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Nature staff discuss some of the week’s top science news. Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 12 June 2026
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Nature staff discuss some of the week’s top science news. Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 12 June 2026
arXiv:2606.12307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The asymmetric three-qubit W-class state $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ defines an isosceles entanglement-network geometry, (a) two vertex-base (VB) links form stronger bipartite connections, (b) while the base-base (BB) link is weaker. This suggests that concentrating entanglement into a super-link may be advantageous for quantum-network tasks. Here, we show that this intuition is incomplete. We analytically compare the bipartite concurrence dynamics of the symmetric |W> state and the asymmetric $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ state, which differ both in entanglement-network geometry and excitation sector under standard noise models. In the absence of noise, the concurrence hierarchy is C_{VB} > C_W > C_{BB}$. Under phase damping, this hierarchy is preserved for all noise strengths and no entanglement sudden death occurs. Under amplitude damping, however, the hierarchy is reordered. The symmetric |W> state becomes the most robust, while the base-base concurrence of $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ vanishes at the finite threshold of parameter $\gamma$. We term this reordering as the Super-Link Fragility Effect. The same structural asymmetry that produces a stronger vertex-base link also makes it more vulnerable to energy dissipation when coupled with multi-excitation amplitudes. Under depolarization, the asymmetry advantage is erased, with $C_W$ and $C_{VB}$ sharing the same sudden-death threshold for some value of the parameter p, while $C_{BB}$ disappears earlier at some other value of the parameter p. The generalized amplitude damping channel continuously connects the damping-dominated regime to the pure-excitation limit, where the initial hierarchy is restored. These results show that entanglement robustness in $W$-class resources is controlled not by initial concurrence alone, but by the joint structure of entanglement-network geometry, excitation sector, and noise symmetry.
Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks. We present IHUBERT, a monolingual Persian PLM trained from scratch with the RoBERTa-base encoder (125M parameters) on a 45 GB curated subset of the Sepahr-Danesh collection (about 7-8B tokens). To improve corpus quality and reduce redundancy, we employ a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline that includes normalization, exact and near-duplicate removal, anonymization, and vector-database-based semantic deduplication for distribution balancing control across domains and registers. We additionally train a 139k-vocabulary BPE tokenizer on the full pretraining corpus to better capture Persian morphology and orthographic variation. IHUBERT is evaluated on seven Persian NLU benchmarks covering NER, sentiment analysis, topic classification, NLI, extractive question answering, and relation extraction, using task-standard metrics (entity-level F1, Macro-F1, EM/F1). IHUBERT achieves its strongest gains on extractive QA, ranking first on both PQuAD (F1 88.3542) and ParsiNLU-RC (F1 49.0987), and attains the best result on FarsTail (Macro-F1 0.8350). On NER and topic classification, it remains competitive (e.g., 0.8308 F1 on ParsTwiNER; 0.7953 Macro-F1 on DigiMag), while relation extraction remains the main remaining gap (0.6684 Macro-F1 on PERLEX). A controlled tokenizer ablation on the IHUBERT pretraining corpus shows that BPE yields slightly lower subword fragmentation than WordPiece at matched vocabulary size, supporting our tokenization design. Overall, IHUBERT advances Persian language modeling through semantically curated large-scale pretraining and broad evaluation across both classification and comprehension-oriented tasks.
We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.
Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.
Drawing on 23 anonymized student pro-jects from a fourth-year Machine Transla-tion and Post-editing course in a BA-level translation programme, this paper exam-ines how structured comparison of gen-eral-purpose LLMs and online MT sys-tems can elicit evaluative judgement in AI-mediated translation. Students translat-ed short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequa-cy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their deci-sion in written reports. Descriptive counts are reported for all 23 projects, while qualitative interpretation is based on the 22 cases accompanied by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, naturalness, and expected post-editing ef-fort. The study therefore does not bench-mark systems under controlled conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an authentic classroom as-signment.
arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.
arXiv:2606.13551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZX calculus provides a graphical formalism for reasoning about quantum processes, built from two interacting Frobenius algebras associated with the Z and X bases of a qubit. While it has found widespread application in quantum information and computing, its relationship to quantum field theory has only recently begun to be explored. In this work, we further develop this connection by providing a generalization of ZX calculus to two-dimensional Yang Mills theory with a compact gauge group. The key observation is that both frameworks can be organized around the Hopf Frobenius algebraic structure associated with a group algebra, which can in turn be described by the diagrammatics of two dimensional topological quantum field theory. Given the well known relationship between gauge theory and gravity in two and three dimensions, our work paves the way for applications of ZX to low dimensional gravity.
arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.
arXiv:2606.15881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce biarchetype analysis for the first time in the context of univariate functional data. This unsupervised methodology extends archetype analysis by simultaneously identifying archetypal structures across both the cases (countries, in our application) and the temporal argument. Both cases and time points are expressed as mixtures of biarchetypes, yielding a concise and highly interpretable representation of complex functional observations. Although biarchetype analysis is not intended as a clustering technique, it offers superior interpretability compared with biclustering approaches, as it is based on extreme, representative patterns rather than average centroids, thereby enhancing human comprehension. We apply the proposed method to 10-year government bond yields of European countries over the period 2001-2025. The results identify three distinct time regimes (the pre-crisis period, the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the post-crisis period), and reveal Germany, Greece, and Hungary as country archetypes.
Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.
The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.
arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.
arXiv:2602.20266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a new class of infinite-dimensional diffusions with values in a generalized Kingman simplex with finitely many marks. The model describes the temporal evolution of the relative frequencies of infinitely many types that are labeled by a finite number $H$ of marks, but unlabeled within each mark. We first establish a blockwise skew-product representation for a finite-type Wright-Fisher diffusion, extending the aggregation-renormalization self-similarity property of Dirichlet laws. The decomposition separates an $H$-dimensional Wright-Fisher diffusion governing the evolving random mark masses, from $H$ Wright-Fisher diffusions, each run on its own random clock, which describe the evolution of the relative frequencies within each mark. After ranking the within-mark frequencies in decreasing order, we identify the distributional limit as the number of types per mark tends to infinity and we derive an explicit form of its infinitesimal generator on a suitable domain. The limiting diffusion admits the multiple Poisson-Dirichlet distribution as a stationary distribution; it recovers the infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion when all types share the same mark and yields a diffusion on the Thoma simplex when there are two marks.
arXiv:2606.16038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The path toward autonomous software engineering is currently bottlenecked by a severe deficit of diverse, large-scale trajectory data. We address this by introducing \ourdataset, an expansive dataset of 207,489 agentic trajectories spanning nine programming languages (Python, Go, TS, JS, Rust, Java, PHP, C, C++). Sourced from 20,000 real-world PRs via OpenHands and SWE-agent harnesses, the dataset utilizes a hybrid-reasoning synthesis: Minimax-M2.5 generates trajectories with explicit "thinking" processes, while Qwen3.5-122B provides high-quality "non-thinking" traces. Filtered for permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) from SWE-rebench-V2, this data facilitates the training of models capable of long-horizon reasoning. We validate the dataset by fine-tuning the Qwen3-30B-A3B series (Thinking, Instruct, and Coder). The best performing model achieves resolve rates of 61.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 36.8% on SWE-bench Pro. These results establish Open-SWE-Traces as a premier resource for distilling human-level software engineering capabilities into efficient, open-source agentic LLMs.
Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in real-world urban navigation, where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pretraining on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: (1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and (2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.
Non-contact pulse wave reconstruction hinges on the precise recovery of waveform morphology, including the dicrotic notch. Conventional Red-Green-Blue (RGB)-based methods, which extract physiological signals from recorded facial videos, are constrained by the integral imaging mechanism of standard cameras, where the exposure process induces a smoothing effect that attenuates subtle vascular pulsation details. Conversely, neuromorphic event cameras, while offering exceptional sensitivity to intensity fluctuations, are inherently susceptible to noise and artifacts induced by minor motion. To exploit the synergy between frame-based integration and event-based differential sensing, we propose a novel multimodal network named Fusion-E2Pulse. This framework utilizes filtered RGB signals as structural priors to suppress motion artifacts, while leveraging the high-sensitivity of event streams to recover fine-grained morphological details. Experimental results demonstrate that Fusion-E2Pulse achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing noise suppression and morphological fidelity, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.78 bpm for heart rate estimation, a waveform correlation of 0.89, and a systolic phase duration error of 16.74 ms, validating its efficacy in reconstructing fine-grained pathological features.
Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.
arXiv:2606.14895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The commute time between two nodes in a network - the expected number of steps for a random walk to travel from one node to the other and then return - is a metric of broad importance arising in community detection, network routing, dimensionality reduction, and diffusion modeling. For random geometric graphs (RGGs), in which nodes are placed at random in a spatial domain and connected pairwise wherever their Euclidean distance is below a threshold radius, the relationship between commute times and the embedding geometry remains poorly understood outside very dense settings (where the role of the geometry disappears and commute times degenerate to a sum of inverse degrees). We develop and numerically validate a model for approximating commute times in sparse RGGs on a torus by combining theoretically motivated geometric contributions with an inverse degree sum. The geometric terms include a universal logarithmic contribution from the Laplacian, a quadratic correction encoding the compact topology of the torus, and a quartic angular term reflecting the square anisotropy of the domain. We fit this model to samples of node pairs across a range of graph sizes and mean degrees, demonstrating good predictive performance and that the geometric terms contribute significantly to model fit. We then study the continuous perturbation of the model from a regular square lattice to a fully random geometric graph, further validating the functional model form through this transition and showing how commute times in sparse RGGs retain meaningful geometric information about the embedding space.
Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) untargeted metabolomics detects thousands of metabolic features, but converting these chemical signals into metabolite set-level biological knowledge remains challenging. This is because most features lack unambiguous metabolite identities. Conventional metabolite set enrichment analysis (MSEA) generally requires identified metabolites and metabolite-level ranked inputs, leaving much of the untargeted feature space unused. Here, we present FeatureMSEA, a feature rank-based framework for metabolite set enrichment directly from metabolic features with ambiguous annotations. FeatureMSEA integrates multi-evidence feature-to-metabolite annotation, feature rank-based enrichment scoring, permutation-based inference, and iterative leading-edge-guided annotation refinement, with an optional LLM-assisted module for post-enrichment interpretation. In null comparisons of randomly split healthy samples, FeatureMSEA detected no significant metabolite sets, whereas metabolite-set spike-in simulations showed recovery of implanted signals. In a cerebrospinal fluid metabolomics study of Huntington's disease, FeatureMSEA identified dysregulated metabolite sets related to amino acid metabolism, mitochondrial energy metabolism, and neuroactive signaling. MS/MS-based annotation analysis further showed that FeatureMSEA refinement reduced annotation ambiguity and prioritized chemically consistent candidate metabolites. In summary, FeatureMSEA provides a general framework for extracting metabolite set-level biological insights from LC-MS untargeted metabolomics in which confident metabolite identification remains incomplete.
arXiv:2606.09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input. Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.
Ultrasound (US) is widely used for surgical navigation, yet real-time registration between intraoperative 2D slices and preoperative 3D volumes remains challenging due to partial observability, speckle noise, and the action-dependent US acquisition. Existing methods are one-shot or short-horizon, making it hard for them to gather evidence over time or capture how surgeons adjust probe motion based on on-screen feedback. We propose DreamReg, a belief-driven world-model framework that formulates 2D-3D registration as belief updating over rigid transformations. DreamReg maintains a latent belief state that summarizes past observations and poses information, and continuously refines the transformation through learned dynamics as new slices arrive. During training, DreamReg is exposed to probe-motion trajectories that mimic clinical scanning behavior and learns to update its belief by conditioning pose refinement on the current US observation. During inference, DreamReg refines registration via internal imagination: it rolls out the learned world model to simulate candidate probe motions and their predicted observations, and integrates these imagined outcomes to converge to an accurate rigid transformation. Experiments on CAMUS and u-RegPro datasets demonstrate improved robustness and competitive registration accuracy for real-time guidance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) creates an urgent need for efficient strategies to identify effective antibacterial combinations. Combination therapy, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) paired with conventional antibiotics, is a promising approach, but exhaustive experimental screening across drug pairs and bacterial targets is impractical. This study introduces a hybrid GCN-based hypergraph neural network (HGNN) for predicting antimicrobial-agent combination outcomes against bacterial targets. Each antimicrobial-agent-antimicrobial-agent-bacterium triplet is represented as a ternary hyperedge, enabling the model to learn context-dependent interaction patterns. The framework integrates SMILES-derived molecular graph embeddings for antimicrobial agents, including conventional antibiotics and AMPs, with taxonomy-derived bacterial representations. The prediction task was formulated as a three-class classification problem: synergy, antagonism, and non-interaction. The non-interaction class included experimentally verified indifferent records and synthetic presumed non-interaction triplets generated by negative sampling. Model development used drug-pair-grouped splitting, five-fold grouped cross-validation within the training/validation partition, and final evaluation on a held-out test set. On the held-out three-class test set, the selected GCN-based HGNN achieved an accuracy of 0.83, weighted F1-score of 0.84, macro F1-score of 0.80, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. Per-class evaluation showed accuracies of 0.80 for synergy, 0.92 for antagonism, and 0.85 for non-interaction. Pair-type analysis showed strong performance across AMP-AMP, AMP-conventional antibiotic, and conventional antibiotic-conventional antibiotic combinations. These findings suggest that hypergraph-based representation learning can support computational prioritization of antimicrobial combinations for experimental follow-up. Further studies will be needed to improve model interpretability and to perform prospective validation of predicted synergistic combinations.