a single leader process to receive and validate votes from a quorum of processes and then broadcast the result, which is inherently non-scalable. Recent approaches avoid this bottleneck by using dissemination/aggregation trees to propagate values and collect and validate votes. However, the use of trees increases the round latency, which limits the throughput for deeper trees. In this paper we propose Kauri, a BFT communication abstraction that sustains high throughput as the system size grows by leveraging a novel pipelining technique to perform scalable dissemination and aggregation on trees. Furthermore, when the number of faults is moderate (arguably the most common case in practice), our construction is able to recover from faults in an optimal number of reconfiguration steps. We implemented and experimentally evaluated Kauri with up to 800 processes. Our results show that Kauri outperforms the throughput of state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain protocols, by up to 58x without compromising latency. Interestingly, in some cases, the parallelization provided by Kauri can also decrease the latency.}, author = {Neiheiser, Ray and Matos, Miguel and Rodrigues, Luis}, issn = {1557-7333}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {{Kauri: BFT consensus with pipelined tree-based dissemination and aggregation}}, doi = {10.1145/3769423}, year = {2025}, } @inproceedings{21049, abstract = {Post-hoc importance attribution methods are a popular tool for “explaining” Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and are inherently based on the assumption that the explanations can be applied independently of how the models were trained. Contrarily, in this work we bring forward empirical evidence that challenges this very notion. Surprisingly, we discover a strong dependency on and demonstrate that the training details of a pre-trained model’s classification layer (<10% of model parameters) play a crucial role, much more than the pre-training scheme itself. This is of high practical relevance: (1) as techniques for pre-training models are becoming increasingly diverse, understanding the interplay between these techniques and attribution methods is critical; (2) it sheds light on an important yet overlooked assumption of post-hoc attribution methods which can drastically impact model explanations and how they are interpreted eventually. With this finding we also present simple yet effective adjustments to the classification layers, that can significantly enhance the quality of model explanations. We validate our findings across several visual pre-training frameworks (fully-supervised, self-supervised, contrastive vision-language training) and analyse how they impact explanations for a wide range of attribution methods on a diverse set of evaluation metrics.}, author = {Gairola, Siddhartha and Böhle, Moritz and Locatello, Francesco and Schiele, Bernt}, booktitle = {13th International Conference on Learning Representations}, location = {Singapore}, publisher = {ICLR}, title = {{How to probe: Simple yet effective techniques for improving post-hoc explanations}}, year = {2025}, } @article{21052, abstract = {Program logics have proven a successful strategy for verification of complex programs. By providing local reasoning and means of abstraction and composition, they allow reasoning principles for individual components of a program to be combined to prove guarantees about a whole program. Crucially, these components and their proofs can be reused. However, this reuse is only available once the program logic has been defined. It is a frustrating fact of the status quo that whoever defines a new program logic must establish every part, both semantics and proof rules, from scratch. In spite of programming languages and program logics typically sharing many core features, reuse is generally not available across languages. Even inside one language, if the same underlying operation appears in multiple language primitives, reuse is typically not possible when establishing proof rules for the program logic. To enable reuse across and inside languages when defining complex program logics (and proving them sound), we serve program logics à la carte by combining program logic fragments for the various effects of the language. Among other language features, the menu includes shared state, concurrency, and non-determinism as reusable, composable blocks that can be combined to define a program logic modularly. Our theory builds on ITrees as a framework to express language semantics and Iris as the underlying separation logic; the work has been mechanized in the Coq proof assistant.}, author = {Vistrup, Max and Sammler, Michael Joachim and Jung, Ralf}, issn = {2475-1421}, journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages}, number = {POPL}, pages = {300--331}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {{Program logics à la Carte}}, doi = {10.1145/3704847}, volume = {9}, year = {2025}, }