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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Dynamics of Human and AI-Generated Language: How Semantics Fluctuates across Different Timescales

Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content. However, we still lack simple, interpretable time-series features that capture how generic versus specific content is distributed over time, and that can be used to compare human and AI-generated speech. We introduce a semantic-timescale analysis pipeline that turns word-level transcripts with timestamps into semantic time-series. For each spoken narrative, we compute (i) semantic specificity using WordNet-based word depth and (ii) contextual similarity using SBERT embeddings and quantify their temporal dependence using autocorrelation-window measures (ACW-0 and related metrics). We then compare original speech to multiple shuffled controls that selectively disrupt lexical identity, temporal order, and word duration. Across human-read autobiographical narratives, TTS readings, and LLM-generated texts rendered with TTS, we find that segments with longer ACW-0 in the semantic time-series tend to contain more generic vocabulary, whereas segments with shorter ACW-0 are enriched in more specific words. These associations are strongly attenuated or abolished when word order and timing are randomized, indicating that ACW-based measures capture non-trivial temporal organization of semantic content beyond static lexical distributions. Our results suggest that ACW-based semantic timescales are a useful family of features for analyzing and comparing the temporal structure of human and AI-generated speech.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Pillbox: A Leakage-Aware Foundation-Model Predictor and Lineage-Ceiling Diagnostic for Cancer Drug Response

We present Pillbox, a predictor whose pipeline is audited against the six Asiaee leakage modes with the one residual pathway shown by per-fold ablation to be non-load-bearing on hard splits. Our model combines CpGPT methylation embeddings, CLAMP drug embeddings, and per-fold-fit gene-expression principal components which are fused by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-conditioned graph attention on the STRING v12 protein-protein interaction graph. Then we alpha-ensemble the model against a histogram-based gradient boosting regressor baseline. On GDSC GSE68379 (987 cell lines, 375 drugs) across seeds 42, 7, and 123, the ensemble reaches test R-Squared of 0.78, 0.77, and 0.76 on random, histology-blind, and site-blind splits respectively, with cell-aware lifts above the drug-mean floor of +0.054, +0.060, and +0.037. As a quantitative diagnostic for feature-stack saturation we propose the cross-architecture residual correlation, calibrated against a same-architecture-different-initialization control. On histology-blind splits the cross-architecture value of 0.939 falls short of the same-architecture ceiling of 0.974 by approximately 0.03 in residual correlation, a gap we interpret as the headroom available to architecture choice on top of the current foundation-model representation and consistent with the long-established observation that tissue lineage dominates cell-line drug response. We integrated curated mutation, methylation, and drug-target-expression channels, but these do not improve prediction once foundation-model embeddings are in place. Cross-screen validation against PRISM matches the GDSC-to-PRISM measurement reproducibility ceiling within 0.01 Spearman.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

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

Structural MRI Synthesis for Alzheimer's Disease via Conditional Diffusion on Anatomical Masks

arXiv:2606.18354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model – originally designed for brain tumor synthesis – to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Multi-Turn Reasoning When Context Arrives in Pieces: Scalable Sharding and Memory-Augmented RL

When a user reveals task-critical information across several conversation turns, LLM accuracy drops by up to 65% despite full context availability. We show that this Lost in Conversation degradation can be substantially mitigated by training models to maintain a compact rolling memory instead of attending to a growing history. To make such training scalable, we introduce a low-cost sharding pipeline that converts single-turn QA datasets into multi-turn fragmented-information episodes, eliminating the need for hours of manual annotation. Training only on sharded GSM8K, our memory-augmented policy significantly improves multi-turn accuracy and generalises zero-shot to harder math and out-of-domain long-context QA. Moreover, memory-trained models outperform full-history baselines even when given the full history at test time, suggesting that learning to compress induces more robust incremental reasoning than full-context exposure alone.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Helpfulness Overrides Causal Caution: Context-Dependent Suppression and Recovery in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs – Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro – across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7–100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7–18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt – "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" – restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4–100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

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

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

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

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.

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

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reduced basis algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations on quantum computers

arXiv:2606.13457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As quantum computing moves toward scientific computing applications, nonlinear differential equations remain a central challenge since quantum evolution is intrinsically linear. In this work, we introduce a reduced basis algorithm (RBA) for polynomial nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and spatially discretized partial differential equations (PDEs). After time discretization, the method composes the resulting polynomial update map over $m$ timesteps, identifies the reduced monomial basis appearing in this composed map, and constructs a linear RBA operator whose action recovers the exact $m$-timestep nonlinear dynamics. Thus, at the level of the chosen discrete update rule, the method introduces no additional approximation error beyond the time discretization error. The qubit number requirement is governed by the size of the reduced monomial basis. For an $n$-dimensional polynomial ODE system of degree $p>1$, the lifted register requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{ODE}} = O(nm\log p)$ qubits in the full basis scenario. For PDEs discretized on $N^D$ grid points, a locality-based construction requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{PDE}} = O(D\log N + n m^{D+1}\log p)$ qubits. Hence, the dependence on the grid size remains logarithmic, while the nonlinear overhead is controlled by local reduced basis size. The main computational burden is moved from the quantum computer to a classical preprocessing step, where the reduced monomial basis and RBA operator are constructed for the chosen timestep window. Through numerical tests on the Lorenz system and the one-dimensional Burgers equation, we verify that the RBA reproduces the corresponding discrete time nonlinear dynamics exactly, while exposing the trade-off between timestep composition, reduced basis growth, and locality.

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

Face versus Body Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction: An Egocentric Dataset

Meaningful human-robot interaction (HRI) requires a robot to continuously assess user engagement through persistent user tracking. However, state-of-the-art Multi-Object Tracking models are heavily optimized for surveillance or autonomous driving. A social robot faces distinct egocentric challenges, such as humans moving in unpredictable nonlinear patterns, obstructing each other, or leaving and reentering the scene. These dynamics trigger frequent identity switches (IDSW), causing the robot to lose its footing mid-conversation. To address this, we introduce a focused, custom-annotated egocentric dataset collected via the Furhat robot. We present a systematic evaluation isolating detection errors from tracking logic, comparing face versus body tracking, and assessing the impact of extended memory and appearance re-identification (ReID). Results indicate that increasing temporal memory mitigates prolonged occlusions but fails on complex dynamic events. Integrating ReID resolves complex switches but exhibits opposing effects: it substantially improves body tracking stability, yet causes facial IDSW to spike due to profile angle sensitivity. Ultimately, our optimized pipeline reduces IDSW by 49% compared to a standard tracking-by-detection baseline, effectively mitigating interaction breakdowns. As standard benchmarks lack dense, close-quarter occlusions, this work highlights the critical need for natively captured social dynamics to truly validate HRI perception models.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network Algorithm for Many-Body Trace Norms

arXiv:2606.11882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trace norms are fundamental to quantum information theory, yet in many-body systems their evaluation remains a major computational bottleneck, as it generally requires diagonalizing exponentially large operators. Here, we overcome this bottleneck by introducing a controlled tensor-network algorithm for estimating the trace norm of matrix product operators without full diagonalization. The key idea is to combine Zolotarev's rational approximation to the sign function with a variational formulation solved using a density-matrix-renormalization-group-like algorithm. The resulting approximation is systematically improvable, with its accuracy controlled by the rational approximation parameters and the spectral weight near zero. Beyond the reach of exact diagonalization, we demonstrate controlled trace-norm calculations for entanglement negativity, quantum fidelity and quantum Fisher information, achieving substantially improved accuracy over polynomial-based Lanczos approaches. Our results establish trace-norm-based quantities as practical tensor-network observables, opening a route toward tensor-network studies of quantum information in mixed states.

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

ArogyaSutra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Multimodal Medical Reasoning in Indic Languages

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising reasoning capabilities in general domains, yet their performance remains limited in specialized settings such as healthcare, especially in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. This gap is critical in regions like rural India, where patients often express complex medical queries in native Indic languages and rely on multimodal inputs such as medical images. Existing English-centric MLLMs struggle to support such use cases, limiting equitable access to AI-driven healthcare assistance. To address this challenge, we introduce ArogyaBodha, a large-scale multilingual multimodal medical question-answer dataset constructed from eight heterogeneous sources, covering 31 body systems, six imaging modalities, and 21 clinical domains across English and seven major Indian languages. We further propose ArogyaSutra, an actor-critic-based multi-agent framework that integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms for step-wise, reasoning-aware decision making, and uses stored actor-critic simulation trajectories for distillation. Experiments show that our dataset and framework improve multilingual medical reasoning accuracy across all Indic languages, with ablations validating the contribution of each component. The source code and dataset are available at: https://iitp-cse.github.io/ ArogyaSutra/

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DCD: Domain-Oriented Design for Controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2604.07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. However, when applied to heterogeneous corpora and multi-step queries, Naive RAG pipelines often degrade in quality due to flat knowledge representations and the absence of explicit workflows. In this work, we introduce DCD (Domain-Collection-Document), a domain-oriented design to structure knowledge and control query processing in RAG systems without modifying the underlying language model. The proposed approach relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the information space and multi-stage routing based on structured model outputs, enabling progressive restriction of both retrieval and generation scopes. The architecture is complemented by smart chunking, hybrid retrieval, and integrated validation and generation guardrail mechanisms. We describe the DCD architecture and workflow and discuss evaluation results on synthetic evaluation dataset, highlighting their impact on robustness, factual accuracy, and answer relevance in applied RAG scenarios.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Tuning without Peeking: Provable Generalization Bounds and Robust LLM Post-Training

Gradient-based optimization is the workhorse of deep learning, offering efficient and scalable training via backpropagation. However, exposing gradients during training can leak sensitive information about the underlying data, raising privacy and security concerns such as susceptibility to data poisoning attacks. In contrast, black-box optimization methods, which treat the model as an opaque function, relying solely on function evaluations to guide optimization, offer a promising alternative in scenarios where data access is restricted, adversarial risks are high, or overfitting is a concern. This paper introduces BBoxER, an evolutionary black-box method for LLM post-training that induces an information bottleneck via implicit compression of the training data. Leveraging the tractability of information flow, we provide non-vacuous generalization bounds and strong theoretical guarantees for robustness to data poisoning attacks and extraction attacks, while ensuring privacy by design. In experiments with LLMs, we demonstrate empirically that black-box optimization methods-despite the scalability and computational challenges inherent to black-box approaches-are able to learn, showing how a few iterations of BBoxER improve performance, generalize well on a benchmark of reasoning datasets, and are robust to membership inference attacks. This positions BBoxER as an attractive add-on on top of gradient-based optimization, offering suitability for deployment in restricted environments while also providing non-vacuous generalization guarantees.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

Authors:

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Exact Schur-Sylvester Dimensionality Reductions for Non-Smooth Stochastic Complexity and Manifold Sampling

arXiv:2606.23867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis–Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GOT-JEPA: Generic Object Tracking with Model Adaptation and Occlusion Handling using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

The human visual system tracks objects by integrating current observations with previously observed information, adapting to target and scene changes, and reasoning about occlusion at fine granularity. In contrast, recent generic object trackers are often optimized for training targets, which limits robustness and generalization in unseen scenarios, and their occlusion reasoning remains coarse, lacking detailed modeling of occlusion patterns. To address these limitations in generalization and occlusion perception, we propose GOT-JEPA, a model-predictive pretraining framework that extends JEPA from predicting image features to predicting tracking models. Given identical historical information, a teacher predictor generates pseudo-tracking models from a clean current frame, and a student predictor learns to predict the same pseudo-tracking models from a corrupted version of the current frame. This design provides stable pseudo supervision and explicitly trains the predictor to produce reliable tracking models under occlusions, distractors, and other adverse observations, improving generalization to dynamic environments. Building on GOT-JEPA, we further propose OccuSolver to enhance occlusion perception for object tracking. OccuSolver adapts a point-centric point tracker for object-aware visibility estimation and detailed occlusion-pattern capture. Conditioned on object priors iteratively generated by the tracker, OccuSolver incrementally refines visibility states, strengthens occlusion handling, and produces higher-quality reference labels that progressively improve subsequent model predictions. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks show that our method effectively enhances tracker generalization and robustness.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.