A treasure trove of Neolithic necklace beads
Archaeological findings from Italy, and machines with a life of their own, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive. Snippets from Nature’s past.
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。
Archaeological findings from Italy, and machines with a life of their own, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive. Snippets from Nature’s past.
arXiv:2606.24902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The "First Proof" benchmark [1] posed ten research-level mathematics questions to the strongest publicly available LLMs and found them consistently wrong-not silent, but confidently, fluently wrong. This paper asks why. Working from the per-question post-mortems in First Proof's Appendix A, I identify four failure modes: citation fabrication (F1), premise smuggling (F2), silent problem reformulation (F3), and local-to-global compatibility gaps (F4). I then audit eight one-shot proofs generated by Gemini 2.5 Flash on Questions 1, 2, and 5 of the benchmark, using two instruments built specifically to surface F1 and F2. The central finding is uncomfortable for anyone who sees retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as the obvious fix: not one of the eight proofs contained a confirmed fabricated citation, yet every single one contained at least one load-bearing claim asserted as a "fundamental result" or "standard argument" with no justification attached. That failure mode-F2, premise smuggling-is invisible to citation verification by design. A premise-audit instrument I introduce flags it at 100% precision (5/5 judge-confirmed flags are true positives) and 50% proof-level recall in this corpus. The taxonomy and the audit together suggest that the right long-term objective is building inference-time pipelines that prevent these failure modes from occurring, not just detecting them after the fact. Index Terms–Large language models, mathematical reasoning, hallucination, premise smuggling, failure-mode taxonomy.
arXiv:2606.16073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines.
arXiv:2606.16765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating neural operators for 3D turbulent flow requires validated datasets with physical benchmarks. We present a reproducible pipeline generating training data for 3D channel flows around generated geometries at Re=1,000-10,000. Our lattice Boltzmann solver with cumulant collision operators is rigorously verified against experimental measurements (Strouhal number, drag coefficients, turbulent fluctuations) with comprehensive grid convergence studies at resolution 1024x512x512. Building upon an established framework, this validated pipeline enables standardized surrogate model comparison. We outline planned systematic evaluation of Fourier Neural Operator and U-Net variants on forecasting, super-resolution, and error correction tasks, using physics-informed metrics to assess turbulent energy cascade representation. Future work will compare computational efficiency between numerical solvers and neural surrogates, exploring practical application. We seek community feedback on our validation approach, planned benchmark methodology, and evaluation priorities for neural operators in turbulent flows.
Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.
arXiv:2606.15199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive warning is an important capability for edge intelligent services, where the system predicts whether a subject will successfully complete an incoming task under strict latency and privacy constraints. Such prediction depends on both long-term static attributes and short-term dynamic states derived from historical interaction logs. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong long-context reasoning for constructing structured profiles from these logs, but existing solutions face two challenges for edge deployment: (1) profiling methods are typically domain-specific and lack a reusable abstraction across service scenarios, and (2) fine-tuning alignment models on heterogeneous edge clusters incurs high synchronization overhead due to the variance in input sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose CogGuard, a proactive-warning framework for edge intelligent services. CogGuard decouples offline LLM-based profile construction from online Small Language Model (SLM)-based score prediction through a shared static-dynamic profile-to-score pipeline, and instantiates it in two representative scenarios: educational performance warning and operational task outcome warning. For efficient profile construction, we design scenario-specific profiling methods with prefix-aligned KV-cache reuse to reduce repeated encoding overhead. For edge-side model alignment, we propose a length-aware distributed fine-tuning strategy with contrastive regularization to mitigate workload imbalance on heterogeneous clusters. Experiments on education and operation datasets show that CogGuard reduces profile construction time by up to 48% and distributed fine-tuning time by 19%, while achieving MAEs of 13.4 and 5.9, respectively, on 100-point-scale warning tasks. In the largest educational setting, CogGuard reduces prediction error by 15.4% compared with the strongest baseline.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored. We present TW-LegalBench that utilizes Taiwanese legal system's rich official corpus open to the public to fill the gap in evaluating LLMs on Taiwanese law, among common-law benchmarks that focus on English sources and civil-law benchmarks focusing on sources of Simplified Chinese. TW-LegalBench comprises three task types: (1) over 16,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across five years of official examinations in 18 professional domains; (2) 117 open-ended essay questions (OEQs) from examinations for legal professionals with official scoring rubrics; and (3) more than 14,000 legal judgment prediction (LJP) instances covering hundreds of crime categories. We evaluate 13 LLMs using accuracy for MCQs, a decomposed LLM-as-Judge framework based on the scoring rubric points for OEQs, and metrics for sentencing accuracy and statute citation for LJP. Our results reveal that top-performing models exceed the passing threshold for qualified lawyers (passing rate: 11%) but fall short of that for judges and prosecutors (passing rate: 1~2%). For LJP, while models demonstrate reasonable verdict type accuracy and sentence prediction capability, they struggle to cite exact legal articles. These findings highlight that reliable legal text generation remains challenging for LLMs, even though their performance on qualification examinations approaches human level.
arXiv:2606.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling for agentic search typically increases depth (i.e., more turns and tokens per trajectory) or breadth (i.e., more parallel rollouts). Here we focus on breadth scaling, showing that standard parallel sampling yields diminishing returns, tracing this to query redundancy at the first turn. When models issue similar first queries across rollouts, the threads retrieve overlapping evidence, and subsequent turns are conditioned on this shared retrieval. We address this limitation with DivInit, a training-free intervention at the first turn. Rather than sampling k independent first queries, DivInit draws n candidates from a single call, picks k < n diverse seeds, and runs them as parallel trajectories. Across five open-weight models and eight benchmarks, DivInit consistently improves over standard parallel sampling, with average gains of five to seven points on multi-hop QA at matched compute. Code available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/diverse-query-initialization
arXiv:2606.21122v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study negative eigenvalues of $n\times n$ stochastic matrices whose off-diagonal support is constrained by a sparse graph. The main tool is a matching-based inertia principle: if $G$ is bipartite with matching number $\mu(G)$, $S$ is a real symmetric matrix supported on $G$ with nonnegative diagonal entries and whose negative index (i.e. number of negative eigenvalues counted with their multiplicities) is denoted by $\nu_{-}(S) $, then \[ \nu_{-}(S)\leq \mu(G). \] In particular, every $n\times n$ nonnegative tridiagonal stochastic matrix $P$ satisfies $ \nu_{-}(P)\leq \left\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor. $ Consequently, after ordering the eigenvalues of $P$ in the decreasing order, we have $ \lambda_{\lceil n/2\rceil}(P)\geq0, \ and hence \ \lambda_2(P)\geq0, \mbox{ for } n\geq3. $ This gives an all-dimensional strengthening of the previously known $4\times4$ tridiagonal stochastic result. Next, we show that this tridiagonal bound is sharp in every dimension in both reducible and irreducible cases. Finally, we explore some possible extension and raise some open questions.
arXiv:2606.16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) systems often degrade when operating conditions differ from those previously encountered, reflecting distributional shifts in the underlying data-generating process. Such shifts may occur between training and evaluation, as in In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, or within non-stationary settings where environment dynamics evolve over time. However, the formal relationship between these views remains unclear, and existing work mainly focuses on mitigation rather than the causal origin of shift within the agent-environment interaction. This work develops a unified causal-origin taxonomy that characterizes sources of distributional shift in RL and relates ID/OOD generalization to non-stationary settings. We transfer the classical dataset-shift principle from supervised learning to RL by reformulating distributional shift in terms of the generative interaction process. Using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), we decompose the interaction into structural components, including the state distribution, observation process, policy, reward, and transition dynamics, together with the shifted-time boundary. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes internal, agent-driven, and external, environment-driven, distributional shifts. The shifted-time boundary perspective further characterizes explicit, implicit, and hybrid shifts. This formulation unifies ID/OOD generalization and non-stationarity as structured changes in the underlying process. We also introduce an evaluation framework for measuring shift impact and adaptation through performance degradation and recovery metrics. By grounding distributional shift in the causal-origin structure of RL, this work supports systematic analysis of robustness under distributional shift.
Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touché ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8-4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.
Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.
Physics-grounded video generation requires controllable 3D object dynamics that remain physically consistent under contact, deformation, and external forcing. Existing trajectory-based methods often model isolated physical effects, making it difficult to compose conservative and non-conservative dynamics in contact-rich 3D scenes. We present NEXUS, a neural energy-field framework for contact-rich 3D object dynamics. NEXUS represents each object as a structural graph and constructs dynamic object-object and object-environment contact graphs. Inspired by Hamiltonian Neural Networks, NEXUS formulates motion through scalar energy and dissipation terms rather than directly predicting states or accelerations. Conservative effects, including gravity and elastic deformation, are composed as additive energy terms, while non-conservative effects such as damping and impact-induced energy loss are modeled with learned Rayleigh-style dissipation. Forces are derived by differentiating the energy and dissipation functions and rolled out with a multi-substep semi-implicit integrator. Across controlled trajectory benchmarks, NEXUS improves long-horizon accuracy over representative learned and physics-structured dynamics baselines under varying mechanical properties and physical-effect compositions. We further show that NEXUS trajectories provide effective guidance for contact-rich video generation, improving physical plausibility while maintaining competitive visual quality.
arXiv:2606.23858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A primary challenge in AI safety is the existence of adversarial examples – slightly distorted inputs that cause a neural network (NN) to misclassify. To mitigate this problem, recent research focuses on the computation of robustness certifications, which, for a given input, determine the largest distortion the input may receive without breaking the network's prediction. Robustness certifications can be interpreted as an axis-aligned hyper-rectangle (multi-dimensional intervals). Most existing approaches focus on maximizing the certification's volume, but recent intractability results prohibit the computation of volume-optimal certifications in reasonable time. We introduce the apothem measure and show how to compute apothem-optimal certifications in a linear number of calls to a NN verifier (oracle) w.r.t. the input domain's diameter. Moreover, we prove that we cannot have a volume-optimal, oracle-based algorithm, even if we discard the oracle costs. Also, we introduce dual certifications – an interval including all instances of a class – thus providing apothem-minimum upper bounds to a robustness certification. Further, we present the ParallelepipedoNN system, which we evaluate on the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST benchmarks. A preliminary comparison with existing work on the same datasets reveals at least two-fold improvement w.r.t. the minimum edge length.
该条目无摘要(多为勘误、社论或新闻类内容,出版方未提供摘要)
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from ambient sensors enables smart-home applications such as health monitoring and assisted living. In realistic deployments, however, sensor events arrive as a continuous stream and activity boundaries are unknown. Sliding-window inference therefore produces many windows that straddle transitions and contain mixed activities, creating boundary contamination that violates the pre-segmented instance assumption used by most benchmarks and models. Moreover, many pipelines under-use spatial context by treating sensor IDs as independent tokens. We present LastAct, a trajectory-centric framework for streaming smart-home HAR that targets the most recent activity under mixed windows while explicitly modeling spatial structure. LastAct projects sensor events onto the home floorplan to form a layout-aligned trajectory image sequence that preserves spatial continuity. A lightweight gate identifies contaminated windows, and a boundary localizer estimates the last transition to enable boundary-guided masking that emphasizes post-boundary evidence and suppresses stale context. For efficiency, we reuse a precomputed layout-aligned template cache to avoid repeated rendering. Empirically, across four public smart-home datasets under near-realistic mixed-activity protocols, LastAct achieves competitive or superior performance on pure windows and yields substantial Macro-F1 gains on cross/mixed windows, demonstrating improved robustness under near-realistic sliding-window regimes.
arXiv:2602.09258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deployed graph neural networks (GNNs) are frozen at deployment yet must fit clean data, generalize under distribution shifts, and remain stable to perturbations. We show that static inference induces a fundamental tradeoff: improving stability requires reducing reliance on shift-sensitive features, leaving an irreducible worst-case generalization floor. Instance-conditional routing can break this ceiling, but is fragile because shifts can mislead routing and perturbations can make routing fluctuate. We capture these effects via two decompositions separating coverage vs selection, and base sensitivity vs fluctuation amplification. Based on these insights, we propose STEM-GNN, a pretrain-then-finetune framework with a mixture-of-experts encoder for diverse computation paths, a vector-quantized token interface to stabilize encoder-to-head signals, and a Lipschitz-regularized head to bound output amplification. Across nine node, link, and graph benchmarks, STEM-GNN achieves a stronger three-way balance, improving robustness to degree/homophily shifts and to feature/edge corruptions while remaining competitive on clean graphs.
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities. However, further enhancing existing MLLMs necessitates high-quality vision-language datasets with carefully curated task complexities, which are both costly and challenging to scale. Although recent self-improving models that iteratively refine themselves offer a feasible solution, they still suffer from two core challenges: (i) most existing methods augment visual or textual data separately, resulting in discrepancies in data complexity (e.g., over-simplified diagrams paired with redundant textual descriptions); and (ii) the evolution of data and models is also separated, leading to scenarios where models are exposed to tasks with mismatched difficulty levels. To address these issues, we propose C2-Evo, an automatic, closed-loop self-improving framework that jointly evolves both training data and model capabilities. Specifically, given a base dataset and a base model, C2-Evo enhances them by a cross-modal data evolution loop and a data-model evolution loop. The former loop expands the base dataset by generating complex multimodal problems that combine structured textual sub-problems with iteratively specified geometric diagrams, while the latter loop adaptively selects the generated problems based on the performance of the base model, to conduct supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning alternately. Consequently, our method continuously refines its model and training data, and consistently obtains considerable performance gains across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code, models, and datasets will be released.
arXiv:2606.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction is important for intelligent shipping, maritime surveillance, and navigation safety. However, existing public maritime AIS resources are often limited by inconsistent forecasting protocols, uneven data quality, and the lack of benchmark-ready contextual annotations, which hinder fair comparison and context-aware modeling. To address this gap, we present EnvShip-Bench, a unified benchmark for short-term vessel trajectory prediction built from large-scale raw AIS data from the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and NOAA through a common processing pipeline. EnvShip-Bench adopts a standardized forecasting protocol with 10 minutes of observation, 10 minutes of prediction, and 20-second sampling in vessel-centric local metric coordinates. Beyond the large-scale core benchmark, it provides a quality-first compact subset for efficient and reproducible experimentation, together with synchronized environmental and nearby-vessel context extensions. As a result, EnvShip-Bench supports trajectory-only, environment-aware, and interaction-aware forecasting under a unified evaluation framework. Extensive benchmark statistics and analysis demonstrate that EnvShip-Bench offers a standardized, extensible, and context-aware foundation for maritime trajectory forecasting research.
arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.
arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.
A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.
Worldwide image geolocalization-the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth-poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a two-stage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods.
Background Despite WHO grade and IDH status, significant survival differences remain in diffuse gliomas. We hypothesized that a brain-aging transcriptomic signature, reflecting neuroinflammation, myeloid infiltration, and synaptic loss, would independently predict survival and allow for molecular reclassification. Methods A neurodegeneration score was derived via PCA of brain MRI volumes from 1,057 OASIS-3 subjects and projected onto 888 TCGA-LGG/GBM (discovery) and 693 CGGA gliomas (validation). A 14-gene signature of glial/myeloid (GFAP, AQP4, TYROBP, TREM2, C1QA, CD68, ITGAM) and neuronal (SYP, DLG4, GRIN1, GRIA1, SNAP25, SYN1, RBFOX3) genes were computed. Elastic-net Cox regression identified a 3-gene panel (C1QA, CD68, GRIA1). Kaplan-Meier, multivariate Cox, decision curve, and single-cell RNA-seq analyses were performed. Results High brain-aging scores predicted poorer overall survival (p < 0.0001) and remained an independent prognostic factor after adjusting for WHO grade and IDH status (z = 4.72, p < 0.001); chronological age was non-significant (p = 0.231). In IDH-mutant gliomas, significance was confirmed in both cohorts (TCGA p = 0.027; CGGA p < 0.0001). Bidirectional reclassification showed high-risk Grade 2 tumors with Grade 3-like survival (p = 0.00089), and indolent Grade 3 tumors resembling Grade 2 by Ki-67. Single-cell RNA-seq confirmed macrophage localization of signature genes; DCA demonstrated net benefit over grade alone at 5-30% probability thresholds. Conclusions A brain-aging transcriptomic signature independently predicts glioma survival beyond WHO grade and IDH status, validated in an independent Chinese cohort, with clinical utility for identifying high-risk Grade 2 and sparing over-treatment of indolent Grade 3 tumors.
arXiv:2606.14177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In distributed quantum networks, interacting spin systems can mediate the generation of highly entangled links between distant nodes. We investigate the role of effective parity-time (PT)-symmetric non-Hermitian spin-1/2 bulks weakly coupled to two quantum links, obtained due to the environmental interactions affecting both the bulk and the links. Focusing on effective non-Hermitian nearest-neighbor (NN) Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models, we analyze how non-Hermiticity influences the dynamical formation of long-distance entanglement (LDE). For a paradigmatic model consisting of a quantum XX bulk subjected to imaginary staggered magnetic fields, we analytically determine the exceptional points arising from the resulting bulk-mediated interactions between the links. Combining analytical and numerical methods, we demonstrate that an initially fully separable state can dynamically evolve into highly entangled link states near these exceptional points in the broken regime. Further, after optimizing over time and system parameters, near-unit time-averaged entanglement between the links emerges under weak imaginary magnetic fields and bulk-link couplings, which cannot be attained in the corresponding Hermitian systems. Moreover, the non-Hermitian dynamics exhibit a freezing of high entanglement in the vicinity of exceptional points, a feature absent in Hermitian counterparts. We also identify regimes of long-range interaction strengths that yield a higher time-averaged entanglement than the corresponding NN models. Furthermore, we establish that LDE persists in the stationary regime, highlighting the promise of engineered non-Hermitian dynamics for realizing robust and frozen entangled links in quantum networks.