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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Cortical activity during narrative discourse production in individuals with post-stroke aphasia and controls measured via functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Authors:
Braun↗E. J↗Carpenter↗E. A↗Gao↗Yucel↗M. A↗Boas↗D. A↗Kiran↗

Introduction: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder with a significant negative functional impact. Much of the research on aphasia has focused on word-level language comprehension and production. Further evaluation of discourse-level tasks, both at behavioral and neural levels, will allow for an ecologically valid understanding of the functional implications of language impairment in this population. Method: This study evaluated bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical activity during computer-based narrative production in 14 young neurotypical individuals, 17 individuals with post-stroke aphasia, and 15 age-matched neurotypical participants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) was measured during narrative production following short video clips and compared to HbO during counting aloud. In addition, behavioral measures quantifying in-task performance were correlated with averaged HbO values. Results: Young neurotypical individuals showed greater cortical activity in bilateral language regions for narrative production compared to counting aloud. In contrast, people with aphasia showed positive condition-related effects in the right frontal ROI and the age-matched group showed positive condition-related effects in the left frontal and right precentral ROIs. Each group showed different patterns in relationships between cortical activity and discourse performance measures. Conclusion: Overall, young participants showing more consistent condition-related effects for narrative discourse production than individuals with aphasia and age-matched controls. This study shows the potential for fNIRS to evaluate cortical activity for ecologically valid language tasks in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

Authors:
Yuefan Shen↗Yican Dong↗Xiufeng Huang↗Zhongtian Zheng↗Youyi Zheng↗Kui Wu↗

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

Authors:
Woogyeol Jin↗Taywon Min↗Yongjin Yang↗Dennis Wei↗Yi Zhou↗Swanand Ravindra Kadhe↗Nathalie Baracaldo↗Kimin Lee↗

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence, encouraging the student to match the teacher's high-confidence predictions. However, we show that the mode-seeking property of reverse KL reduces generation diversity and yields unstable learning signals when the teacher distribution has high entropy. To address this, we introduce Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation. Our key idea is augmenting the standard reverse KL objective with forward KL when teacher entropy is high, capturing the full range of plausible outputs while retaining precise imitation elsewhere. It balances mode-seeking precision with mode-covering robustness without sacrificing on-policy training efficiency. Experiments show that our method maintains generation diversity (sustained token-level entropy) and improves student-teacher alignment (lower forward KL on high-entropy tokens). Across six math reasoning benchmarks, this yields Pass@8 accuracy gains of +1.37 for Qwen3-0.6B-Base, +2.39 for Qwen3-1.7B-Base, and +5.05 for Qwen3-4B-Base compared to baseline on-policy distillation methods. These results demonstrate that accounting for teacher uncertainty is essential for maintaining diversity and achieving effective knowledge transfer.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

Authors:
Alexander Ryabchenko↗Wenlong Mou↗

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

Authors:
Rohit Tewari↗Shubhankar Shilpi↗Navin Chhibber↗Devendra Singh Parmar↗Sunil Khemka↗Piyush Ranjan↗

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Referral pathways, ETAT triage acuity, and inpatient outcomes among children presenting to a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit in Ghana: a prospective cohort study

Authors:
Obeng↗W. K↗Renner↗L. A↗Alhassan↗Ndanu↗T. A↗Goka↗B. Q↗

Emergency referral systems in sub-Saharan Africa are fragmented, and children reaching tertiary facilities through different referral pathways often arrive in advanced clinical states. Prospective data simultaneously characterising referral patterns, triage acuity at presentation, diagnostic case mix, and inpatient mortality at a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit are lacking from West Africa. This prospective cohort study enrolled 675 consecutively presenting children aged one month to 12 years at the Paediatric Emergency Unit of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Accra, Ghana, from February to December 2019. The primary outcome was all-cause inpatient mortality. Key variables collected included referral status and facility tier, Emergency Triage Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) triage category, ICD-10 diagnostic classification, Oyedeji socioeconomic classification, and time from symptom onset to PEU registration. Crude odds ratios were computed for all candidate predictors. Multivariable logistic regression was conducted using complete case analysis (n = 613). Of 675 children, 63.0% (n = 425) were referred from another health facility; referred children had higher ETAT emergency triage category rates than self-presenting children (32.7% vs 27.6%, p < 0.001). Overall inpatient mortality was 9.9% (67/675). Mortality varied by referral source: 16.7% among secondary/regional hospital referrals, 11.0% among lower-tier facility referrals (district, municipal, CHAG, polyclinic, private, health centre, and maternity home facilities combined, n = 356), 7.6% among self-presenting children, and 7.4% among tertiary referrals. Overall, 30.8% of children were classified as ETAT emergencies on arrival, with case fatility rate of 21.6%. The three most common diagnostic domains were respiratory conditions (17.2%), blood and haematological disorders (17.0%), and digestive presentations (16.4%). Inpatient mortality was highest in neoplastic disease (33.3%, n = 30) and circulatory presentations (31.0%, n = 29). In the primary multivariable analysis (n = 613, 51 events; events-per-variable ratio 4.2), no referral tier was independently associated with inpatient mortality after adjustment. Referral from secondary/regional hospitals showed a borderline non-significant association (adjusted odds ratio 3.09, 95% CI 0.96 to 9.90, p = 0.058). School going children (60-119 months) had higher odds of inpatient death than infants (adjusted odds ratio 5.56, 95% CI 1.16 to 26.53, p = 0.032), as did adolescents (adjusted odds ratio 10.01, 95% CI 2.15 to 46.69, p = 0.003). ETAT emergency category and lower socioeconomic status were not independently significant in this model. A pre-specified sensitivity analysis using the full analytic cohort (n = 674, events-per-variable ratio 6.7) with collapsed referral categories did not confirm any referral tier association; ETAT emergency category and lower SES were independently associated in the sensitivity model. All multivariable estimates should be regarded as exploratory. This prospective cohort provides simultaneous characterisation of referral patterns, ETAT triage acuity, diagnostic case mix, and inpatient mortality at a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit in West Africa. The referral-mortality gradient and high ETAT emergency category proportion document the severity of illness arriving through different referral pathways at this facility. The association between secondary/regional hospital referral and inpatient mortality is hypothesis-generating and requires replication in an adequately powered multicentre study before any service-level conclusions can be drawn.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Plasma proteomics reveals clinical and mechanistic heterogeneity among individuals who develop coronary artery disease

Authors:
Yang↗Tan↗Carrasco-Zanini↗Su↗C.-Y↗Zhou↗Koyama↗Natarajan↗langenberg↗Lu↗Yoshiji↗

BACKGROUND: Individuals who develop coronary artery disease (CAD) are clinically and mechanistically heterogeneous, and understanding this variation is crucial for precise risk stratification and tailored interventions. However, the molecular mechanisms that connect these two kinds of heterogeneity remain unclear, limiting progress toward biologically grounded risk stratification and targeted interventions. Here, we investigated the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD by leveraging plasma proteomic signatures, placed individuals along continuous metabolic gradients and revealed the molecular programs underlying these patterns, thereby linking mechanistic variation to clinical heterogeneity. METHODS AND RESULTS: From 42,803 UK Biobank participants, including 3,713 individuals who developed CAD within 10 years (incident CAD), we first identified a 320-protein panel from 2,923 baseline proteins that improved prediction of incident CAD beyond clinical risk scores. Using reverse graph embedding, we reduced the proteomic data to two dimensions and mapped each incident case onto the resulting two-dimensional latent proteomic space. These proteomic dimensions show significant associations with cardiometabolic and kidney-related clinical markers. The patterns were replicated in the EPIC-Norfolk study. Phenome-wide Cox regression analyses further linked these proteomic dimensions to 10-year incidence rates for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Furthermore, adding the proteomic dimensions to clinical variable-based Cox regression model improved prediction of 10-year incidence of CKD and other diseases, demonstrating the value of proteomic dimensions beyond conventional clinical risk factors. Moreover, individuals with prevalent CAD (diagnosed before proteomic sampling) exhibited high, metabolically adverse dimension values, indicating that these axes capture cumulative metabolic burden. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated altered extracellular matrix organization and immune programs among the proteins contributing to the proteomic dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that plasma proteomic signatures can dissect the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD in continuous phenotypic gradients, improve prediction of CAD and comorbidities, and map underlying biological mechanisms.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Authors:
Marina Chagas Bulach Gapski↗Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai↗Gustavo Rosseto Leticio↗Lucas Pascotti Valem↗Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette↗Mohand Said Allili↗

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

Authors:
Ahmed Gamal Eldin↗

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer: Scalable 3D CT Volume Generation

Authors:
Zhenkai Zhang↗Markus Hiller↗Krista A. Ehinger↗Tom Drummond↗

Generating high-resolution 3D CT volumes with fine details remains challenging due to substantial computational demands and optimization difficulties inherent to existing generative models. In this paper, we propose the Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer (PRDiT), a scalable generative framework that synthesizes high-quality 3D medical volumes directly at voxel-level. PRDiT introduces a two-stage training architecture comprising 1) a local denoiser in the form of an MLP-based blind estimator operating on overlapping 3D patches to separate low-frequency structures efficiently, and 2) a global residual diffusion transformer employing memory-efficient attention to model and refine high-frequency residuals across entire volumes. This coarse-to-fine modeling strategy simplifies optimization, enhances training stability, and effectively preserves subtle structures without the limitations of an autoencoder bottleneck. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIDC-IDRI and RAD-ChestCT datasets demonstrate that PRDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as HA-GAN, 3D LDM and WDM-3D, achieving significantly lower 3D FID, MMD and Wasserstein distance scores.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

Authors:
Kien Tran Duc Tuan↗Tam Nguyen Trong↗Son Nguyen Hoang↗Khoat Than↗Anh Nguyen Duc↗

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

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

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Authors:
Maksim E. Eren↗Andrea Brennen↗Ryan C. Barron↗Eric Michalak↗

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Authors:
Joanito Agili Lopo↗Yunita Sari↗Guntur Budi Herwanto↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Unified MRI Brain Image Translation via Hierarchical Tumor Structure Comparison

Authors:
Yupeng Cai↗Jia Wei↗Jianlong Zhou↗

Multi-modal MRI brain image translation via available modalities holds significant practical importance in modern medicine, providing robust support for early diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment of diseases. For this purpose, it is important to ensure the fidelity of the tumor regions after translation. However, existing brain image translation methods ignore the structure information of different tumor regions, which could assist translation models in enhancing the quality and clinical applicability of the translated images. In this work, we propose a novel translation model called HTSCGAN, which is a unified multi-modal brain image translation generative adversarial model integrating the structural information within tumor regions with the aim of improving the quality of brain image translation. Specifically, the generator employs three Patch Contrast Module (PCM) with different patch sizes to capture the hierarchical structural information of the tumor regions. In addition, a pretrained Patch Classifier (PC) and a pretrained Structure-Aware Encoder (SAE) are employed to derive the generated image containing the same tumor region structure as the ground truth image via patch classification loss and tumor perceptual loss, respectively. The experiments on BraTS2020 and BraTS2021 demonstrate strong performance of our model in both translation tasks and down stream segmentation tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing the quality and clinical relevance of the translated brain images. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HTSCGAN.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Hormonal Contraceptives Drive Genital Lipid Metabolism Reprogramming and Susceptibility to HIV Infection

Authors:
Gebrehiwot↗A. G↗Niazy↗Ambaw↗Y. A↗Henriquez↗Wessels↗J. M↗Lajoie↗Kimani↗Fowke↗K. R↗…

Heterosexual genital HIV transmission is a major driver of new infections, particularly in women, making them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition. Previous studies have associated injectable hormonal contraceptives (HC) with increasing susceptibility to HIV. Yet, the underlying molecular mechanism remains incompletely understood. Given the structural and signaling role of lipids in the female genital tract, cervicovaginal lipidomic profiling has the potential to reveal the mechanistic interplay among HC, lipidome, and HIV susceptibility in the female genital tract. We conducted untargeted cervicovaginal lipidomics study in a cohort of high-risk, HIV-negative, Kenyan sex workers who were using injectable depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), oral contraceptive pill (OCP), or no hormonal contraception (NH). Genital lipids were quantitatively analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and bioinformatics platforms. A total of 1045 lipid species were identified in the cervicovaginal lavage samples. Injectable DMPA significantly downregulated major structural and signaling membrane lipids, including phospholipids, ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids (p

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16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

Authors:
Xiaoying You↗

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

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17.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

Authors:
Dong Hyun Jeong↗Feng Chen↗Jin-Hee Cho↗Lance M. Kaplan↗Audun J{\o}sang↗Soo-Yeon Ji↗

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mahalanobis-Guided Latent OOD Detection for Hybrid ES-DRL Control in Time-Varying Systems

Authors:
Shaifalee Saxena↗Alexander Scheinker↗

arXiv:2606.11474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study Mahalanobis-guided latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for test-time RL controller switching in nonlinear time-varying systems. RL controllers can quickly control high-dimensional systems within the training distribution, but their performance can degrade when time-varying dynamics produce unseen observations. We consider a combined ES–DRL controller, where RL provides fast in-distribution actions and bounded extremum seeking (ES) provides robust model-independent control under OOD operation. The key challenge is deciding when to switch. We train a variational autoencoder (VAE) on in-distribution beam-profile observations and use Mahalanobis distance in the VAE latent space to detect OOD beam profiles at test time. This OOD decision sets a binary switch that selects either the RL controller or the ES controller. We evaluate the approach in safety-critical particle accelerator control. In this setting, spatial magnet motion creates OOD beam profiles that were not seen during RL training. Visualization of the VAE latent space shows that the proposed method identifies this OOD scenario and provides an interpretable signal for switching between RL and ES in the combined controller.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Evidence for recombination in dengue virus genomes

Authors:
de Paula Oliveira↗Jacob Machado↗Prieto Oliveira↗Ocana↗

Recombination is a key driver of RNA virus evolution, yet its extent and evolutionary implications in dengue virus (DENV) remain incompletely understood. We conducted a comprehensive, genome-wide recombination screen across 6,905 complete DENV genomes representing all four serotypes, 82 countries, and eight decades of sampling (1944-2023) retrieved from the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center. Using seven complementary recombination detection methods implemented in RDP5, we identified 66 recombination events across 53 unique recombinant sequences, of which 29 are newly described. Events included intra-genotypic (n = 18), inter-genotypic (n = 32), and inter-serotypic (n = 16) exchanges spanning 14 genotypes and four continents, with no meaningful serotype-level enrichment (Cramer's V = 0.054). Recombination was concentrated in non-structural genes, most frequently NS3 (19 events), NS5 (17), and NS2 (12), while the capsid gene contained no recombination events, consistent with strong functional constraint. Single-nucleotide polymorphism analyses confirmed low divergence between recombinants and their inferred parents in both recombinant and non-recombinant regions. Phylogenomic analysis of 6,642 sequences revealed that recombinants cluster significantly closer to their major parents (p = 8.9 x 10-6 ) and that their removal does not significantly alter tree topology (p = 0.898), suggesting that the short length of recombinant regions limits phylogenetic conflict. We also introduce RECOSIM, an unsupervised machine-learning tool for recombination detection that achieved higher precision than RDP5 on both simulated (93.4% vs. 80.0%) and empirical (98.1% vs. 39.3%) datasets. Collectively, these results establish recombination as a widespread, pan-serotypic phenomenon in DENV with implications for genomic surveillance, vaccine evaluation, and evolutionary inference.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART): Co-design priorities to connect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and clinic activities for healthy hearts

Authors:
Wyber↗Zagler↗Liu↗Yadav↗U. N↗O'Dwyer↗Hart↗Chapman↗McGrady↗Kohn↗Winterfield↗Williams↗…

Aim: Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART) is a multi-phased research project that seeks to identify, implement and evaluate strategies to connect community and clinical activities to reduce the burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The aim in Phase One was to identify priority activities for two participating services. Background: The ongoing effects of colonisation drive a disproportionate burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Clinical and community groups both have established strengths in reducing the risk of heart disease, but these are not always well connected. Methods: Using a case study methodology in two locations we partnered in a 12-month co-design process to identify priority activities to connect clinical and community activities. Findings: Three priorities emerged from the Phase One co-design process: (i) community-led gardening as a strategy to promote heart health through connection and healthy lifestyles; (ii) community days to increase engagement in heart checks and strengthen community-clinic relationship; and (iii) clinic-led development of culturally relevant education resources to promote clinician confidence and community heart health knowledge.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors:
Juhyeon Lee↗Wonduk Seo↗Junseo Koh↗Seunghyun Lee↗Haihua Chen↗Yi Bu↗

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Entanglement transition in unitary system-bath dynamics

Authors:
Bo Xing↗Giuliano Chiriac\`o↗Paola Cappellaro↗Rosario Fazio↗Dario Poletti↗

arXiv:2512.06081v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of a system coupled to baths is commonly described by a master equation that, in the long-time limit, yields a steady-state density matrix. However, when the same evolution is unraveled into quantum trajectories, it is possible to observe a transition in the scaling of entanglement within the system as the system-bath coupling increases - a phenomenon that is invisible in the trajectory-averaged reduced density matrix of the system. Here, we go beyond the paradigm of trajectories from master equations and explore whether a qualitatively analogous entanglement-scaling transition emerges in a single unitary evolution of the combined system-bath setup, without monitoring the dynamics of the system. We investigate the scaling of entanglement in a unitary quantum setup composed of a two-dimensional lattice of free fermions, where each site is coupled to a fermionic bath. As the system-bath coupling increases, the logarithmic fermionic negativity reveals an entanglement transition from logarithmic-law to area-law scaling. This occurs while the system's steady-state properties are trivial, highlighting that the signatures of these different scalings are within the bath-bath correlations. Evidence of the transition is also found in the mutual information and the correlations of the full system-bath setup, suggesting that the entanglement transition is underpinned by a change in the spatial structure of quantum information.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

Authors:
Noor Islam S. Mohammad↗Tamim Sheikh↗

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

Authors:
Dimitrios Georgiadis↗Boxi Li↗Asier Galicia↗Rami Barends↗F. A. C\'ardenas-L\'opez↗Felix Motzoi↗

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.

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