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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

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

AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

arXiv:2602.11510v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current output-only benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data may pass through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments, all pathways that final-output audits typically do not inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, a benchmark for evaluating internal-channel privacy leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. AgentLeak instruments seven privacy-relevant communication pathways and provides a large-scale empirical evaluation focused on final outputs, inter-agent messages, and shared memory. Across 1,000 scenarios spanning healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, five production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B), and 4,979 validated execution traces, we find that multi-agent configurations reduce final-output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent mode) compared with single-agent baselines but introduce internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared with 27.2% for final outputs (C1), meaning that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 $\geq$ C1 holds consistently. These results suggest, within the evaluated coordinator-worker setting, that privacy risk in multi-agent systems is strongly shaped by architectural coordination channels rather than final-output behavior alone: it arises from internal channels that remain invisible to standard output-level defenses.

03.
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.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Machine-Checked Itô Calculus for Brownian Motion

arXiv:2606.15089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a machine-checked development of the $L^2$ Itô calculus of Brownian motion on a bounded time interval $[0,T]$, formalized in Lean 4 on top of Mathlib and the BrownianMotion package. The development contains: the construction of the Itô integral as an isometry of Hilbert spaces, from a predictable-rectangle $\pi$-system through the density of simple adapted processes; the Itô integral as a process, proved to be an $L^2$-continuous martingale through a single structural identity (the integral at time $t$ is the conditional-expectation projection of its terminal value onto $\mathcal{F}t$), from which adaptedness, the martingale property, the contraction bound, and both the terminal and the time-indexed Itô isometries follow as corollaries; and Itô's formula for $C^3$ functions with bounded derivatives, including its time-dependent form $df = f_x,dB + (f_t + \tfrac12 f{xx}),dt$, obtained by a discrete-to-continuous argument through weighted quadratic variation and explicit $L^2$ remainder bounds. To our knowledge this includes the first machine-checked proof of Itô's formula, and the first machine-checked construction of the Itô integral as a martingale-valued process, in any proof assistant. We are deliberate about the boundary: the theory is the $L^2$ theory on $[0,T]$ with bounded-derivative integrand classes; localization to the unrestricted $C^2$ formula, integrators beyond Brownian motion, and pathwise statements are out of scope, and we say precisely why and where. The development is roughly 7,200 lines of Lean across 22 modules; every theorem is sorry-free, the axioms of each headline result are pinned to Mathlib's classical defaults by a build-enforced gate, and the whole is reproducible from a pinned toolchain.

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

Does AI Reviewer See the Full Picture? Attacking and Defending Multimodal Peer Review

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) into scientific peer-review workflows introduces novel and significant risks for adversarial manipulation, especially given the multimodal nature of scientific papers where figures, not just text, convey core evidence. This creates a significant gap: current robustness studies on AI peer-review are overwhelmingly text-only. Moreover, the problem is distinct from standard jailbreaking, as a peer-review attack seeks to induce a domain-specific, targeted failure (e.g., "inflate this score") rather than a general safety policy violation, for which no practical defenses exist. To address this, we introduce PaperGuard, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and defend AI-generated peer-review against these domain-specific, cross-modal attacks. Our framework is built on three pillars: (1) a new multimodal peer-review dataset spanning multiple scientific domains; (2) a unified suite of attacks, including black-box prompt injections and white-box perturbations, specifically designed to target both text (GCG) and figures (PGD); and (3) a practical defense, motivated by the long-context challenge of academic papers, that uses chunk-based embedding search to efficiently localize and mitigate harmful instructions. Our extensive experiments, conducted across state-of-the-art models, confirm that AI reviewers are pervasively vulnerable. PaperGuard establishes the foundational benchmark, protocols, and actionable defense necessary to pioneer trustworthy, attack-resilient AI-assisted scholarly reviewing.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spin correlations, low-energy scales, and anisotropy scaling in kagome frustrated magnets

arXiv:2606.12512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neutron scattering is central to identifying quantum states of magnetic materials. In the search for quantum spin liquids, broad spectral features of inelastic spectra have been cited as evidence for spinon excitations, but can also arise from magnon excitations excitations in the presence of quenched disorder and strong magnon interactions. We develop a new approach to this problem, based on the adiabatic continuity in the $XXZ$ Heisenberg model on geometrically frustrating (GF) lattices as a function of the model's anisotropy. Using this approach, we identify universal features and energies of finite-temperature spin correlators. Focusing on the kagome lattice, we show that the low-energy spin spectral function contains robust, momentum-independent peaks with frequencies: $\omega_1 \approx 3.4 T^*$ and $\omega_2 \approx 6.3 T^*$, where the ``hidden energy scale'' $T^*$ is the characteristic scale of a low-temperature peak in the heat capacity, at which many GF magnets also display spin-glass freezing. We show that the spectral features at low energies $\omega\lesssim T^*$ arise from single-magnon scattering and identify the magnetizations of the respective excitations. We explore the evolution of the spectral features with temperature and discuss extensions to other GF lattices. Our results provide a sharp spectroscopic criterion for interpreting neutron scattering in kagome and other GF quantum magnets.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

HAMON: Passive Optical Sequence Mixing for Long-Horizon Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simple linear and frequency-domain models remain surprisingly competitive in long-horizon time-series forecasting, and recent mechanistic evidence suggests that standard forecasting benchmarks may not require the dense superposed representations that make transformers powerful in other domains. This raises a substrate-level question: if the core forecasting operator is often low-complexity and approximately linear, does it need to be implemented as learned digital temporal mixing? We introduce HAMON, a passive diffractive optical forecasting core in which historical values are encoded onto an optical aperture, future positions are left dark, and cascaded trainable phase masks with free-space diffraction shape the forecast directly in the output field. At inference, prediction is performed by a single passive optical propagation pass with no trainable digital sequence-mixing layer. Across standard benchmarks, HAMON outperforms the strongest digital baselines considered on ETTm2 at all horizons and on ETTh2 at all but the longest horizon, improving MSE by up to 14\% and doing so consistently across horizons rather than at isolated points. It is competitive on Weather and trails the strongest baselines on the remaining ETT settings and on the high-channel-count Traffic and Electricity datasets. Phase encoding, intensity-compatible readout, and phase-scrambling ablations, together with a TorchOptics cross-simulator check, indicate that the forecasts arise from the data-bearing optical field rather than from a digital forecasting head. Because the passive core uses standard Fourier optics, HAMON defines a concrete target for optical hardware and for passive physical sequence mixing.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-05-29

A prototype-augmented graph representation learning framework for identifying brain disorder-associated genes and facilitating drug repurposing

作者:

by Jiafang Li, Yifei Li, Siying Lin, Jiahua Rao, Huiying Zhao Many genetic loci were identified as associated with neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative disorders by Genome-wide association studies (GWAS). How these loci impact these diseases is unclear. Advances in deep-learning approaches and multi-omics data have the potential to link GWAS findings with disease mechanisms. Here, we proposed the Multi-omics Graph Transformer Network (MOGT), a semi-supervised graph neural network that leverages graph representation learning to model biological networks derived from multi-omics data to predict disease-associated genes. MOGT outperforms the current approaches in disease gene prediction for two psychiatric disorders and three neurodegenerative/neurological diseases. High-risk genes (HRGs) for Parkinson’s disease (PD) predicted by MOGT were used to drug discovery by integrating with the CMAP database. Finally, 10 drugs were identified as potential candidates. Among them, the effect of drug UK-356618 was experimentally verified in a primary neuron model, showing that UK-356618 reversed the abnormal expression of PD-associated genes and improved the cell-level phenotypes of PD. Together, these results indicate that MOGT can be used to identify HRGs for brain disorders, and these predicted HRGs provide high-level insights into the mechanisms and treatments of brain disorders.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

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

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

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

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

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

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Consensus on Dynamic Stochastic Block Models: Fast Convergence and Phase Transitions

arXiv:2209.03999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.

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

Parallelizing Tool Execution and LLM Generation for Low-Latency Agent Serving

arXiv:2603.18897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-powered agents execute tasks through a sequential loop of model generation and tool execution. Today's serving systems serialize this loop, leaving tool latency exposed on the task critical path. This paper presents PASTE, a tool-aware agent-serving system that predicts concrete future tool invocations from recurring agent patterns and executes them speculatively while the LLM is still generating. PASTE isolates speculative results until confirmed by the LLM and jointly schedules tool execution and returning LLM sessions to avoid shifting bottlenecks to the GPU. Across deep research, coding, and scientific-agent workloads, PASTE reduces average task completion time by 43.5% and lowers observed tool latency by 1.8x.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Gradient-based Causal Discovery Framework with Applications to Complex Industrial Processes

arXiv:2507.11178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the advancement of deep learning technologies, various neural network-based Granger causality models have been proposed. Although these models have demonstrated notable improvements, several limitations remain. Most existing approaches adopt the component-wise architecture, necessitating the construction of a separate model for each time series, which results in substantial computational costs. In addition, imposing the sparsity-inducing penalty on the first-layer weights of the neural network to extract causal relationships weakens the model's ability to capture complex interactions. To address these limitations, we propose Gradient Regularization-based Neural Granger Causality (GRNGC), which requires only one time series prediction model and applies $L_{1}$ regularization to the gradient between model's input and output to infer Granger causality. Moreover, GRNGC is not tied to a specific time series forecasting model and can be implemented with diverse architectures such as KAN, MLP, and LSTM, offering enhanced flexibility. Numerical simulations on DREAM, Lorenz-96, fMRI BOLD, and CausalTime show that GRNGC outperforms existing baselines and significantly reduces computational overhead. Meanwhile, experiments on real-world DNA, Yeast, HeLa, and bladder urothelial carcinoma datasets further validate the model's effectiveness in reconstructing gene regulatory networks.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.