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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease

Authors:

Aging is asynchronous across cells and organs. Here we tested whether plasma proteomics can be used to analyze cell type-specific aging. From analyses of over 7,000 plasma proteins measured in 60,542 individuals, we developed machine learning models to estimate the biological age of over 40 cell types spanning neuronal, immune, glial, endocrine, epithelial and musculoskeletal origins. We observed that 20–25% of individuals exhibited accelerated aging in a single cell type and 1–3% in 10 or more cell types. Cellular aging signatures were associated with disease status and predicted incident disease and mortality over 15 years of follow-up. Individuals with the APOE4 genotype showed older astrocytes but younger macrophages compared to APOE3 carriers, whereas the APOE2 genotype had inverse associations. Moreover, extreme astrocyte aging tripled the risk of incident Alzheimer’s Disease in individuals with two APOE4 alleles, while youthful astrocytes reduced risk. Individuals with extremely aged compared to youthful skeletal myocytes exhibited a 12.7-fold higher risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In individuals who smoked, extreme respiratory epithelial cell aging was associated with a 58% higher lung cancer risk compared to smoking alone. Specific cellular vulnerabilities and cumulative cellular aging burden influenced survival, with youthful immune and neuronal cell types conferring protective effects. Finally, we developed a polycellular aging risk score that stratified mortality risk across cohorts and proteomics platforms. These findings establish a framework for quantifying human physiology at cellular resolution, revealing heterogeneous aging trajectories and their impact on disease susceptibility and resilience. The biological age of individual cell types can be evaluated using plasma proteomics, revealing diverse aging profiles across more than 40 cell types and links between the accelerated aging of specific cell types and disease.

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

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BindEdit: Taming Attention Leakage for Precise Multi-Object Image Editing

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose BindEdit, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

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

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

A comparison of contact patterns derived from the population structure in agent-based models and empirical contact survey data

Authors:

by Janik Suer, Johannes Ponge, Michael Brüggemann, Jan Pablo Burgard, Vitaly Belik, Bernd Hellingrath, Alejandra Rincón Hidalgo, Andrzej K. Jarynowski, Richard Pastor, Huynh Thi Phuong, Steven Schulz, Ashish Thampi, Chao Xu, Marlli Zambrano, Rafael Mikolajczyk, André Karch, Veronika K. Jaeger, on behalf of the OptimAgent Consortium Agent-based models (ABMs) are powerful tools for simulating disease spread, relying on individual-level interaction rules from which emergent dynamics arise. An important component in ABMs is contact behaviour. To reduce computational complexity, contact behaviour in ABMs is often assumed as random mixing within structurally defined settings (as, e.g., workplaces). with setting composition typically based on empirical data such as census information. However, the validity of this approach to represent contacts remains unclear. To address this gap, we compare the contact structure derived through this approach in a large-scale ABM with empirical contact survey data with respect to age contact matrices for households, schools, workplaces, all remaining contact settings, and all contacts combined (based on difference matrices and sum of squared errors (SSE)). Our results demonstrate that random mixing in settings with known age compositions like households (SSE:0.7(95%CI0.4–0.9)), schools (SSE:0.7(95%CI:0.3–1.1)) and workplaces (SSE:0.5(95%CI:0.2-0.7)), captures basic interaction patterns but fails to account for age-related variation in contact numbers. The largest differences arise for contacts outside these settings (SSE:3.8(95%CI:1.2–6.5)), as ABMs typically use random regional contacts that do not capture age-structured behaviour observed in contact surveys. Applying contact matrices from both approaches to an age-structured compartmental model, leads to noticeable differences in simulated epidemic outcomes regarding reproduction numbers and spreading dynamics between age groups. Our results suggest that naïve approaches to represent contact behaviour in ABMs based on population structure can be valid in settings with defined age-structures while settings with low a priori structure require more advanced methods to represent contact behaviour observed in contact surveys.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Exploring Extrinsic and Intrinsic Properties for Effective Reasoning with Code Interpreter

Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification. Despite its growing adoption, the behavioral properties underlying effective code reasoning remain largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate code reasoning from two distinct perspectives inspired by prior studies of natural language reasoning: extrinsic properties, represented by crucial tokens, and intrinsic properties, represented by code-specific cognitive behaviors. Across multiple LLMs, we find that stronger CI reasoning models consistently exhibit a higher prevalence of crucial tokens and cognitive behaviors, particularly verification, backtracking, and backward chaining. Building on these observations, we examine how these properties can be leveraged during both inference and training. At inference time, appending code-specific crucial tokens improves performance on several reasoning capabilities, including mathematical, ordering, and optimization, while yielding limited benefits elsewhere. At training time, augmenting a state-of-the-art framework with code-specific cognitive behaviors improves supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning performance in two of three evaluated models. Further analysis shows that these behaviors reduce overthinking in incorrect responses and improve token efficiency, while also revealing factors that limit gains in a certain model. Our findings provide the first systematic characterization of effective reasoning with CI and demonstrate both the potential and limitations of leveraging key properties to improve CI-based reasoning.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

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

Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Emission of time-ordered photon pairs from a coherently-driven Kerr microcavity

arXiv:2601.06468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weakly-interacting many-body systems possess remarkable quantum properties that are essential components of quantum technologies, and constitute a topic of fundamental interest. Here we show that in a solid-state nonlinear microcavity embedding discrete modes of exciton-dressed photons, we can isolate a single eigenmode of quantum fluctuations from the much brighter coherent fraction of the field. In this regime, we perform frequency- and time-resolved correlations measurements between photons on the red and blue side of the fluctuations spectrum. When the average number of fluctuation quanta is smaller than one, we observe the formation of large pairwise time-ordered correlations: red photon first and blue photon second. We show that this peculiar time-ordering correlation emerges spontaneously from the interplay between frequency-resolved detection, and the non-trivial internal quantum structure of the elementary fluctuations.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Entanglement via Quantum Wasserstein Distances

arXiv:2606.04969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a bipartite entanglement measure defined as the minimal order-1 quantum Wasserstein distance from a state to the set of separable states. Owing to the universal data-processing inequality of the Wasserstein metric, the measure satisfies all fundamental axioms within a single geometric framework. A Lipschitz dual formulation yields explicit lower bounds for pure and mixed states, a sharp constant for two-qubit systems, and an expected value for Haar-random pure states. We further establish a quantitative connection to entanglement witnesses: any negative witness expectation value certifies a lower bound, and the dual variational bound is exactly the maximal violation achievable by a Lipschitz-1 witness. The approach naturally provides subadditivity, trace-distance estimates, and bounds on local observables, while pointing toward large-deviation conjectures. This work introduces a framework at the interface of entanglement theory, optimal transport, and experimental entanglement detection.

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

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Three multimodal large language models fail at clinically actionable breast pathology in three different directions

Background. Breast cancer treatment depends on histopathological features, such as grade and receptor-defined subtype; however, specialist pathologist access is constrained when the workforce is limited. Commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) accept hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) image tiles through paid interfaces without local hardware or fine-tuning. However, prior pathology evaluations addressed only coarse tasks. Whether they reach treatment-determining accuracy and whether vendors agree remain unclear. Methods. We aimed to evaluate three vendor-designated flagship MLLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5.5) in 427 invasive breast cancer cases. Each case went to all three with identical H&E tiles and prompts, and the subtype was inferred in the second call. The reference was an institutional sign-out report of an immunohistochemistry-derived subtype. We calculated the concordance, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and pairwise McNemar and Bowker tests. Findings. Claude ranked highest by raw histologic-type concordance but lowest by kappa, classifying all 23 lobular and seven micropapillary carcinomas as invasive breast carcinoma of no special type. The models anchored the Nottingham grade to three modal grades. None of the models reliably identified human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive disease. The failure direction was vendor-specific: Claude and GPT-5.5 were under-detected, whereas Gemini was over-called. Twelve prompt variants (4,056 calls) did not recover sensitivity. Interpretation. No current commercial MLLM reaches deployment-ready accuracy for any treatment-determining feature of breast pathology. As each vendor fails in its own fixed direction, changing vendors alters the type of error rather than removing it; therefore, the value of these models is assistive rather than autonomous. At USD 0.20-0.50 per case, they may serve as supervised draft generators that leave the diagnosis with the pathologist.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series Generation

arXiv:2605.27478v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Schrödinger bridges for time series (SBTS) generate synthetic paths by projecting, in relative entropy, a Brownian reference onto the path laws that match the joint distribution of the data on the observation grid. The Brownian reference, however, fixes the quadratic variation of the generated paths, which is restrictive when stochastic volatility, correlated noise, or rank-deficient covariance structures must be reproduced. We introduce "Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series" (TR-SBTS), which keeps the entropy-projection backbone of SBTS but replaces the Brownian reference by a triangular, volatility-informed, intervalwise frozen reference on a state augmented with latent covariance descriptors. The construction remains a single entropy projection on the augmented state: the minimiser is the \(h\)-transform of the reference, and on each frozen interval the optimal drift has the logarithmic-gradient form \(b^\star(t,x)=A\,\nabla\log H(t,x)\), intrinsic to the active covariance directions when the frozen covariance \(A\) is degenerate. We prove stability of the frozen approximation and consistency of the associated regularised kernel estimators, describe a reference-aware Nadaraya–Watson implementation of the conditional next-increment law, and evaluate the construction on numerical experiments.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Repeat expansions in Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism across ancestries: insights from a global genetic cohort

Expanded short tandem repeats contribute to a broad spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases, yet their roles in Parkinson's disease (PD) and parkinsonism remain incompletely characterized, especially across diverse ancestries. We analyzed short-read whole-genome (WGS) and clinical exome sequencing (CES) data from 38,365 individuals (28,861 WGS; 9,504 CES), encompassing 23,242 patients with PD, 4,729 patients with atypical parkinsonism and 10,394 healthy controls from 11 genetic ancestries. To determine carrier frequencies and characterize repeat structures across diverse ancestries, we genotyped 12 established pathogenic loci where normal, intermediate, and pathogenic alleles can be reliably differentiated using short-read sequencing data. Additionally, we conducted threshold-based associations to determine the minimum threshold associated with increased PD risk in 15,995 individuals (8,591 PD, 7,404 controls) of European ancestry. Pathogenic repeat expansions were detected in 62 patients (56 PD and 6 atypical parkinsonism) and 5 controls across seven loci (AR, ATXN1, ATXN2, ATXN3, CACNA1A, HTT and THAP11), spanning seven ancestries. Among these, ATXN2 expansions were the most frequently observed in PD and were present in African, East Asian, European and Middle Eastern ancestries. Additionally, intermediate ATXN2 repeat expansions exhibited a strong, length-dependent association with PD risk in the European population, with individuals with [≥]32 repeats having a more than four-fold increased risk (odds ratio 4.25, 95% confidence interval 1.80-12.05). Overall, >92% of expanded alleles harbor CAA interruptions within the CAG tract. Pathogenic expansions at other loci, such as ATXN3 and THAP11, showed more ancestry-specific distributions. Clinically, individuals with pathogenic ATXN2 and ATXN3 expansions most often presented with typical PD features but frequently showed earlier disease onset and a strong family history of PD. This large-scale, multi-ancestry study comprehensively maps the genetic landscape of pathogenic and intermediate repeat expansions in PD. Our findings confirm a length- and structure-dependent risk association for ATXN2 with PD in the European population, and highlight the pleiotropic effects of repeat expansions across the parkinsonian spectrum.