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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A blinded, counterbalanced rater design for evaluating AI-assisted summarisation of tertiary clinical genomics reports: methodology of the QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 study

Background. Tertiary clinical genomics reports condense layered molecular findings into documents that treating oncologists must read, translate, and act upon; manual summarisation of these reports is time-consuming and variable. Tools that assist summarisation and translation into local languages are emerging, yet the field lacks an agreed methodology for evaluating such tools before any downstream clinical use. The appropriate first endpoint is fidelity of the generated summary to its source report, assessed by qualified human raters under blinded scoring, not downstream variant classification. Methods. QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 is a single-site, non-interventional clinical performance study conducted at Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) under ISO 20916:2019 as a Clinical Performance Study Protocol. De-identified tertiary cancer genomics reports from pediatric oncology cases are summarised by the AI-assisted summarisation system under evaluation and, in parallel, by the standard manual workflow. Qualified raters score both summary types against the source genomics report using the Quality Summary Index (QSI), a six-dimension, five-point rubric adapted from the Provider Documentation Summarization Quality Instrument, under a blinded, counterbalanced, two-period crossover with a minimum fourteen-day washout. Two co-primary composite endpoints, content and presentation, are analysed for non-inferiority under a Bayesian hierarchical model, with a frequentist linear mixed model as the convergence check. Inter-rater reliability is reported as Krippendorff's ; a Monte-Carlo power analysis of the fixed clustered design is pre-specified. Discussion. The design isolates summarisation quality from clinical decision-making by scoring both summary types against the same source report under blinding, counterbalancing, and a fourteen-day washout. Conclusion. The QSI rubric, the counterbalanced crossover, and the pre-specified Bayesian primary with frequentist convergence check define a replicable protocol for early-stage evaluation of AI-assisted summarisation in tertiary genomics reporting; observed variance components will inform sample-size determination for Phase 2.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Atlas of glomerular disease-specific genetic effects on blood transcriptome

IgA nephropathy (IgAN), IgA vasculitis (IgAV), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), membranous nephropathy (MN), and minimal change disease (MCD) account for the majority of idiopathic glomerulo-nephropathies (GN). These disorders involve immune system dysregulation and have a complex genetic architecture. Currently, there are no adequately powered blood transcriptomic datasets coupled to genetic data from patients with GN that can delineate disease-context specific genetic effects on blood immune cell transcriptome. We performed whole genome sequencing coupled with bulk blood transcriptome sequencing on 1,822 participants from the CureGN study, a prospective cohort of participants with a kidney biopsy diagnosis of primary GN. We generated disease-context specific transcriptome-wide maps of gene expression QTL (eQTL), splicing QTL (sQTL), and double strand RNA-editing QTL (edQTL) for FSGS (N=447), IgAN (N=403), IgAV (N=123), MCD (N=408), and MN (N=441), as well as cross-disease maps for all 1,822 participants. Our QTL mapping identified 16,068 eGenes, 4,644 sGenes and 4,611 edQTLs with an FDR

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

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Metis: Bridging Text and Code Memory for Self-Evolving Agents

Self-evolving agents improve over time by distilling experience from past executions and reusing it in future tasks. Existing systems represent such experience either as natural-language text injected into the agent context or as code exposed as callable tools. However, the choice between these representations is typically made at design time rather than derived from the characteristics of the experience itself, leaving the trade-offs between them poorly understood. We present the first controlled study that isolates text memory and code memory over an identical set of experiences. Our results show that the two forms exhibit complementary trade-offs in construction cost, execution efficiency, and transferability, such that neither representation alone is sufficient. Guided by these findings, we propose Metis, a self-evolving agent system built on a hierarchical dual-representation memory. Metis organizes textual experience into execution plans, environment facts, and common pitfalls, and selectively crystallizes recurring plans into validated callable tools. This design combines the broad applicability of text memory with the execution efficiency of code memory while incurring tool-generation cost only when justified by repeated reuse. We evaluate Metis on AppWorld, a challenging benchmark for interactive agents. The results show that Metis improves task accuracy by up to 20.6% over ReAct while reducing execution cost by up to 22.8%. Compared with representative self-evolving agent systems, Metis consistently achieves a better balance between accuracy, execution efficiency, and memory-construction cost.

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

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

Authors:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X chromosome

Sirtuins are deacetylases implicated in stress responses and longevity in mammals1,2. Although their differential impact on disease for the two sexes has been noted3–7, the underlying reasons are unclear. Here, using Sirt7 as a model in mice, we examine the mechanisms leading to sex differences and find that Sirt7−/− female mice have decreased fitness throughout their lifespan. Notably, SIRT7 preferentially localizes to the sex chromosomes. In female individuals, SIRT7 loss affects X-chromosome inactivation, the first arm of dosage compensation that equalizes X-linked gene expression between males and females8–10. Xist is overexpressed and gene silencing becomes more efficient. However, SIRT7 loss has greatest impact on the active X (Xa) chromosome. The Xa chromosome becomes hyperacetylated at Lys36 of histone H3, structurally disorganized, prone to DNA damage and overexpressed. Increased Xa-chromosome expression leads to genome imbalance and augmented X-chromosome upregulation—the second arm of dosage compensation that balances X-chromosome versus autosomal gene expression. These data reveal an essential crosstalk between sirtuins and the sex chromosomes, with SIRT7 safeguarding X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes. We propose that the sex bias in SIRT7 biology can be explained in part by unequal effects on the sex chromosomes. SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinician knowledge and self-efficacy in snakebite management: A cross-sectional assessment in Northern Uganda

Background: Snakebite envenomation (SBE) is a major public health crisis in rural Uganda, yet it remains a neglected tropical disease. Effective management is often compromised by systemic barriers and a lack of clinician training. This study assessed clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge regarding SBE management in Northern Uganda. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted between February and July 2025 among 379 healthcare workers in Gulu, Omoro, and Pader districts. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographics, self-reported efficacy (scale 1-10), and objective knowledge. Knowledge scores [&ge;]70% were categorized as adequate. Multivariable logistic regression identified independent predictors of adequate knowledge, and Spearmans correlation ({rho}) assessed the relationship between knowledge and self-efficacy. Results: The participants had a mean age of 35.6 years (SD {+/-}7.3), were predominantly female (56.5%, 214/379), and most (83.6%, 317/379) practiced at Health Centre III level facilities. While 53.8% (204/379) reported prior training, 48.3% (183/379) of these had not received an update in over 10 years. Adequate knowledge was demonstrated by 51.5% (195/379) of participants. In the multivariable analysis, practicing in Omoro (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 0.3, 95% CI: 0.1-0.6, p < 0.001) or Pader (aOR: 0.2, 95% CI: 0.1-0.4, p < 0.001) was associated with lower odds of adequate knowledge compared to Gulu district. Prior training significantly increased the odds of adequate knowledge (aOR: 2.3, 95% CI: 1.3-4.2, p = 0.006). A moderate positive correlation was observed between self-efficacy and objective knowledge (Spearmans {rho} = 0.33, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Approximately half of the frontline healthcare workers in Northern Uganda lack adequate knowledge on SBE management, with significant geographic differences and outdated training. The gap between clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge poses a risk to patient safety. Regular, mandatory refresher training and targeted educational outreach to remote districts are required to reduce SBE-related morbidity and mortality.

10.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Observation of quantum vortex core fractionalization and skyrmion formation in a superconductor | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Magnetic fields can penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantum vortices, which consist of a core singularity with circulating currents. London’s quantization implies that there is one core singularity per quantum of magnetic flux in single-component superconductors. Here, we report signatures of quantum vortex core fractionalization on the potassium-terminated surface of a multiband superconductor KFe 2 As 2 . The observed splitting of single integer-flux vortices into several fractional vortices results in a disparity between the numbers of flux quanta and vortex cores. These fractional vortices often arrange in chains, which calculations show are characterized by a ℂP 2 skyrmionic topological invariant; this constitutes a different type of topological defect: the chiral skyrmion. The disparate natures of integer and fractional vortices comprising skyrmions lead to distinct spectroscopic signatures.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

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

Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure

arXiv:2606.18154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building personalized cardiac electrophysiology (EP) digital twins requires identifying the appropriate model structure for each patient, not merely fitting parameters. Traditional methods rely on experts to manually prescribe hybrid physics-neural architectures, which requires deep domain expertise and does not transfer across patients. Recent works have applied large language models (LLMs) to generate or act as hybrid models. However, despite their promising generalization capacity, these LLM-based methods lack the structural priors needed for stable cardiac simulations. Hence, we propose LEADS, a framework that formulates cardiac EP domain knowledge as a structured action space and utilizes an LLM agent to discover hybrid models. The agent follows an iterative reasoning-and-action loop to select, combine, and refine hybrid models, whilst gradient descent handles parameter fitting. The proposed LEADS designs every candidate model towards physically grounded, interpretable, and numerically stable, while allowing open-ended architectural discovery. We validate LEADS on synthetic data with three ground-truth reaction models and on real cardiac EP data, demonstrating that it outperforms both human-designed hybrid models and other LLM-based hybrid modeling.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Examining the Usage of Generative AI Models in Student Learning Activities for Software Programming

arXiv:2511.13271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student performance, often overlooking its effects on knowledge gains. In this study, we investigate how GenAI assistance compares to conventional online resources in supporting knowledge gains across different proficiency levels. We conducted a controlled user experiment with 24 undergraduate students of two different levels of programming experience (beginner, intermediate) to examine how students interact with ChatGPT while solving programming tasks. We analyzed task performance, conceptual understanding, and interaction behaviors. Our findings reveal that generating complete solutions with GenAI significantly improves task performance, especially for beginners, but does not consistently result in knowledge gains. Importantly, usage strategies differ by experience: beginners tend to rely heavily on GenAI toward task completion often without knowledge gain in the process, while intermediates adopt more selective approaches. We find that both over-reliance and minimal use result in weaker knowledge gains overall. Based on our results, we call on students and educators to adopt GenAI as a learning rather than a problem solving tool. Our study highlights the urgent need for guidance when integrating GenAI into programming education to foster deeper understanding.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains

Speech foundation models often struggle in low-resource domains due to domain mismatch and data scarcity. We propose Gumbel-BEARD, a domain adaptation framework that automates Whisper encoder layer selection via an end-to-end trainable hard Gumbel-Softmax selector. It enables self-supervised adaptation with a BEST-RQ objective that dynamically adapts to target acoustic characteristics without manual tuning. Experiments on the MyST child speech corpus demonstrate efficiency and scalability: with 10 h of labeled data for fine-tuning, our method matches a fully supervised baseline trained on the complete 133 h labeled set. We establish new state-of-the-art word error rates (WERs) of 8.21% using Whisper-medium on MyST and 11.06% using Whisper-small on the OGI Spontaneous dataset. Evaluation on CORAAL further confirms robustness to adult dialectal domain shifts, with up to 6% relative WER reduction, highlighting the generalizability of our approach to diverse low-resource conditions.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

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

Authors:

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

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

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

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

Structure-Aware Text Recognition for Ancient Greek Critical Editions

Recent advances in visual language models (VLMs) have transformed end-to-end document understanding. However, their ability to interpret the complex layout semantics of historical scholarly texts remains limited. This paper investigates structure-aware text recognition for Ancient Greek critical editions, which have dense reference hierarchies and extensive marginal annotations. We introduce two novel resources: (i) a large-scale synthetic corpus of 185,000 page images generated from TEI/XML sources with controlled typographic and layout variation, and (ii) a curated benchmark of real scanned editions spanning more than a century of editorial and typographic practices. Using these datasets, we evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in current VLM architectures when confronted with highly structured historical documents. In zero-shot settings, most models significantly underperform compared to established off-the-shelf software. Nevertheless, the Qwen3VL-8B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a median Character Error Rate of 1.0\% on real scans. These results highlight both the current shortcomings and the future potential of VLMs for structure-aware recognition of complex scholarly documents.

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

Curvature-Informed Potential Energy Surface for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery. Recent geometric deep learning methods have achieved promising performance by representing protein-ligand complexes as three-dimensional graphs. However, most existing approaches mainly rely on static interaction geometry from a single bound conformation, while neglecting molecular flexibility and binding-induced conformational changes. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-informed potential energy surface (CPES) graph neural network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, which incorporates physics-informed curvature representations to model conformational flexibility. CPES first derives curvature spectral descriptors from the Hessian of the potential energy surface evaluated at equilibrium configurations, whose eigenvalues define the local principal curvatures of the potential energy surface. It then uses spectral cross-attention to compare the unbound ligand and protein with the bound complex, thereby capturing binding-induced changes in conformational dynamics. In parallel, hierarchical protein-ligand interaction representations are learned from static structural features through geometry-aware message passing, soft clustering, and bidirectional cross-attention. Finally, CPES fuses the curvature-informed dynamic representations with static interaction representations for affinity regression. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPES achieves improved predictive performance and offers physical interpretability.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction

arXiv:2606.16611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust prediction infers latent user-user trust relations and provides important support for social recommendation, fake-review and manipulation detection, and risk identification. Graph neural networks have become a prominent approach to trust prediction because of their ability to learn network structures and complex trust dependencies. However, existing methods often rely on a unified representation of trust signals and do not disentangle heterogeneous trust evidence into separate evidence channels, failing to exploit the distinct roles that different evidence channels should play during trust modeling. To address this gap, this paper argues that trust evidence should not be treated as an undifferentiated input, but should be decomposed and used as functional control factors over graph propagation. We propose TCHG, a tri-trust conditioned heterogeneous graph learning framework that decomposes trust evidence into three channels and assigns them distinct functional roles in propagation: entity reliability governs message admission, interaction-behavior reliability modulates propagation strength, and contextual trust adjusts the propagation mode through context-conditioned operator selection. Since the three evidence channels evolve at different temporal scales, TCHG maintains independent temporal states with non-uniform decay rates to prevent rapidly changing contextual signals from overwriting slowly accumulated entity reliability. It further predicts trust probability and calibrates the output probability, improving predictive confidence under sparse or conflicting evidence. Extensive experiments on multiple public trust datasets show that TCHG achieves effective and reliable trust prediction compared with representative trust prediction and heterogeneous graph baselines.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv:2510.01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Similar trends hold for OpenHands, SWE-Agent, and OpenAI Codex, suggesting our JAWS-Bench is agent-agnostic. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Scaling Laws for Agent Harnesses via Effective Feedback Compute

Agent harnesses shape language-model performance by controlling tool use, feedback, verification, memory, and repair. Yet raw test-time expenditure, such as tokens, tool calls, wall time, or cost, cannot distinguish useful feedback from redundant or unstable interaction. We introduce Effective Feedback Compute (EFC), a trace-level scaling coordinate for informative, valid, non-redundant, and retained feedback. We further define Estimated-EFC, NRS-EFC, harness efficiency $\eta$, and task-demand normalization for realistic traces and heterogeneous tasks. Across synthetic, real, held-out, and prospective evaluations, EFC-based coordinates outperform raw-compute baselines and SAS. Oracle-EFC/$D_{\mathrm{task}}$ reaches $R^2=0.99$ in controlled scaling, and NRS-EFC/$D_{\mathrm{task}}$ reaches $R^2=0.93$ on real traces where raw compute has near-zero or negative fit. Finally, \ours uses EFC as a companion control layer for existing harnesses, improving mean pass rate from $61.2\%$ to $68.2\%$ while reducing mean raw cost from $213.8$ to $85.1$ under matched settings. These results suggest that harness scaling depends on durable, task-sufficient feedback rather than raw computation alone.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606.19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose MetaResearcher, a novel framework that scales deep research agent training across four synergistic dimensions. First, we introduce an Evolving Virtual World that injects temporal dynamics and adversarial misinformation into the training environment, forcing agents to develop source credibility assessment and temporal conflict resolution skills. Second, we design Discovery-Oriented Tasks – including hypothesis generation and contradiction resolution – that transcend simple fact retrieval and push agents toward genuine research behaviors. Third, we propose a Self-Reflective Meta-Reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that jointly optimizes for answer correctness, search path efficiency, reflection depth, and tool call diversity, directly addressing the repetitive action loop problem observed in prior work. Fourth, we introduce a Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Swarm architecture comprising specialized Scout, Filter, and Synthesizer models that learn collaborative research strategies through coordinated reinforcement learning. Built upon the LiteResearcher infrastructure, MetaResearcher requires zero marginal API cost for training while targeting substantial improvements in both benchmark performance (GAIA, Xbench-DS) and epistemic robustness under adversarial conditions. We present the complete framework design, training methodology, and planned experimental validation.

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

FlowPipe: LLM-Enhanced Conditional Generative Flow Networks for Data Preparation Pipeline Construction

arXiv:2606.24679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment, dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two benchmark suites with 74 real-world datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

BATTLE-AMP: Benchmarking Antimicrobial Peptide Predictors

As antimicrobial resistance outpaces antibiotic development, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have emerged as a promising class of alternative antibacterials, and computational predictors are increasingly used to prioritize AMP candidates. Such predictors are typically evaluated on binary AMP/non-AMP classification, which does not test whether they can identify peptides with clinically relevant potency against specific pathogens. We present BATTLE-AMP, a benchmarking framework that evaluates AMP predictors against experimentally measured minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) across clinically relevant bacterial species and strains. We surveyed 48 published methods, finding fewer than 25% reproducible, and benchmarked 10 model families (21 variants) using experimental MIC data, synthetic sequence perturbations, activity cliff analyses, and all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Four findings emerge: (i) models trained on MIC data outperform binary classifiers regardless of architecture; (ii) the best model depends on the target pathogen, so model selection must be guided by the biological question; (iii) most models cannot distinguish active peptides from inactive sequences with identical amino acid composition; and (iv) activity cliffs remain unresolved by both machine learning and MD, marking a limit of current computational methods. BATTLE-AMP is released as an open Snakemake framework at https://github.com/szczurek-lab/battleamp-snakemake for benchmarking new models and scoring novel candidate libraries.