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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART): Co-design priorities to connect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and clinic activities for healthy hearts

Aim: Healthy Heart Actions Right Time (HHART) is a multi-phased research project that seeks to identify, implement and evaluate strategies to connect community and clinical activities to reduce the burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The aim in Phase One was to identify priority activities for two participating services. Background: The ongoing effects of colonisation drive a disproportionate burden of heart disease for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Clinical and community groups both have established strengths in reducing the risk of heart disease, but these are not always well connected. Methods: Using a case study methodology in two locations we partnered in a 12-month co-design process to identify priority activities to connect clinical and community activities. Findings: Three priorities emerged from the Phase One co-design process: (i) community-led gardening as a strategy to promote heart health through connection and healthy lifestyles; (ii) community days to increase engagement in heart checks and strengthen community-clinic relationship; and (iii) clinic-led development of culturally relevant education resources to promote clinician confidence and community heart health knowledge.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VL-DINO: Leveraging CLIP Vision-Language Knowledge for Open-Vocabulary Object Detectio

Vision-language models like CLIP can provide rich semantic priors for open-vocabulary object detection. However, jointly integrating both textual and visual knowledge into detection architectures remains challenging. In this paper, we propose VL-DINO, an open-vocabulary detector that enhances DINO through more effective exploitation of CLIP's vision-language knowledge. Specifically, a Query-guided Positive Sample Construction (QPSC) module is first developed to construct additional high-quality positive samples, enabling the vanilla DINO framework to better accommodate mixed training across heterogeneous data sources while providing more vision-language alignment signals, thereby incorporating richer textual knowledge during training. A Visual Semantic Encoder (VSE) module is then introduced to distill CLIP visual knowledge into backbone-extracted features, producing fused features for subsequent encoder refinement. Based on the fused features, an Object-Region Semantic Alignment (ORSA) module extracts object-centric region features and aligns them with the corresponding textual embeddings, further incorporating textual cues. In the zero-shot setting, VL-DINO-T and VL-DINO-L achieve 36.3 and 38.1 AP on the LVIS benchmark, respectively, consistently outperforming prior advanced approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of the proposed design.

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

CalTennis: Large Multi-View Tennis Video Dataset and Benchmark of Monocular-to-3D Pose Estimation

The Caltech Tennis Dataset (CalTennis) is a large-scale video benchmark for evaluating monocular-to-3D pose estimation in the wild. CalTennis comprises over 11 million frames (51 hours) of tennis practice and match play from 40 players, captured with 2-6 synchronized cameras at 60 Hz. It is 10 times larger than existing in-the-wild human motion video datasets and 3 times larger than existing MOCAP-ground-truthed datasets, and it is the first large-scale benchmark to provide synchronized multi-view recordings of expert athletic motion. The multi-view setup enables inexpensive, label-free evaluation of monocular-to-3D pose estimation algorithms. We describe a simple, standardized protocol that enables data collection without specialized equipment or expertise, along with fully automated video calibration and synchronization. Benchmarking state-of-the-art monocular-to-3D pose methods on CalTennis, we find that while 3D joint angle recovery is now quite accurate, all models struggle to estimate depth and foot contact consistently. We further propose two novel performance metrics, footwork and stability, as well as qualitatively study body shape inconsistency. These metrics expose previously underexplored failure modes and point to concrete opportunities for improvement in pose estimation and action analysis.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

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

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Interference Queueing Networks: A Replica Mean-Field Approach in the Symmetric Setting

arXiv:2606.13264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a model for evaluating the performance of wireless communication networks beyond the ubiquitous full-buffer assumption, under which every transmitter is always active. The network is represented by N interacting queues arranged on a torus, with homogeneous arrival rate and service rates depending on the activity of neighboring interferers. More precisely, each queue is associated with a transmitter-receiver pair, and its service rate is given by the Shannon capacity, which depends on the corresponding Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). Since interfering transmitters only emit when their queue is non-empty, the SINR and hence the service rate improves when neighboring queues are empty. We derive the stability region of the system, together with approximations of its stationary distribution and its exponential rate of convergence to stationarity. These approximations are obtained via a replica mean-field limit, for which we establish propagation of chaos and long-time behavior results.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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

S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents

Deep research agents aim to solve complex knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon planning, evidence gathering, reasoning, and report generation. While recent progress in search agents has demonstrated strong capabilities in information retrieval and answer verification, most existing training datasets remain search-centric, focusing primarily on closed-ended question answering and information localization. As a result, they mainly train information-seeking behavior while providing limited coverage of key deep research capabilities, including evidence integration, knowledge synthesis, planning, file understanding, and structured report generation. In this work, we propose a unified trajectory construction paradigm for deep research agents that combines closed-ended QA and open-ended exploration. The proposed framework consists of graph-grounded task formulation, agentic trajectory rollout, and multi-dimensional trajectory verification, enabling scalable synthesis of high-quality agentic trajectories spanning long-chain complex reasoning, deep research instruction following, report writing, file understanding and generation, and skills usage. Compared with existing search-oriented datasets, our synthesized trajectories place greater emphasis on knowledge synthesis, complex reasoning, and planning. S1-DeepResearch-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale across 20 benchmarks spanning five capability dimensions, including complex reasoning, instruction following, report generation, file understanding, and skills usage. On several challenging deep research benchmarks, it approaches the performance of leading proprietary frontier models. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling information acquisition, knowledge synthesis, and planning-oriented agent behaviors for building effective deep research agents.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Robust Regularized Policy Iteration under Transition Uncertainty

arXiv:2603.09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs where value estimates and learned dynamics are unreliable. To address policy-induced extrapolation and transition uncertainty in a unified framework, we formulate offline RL as robust policy optimization, treating the transition kernel as a decision variable within an uncertainty set and optimizing the policy against the worst-case dynamics. We propose Robust Regularized Policy Iteration (RRPI), which replaces the intractable max-min bilevel objective with a tractable KL-regularized surrogate and derives an efficient policy iteration procedure based on a robust regularized Bellman operator. We provide theoretical guarantees by showing that the proposed operator is a $\gamma$-contraction and that iteratively updating the surrogate yields monotonic improvement of the original robust objective with convergence. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that RRPI achieves strong average performance, outperforming recent baselines including percentile-based methods on the majority of environments while remaining competitive on the rest. Moreover, RRPI exhibits robust performance by aligning lower $Q$-values with high epistemic uncertainty, which prevents the policy from executing unreliable out-of-distribution actions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Authors:

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Cognitive Loop for Behavioral Intelligence in Large Language Model Agents (Extended Revision: From Behavioral Architecture to Epistemic Accountability)

Authors:

arXiv:2510.05107v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The central challenge for AI agents is not only performance but accountability. Agents that act through opaque prompt sequences may produce correct outputs, but they provide little basis for verifying why an action was permitted, where an error occurred, or how responsibility should be assigned. This paper presents the Structured Cognitive Loop as an architecture for accountable behavior in large language model agents. SCL separates cognition, memory, control, and action into distinct modules. The language model proposes. External memory preserves verified state. A lightweight controller checks preconditions, prevents redundant actions, and authorizes execution before tools are used. We evaluate SCL against ReAct and common LangChain agent variants across travel planning, conditional email drafting, and constraint guided image generation. Across 360 episodes, SCL achieves 86.3 percent task success compared with 70.5 to 76.8 percent for prompt based baselines. It also improves goal fidelity, reduces redundant tool calls, increases reuse of intermediate state, and lowers unsupported assertions. This extended revision situates SCL within a broader architecture of epistemic accountability. Subsequent extensions integrate context aware Human in the Loop control, Pool Gated Retrieval, and the Horizon Warrant Commitment framework. Together these components define an agent architecture in which the model proposes, structure decides, evidence is warranted before use, and human judgment is embedded in the trace rather than imposed after the fact. The result is a foundation for AI agents whose decisions are not only effective but also authorized, inspectable, and accountable.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Data-driven Control with Real-time Uncertainty Compensation for Multi-Fuel Engines

arXiv:2606.16171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

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

Evaluating and Preserving Lexical Stress in English-to-Chinese Speech-to-Speech Translation

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems have achieved impressive progress in semantic accuracy and speech naturalness. However, the cross-lingual transfer of lexical stress, a vital cue for emphasis and speaker intent, remains heavily underexplored, compounded by a lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics for tonal languages like Chinese. We investigate English-to-Chinese S2ST stress transfer by constructing a stress-annotated Chinese dataset and an XLS-R-based Mandarin stress detector. Integrating this with the English EmphAssess system, we propose a novel objective metric for cross-lingual stress evaluation. Furthermore, we fine-tune CosyVoice3 to build a stress-aware S2ST system. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed S2ST architecture significantly outperforms existing systems in stress translation capability while maintaining competitive translation quality. Furthermore, our evaluation metric exhibits a strong correlation with human subjective judgments.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

PhyloZoo: a unified framework for phylogenetic network analysis in Python

Authors:

Reticulate evolutionary processes (events in which lineages merge, such as hybridization, recombination, and horizontal gene transfer) are widespread across nature but cannot be represented by phylogenetic trees alone. Phylogenetic networks have therefore become an important modelling tool, yet existing software is typically tied to specific inference paradigms and provides limited support for working with multiple network representations in a unified and programmable environment. PhyloZoo is an open-source Python framework that lowers the barrier to developing practical, easy-to-use software for phylogenetic network analysis. It provides data structures and algorithms covering the main representations used in the field, together with dedicated visualization tools and robust I/O for all major phylogenetic file formats. A particular emphasis lies on semi-directed phylogenetic networks, which explicitly represent root uncertainty and have so far received limited support in existing software. By offering a shared foundation for developing interoperable tools and a combinatorial layer that supports computational proofs and theoretical exploration, PhyloZoo enables reproducible workflows for applied, methodological, and theoretical studies of reticulate evolution. Availability and implementation: PhyloZoo is implemented in Python and installable from PyPI, with source code, documentation, and examples available at https://github.com/nholtgrefe/phylozoo.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.