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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

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

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

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

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

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

Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes

arXiv:2501.08425v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Evidence-Gated LLM Priors for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2606.01730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as heuristic advisors for black-box optimization, yet their suggestions and self-reported confidence are not necessarily calibrated to downstream objective values. This issue becomes more pronounced in multi-objective Bayesian optimization, where different objectives may require different expert knowledge and where an LLM expert can be useful for one objective but misleading for another. We study how to use LLM-generated expert priors in discrete multi-objective Bayesian optimization without blindly trusting them. We propose an objective-wise reputation-market mechanism that treats each expert-objective pair as a falsifiable prior source. Expert weights are updated online from observed objective feedback, discounted over time, and gated by market-level trust. We then introduce a decoupled counterfactual gate that can use the LLM prior without confidence, use it with confidence, or abstain from the LLM prior entirely. Across controlled synthetic stress tests and three molecule optimization benchmarks with \qwenflash{}-generated expert priors, we find that dynamic objective-wise calibration improves robustness over fixed LLM priors. However, raw LLM confidence is not reliably beneficial: on ESOL, confidence is positively correlated with prediction error; on FreeSolv, confidence can help; and on Lipophilicity, ignoring confidence remains strongest. Our fixed three-arm counterfactual gate improves over the first counterfactual variant on ESOL and FreeSolv, while an attempted margin portfolio exposes a useful negative result: margin selection should be acquisition-aware rather than based only on one-step prior error.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Seeing Below the Limit of Detection: A Censored-Poisson Bayesian Latent-Growth Change-Point Detector (the Span Detector) for Serial ctDNA in HR+/HER2- Metastatic Breast Cancer

arXiv:2606.11876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circulating-tumour DNA (ctDNA) carries evidence of drug resistance months before imaging shows it, but the earliest evidence lives below the assay's limit of detection (LoD): a nascent subclone is detected only intermittently, producing a flickering sequence of faint detects and non-detects. Commercial liquid biopsies treat each draw as an independent snapshot and a non-detect as nothing. We argue a non-detect is a left-censored observation, and the pattern of non-detects and faint detects over time carries actionable evidence of growth before any single value is trustworthy. We introduce Span, a censored-Poisson Bayesian latent-growth change-point detector that models the binary detection process, accumulates a sequential generalised-likelihood-ratio statistic for an upward change-point in the per-variant detection rate, and raises a competing-risks alarm with calibrated false-alarm control. Span has no learned weights, so there is nothing to overfit. On a synthetic cohort of HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer on first-line CDK4/6-inhibitor plus endocrine therapy, at a matched 10% false-alarm rate, Span roughly doubles the fraction of impending progressions caught three months ahead (indolent regime: 25% vs 11% for the snapshot), with a falsifiable dose-response: large for indolent emergence, vanishing for fast emergence. A value-trajectory baseline performs identically to the snapshot, isolating the gain to the censored detection model. The survival backbone matches a Cox baseline on real breast-cancer data (GBSG-2, n=686; C-index 0.67 vs 0.68), and on a real longitudinal cohort with clean biomarkers (PBC2, n=312) the same pipeline correctly declines to win, a falsifiable boundary test confirming the mechanism is regime-specific. All ctDNA trajectories are synthetic.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Examining the Limits of Word2Vec with Toki Pona

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance – a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature – we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Cellfm-datasets: A Unified Data Infrastructure for Single-Cell and Spatial Transcriptomics Foundation Model Pretraining

Large-scale cell foundation models are increasingly limited not only by model architecture, but also by the data infrastructure required to repeatedly sample sparse transcriptomic profiles from out-of-core cohorts. AnnData/H5AD has become a standard exchange format for single-cell and spatial omics analysis, yet its HDF5-backed layout is not designed for high-frequency random mini-batch loading under multi-worker and distributed pretraining. We present Cellfm-datasets, a data infrastructure artifact that converts H5AD cohorts into a self-describing compressed sparse row (CSR) memmap layout and exposes the resulting corpus through Hugging Face Dataset and IterableDataset interfaces. The artifact stores a shared gene vocabulary, per-sample metadata, optional spatial coordinates, observation metadata, manifests, and checksums, and reconstructs sparse cell or group records at runtime without dense expansion. A unified sampling abstraction supports random-cell groups, manifest-defined biological regions, and coordinate-based spatial blocks, with deterministic sharding across distributed ranks and data-loader workers. Spatial demonstrations on P14 mouse brain transcriptomics sections illustrate region- and block-level sampling over real anatomical structures. In controlled benchmarks on a public heterogeneous ModelScope scRNA-seq subset, Cellfm-datasets reached 60,571 +/- 1,734 samples/s in single-core random loading, scaled to approximately 160,000 samples/s with eight workers, and maintained near-constant process-private memory while reading up to one million cells. By moving sparse single-cell and spatial corpora from model-specific loader code into reusable, validated, and framework-native dataset artifacts, this design may reduce the engineering burden of reproducible cell foundation model pretraining and make repeated training runs, model comparisons, and mixed-modality data reuse easier to standardize.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI

arXiv:2606.19118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

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

My Chemical Harness: Evolutionary Molecular Design over Synthetic Pathways with Large Language Model Agents

arXiv:2606.11256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing molecules with target properties is most useful when candidate structures are accompanied by feasible synthetic routes. We introduce My Chemical Harness, a route-native evolutionary framework for goal-directed molecular design in which the search population consists of executable synthetic pathways rather than isolated molecular graphs. Each route is built from purchasable building blocks and reaction templates, executed by deterministic chemistry tools, and scored through task-specific molecular oracles. Large language models (LLMs) are used only as strategy controllers that select high-level preferences over route length, move type, reaction families, motifs, and exploration pressure, while local code performs route construction, validation, deduplication, scoring, selection, and memory updates. This separation lets the LLM guide exploration without allowing it to introduce hallucinated products or unsupported reaction steps. On a soluble epoxide hydrolase proxy task, our LLM agent improves over single pass LLM and deterministic controllers, reaching state-of-the-art performance across the sEH score, synthetic accessibility score, and AiZynthFinder success rate metrics. These results suggest that constrained LLM agents can play a significant role in molecular discovery without requiring training, fine-tuning, or dedicated generative models.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bergson: An Open Source Library for Data Attribution

arXiv:2606.11660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data attribution is a promising field in interpretability that aims to explain model behavior through the influence of its training data, with applications including debugging undesirable model behavior and training dataset curation. However, significant engineering effort is required to perform it at scale, and many cutting edge techniques lack open-source tooling and support. Bergson is an open source library that aims to enable faster progress in the field by providing a host of techniques that scale to very large language models and pre-training datasets. The library natively supports on-disk gradient stores and multi-node distributed training, and provides quality of life tools for researchers. Finally, we introduce the first open-source implementations of three leading data attribution methods: MAGIC, SOURCE, and TrackStar. The library is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/bergson .

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Cell-type resolved transcriptional network analysis of <i>in vivo</i> cellular senescence following injury

Authors:

by Alda Sabalic, Victoria Moiseeva, Andres Cisneros, Oleg Deryagin, Eusebio Perdiguero, Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo Identifying the genetic correlates of complex phenotypes is a challenging task. Methods coming from the field of complex networks can help finding such molecular patterns, by revealing statistical associations among groups of genes that correlate with the phenotype. Here we study cellular senescence, a complex cell state whose molecular underpinnings are still under active investigation. We analyze cell type–resolved RNA sequencing data obtained from injured muscle tissue in mice, with a network-based approach that merges eigenvector centrality feature selection and community detection. Our analysis identifies genetic markers that had not been associated with senescence so far, which are validated with existing single-cell RNA sequencing data in a different type of tissue. The identified key genes belong to transcriptional pathways associated with established hallmarks of senescence, and thus can be interpreted as molecular correlates of such hallmarks. The method proposed here could be applied to any complex cellular phenotype even when only bulk RNA sequencing is available, provided the data is resolved by cell type.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Exoplanet Detection and Atmospheric Characterization with JWST and the Upcoming Ariel Mission

arXiv:2606.23766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The detection and atmospheric characterization of exoplanets have entered a new data-intensive era driven by the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Ariel mission. Modern surveys produce millions of light curves and high-resolution spectra that overwhelm traditional pipelines, motivating the rapid integration of Machine Learning and Deep Learning methods into the exoplanet workflow. This review synthesizes the latest progress in applying ML/DL techniques to exoplanet detection (transit identification, candidate vetting, false-positive rejection) and atmospheric characterization (retrieval, detrending, cross-correlation, surrogate modelling) in the context of JWST and Ariel. We start with classical algorithms such as Random Forests and Convolutional Neural Networks, move through Transformers and Recurrent architectures, then survey modern simulation-based inference using Neural Posterior Estimation and Flow Matching Posterior Estimation with normalizing or continuous normalizing flows. We discuss benchmark efforts, including the Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenges (2019 to 2025) hosted with NeurIPS, and key JWST case studies such as the WASP-39b Early Release Science programme. Results indicate that DL approaches consistently match or exceed traditional pipelines in both speed and accuracy, while ML-driven retrievals reduce inference time from CPU-hours to seconds and can accelerate nested-sampling retrievals by factors of 3-8 without compromising Bayesian evidence. We identify outstanding challenges interpretability, calibration of uncertainties under noisy data, hybrid modelling, and the generalization of models across instruments and planet populations and outline a research roadmap spanning the JWST era and beyond into Ariel's launch in 2029.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

THEIA: Learning Complete Kleene Three-Valued Logic in a Pure-Neural Modular Architecture

arXiv:2604.11284v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present THEIA, a 2.75M-parameter modular neural architecture that learns the complete Kleene three-valued logic (K3) truth table from task data without external symbolic inference or hand-encoded K3 gate primitives. Across 5 seeds it passes all 39 K3 rules at >99% per-rule accuracy. K3 learnability is not the central finding: Transformer baselines also pass all 39 rules, and flat MLPs match THEIA on Phase-1 accuracy within 0.04pp. The contributions are two properties of the learned system. (1) Uncertainty-verdict asymmetric propagation. THEIA preserves Has-Unknown at every upstream boundary (80.0/91.1/90.8/99.7% across Arith/Order/Set/Logic vs. ~52% majority) while final-verdict decodability stays at or below a 73.4% U-vs-non-U oracle reference under linear and nonlinear probes. Activation patching on non-absorbent T->U cases flips 4,898/4,898 OR and 4,719/4,719 AND pairs across 5 seeds, ruling out residual shortcuts. (2) Reliability spectrum under discretized end-to-end training, on tasks decomposable along the engine boundaries. A mod-3 sequential composition task generalizes from 5- to 500-step evaluation at 99.96+-0.04% (5 seeds). Under identical Gumbel-softmax training, flat MLPs collapse to chance by 50 steps; a 2x2 ResMLP grid reaches >=99% on only 3/20 (config, seed) trials; a pre-LN Transformer reaches 99.24+-0.34%. Straight-through discretization prevents 0.999^500 compounding; the architectural separator is sustaining Phase-1 accuracy under Phase-3 training, where flat MLPs fail. Auxiliary: under per-architecture development defaults (not optimizer-controlled), THEIA reaches 12/12 Kleene coverage 6.5x faster than a parameter-comparable 8L Transformer; this narrows to ~3.6x with Transformer-standard tuning and 4.93x with the same recipe on both. Ratios are config-specific, not asymptotic.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Scale Save Us From Plasticity Loss in Large Language Models?

arXiv:2606.24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains. To determine whether loss of plasticity remains a problem in the modern transformer-based LLM paradigm, we study plasticity loss in GPT-style Transformer models trained on a multilingual continual learning problem. Consistent with prior work, we find evidence of plasticity loss across models ranging from 5M to 314M non-embedding parameters, as measured by deterioration on a held-out Vietnamese probing task. We further find that the onset of plasticity loss follows a predictable scaling law, growing sublinearly with model size. These results suggest that larger models may delay the measurable effects of plasticity loss, but that increasing parameter count alone is likely to be insufficient to completely prevent it. We also find evidence of plasticity loss under stationary multilingual training, challenging the view that the phenomenon is exclusive to continual learning with abrupt task changes. Overall, our results suggest that even large Transformer language models trained on natural-language will eventually lose the ability to efficiently adapt to new data after sufficiently long training, in both continual and stationary settings.