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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Authors:
Clark↗S. E↗Torii↗Li↗Mathur↗Barrado-Martin↗Stevenson↗Khadjesari↗Lovat↗L. B↗Vindrola-Padros↗

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

Authors:
Sizhuang He↗Yangtian Zhang↗Shiyang Zhang↗David van Dijk↗

arXiv:2603.17353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion methods define forward noising via shuffle-based random walks (e.g., riffle shuffles) and learn reverse transitions with Plackett-Luce (PL) variants, but the resulting trajectories can be abrupt and increasingly hard to denoise as n grows. We propose Soft-Rank Diffusion, a discrete diffusion framework that replaces shuffle-based corruption with a structured soft-rank forward process: we lift permutations to a continuous latent representation of order by relaxing discrete ranks into soft ranks, yielding smoother and more tractable trajectories. For the reverse process, we introduce contextualized generalized Plackett-Luce (cGPL) denoisers that generalize prior PL-style parameterizations and improve expressivity for sequential decision structures. Experiments on sorting and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that Soft-Rank Diffusion consistently outperforms prior diffusion baselines, with particularly strong gains in long-sequence and intrinsically sequential settings.

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03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Zero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural iterative selection−expansion

Authors:
Benjamin Fry↗

The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been challenging because it requires simultaneous optimization of the protein sequence, protein structure and ligand conformation1–7. Current deep-learning algorithms have struggled to navigate this landscape, precluding the zero-shot design of binders. Here we show that by combining two neural networks in an iterative design algorithm, small-molecule binding proteins can be created from scratch with high accuracy. We trained a graph neural network—ligand-aware sequence engineering message-passing neural network (LASErMPNN)—to design compatible protein sequences for an input protein backbone and docked ligand. We paired  LASErMPNN with a structure predictor that models a three-dimensional protein–ligand complex for an input protein sequence and ligand identity. The closed-loop iteration of these reciprocal networks optimized sequence–structure–ligand compatibility, and outperformed a comparable design loop using a physics-based energy function. We used our strategy, termed neural iterative selection–expansion (NISE), to design proteins that, using different folds, specifically bind to two chemically distinct small-molecule drugs, exatecan and apixaban, with success rates of 100% and 83%, respectively. The tightest NISE binders had nanomolar-to-picomolar affinities, surpassing those of the next-leading method by 70-fold for exatecan and nearly 10,000-fold for apixaban. LASErMPNN then suggested two amino-acid substitutions that improved the affinity of the tightest exatecan binder by 100-fold without any experimental input. The optimized binder protected the labile lactone ring of exatecan from hydrolysis for days. Our work describes a general recipe for using neural networks to automate the design of small-molecule binding proteins for applications in drug delivery, sensing and catalysis.  By pairing two neural networks in an iterative optimization algorithm, small-molecule binding proteins can be designed from scratch with high accuracy, affinity and success rates, showing promise for applications in drug delivery and sequestration.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

SMS: Symmetric Mediation Statistics for Powerful High-Dimensional Mediation Analysis

Authors:
Wang↗Yan↗H.-J↗Hu↗Y.-J↗

Background: Mediation analysis of high-dimensional features, particularly molecular-level omics features, provides important opportunities to uncover biological mechanisms underlying human health and disease. However, two central statistical challenges remain: testing the composite-null hypothesis and maintaining power when the exposure-mediator and mediator-outcome associations differ substantially in statistical significance. Existing methods typically rely on accurate estimation of the proportions of the three null types or on the maximum of the two association p-values, and may not always control the FDR well and may have limited power under imbalanced significance. Methods: We propose SMS, a new statistical framework based on symmetric mediation statistics. By exploiting symmetry, SMS calibrates the composite null distribution as a whole for FDR control. It also allows flexible combinations of the two association p-values, including the maximum, and then enables construction of an omnibus test. Moreover, it permits direct use of effect-size estimates, bypassing the need to compute p-values. Results: SMS controlled the FDR across a wide range of simulation scenarios while achieving a substantial sensitivity gain, often around 20 percentage points, over existing methods including HDMT, DACT, and DEI-B. Applications to a metabolomics dataset and a DNA methylation dataset further corroborated these findings. Notably, SMS discovered five plausible mediators in the metabolomics dataset that were missed by all existing methods considered.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Learning-based Algebraic Reynolds Stress Closures for RANS Simulations of Turbulent Flows

Authors:
Daniel Dehtyriov↗Jonathan F. MacArt↗Justin Sirignano↗

arXiv:2605.26358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Turbulence is ubiquitous in engineering and science, yet direct simulation is prohibitively expensive. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations provide savings exceeding ten orders of magnitude but introduce unclosed terms (the closure problem). Offline-trained machine-learning (ML) closures suffer distribution shift in predictive simulations, while ML methods that bypass the governing equations struggle to generalise from scarce high-fidelity data. We develop a physics-derived deep learning closure model for RANS, the Deep Algebraic Reynolds Stress Model (DARSM), which can be trained on small datasets and accurately generalise across Reynolds numbers, to unseen geometries, and to different flow regimes. A neural network maps flow invariants to empirical parameters in an implicit algebraic Reynolds stress equation, derived from the Reynolds stress transport equations under the weak-equilibrium assumption, imposing physics-based structure on the ML closure. End-to-end optimisation through the governing PDEs and the coupled implicit closure eliminates distribution shift, but both unrolled and implicit automatic differentiation fail on the stiff coupled solver. We derive adjoint equations that exploit the solver's implicit-explicit structure for efficient optimisation. On canonical square-duct and periodic-hill benchmarks, DARSM reduces average test velocity error over baseline RANS by $2$-$4\times$ across Reynolds number, geometries, and flow regimes, with peak case-level reductions of $12\times$. The model trained on attached, anisotropy-dominated flows (square duct) accurately generalises without retraining to separated flows (periodic hills), a regime change in the underlying physics. DARSM also outperforms five established ML methods: offline training, tensor-basis neural networks, field-inversion machine learning, DeepONets, and physics-informed neural networks.

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

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

Authors:
Franz Louis Cesista↗Katherine Crowson↗C\'edric Simal↗Stella Biderman↗

arXiv:2606.12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines. We derive LoRA-Muon by applying the Muon optimizer's spectral steepest-descent rule to the low-rank setting. Along with our split weight-decay rule, our main claim is that LoRA-Muon is a good low-rank proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo-family optimizers. Its optimal learning rates transfer across rank, width, depth, and factor-rescaling. In our compute-matched TinyShakespeare study, a rank-$2$ proxy recovers the dense best tested learning rate, and a rank-$32$ LoRA-Muon run attains lower mean validation loss than the dense baseline in the seed-averaged sweep. We further show that the Spectron optimizer depends on arbitrary factor scaling, so it would likely be a poor fit when finetuning starts from badly imbalanced factors, and that LoRA-RITE's simplified QR-coordinate core implements the same spectral update. LoRA-Muon computes that update without QR-decomposition and avoids storing second moments, making it more accelerator-friendly and memory-efficient.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PhysDrift: Bridging the Embodiment Gap in Humanoid Co-Speech Motion Generation

Authors:
Zhangzhao Liang↗Xiaofen Xing↗Mingyue Yang↗Wenlve Zhou↗Xiangmin Xu↗

arXiv:2606.19935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots require co-speech motions that are not only expressive and speech-aligned, but also physically executable under embodiment constraints. Existing co-speech generation pipelines are predominantly human-centric: motions are first generated in human-body representations such as SMPL-X and subsequently retargeted to humanoid robots. In this work, we identify a fundamental embodiment gap in this paradigm, where the mismatch between human motion manifolds and humanoid embodiment constraints disrupts embodiment consistency during motion transfer and physical execution. Through extensive analysis, we show that although retargeting can preserve coarse motion semantics, it significantly compresses motion diversity and weakens prosody-motion synchronization, limiting expressive humanoid behaviors. To address this problem, we first propose IK-EER, a prosody-preserving humanoid motion curation framework that jointly optimizes kinematic feasibility and speech-motion temporal alignment during retargeting. Building upon the curated robot-native motion dataset, we further introduce PhysDrift, an embodiment-aware co-speech motion generation framework that directly predicts executable humanoid joint trajectories from speech without relying on intermediate human-body representations. Unlike conventional human-centric pipelines, PhysDrift maintains embodiment consistency throughout both training and inference while incorporating physical regularization to stabilize robot motion dynamics. Extensive experiments and real-world humanoid deployment demonstrate that embodiment-aware robot-native generation substantially improves speech-motion alignment, physical plausibility, motion smoothness, inference efficiency, and real-time interaction capability.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Authors:
Huan Kang↗Hui Li↗Tianyang Xu↗Tao Zhou↗Xiao-Jun Wu↗Josef Kittler↗

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

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

Deep Residual Injection for Full-Spectrum Forensic Signal Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Kaiqing Lin↗Zhiyuan Yan↗Ruoxin Chen↗Ke-Yue Zhang↗Yue Zhou↗Caiyong Piao↗Bin Li↗Taiping Yao↗Bo Wang↗Youchang Xiao↗Shouhong Ding↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been increasingly adopted in forensics for their robust semantic understanding. As AI-generated images become realistic, semantic-level inconsistencies alone are often insufficient for reliable detection. This motivates a critical question: whether MLLMs can achieve full-spectrum forensic signal perception, i.e., capturing low-level generator artifacts without sacrificing pre-trained semantic knowledge. We further perform a layer-wise analysis of forensic signal perception in MLLMs, showing that semantic information is primarily formed in the early-to-middle layers, whereas direct fine-tuning for artifact learning disrupts these semantic representations. Based on this insight, we propose Deep Visual Residual MLLM (Deep-VRM) to preserve early semantic processing while injecting artifact-specific visual signals as a residual path into an intermediate layer, where they are fused with semantic token representations and propagated through subsequent trainable layers. This enables later layers to jointly model semantic reasoning and signal-level forensic cues, and surprisingly, the model learns to adaptively leverage different levels of forensic signals depending on the input, achieving robust and generalizable detection performance. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art across most benchmarks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/KQL11/Deep-VRM.

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

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

Authors:
Nafis Fuad Shahid↗

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

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

Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

Authors:
Najmul Hasan↗Prashanth BusiReddyGari↗Haitao Zhao↗Yihao Ren↗Jinsheng Xu↗Shaohu Zhang↗

arXiv:2512.10104v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

Authors:
Haowen Gao↗Haoran Chen↗Can Wang↗Shasha Guo↗Liang Pang↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Huawei Shen↗Xueqi Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

Authors:
Yuxuan Chen↗Haoyuan Yu↗Peize He↗

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

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

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Authors:
Jaeho Lee↗Nick Merrill↗Ezra Karger↗

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TRUSTMEM: Learning Trustworthy Memory Consolidation for LLM Agents with Long-Term Memory

Authors:
Tianyu Yang↗Sudipta Paul↗Vijay Srinivasan↗Vivek Kulkarni↗Srinivas Chappidi↗

arXiv:2606.25161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents rely on long-term memory to support extended interactions and personalized assistance beyond finite context windows. Existing memory agents actively update external memory through generated write, revise, and delete operations, but these updates may omit important information, corrupt existing memory, or introduce unsupported hallucinated content. Once stored, such errors become persistent system-state failures that can affect future reasoning and generation. In this paper, we propose TrustMem, a framework designed to improve the trustworthiness of memory consolidation. TrustMem relies on a Memory Transition Verifier to evaluate the transition process of memory updates in terms of coverage, preservation, and faithfulness. It further constructs preference pairs among candidate updates under the same memory state, enabling preference-guided reinforcement learning to directly optimize memory updating behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TrustMem improves both memory utility and reliability: it achieves state-of-the-art results across MemoryAgentBench, HaluMem, and the Mem-alpha validation set, improves HaluMem memory extraction by 12.14 F1 points, and reduces transition-level omission, corruption, and hallucination by 40.1\%, 79.1\%, and 50.0\%, respectively, compared with the strongest baseline for each error type.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Authors:
Allen↗Stasiak↗Lottridge↗

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

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

Achieving Precise Text-To-Cypher Via Grounded Knowledge Graph Data Generation

Authors:
Francesco Cazzaro↗Jessica Lennon↗Ariadna Quattoni↗

Property Graphs are rapidly being adopted as database frameworks for representing heterogeneous data sources. To enable precise access to the information contained in them we need conversational interfaces based on Text-To-Cypher (Text2Cypher) parsers. This paper presents an automatic synthetic data generation method that can be leveraged to fine-tune small LLMs for this task. We conduct experiments on all the major Text-To-Cypher benchmarks, demonstrating that with our synthetic data generation approach we can significantly increase the performance of small LLMs, allowing them to compete with much larger proprietary models. This means that in settings in which models must be locally deployed we can ensure data-sovereignty without sacrificing accuracy and without costly annotation campaigns.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ESBMC-PLC+: A Unified IEC~61131-3 Formal Verification Framework as a PLCverif Successor

Authors:
Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Waldir Junior↗

PLCverif is the most mature open-source platform for PLC formal verification, developed at CERN and in production use since 2019. Yet it has two fundamental limitations: no support for Ladder Diagram (LD) programs, the dominant PLC notation, and reliance on CBMC as its primary backend, which restricts verification to bounded proofs. The PLCverif authors themselves identified ESBMC as the appropriate backend improvement. Prior work established ESBMC-PLC (a textual LD frontend with k-induction) and ESBMC-GraphPLC (graphical PLCopen XML support); together, they cover LD with unbounded proofs but not Structured Text (ST), and graphical LD with timer/counter function blocks remains unverifiable. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC+, a unified framework that closes both gaps: (1) an ST/SCL frontend via the MATIEC IEC 61131-3 compiler, routing C-compiled ST to ESBMC with nondeterministic input modeling and YAML property injection; (2) function block state semantics for graphical LD, extending the DFS resolver to model TON/TOF/TP timers, CTU/CTD counters, and R_TRIG/F_TRIG edge triggers as persistent scan-cycle state variables in the GOTO IR. ESBMC-PLC+ is the first open-source PLC verification framework to support all three major IEC 61131-3 input formats via a single ESBMC backend, enabling k-induction-unbounded safety proofs. A feature comparison with PLCverif and experimental evaluation on 8 benchmark programs, including programs with up to 8 integer timers, shows that ESBMC-PLC+ matches PLCverif's input coverage while providing stronger guarantees. Against nuXmv's BDD backend, ESBMC-PLC+ is 400-2,000x faster on timer programs and completes proofs where nuXmv BDD times out at 120s.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Authors:
Ashraf↗Mathers↗K. E↗Wagner↗Saumur↗

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Authors:
morales↗f. r↗Gonzalez↗S. R↗Osses↗M. F. S↗Hernandez↗B. L↗Ramirez↗D. A↗

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

pyhgf: A neural network library for predictive coding

Authors:
Nicolas Legrand↗

by Nicolas Legrand, Lilian Weber, Peter Thestrup Waade, Anna Hedvig Møller Daugaard, Mojtaba Khodadadi, Nace Mikuš, Christoph Mathys Bayesian models of cognition have gained considerable traction in computational neuroscience and psychiatry. Their scopes are now expected to expand rapidly to artificial intelligence, providing general inference frameworks to support embodied, adaptable, and energy-efficient autonomous agents. A central theory in this domain is predictive coding, which posits that learning and behaviour are driven by hierarchical probabilistic inferences about the causes of sensory inputs. Biological realism constrains these networks to rely on simple local computations in the form of precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors. This can make this framework highly efficient, but its implementation comes with unique challenges on the software development side. Embedding such models in standard neural network libraries often becomes limiting, as these libraries’ compilation and differentiation backends can force a conceptual separation between optimization algorithms and the systems being optimized. This critically departs from other biological principles such as self-monitoring, self-organisation, cellular growth, and functional plasticity. In this paper, we introduce pyhgf: a Python package backed by JAX and Rust for creating, manipulating, and sampling dynamic networks for predictive coding. We improve over other frameworks by enclosing the network components as transparent, modular, and malleable variables in the message-passing steps. The resulting graphs can implement arbitrary algorithms as belief propagation. Moreover, the transparency of core variables can also translate into inference processes that leverage self-organisation principles and express structure learning, meta-learning, or causal discovery as the consequence of network structural adaptation to surprising inputs. The main functions of the library are differentiable and seamlessly integrate into sampling or optimization workflows. Additionally, we offer generalized Bayesian filtering and the hierarchical Gaussian filter as key examples of dynamic networks implemented in our library. The source code, tutorials, and documentation are hosted under the main repository at https://github.com/ComputationalPsychiatry/pyhgf.

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22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Spatial distribution of the proteome in the human body and in cancers

Authors:
Liang Yue↗

A detailed, spatially resolved quantitative map of the human proteome is essential for a deeper understanding of human biology and disease1–4. Here we present a comprehensive human proteomic landscape, generated by profiling more than 13,000 proteins across 2,856 samples using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry. The dataset spans 58 major tissue types, 251 specific tissue subtypes and 25 distinct carcinomas. This resource enables the depiction of spatially resolved proteome trajectories across tissue types and physiological states, including fetal, tumour, adjacent non-tumour and healthy adult tissue, thereby providing insight into both developmental processes and oncogenic progression. Furthermore, quantitative proteomics comparisons across diverse tissue types and states facilitate the indication of organ-specific toxicity, the identification of repurposable anticancer drug candidates and the prioritization of therapeutic targets for cancers. This study establishes a quantitative resource for navigating the proteome in the human body and in common cancers. A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

BigPower: Hierarchical Source-Level Module Power Estimation for CPUs with Large Language Models

Authors:
Honghua Zhu↗Chunjie Luo↗Jianfeng Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis. In this work, we present BigPower, a hierarchical source-level surrogate model for fine-grained module-level power estimation during CPU design. BigPower leverages large language model-based representations together with architectural hierarchy, module connectivity, configuration parameters, and workload context to estimate module-level power consumption directly from source-level design information, without requiring additional simulation during inference. Experimental results in the open-source XiangShan processor family demonstrate practical fine-grained power estimation across diverse configurations and workloads, offering an efficient alternative to conventional simulation-based workflows.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Machine Learning-based Two-Stage Graph Sparsification for the Travelling Salesman Problem

Authors:
Bo-Cheng Lin↗Yi Mei↗Mengjie Zhang↗

arXiv:2604.20236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-performance TSP solvers such as Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) search within a candidate graph – a small subset of edges pre-selected for the solver – rather than over the complete graph. The two leading sparsification heuristics, $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, each fall short of the density-coverage balance: $\alpha$-Nearest is dense with stable recall, while POPMUSIC is sparser but its recall degrades with scale. Their union closes the recall gap while remaining far below the complete graph in density, leaving room for further reduction. Existing learning-based sparsifiers score edges on the complete graph, an approach that is expensive and largely limited to Euclidean instances. We propose a two-stage method that inverts this logic. Stage~1 takes the union of $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, achieving near-perfect recall at ${\sim}6N$ edges. Crucially, the union annotates each edge with its source provenance – whether it was endorsed by $\alpha$-Nearest, POPMUSIC, or both. Stage~2 trains a lightweight classifier on these annotated edges and prunes the lowest-scoring ones. Because dual-source edges are almost always optimal, the learning problem reduces to filtering the single-source subset – a substantially easier task than classifying all $O(N^2)$ edges from scratch. Across four distance types, five spatial distributions, and problem sizes from 50 to 500, the pipeline reduces candidate-graph density by $37$-$47\%$ while retaining ${\geq}99.69\%$ of optimal-tour edges, and matches or exceeds the coverage of recent Euclidean-only neural sparsifiers at lower density at TSP500.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Brain age gap correlates with DTI-derived microstructural abnormalities in multiple sclerosis.

Authors:
Lea↗Al-Ledani↗Bardell↗Maltby↗Ramadan↗R. A↗Lechner-Scott↗

Background: Brain age gap (BAG) is increased in multiple sclerosis (MS), but whether it reflects microstructural pathology beyond conventional atrophy remains unclear. Objective: To test whether BAG is elevated in MS and correlates with conventional and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) abnormalities relative to healthy controls. Methods: A case-control study of 43 people with MS and 18 healthy controls was performed. BAG was estimated from T1-weighted MRI using brainageR. Controls were used as MRI reference distributions. MRI values were expressed as deviation z-scores and correlated with BAG within MS. Conventional MRI and DTI domains were analysed using age/sex-adjusted partial correlations with domain-wise Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction, where appropriate. Results: BAG was higher in MS than controls (4.79 vs -2.58 years; p

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