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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TSAssistant: A Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Framework for Automated Target Safety Assessment

Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LegalHalluLens: Typed Hallucination Auditing and Calibrated Multi-Agent Debate for Trustworthy Legal AI

AI systems deployed in legal workflows hallucinate at rates that aggregate metrics report at ~52%, but this average conceals where errors concentrate and in which direction they run, leaving compliance officers without an actionable signal for trustworthy deployment. We present LegalHalluLens, an auditing framework with three components: typed hallucination profiles across four legally-motivated claim categories (numeric, temporal, obligation/entitlement, factual) over CUAD (Hendrycks et al., 2021); a Risk Direction Index (RDI) that reduces omission-versus-invention bias to a single deployment-comparable scalar; and a typed debate pipeline calibrated to both magnitudes and directions. Across 510 contracts and 249,252 clause-level instances we measure a within-model gap of approximately 38-40 pp between obligation/numeric and temporal claims that aggregate reporting hides, and show that two systems with matched 52% rates can carry opposite RDIs. The debate pipeline reduces fabricated detections by 45% with per-category gains tracking the diagnosis, matching commercial APIs with a substantially smaller backbone (4B active parameters). Typed profiles and RDI surface failure modes that aggregate metrics hide; we further show these diagnostics serve as calibration inputs for multi-agent debate pipelines, where Skeptic challenges and asymmetric gates targeted at measured failure modes outperform generically-tuned debate. The framework supports direction-aware procurement, accountability, and agent design for legal AI deployed in the wild.

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

Large Language Models for Agentic NetOps and AIOps: Architectures, Evaluation, and Safety

arXiv:2605.12729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, and limited self-healing. In both NetOps and AIOps, this shift is changing how tasks are managed. Agent-based operations work as workflows, from gathering evidence to taking action, following permissions, policies, and checks, and providing rollback options when necessary. This is crucial because operational decisions can have instant impacts. To make the argument concrete, we organise the relevant literature around the hierarchy of autonomy, tool scope, evidence traces, and assurance contracts. These contracts define what an agent may observe, propose, and execute. They also define the checks that must pass before any action is allowed. A consistent pattern appears across work on telemetry query recommendation, diagnosis, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, change planning, and limited self-healing. Operational reliability does not come chiefly from the model itself. It depends on the machinery around the model. We also argue that evaluation should go beyond static question answering. Agentic NetOps and AIOps systems require workflow-centred evaluation, including trace quality, bounded tool use, safe proposal generation, replay in sandboxed environments, and canary trials with rollback-aware scoring. Without these measures, a system may appear robust yet remain too fragile. Finally, we examine security, privacy, and governance risks that become acute when agents sit close to operational control surfaces. Taken together, the survey concludes that progress in intelligent NetOps and AIOps will depend on treating autonomy as a constrained operational control problem, whose outputs must be reliable, auditable, and securely deployable.

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

ThinkDeception: A Progressive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Deception Detection

arXiv:2606.18988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal deception detection is critical for identifying fraudulent intentions, yet existing approaches predominantly rely on end to end black–box paradigms. These methods suffer from a severe lack of interpretability failing to provide transparent reasoning trajectories and struggling to explicitly capture the subtle, cross modal inconsistencies inherent in deceptive behaviors. To transcend these limitations, we propose ThinkDeception, a novel and interpretable multimodal deception detection framework. As a pioneering effort, it introduces Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into this domain, transforming deception detection from a traditional binary classification task into an explicit cognitive reasoning process. Facilitated by the first meticulously annotated step–by–step multimodal Chain of Thought (CoT) dataset, we develop a foundational model, ThinkDeception Base, empirically validating the critical role of modal inconsistency in decoding deception. Building upon this foundation, our core innovation lies in proposing Visual-Audio Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization(VAC–GRPO) equipped with a progressive training strategy. Distinct from standard GRPO, we stratify the training data into four progressive difficulty tiers, guiding the model through a psychologically grounded easy–to–hard cognitive transition. By innovatively coupling this dynamic curriculum scheduler with a multi dimensional, process aware reward mechanism and a reflective learning paradigm, we significantly elevate the model's overall reasoning quality. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkDeception establishes a new SOTA, significantly outperforming existing methods in both detection accuracy and rationale quality. Ultimately, this work successfully drives the field of deception detection toward interpretable, multimodal cognitive reasoning.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ML Inference Scheduling with Predictable Latency

arXiv:2512.18725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning (ML) inference serving systems can schedule requests to improve GPU utilization and to meet service level objectives (SLOs) or deadlines. However, improving GPU utilization may compromise latency-sensitive scheduling, as concurrent tasks contend for GPU resources and thereby introduce interference. Given that interference effects introduce unpredictability in scheduling, neglecting them may compromise SLO or deadline satisfaction. Nevertheless, existing interference prediction approaches remain limited in several respects, which may restrict their usefulness for scheduling. First, they are often coarse-grained, which ignores runtime co-location dynamics and thus restricts their accuracy in interference prediction. Second, they tend to use a static prediction model, which may not effectively cope with different workload characteristics. In this paper, we evaluate the potential limitations of existing interference prediction approaches, finding that coarse-grained methods can lead to noticeable deviations in prediction accuracy and that static models degrade considerably under changing workloads.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic epidemic model with varying infectivity and waning immunity: the law of large numbers with unbounded infectivity

arXiv:2606.11845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the large population limit of our epidemic model with infection age dependent infectivity and progressive immunity waning, under the assumption that the supremum in $t$ of the random infectivity function has a finite expectation, while the previous proofs assumed that this supremum admits a deterministic upper bound.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Trust but Verify: Mitigating Medical Hallucinations via Post-Hoc Adversarial Auditing and Multi-Agent Feedback Loops

arXiv:2606.14149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare settings, yet their tendency to hallucinate poses risks when clinical decisions are involved. This study examine whether LLMs recommend recently banned or withdrawn pharmaceuticals when answering clinical questions and tests an agent-based method for reducing such errors. We developed a five-agent "Trust but Verify" system using a single LLM backbone. To measure regulatory knowledge obsolescence, we created an adversarial dataset of 103 clinical MCQs where historically correct answers now refer to banned substances. This scale ensures statistical significance across various therapeutic classes. We evaluated three open-access model families (GPT-OSS, Llama-3, Falcon-3) under vanilla and agentic conditions. Performance was measured via pointwise score, label accuracy, Hallucination Error Rate (HER), and Component Fidelity (CF) score. We also observed clinical safety regression in proprietary models. In default configurations, all models showed high hallucination rates, consistently selecting banned drugs that matched training data patterns. Our proposed agentic architecture reduced HER by approximately 53% across models. Pointwise scores shifted from -0.25 (unsafe recommendation) toward 0.0 (appropriate refusal). The safety audit intercepted dangerous outputs even when models' parametric knowledge favored the banned substance. The proposed multi-agent framework offers a model-agnostic method for enforcing regulatory compliance that prioritizes patient safety over fluent text generation. Our work demonstrates a practical approach for deploying autonomous AI systems in safety-critical healthcare settings. It shows how real-time regulatory data can be integrated into LLM pipelines to support clinical decision-making.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Engineering entanglement and transport in interacting quantum walks with tailored potentials

arXiv:2606.17825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the interplay between particle propagation and quantum correlation generation is a central challenge in quantum transport. Here, we investigate two distinguishable continuous-time quantum walkers evolving on parallel one-dimensional lattices, interacting via distance-dependent potentials. While on-site interactions reproduce the typical bosonic behaviour, extending the interaction to a linear potential over multiple neighbors introduces controlled Bloch-like oscillations and shifts the bound-pair regime to stronger couplings. More generally, we explore a Coulomb-like interaction parameterized by strength, spatial scaling, and decay rate. This reveals a rich phase diagram including four distinct dynamical regimes: (i) a high-entropy, oscillatory regime akin to a linear potential; (ii) a strongly localized, bound-pair regime; (iii) a novel intermediate regime combining near-ballistic spreading with strong correlations; and (iv) a weakly interacting, free-propagation regime. Notably, regime (iii) achieves concurrent optimization of transport efficiency and entanglement, offering a sweet spot for correlated quantum dynamics. Our results provide a tool for designing interaction-engineered quantum walks with potential applications in quantum information processing and simulations.

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

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FreqKD: Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Infrared Object Detection

Transfer learning from large-scale RGB foundation models to infrared (IR) imagery through knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to fundamental differences in image formation physics. We investigate the spectral structure of the RGB–IR modality gap and observe that feature divergence is not uniform across spatial frequencies: low-frequency components (shape, layout) show greater cross-modal alignment than high-frequency components (texture, fine edges), which reflect modality-specific characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose FreqKD, a frequency-decoupled distillation framework that applies asymmetric supervision adapted to each band's cross-modal consistency. The method employs strict mean squared error (MSE) on the low-frequency band to preserve shared structural information and a relaxed log-MSE loss (weighted at 0.1) on the high-frequency band to provide edge guidance while tolerating texture differences. Spectral divergence analysis on 500 paired samples shows that high-frequency divergence exceeds low-frequency divergence by a factor of 2.4x on average across all analysed transformer layers. On KAIST multispectral pedestrian detection, FreqKD achieves 64.1 mAP50, improving 2.4 points over the DINOv2 baseline. The learned representation transfers across datasets (FLIR ADAS, +2.1 mAP50), tasks (MFNet segmentation, +1.85 mean intersection-over-union), and architectures (ResNet-50, +1.0 mAP50). Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/freq_decoupled_kd-5E5A

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Benign overfitting beyond prediction: The ordinary least squares interpolator

arXiv:2309.15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime – unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso – remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

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

Where Does Texture Evidence Live in SAM? Features, Proposal Masks, and Texture Segmentation

Texture segmentation stresses foundation segmentation because meaningful regions are defined by material or repeated appearance rather than object identity. Segment Anything Models (SAMs) often fail by default on such texture-defined partitions, but this failure is ambiguous: the texture evidence may be absent, missing from the proposal bank, or present but selected or assembled incorrectly by an object-centric readout. We ask what texture-relevant evidence is already preserved in frozen SAM before adaptation. We study two frozen evidence spaces: multiscale features, probed with a minimal clustering readout, and the automatic proposal bank, treated as evidence for a supervised consolidation readout. SAM is frozen throughout; we do not fine-tune the backbone or retrain the proposal generator. Across RWTD, STLD, an ADE20K-selected refined-crop complement, and a ControlNet-stitched PTD bridge archive, frozen SAM is not a texture segmenter by default, but its failures are not simple texture blindness. Coarse frozen features preserve texture organization, and proposal banks often contain texture-aligned masks or fragments. Natural scenes more often require assembly and commitment over fragments, while cleaner synthetic cases more often reduce to selecting an already coherent proposal. Default mask failure should therefore be decomposed into representation evidence, proposal-bank support, readout mismatch, and commitment failure.

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

WeGenBench: A Multidimensional Diagnostic Benchmark towards Text-to-Image Model Optimization

Recent text-to-image generation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing highly realistic images from text inputs alone. Although existing benchmarks can evaluate the generation capabilities of various models to some extent, they struggle to comprehensively and accurately measure performance across multiple dimensions, often failing to reveal the inherent deficiencies of models in specific categories. To address these limitations, we propose WeGenBench, a novel benchmark designed for the comprehensive, multi-perspective evaluation of text-to-image generation capabilities. Our benchmark comprises a total of 4,000 test prompts across two primary categories, meticulously balanced between Chinese and English to evaluate bilingual and cross-cultural generation capabilities. Beyond macroscopic scene classification, we annotate each prompt with multi-dimensional tags tailored to the distinct content and challenges of each language, thereby refining the generation tasks into more specific sub-categories. Through a cross-dimensional evaluation mechanism leveraging both scene classifications and multi-dimensional tags, WeGenBench can precisely pinpoint model shortcomings in specific generation categories. Furthermore, to measure generation quality more accurately, we design and validate several novel evaluation metrics by integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which assess model performance on domain-specific tasks from three core aspects. Crucially, our approach yields both the assessment outcomes and the detailed reasoning trajectories, facilitating a rigorous verification of the accuracy and soundness of the evaluation results. Finally, we conduct systematic benchmarking on current state-of-the-art methods and provide an in-depth analysis of the limitations present in existing models.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

18.
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.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning

The correspondence between large language models (LLMs) and the neural mechanisms underlying human higher-order cognition remains insufficiently characterized. Given that language and reasoning in the human brain appear dissociable, an open question is whether LLMs align with neural signals from reasoning-related regions and whether such signals can improve them. Here, focusing on deductive reasoning, we show that LLM internal representations are not only partially aligned with task-fMRI activity but can also be directly enhanced by these signals. Using a neural-predictivity metric, we find that LLMs explain a substantial fraction of the explainable variance in reasoning-related regions at the aggregate level, whereas predictivity within specific reasoning types is lower, indicating both alignment and divergence. Building on this, we propose a brain-guided framework: we steer model representations along directions induced by the joint structure of model and brain representations, applying intervention at inference and fine-tuning during training. We demonstrate that task-evoked brain signals can directly enhance LLM reasoning, yielding gains orthogonal to language-only supervision across 10 LLMs (1.5B-72B), with transfer across reasoning types and up to 13\% absolute accuracy gain. Our results advance LLM-brain correspondences from correlation to guidance, establishing a brain-signal-driven pathway toward more robust and cognitively aligned AI.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Feature-preserving Latent-EnKF for Data Assimilation of Flows with Shocks

arXiv:2606.12559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely adopted for sequential data assimilation, but fails for solutions with discontinuities, such as shocks in compressible flows. Uncertainty in shock location induces multimodal ensemble statistics that violate the Gaussian assumptions underlying the EnKF, producing large-scale spurious oscillations in the analysis state. We introduce a feature-preserving latent-EnKF that performs the ensemble update in a learned low-dimensional latent space, where shock and flow features admit a smooth manifold representation, thereby preserving sharp features during EnKF analysis. The updated latent state is mapped back to physical state through a shared decoder for all ensemble members. The algorithm eliminates the member-specific ordered training and positivity flooring used in prior approaches. Numerical experiments on a Sod shock tube and Mach 2 shock interaction with a 2D cylinder, using sparse and noisy observations, show accurate feature recovery of shocks and contact discontinuities without spurious oscillations.

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

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PepALD: Macrocyclic Peptide Generation via Autoregressive Latent Diffusion

arXiv:2606.14510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Macrocyclic peptides are promising therapeutic candidates for intracellular targets, but their design requires simultaneous control over non-natural monomer chemistry, ring topology, membrane permeability, and target binding. Existing SMILES- or HELM-string generative models either operate in long atom-level sequence spaces or treat monomers as symbolic tokens with limited chemical grounding. We introduce PepALD, an Autoregressive Latent Diffusion (ALD) foundation model for de novo macrocyclic peptide generation. The model represents HELM monomers with structured chemical embeddings, generates each residue through context-conditioned diffusion in chemically informed latent space, predicts R-group-aware ring closures during autoregressive generation, and aligns the denoiser to affinity rewards using winner-protected diffusion-adapted preference optimization. In silico experiments demonstrate PepALD's generation quality and reward-optimization performance against representative peptide generation baselines.