Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

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。

01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Cell-type resolved transcriptional network analysis of <i>in vivo</i> cellular senescence following injury

作者:

by Alda Sabalic, Victoria Moiseeva, Andres Cisneros, Oleg Deryagin, Eusebio Perdiguero, Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo Identifying the genetic correlates of complex phenotypes is a challenging task. Methods coming from the field of complex networks can help finding such molecular patterns, by revealing statistical associations among groups of genes that correlate with the phenotype. Here we study cellular senescence, a complex cell state whose molecular underpinnings are still under active investigation. We analyze cell type–resolved RNA sequencing data obtained from injured muscle tissue in mice, with a network-based approach that merges eigenvector centrality feature selection and community detection. Our analysis identifies genetic markers that had not been associated with senescence so far, which are validated with existing single-cell RNA sequencing data in a different type of tissue. The identified key genes belong to transcriptional pathways associated with established hallmarks of senescence, and thus can be interpreted as molecular correlates of such hallmarks. The method proposed here could be applied to any complex cellular phenotype even when only bulk RNA sequencing is available, provided the data is resolved by cell type.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Crossing the Validation Crisis: Cross-Validation Reduces Benchmarking Variance Surprisingly Well

arXiv:2606.12552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern machine learning progresses through empirical work, benchmarking new methods to evaluate relative performance. However, the statistical variability inherent to evaluation - exacerbated by the stochastic nature of many algorithms - often makes performance estimation unreliable due to the limited test samples available, leading to a validation crisis in which genuine advances are difficult to discern. In this work, we show that cross-validation improves markedly confidence when evaluating and comparing learning algorithm performances. We introduce the concept of sample gain, which quantifies the virtual data augmentation achieved by using multiple cross-validation splits to reduce benchmarking variance. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets (histopathologic scans and NLP fine-tuning) demonstrate that multiple splits can substantially improve the reliability and stability of performance estimates, with diminishing returns often setting in later than expected. We also introduce a procedure to dynamically early-stop cross-validation by estimating from the first few folds if subsequent folds will bring large sample gains. Our findings highlight the value of pushing cross-validation on available samples to achieve robust and reliable benchmarking.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents

arXiv:2602.14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface. A malicious or compromised skill can be repeatedly loaded as trusted guidance and steer downstream tool use. Existing skill-based prompt-injection attacks are often manual and brittle, because explicit malicious instructions are rejected or ignored when they are not aligned with the original workflow. We propose SkillJect, the first automated framework for generating poisoned skills against skill-enabled agent systems. SkillJect uses two coordinated channels. In the artifact channel, it hides the payload inside an auxiliary helper script. In the instruction channel, it rewrites SKILL.md with a front-loaded inducement strategy, placing injected content at the beginning and framing the helper script as a mandatory prerequisite or initialization step. The rewritten instruction explicitly references the helper-script path and provides an executable example command, making the helper appear to be a legitimate setup step before normal skill operations. SkillJect further adopts a closed-loop multi-agent process to improve attack effectiveness. An Attack Agent generates poisoned skills, a Victim Agent executes downstream tasks with the poisoned skill, and an Evaluate Agent inspects execution traces to determine whether the hidden payload was executed. The Attack Agent then uses this feedback to diagnose failure causes and rewrite SKILL.md, while keeping the payload fixed. Experiments across skill-enabled platforms, backend LLMs, and attack categories show that SkillJect substantially outperforms naive direct injection and prior manual skill-injection attacks, highlighting poisoned skills as a persistent threat in reusable skill ecosystems.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Communication Complexity of Distributed Unitary Synthesis

arXiv:2511.04250v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study space-bounded communication complexity for unitary implementation in distributed quantum processors, where we restrict the number of qubits per processor to ensure practical relevance and technical non-triviality. We model distributed quantum processors using distributed quantum circuits with nonlocal two-qubit gates, defining the distributed communication complexity of a unitary as the minimum number of such nonlocal gates required for its realization, up to permutations of data qubit positions. Our contributions are twofold. First, for general $n$-qubit unitaries, we improve upon the trivial $O(4^n)$ communication bound. Considering $k$ pairwise-connected processors (each with $n/k$ data qubits and $m$ ancillas), we prove the communication complexity satisfies $O\left(\max\{4^{(1-1/k)n - m}, n\}\right)$ – for example, $O(2^n)$ when $m=0$ and $k=2$ – and establish the tightness of this upper bound. We further extend the analysis to approximation models and general network topologies. Second, for special unitaries, we show that both the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) and Clifford circuits admit linear upper bounds on communication complexity in the exact model, outperforming the trivial quadratic bounds applicable to these cases. In the approximation model, QFT's communication complexity reduces drastically from linear to logarithmic, while Clifford circuits retain a linear lower bound. These results offer fundamental insights for optimizing communication in distributed quantum unitary implementation, advancing the feasibility of large-scale DQC systems.

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

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a de facto backbone of modern visual generation, and nearly every major axis of their design – tokenization, attention, conditioning, objectives, and latent autoencoders – has been extensively revisited. The residual stream that governs how information accumulates across layers, however, has been directly inherited from the original Transformer. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis of cross-layer information flow in DiTs, jointly along depth and denoising timestep, and identify three concrete symptoms of traditional residual addition, namely monotonic forward magnitude inflation, sharp backward gradient decay, and pronounced block-wise redundancy. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Diffusion-Adaptive Routing (\textsc{DAR}), a drop-in residual replacement that performs learnable, timestep-adaptive, and non-incremental aggregation over the history of sublayer outputs. Moreover, the proposed \textsc{DAR} is compatible with many modern Transformer enhancement methods, such as REPA. On ImageNet $256\times256$, \textsc{DAR} improves SiT-XL/2 by $2.11$ FID ($7.56$ vs.\ $9.67$) and matches the baseline's converged quality with $8.75\times$ fewer training iterations. Stacked on top of REPA, it yields a $2\times$ training acceleration in the early stage, suggesting cross-layer information routing as an underexplored design axis in diffusion modeling, one that operates orthogonally to existing representation-alignment objectives. Beyond pretraining, \textsc{DAR} can also be applied during the fine-tuning stage of large-scale T2I models and preserves high-frequency details during Distribution Matching Distillation.

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

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Characterizing metric-space-valued processes: separating classes and weak invariance principles for measure-theoretic inference

arXiv:2606.13084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article investigates stochastic processes taking values in metric spaces that lack a topological vector space structure, a regime characterized by intricate interplay between topological, geometric, and temporal dependence structures. It is formally established that spaces admitting an isometric Hilbertian embedding constitute a strict subclass within the much broader class of metric spaces possessing the ball property. While traditional kernel methods are susceptible to geometric distortion when the underlying space cannot be isometrically embedded into a Hilbert space, we bypass such limitations by exploiting a fundamental structural property inherent to this broader class; namely, that Borel probability measures are uniquely determined by their values on balls. These separating classes provide the foundation for the subsequently introduced measure-theoretic inference methodology. We derive uniform convergence of a family of time-dependent random measures, alongside weak invariance principles for the corresponding nonstationary random fields. This framework explicitly exposes how dependence and geometric complexity influence sample path regularity. Furthermore, because the rapid decay of small-ball probabilities can prohibit the existence of limiting distributions for supremum-based discrepancy measures, we develop $L^p$-based alternatives. By directly leveraging the introduced convergence results, this approach circumvents the need for higher-order $U$-process formulations. Finally, for spaces that do admit an isometric Hilbertian embedding, and where $U$-processes naturally arise, we establish limit theory for both degenerate and nondegenerate multi-parameter $U$-processes, and demonstrate that local discrepancy tests maintain asymptotic stability under dynamic parameter regimes.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance(VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bayesian modeling of longitudinal metatranscriptomes of broiler meat spoilage microbiomes shows shared predictive signature associated with spoilage at refrigerated temperatures

Microbial spoilage of packaged meat is driven by complex microbial succession and related metabolic activity, yet conventional shelf-life assessment is mainly based on shelf-life studies relying on culturing and sensory analysis. In routine quality assurance, results are obtained retrospectively, and they are only indirectly linked to the metabolic activity related to sensory deterioration. Functional, time informative approaches that capture the active metabolic state of the spoilage microbiome and predict the rate of spoilage are lacking. We developed a censoring-aware Gaussian process (CAGP) framework to model longitudinal pathway expression profiles from broiler meat metatranscriptomes collected over consecutive storage days at 4 or 6{degrees}C. Samples were annotated using odor-based sensory scores defining fresh, early-spoilage, and late-spoilage phases. Because observed zeros in pathway-level data may reflect non-detection rather than true absence, the model treats low values as left-censored observations below a detection threshold while estimating smooth temporal trajectories with uncertainty. In leave-one-out prediction within the 4{degrees}C time series, predicted sampling days differed from the true days by an average of 0.43 days, and predicted spoilage phases agreed with the sensory classification. Trajectories learned at 4{degrees}C also transferred to an independent 6{degrees}C time series at the spoilage-phase level, suggesting that shared functional spoilage programs are preserved despite temperature-dependent changes in spoilage rate. Cross-entropy ranking further identified pathway modules carrying time- and phase-informative signals across temperatures. Overall, this framework provides a probabilistic approach for linking metatranscriptomic functional dynamics to sensory spoilage progression, supporting shelf-life assessment beyond retrospective microbial enumeration.

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

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

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

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

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

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Burden of Cardiovascular Disease in Brazil, 1996-2023: A Retrospective Descriptive Study of the Epidemiology and Impact on Public Healthcare with Emphasis on Acute Myocardial Infarction

Background Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death worldwide, and their epidemiology is correlated with genetic predisposition, exposure to risk factors, sex, age, access to medical care, and other sociodemographic characteristics. Brazil is a developing country with a vast territory, which leads to structural inequalities. Estimates of CVD in Brazil, in its regions, and in its population are poorly evaluated and analysed. Methods We obtained CVD-related data from the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) and analysed mortality and morbidity from 1996 to 2023 by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and region. We calculated the risk of death from the most prevalent diseases, the average length of hospital stay, and the costs associated with heart transplantation. Findings In Brazil, acute myocardial infarction was the pathology that led to the highest number of deaths across all variables analysed during the evaluated period. Other CVD were also related to causes of death and morbidity, such as hypertensive diseases and heart failure. Interpretation Brazil presents a serious challenge to the public health system due to the high number of deaths and the progressive mortality rate. This study represents a fundamental contribution to the basis for formulating public health policies aimed at reducing the growing impact associated with these diseases. Funding CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, INCT

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Greedy Coordinate Diffusion: Effective and Semantically Coherent Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Guidance

arXiv:2606.15531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks (e.g. math tutoring) systematically breaks safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content. While mechanistic approaches have shed light on where alignment resides in model weights, they do not by provide a general formal framework for deriving guarantees about when fine-tuning degrades it – leaving the field without principled tools for predicting or preventing alignment collapse. We develop a local geometric framework through geometric analysis of parameter-space trajectories and apply it to understand the fragility of alignment in fine-tuning. While first-order analysis suggests orthogonal updates are safe, we prove this is illusory: the curvature of the fine-tuning loss induces second-order acceleration that can induce second-order drift into alignment-sensitive regions. We formalize a construct of our framework as the Alignment Instability Condition (AIC), three geometric properties that, when present, are sufficient to guarantee degradation. Our main result proves quartic onset of alignment degradation along gradient-flow trajectories, determined by how sharply alignment depends on specific parameters and how strongly tasks couple to these parameters. These findings yield formal sufficient conditions under which static first-order protection can fail under gradient descent. We further empirically validate the framework's foundations, showing that the Fisher Information Matrix provides a proxy for the degree of safety degradation across diverse fine-tuning.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Parent and physiotherapist perceptions about movement skills of young children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Objective: The onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) in the early years ([&le;]5 years) may negatively impact movement skill (encompassing related concepts of gross motor skills, fundamental movement skills, and functional ability) development. Few studies have explored the perceptions and needs of parents and physiotherapists towards children's difficulty with these movement skills, essential to identify potential areas for added support. The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards movement skills of children with JIA. Methods: Seventeen parents and 24 physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire consisting of multiple choice and open-ended questions about the movement skills of young children with JIA. Demographic and multiple choice questions were quantitively analysed using descriptive statistics. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Results: About half (47%) of parents perceived their children to have movement difficulties, and 75% of physiotherapists described the movement skills of children with JIA as worse than other children of the same age. Our qualitative analysis revealed three general themes including: functional task difficulties; clinical variability in movement skills; and psychosocial components of movement skill difficulties. Conclusion: This study provides an analysis of perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards the movement skills of young children with JIA. A significant proportion of parents and physiotherapists identify movement difficulties among children with JIA that impact daily life. Future interventions co-designed with both parents and care providers targeting movement skills are needed.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Advancing Clinical Implementation of Cardiovascular Polygenic Risk Scores Through Patient-Level Robustness Assessment

Background and Aims: Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) can perform equivalently at the population level yet disagree for individual patients. We examined whether such intra-individual variability reflects genuinely complementary risk information or mainly statistical and methodological uncertainty, and whether it affects clinical classification once PRSs are integrated into SCORE2-OP. Methods: In 4,137 ASCVD-free participants of the CoLaus|PsyCoLaus cohort (478 incident events over a median 14.4 years), we identified 16 ASCVD-PRSs with practically equivalent population-level performance using Bayesian equivalence testing. We quantified intra-individual variability (standard deviation, coefficient of variation, intraclass correlation, Cohen's kappa, extreme discordance), tested whether discordance exceeded chance, decomposed scores into shared and unique genetic components, and assessed variability after integration into SCORE2-OP, benchmarked against perturbation of systolic blood pressure. Results: For a typical individual, risk estimates varied by 18 percentile points across PRSs. Discordance matched chance expectations under a shared-signal model, with no distinct phenotypic profile among discordant individuals, and predictive power resided overwhelmingly in the shared genetic component. Variability tracked PRS size and weighting rather than distinct variants. After integration into SCORE2-OP, 75.6% of participants were placed in different categories by at least one model and 54.6% as both low and high risk; instability was concentrated near guideline thresholds and far exceeded that from blood-pressure measurement error. Conclusions: Equivalent population-level performance is not sufficient to treat PRSs as interchangeable at the individual level, and methodological standardisation and pragmatic clinical trials remain necessary to determine whether PRS integration improves long-term cardiovascular outcomes.