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

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks using K-Hop Gaussian Diffusion

arXiv:2606.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most graph neural network (GNN) cores rely on graph convolutions, typically implemented as message passing between direct (single-hop) neighbors. In many real-world graphs, edges can be noisy or poorly defined, limiting information propagation to local neighborhoods. Existing diffusion kernels, such as Personalized PageRank (PPR) and Heat Kernel, alleviate this issue through global propagation, but still struggle with complex local structures and distant node noise. To address these limitations, we propose a K-Hop Gaussian (KHG) diffusion kernel as a preprocessing module for graph data. KHG introduces multi-hop diffusion with Gaussian weighting for remote nodes, balancing local and global information propagation before applying standard GNNs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KHG significantly outperforms traditional message-passing GNNs, as well as PPR and Heat Kernel diffusion, particularly in noisy or structurally complex graphs.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

作者:

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Study protocol: Feasibility and clinical implications of real-time cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery with the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm (AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC-COTRENDING)

Background: Perioperative hypotension is associated with postoperative organ injury. However, trials of hypotension avoidance have not found meaningful improvements in postoperative cardiovascular, renal, neurological or functional outcomes. One possible explanation is that organ perfusion depends on patients individual autoregulatory ranges. Hence, technology enabling monitoring of the autoregulatory status of vital organs, e.g. the brain, could provide a physiologic basis for personalising of blood pressure targets. However, current established methodologies for monitoring cerebral autoregulation in noncardiac surgery, e.g. the cerebral oximetry index (COx), are limited by performance and usability. The Medtronic Cotrending algorithm has been developed to provide automated, near real-time assessment of cerebral autoregulation. While feasibility was demonstrated in cardiac surgery, its applicability in major noncardiac surgery remains unknown. This study aims to evaluate the technical feasibility and clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery. Objectives: Primary objective: To evaluate the technical feasibility of using the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm to monitor intraoperative cerebral autoregulation in real-time during major noncardiac surgery, drawing comparisons to the COx algorithm. Secondary objectives: to investigate the potential clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring. Design: Single-centre, prospective cohort study. Setting: Swiss tertiary care centre Patients: Patients enrolled in AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC who were monitored intraoperatively with the Medtronic INVOS(TM) 5100 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Outcomes: Technical feasibility outcomes include success rate of determination of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, intraoperative uptime, time to first estimate of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, sensitivity to external factors and to data artefacts; agreement of Cotrending-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation with COx-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation. Conclusions: N/A Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT07630129

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

arXiv:2606.20062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Modeling light-matter coupled systems with neural quantum states

arXiv:2606.14352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in cold atom manipulation enable the study of many-body systems where short-range interactions between neighboring atoms coexist with long-range interactions mediated by photons. Such a combination of interactions makes a theoretical approach challenging beyond mean-field methods. In this work, we develop a neural quantum state based approach to study these systems numerically. We introduce a neural-network architecture capable of handling hybrid Hilbert spaces with large local bosonic dimensions in strongly interacting spin-photon systems. We benchmark this approach on a model of a two-dimensional lattice of Rydberg atoms coupled to a photon mode. The superradiant ground states found in the large spin-photon coupling regime allow us to demonstrate the efficiency of the method in the presence of high photon occupation. Furthermore, the ability to capture spin-spin and spin-photon correlations leads us to observe quantitative deviations in the ground state phase boundaries with respect to mean-field theory. The method extends to other systems with a similar hybrid Hilbert space structure, such as spin-phonon systems, and provides a scalable framework for investigating their ground state properties.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Moving Out: Physically-grounded Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2507.18623v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The ability to adapt to physical actions and constraints in an environment is crucial for embodied agents (e.g., robots) to effectively collaborate with humans. Such physically grounded human-AI collaboration must account for the increased complexity of the continuous state-action space and constrained dynamics caused by physical constraints. However, most existing collaboration benchmarks are discrete or do not consider physical attributes and constraints. To address this, we introduce Moving Out, a human-AI collaboration benchmark that resembles a wide range of collaboration modes affected by physical attributes and constraints, such as moving heavy items together and coordinating actions to move an item around a corner. Moving Out consists of two challenges and human-human interaction data to comprehensively evaluate models' abilities to adapt to diverse human behaviors and unseen physical attributes. To give embodied agents the capability to collaborate with humans under physical attributes and constraints, we propose a novel method, BASS (Behavior Augmentation, Simulation, and Selection), to enhance the diversity of agents and their understanding of the outcome of actions. We systematically compare BASS and state-of-the-art models in AI-AI and human-AI experiments, showing that BASS can effectively collaborate with both unseen AI and humans. The project page is available at https://live-robotics-uva.github.io/movingout_ai/.

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

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

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

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

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

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

作者:

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

GUMP-Net: An interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation

Pelvic segmentation is one of the most important and fundamental research problems in precise and intelligent diagnosis and treatment, as well as surgical planning and navigation for pelvic fractures. By combining an improved geodesic active contour model with deep neural networks, we propose GUMP-Net, an interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation, in which three network modules are designed to constitute the overall segmentation framework together: the object detection module for automatic level set initialization, the edge detector module for learning an anatomy-aware edge detector function and the iteration module for deep level set evolution. Leveraging the advantages of level set representation and deep learning, GUMP-Net shows more accurate, robust and consistent segmentation performance, especially in small training data situation, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on pelvic datasets demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Further experiments extended to ankle dataset indicate broader applications to other anatomies. The proposed algorithm not only provides an efficient segmentation method for complex fracture reduction, but also gives an interpretable geometric perspective for understanding deep learning segmentation.

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

Orbital-optimized spin-adapted multistate contracted VQE for excited states and properties on quantum hardware

arXiv:2606.15489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the orbital-optimized multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver (oo-MC-VQE) method with spin-adapted operators for the computation of ground and excited states, as well as state-specific and transition properties. The use of spin-adapted operators ensures that the spin symmetry of the reference states is conserved throughout the VQE optimization. In multistate variational approaches, achieving a balanced description of an increasing number of electronic states places growing demands on the expressibility of the underlying ansatz, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and circuit complexity. We consider the effects of this trade-off explicitly and find that the number of circuit parameters required to obtain accurate results is reported to scale approximately linearly in the number of states. We further present an explicit quantum-circuit implementation of the oo-MC-VQE method and demonstrate its integration with quantum error mitigation techniques. Finally, we execute the method on real quantum devices to compute absorption spectra for two benchmark molecular systems.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

作者:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

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

MSUE: Multi-Modal Soccer Understanding Expert

This paper presents our solution to the 2026 SoccerNet VQA Challenge. We first develop a cost-effective data synthesis pipeline driven by a Vision-Language Model (VLM), which systematically restructures raw domain data into diverse VQA samples, including concise answers and long-form responses. Second, we propose MSUE, a multi-expert question answering architecture that employs a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically dispatch questions to text, image, and video experts. These experts are instantiated as a strong text baseline Gemini3-Flash, a fine-tuned Qwen3-VL, and an external knowledge base, respectively, working collaboratively to enhance VQA performance. MSUE achieves an accuracy of 0.95 on the challenge benchmark, securing third place in the leaderboard.

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

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall at 100% precision. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets. Experiments with seven state-of-the-art VPR techniques across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, enabling the underlying VPR technique to operate at 100% precision in approximately twice as many deployment scenarios (median improvement), while retrieving up to 29% more correct matches at that precision. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhyeyR-007/Quantile-Transfer-for-Reliable-VPR.

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

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.05878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder–regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

LivePI: More Realistic Benchmarking of Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection

arXiv:2605.17986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly deployed in local workflows with access to external tools. This creates indirect prompt-injection (IPI) risk: an agent may execute harmful instructions embedded in untrusted inputs such as email, downloaded files, webpages, repositories, or group-chat messages. Existing evaluations are often small, purely simulated, or focused on a narrow set of channels. We introduce LivePI (Live Prompt Injection), a structured benchmark for IPI risk in a production-like but test-controlled environment. LivePI covers seven input surfaces, twelve attack/rendering families, and five malicious goals, including protected-information exfiltration, unauthorized security-control changes, unsafe code retrieval or execution, inbox-summary exfiltration, and cryptocurrency transfer. We run LivePI on a real virtual machine with live but test-controlled email, chat, web, local-file, repository, and wallet interfaces. Across GPT-5.3-Codex, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Kimi K2.5, and GLM-5, total attack success rates range from 10.7% to 29.6%. Group-chat injection is uniformly successful across the evaluated backbones in our deployment, and repository-link attacks produce high-severity failures despite a small denominator. We also evaluate a two-layer defense consisting of prompt-level filtering and pre-execution tool-call authorization. In the GPT-5.3-Codex setting, the defense intercepts all tested malicious-goal completions in LivePI before execution while preserving benign utility on PinchBench-derived workloads.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

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

Quantifying Subliminal Behavioral Transfer Ratios in Language Model Distillation

Distillation of a language model intended to transfer benign behavior to a student model may also transfer undesirable characteristics, if they are present in the teacher model, a phenomenon known as subliminal learning. While qualitative evidence supports the existence of this effect, its magnitude has not been systematically characterized. This study quantifies subliminal behavioral transfer ratios by steering two teacher models (Llama-2-7B-Chat and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct) at varying steering strengths and distilling student models using only benign data. Evaluation on 100 JailbreakBench prompts with GPT-4.1, serving as the evaluator, indicates that transfer is robust but exhibits distinct scaling behaviors. Llama-2 demonstrates a sharp threshold ($\tau = {0.25,0.32} \ beyond \ \alpha = -0.15$), whereas Qwen2.5 displays continuous and higher levels of transfer ($\tau$ up to $0.61$).

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hilbert space embeddings of independence tests and interaction measures of several variables

arXiv:2411.08653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a unified theoretical framework for kernel-based measures of dependence on product spaces. Building on the ideas underlying distance covariance, distance multivariance, and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), we define a new family of kernels on an $n$-fold Cartesian product, termed positive definite independent of order $k$ (PDI$_{k}$ kernels). These kernels extend the concepts of positive definite and conditionally negative definite kernels to higher orders and provide the foundation for generalized independence and interaction tests, such as the generalized Lancaster interaction of order $k$ ($\Lambda_{k}^{n}$), and the Streitberg interaction ($\Sigma$). Our analysis focuses on the continuous setting, where we prove a Kernel Mean Embedding Theorem for PDI$_{k}$ kernels and establish the corresponding integrability restrictions. Based on these results, we characterize how the Kronecker products of PDI kernels behave.