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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparative Study of Neural Surrogate Architectures for Autoregressive Prediction of Internal Battery States

arXiv:2606.20053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Doyle-Fuller-Newman (DFN) model resolves internal electrochemical states in lithium-ion batteries with high fidelity. However, the numerical solution of its governing equations is computationally prohibitive for real-time deployment, limiting scalability from individual cells to pack and fleet-scale applications. While machine learning surrogates can substantially reduce inference latency through GPU acceleration, most existing approaches learn solution approximations tied to specific operating conditions rather than learning generalizable state-evolution dynamics. This work presents a systematic comparison of four neural network architectures (MLP, ResNet, U-Net, FNO) formulated as autoregressive state-transition operators that predict full DFN internal states across a wide range of operating conditions. To ensure a controlled architectural comparison, all models are trained under a unified framework using multi-step unrolling and current-conditioning, isolating the impact of spatial inductive bias. Results demonstrate that the U-Net's multi-scale feature hierarchy achieves a mean final-step nRMSE of 3% averaged across all internal state variables after 300-step autoregressive rollouts, while providing a 5.38x speed-up over the numerical solver. These findings highlight spatial inductive bias as a critical determinant of surrogate performance, advancing the development of surrogates for internal state observability for next-generation battery management systems and digital twins.

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

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

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

BASENet: Band-Adapted Speech Enhancement Network with Cross-Band Attention

arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Flow Matching with In-Context Priors for Out-of-Distribution Brain Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching and diffusion models enable conditional generation across domains ranging from images to proteins, with recent extensions to out-of-distribution contexts. Yet generative models of neural time series have largely remained restricted to categorical conditioning, precluding compositional and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we propose a per-timestep conditioned diffusion transformer for generating realistic fMRI brain dynamics during unseen cognitive tasks by injecting both compositional language and optional spatial priors in-context. Such zero-shot generation could enable counterfactual neuroscience by supporting in-silico design and evaluation of novel cognitive experiments before empirical validation. Leveraging this model, we evaluate across hundreds of held-out task conditions and characterize predictive performance in relation to the training manifold. From language alone, the model recovers region-specific recruitment across tasks and held-out spatial activation patterns. Spatial priors, when available, complement the text pathway by anchoring generation in regions of task space where language alone degrades, while retaining the compositional structure needed for counterfactual task specification. To our knowledge this is the first generative model of whole-cortex fMRI dynamics for unseen cognitive tasks, advancing counterfactual neuroscience and data-driven experimental design.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hybrid Acousto-Optical Double Dressing of a Two-Level System

arXiv:2509.25847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally investigate resonance fluorescence from a two-level system in a novel configuration where a strong laser drives an optical Rabi oscillation while an acoustic field parametrically modulates the frequency of the two-level system. We observe emission spectra that deviate markedly from the standard Mollow triplet, including dynamical cancellation of the central peak. A doubly dressed state model incorporating hybridization among the emitter, optical field, and acoustic field captures these features. Guided by this model, we experimentally validate the condition for optimal cooling of acoustic phonons in an emitter-optomechanical system. These results reveal new regimes of strongly driven quantum nonlinear interactions.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior work has studied the formalization and decision, but not narration, which is the step that turns a formal tool's output into the user answer. To fill the narration gap, we first model the LLM-solver loop as a verified decision procedure. We further evaluate five open-sourced models under prompt injection, and we find certificate gating makes the solver verdict sound, while an adversary can invert a verified conclusion across phrasings and channels. We study the mitigation through hardened prompt that reduces injection significantly but cannot eliminate it and still suffers under adaptive attack. Combining the formal analysis and empirical studies, we show in the LLM-solver loop, robustness does not reach to the answer that the user finally reads.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data

arXiv:2603.14407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tabular anomaly detection (TAD) aims to identify samples that deviate from the majority in tabular data and is critical in many real-world applications. However, existing methods follow a ``one model for one dataset (OFO)'' paradigm, which relies on dataset-specific training and thus incurs high computational cost and yields limited generalization to unseen domains. To address these limitations, we propose OFA-TAD, a generalist one-for-all (OFA) TAD framework that only requires one-time training on multiple source datasets and can generalize to unseen datasets from diverse domains on-the-fly. To realize one-for-all tabular anomaly detection, OFA-TAD extracts neighbor-distance patterns as transferable cues, and introduces multi-view neighbor-distance representations from multiple transformation-induced metric spaces to mitigate the transformation sensitivity of distance profiles. To adaptively combine multi-view distance evidence, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scoring network is employed for view-specific anomaly scoring and entropy-regularized gated fusion, with a multi-strategy anomaly synthesis mechanism to support training under the one-class constraint. Extensive experiments on 34 datasets from 14 domains demonstrate that OFA-TAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance and strong cross-domain generalizability under the strict OFA setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-TAD.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

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

Beyond the Current Observation: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Controllable Non-Markov Games

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Bilateral Efficiency of Ethernet: Recalibrating Metcalfe and Boggs After Fifty Years

作者:

arXiv:2603.19406v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In July 1976, Metcalfe and Boggs published their foundational paper on Ethernet in Communications of the ACM. Their efficiency model – E = (P/C)/(P/C + W*T) – measures the fraction of Ether time carrying good forward packets under contention. For fifty years this model has framed how the community thinks about Ethernet performance. We argue it is silent on the question that matters for modern intra-rack interconnect: bilateral transaction efficiency – the fraction of link time that produces committed agreements between sender and receiver. Metcalfe and Boggs themselves planted the seed in their EFTP "end-dally" protocol (Section 7.2.2), and the deeper anchor is older still: Abramson's Alohanet carried positive acknowledgments at the link layer – a bilateral mechanism Metcalfe consciously removed in 1973 to obtain Ethernet's simple, ACK-free packet format. The result is a fifty-year bilateral zigzag: Aloha (bilateral) to Ethernet (unilateral) to the EFTP end-dally (bilateral) to TCP (unilateral-with-bilateral-above). We formalize bilateral efficiency, connect it to the back-to-back Shannon channel with Perfect Information Feedback, and – scoping the claim explicitly to intra-rack distances of one meter or less – describe how the Open Aethernet link recovers mutual knowledge at the link layer. The correction to Table 1 is not a different set of numbers. It is a different question.

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

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Background: DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression in response to environmental exposures. We measured differential DNA methylation levels in blood before after general anesthesia and surgery in participants with and without postoperative delirium (POD) and postoperative neurocognitive disorder (PNCD). Methods: Blood sampling, delirium assessment and cognitive testing were prospectively performed at baseline before non-cardiac, non-neurologic surgery, and at 24 hours (24h) and 6 weeks (6wk) thereafter in 94 participants comprising 13 with POD and 81 without POD, and 40 with PNCD and 54 without PNCD 6wk after surgery who were matched for age and sex in the INTUIT and MADCO cohorts. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC Beadchip. Results: 132 differentially methylated positions (DMPs) annotated to 198 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified in 94 participants 24h after surgery compared to baseline with a local false discovery rate (LFDR)

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) Alzheimer's Classification via Supervised $\beta$-VAE and Quantum Kernels

This paper presents a two-stage Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) pipeline for binary Alzheimer's disease (AD) classification from 3D T1-weighted structural MRI volumes, where the classical and quantum components are designed to complement each other rather than operate independently. A supervised 3D $\beta$-variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained end-to-end under voxel-wise reconstruction, KL-divergence, and focal classification losses that compress each 3D MRI volume (resized from 152 x 184 x 152 to 96 x 96 x 96) into a 64-dimensional latent code. Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression selects the six components in the latent code that best separate Alzheimer's Disease (AD) from cognitively normal (CN) subjects and rescales them into rotation angles, which are encoded onto a six-qubit register using the ZZ quantum feature map to give us the respective quantum states. The input to a precomputed-kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM) is an N x N Gram matrix (N = 308), created by calculating the overlap between every pair of quantum states. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that the quantum kernel operates directly on disease-aware features that are learned end-to-end by a supervised autoencoder, rather than on pre-extracted inputs. On 308 ADNI-1 subjects, consisting of 137 AD and 171 CN subjects, the baseline achieved 67.2% accuracy and 0.759 AUC, while the stability-enhanced variant reached 72.1% accuracy and 0.799 AUC with cross-fold variance halved. 3D Grad-CAM further helped validate our model's focus on brain regions linked to Alzheimer's. The HCQ pipeline could serve as a general-purpose framework for diagnostic classification across biomedical imaging domains that present similar challenges for classical approaches.

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

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.