Author Correction: Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus
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RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.
Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with limited labeled data remains a challenging problem, particularly for Arabic-script languages. Although modern sequence-based recognizers perform well in high-resource settings, their accuracy degrades sharply as training data becomes scarce. Arabic-script languages share a common writing system with substantial character overlap, motivating cross-lingual learning as a strategy to mitigate data scarcity. We conduct a controlled line-level study of cross-lingual joint training for Arabic-script HTR under low-resource regimes (number of samples K = 100, 500, 1000 labeled lines) on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR) and Persian (PHTD). CRNN and Vision Transformer-based HTR-VT models are trained on the union of multiple related Arabic-script datasets to mitigate the data scarcity and are evaluated on individual target languages. Both architectures benefit from cross-language training under low-resource conditions. CRNN remains more effective under extremely limited target-language data, whereas the benefits of cross-language training for HTR-VT become less consistent as larger amounts of target-language data become available. On Persian (PHTD), joint training achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 9.99 , surpassing previously reported results despite not using the full available training data. On an additional Urdu dataset (UNHD), joint training reduces CER from 17.20 to 14.45.
arXiv:2606.11383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rolling stock planning is a complex optimization problem in railway management that involves assigning physical trains to scheduled trips while minimizing operational costs. In this work, we address a specific instance of this problem featuring 190 trips over two days, subject to constraints such as mandatory maintenance stops. We reformulate the problem as a Maximum-Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem on a graph where nodes represent feasible train cycles. To handle the computational complexity of the large search space, we propose a hybrid divide-and-conquer algorithm. This approach iteratively selects subgraphs and solves the MWIS problem using various solvers, including exact classical methods and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We evaluate the algorithm's performance by comparing these methods and analyzing the scaling with respect to subgraph size, with QAOA assessed through both classical simulation and execution on a quantum device (IQM Emerald). Our results indicate that increasing the subgraph size generally improves solution quality, demonstrating that the hybrid framework can effectively bridge the gap between polynomial-time approximate solvers and exponential-time exact methods.
arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.
Standardized evaluation protocols are indispensable for robust benchmarking in remote sensing, particularly as foundation features are increasingly transferred across diverse sensors and complex imaging geometries. In satellite multi-view reconstruction, conventional evaluations relying on unconstrained 2D global matching are often misleading. The Rational Function Model (RFM) and its Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) dictate a curved, height-dependent epipolar geometry that render flat 2D search spaces physically inconsistent. We propose a geometry-faithful and reproducible protocol tailored for the RPC framework. Our approach integrates an RPC-projected 3D consistency metric with a geometry-constrained dense matching proxy, specifically evaluating whether similarity responses remain localized and unique under physically plausible search manifolds. A pivotal finding of our joint reporting strategy is the decoupling of semantic agreement and geometric localization: high cross-view similarity at a projected 3D point does not guarantee reliable matchability in practical inference. Our benchmark demonstrates that incorporating geometric constraints is fundamental to the problem definition in satellite imagery. Furthermore, we show that state-of-the-art 2D backbones remain remarkably competitive against specialized 3D-aware models when subjected to this RPC-consistent evaluation.
The rapid increase in scientific publications leads to the fact that manual study screening in systematic literature reviews (SLRs) is increasingly resource consuming, inefficient, and inconsistent. Classifying studies that clearly report health-related quality-of-life results, such as EQ-5D data, requires a high level of clinical interpretation and poses challenges for human reviewers. This study investigates the use of Google's Gemini and Gemma large language models (LLMs) in automating EQ-5D detection in the PubMed biomedical database based only on published abstracts. A multi-phase framework is proposed that integrates few-shot prompting, weight ensembling aggregation, and a soft stacking meta-classifier. Nine LLMs are evaluated on a dataset of PubMed studies manually labeled by two experts regarding EQ-5D reporting. The weighted ensemble of gemini-2.5-pro, gemma-3-12b, and gemma-3-27b obtained a 0.74 weighted F1-score and 0.74 accuracy, exceeding individually attained results. The ensembling of top-performing models improved the balance between precision and recall compared to individual models, while the soft stacking approach provided greater reliability and interpretability. Feature analysis shows that the probability results from the models are important in guiding the final predictions. The findings suggest that an ensemble-based LLM setup is a reliable and scalable approach for automating screening in biomedical research.
Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.
Current RNA codon design methods are limited by inefficient long-sequence processing and poor generalizability, often relying on a decoupled "generate-or-optimize" paradigm. We introduce RNARL, a reinforcement learning-driven framework that unifies sequence generation with multi-objective optimization. RNARL directly learns to generate high-performance sequences, effectively optimizing sequences over 3,900 nucleotides and demonstrating superior performance and universality across six species and five RNA types. RNARL thus establishes an effective and generalizable framework for RNA codon design. Finally, a user-friendly web platform is freely available to facilitate its application for RNA therapeutic design.
A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.
arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.
The natural variation that distinguishes living organisms within a single species is currently being studied intensively, primarily at the genetic level. Unfortunately, studies of natural variants at the level of protein gene products are not very common, mainly due to the lack of appropriate databases and bioinformatics tools. The main research technique used to study proteomes/peptidomes is mass spectrometry (MS). A classic method for interpreting raw mass spectrometry data in proteomic/peptidomic studies involves the use of databases containing representative (canonical) sequences that define the proteome of the organism under study. In this paper, we present the AliceDB database, which contains information on over 7 million natural variants of protein sequences described in the scientific literature for Homo sapiens. The data contained in the AliceDB database can be utilized using widely available and commonly used software for interpreting proteomic data. Test results regarding the use of the AliceDB database for the interpretation of proteomic data indicate that accounting for the presence of natural variants increases both the number and quality of identified proteins. Furthermore, it is easy to identify protein sequence variants that may, for example, be of significance in medicine.
Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.
by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.
arXiv:2412.01871v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is a fundamental question why quantum mechanics employs complex numbers rather than solely real numbers. In this work, we conduct the first analysis of imaginarity quantification in neutrino flavor and spin-flavor oscillations. As quantum systems in coherent superposition, neutrinos are ideal candidates for quantifying imaginarity within the resource theoretic framework, using measures such as the $\ell_1$-norm and the relative entropy of imaginarity. We show that in the case of two-flavor mixing, these measures of imaginarity are nonzero. The measures of imaginarity reach their extreme values when the probabilistic features of quantum theory are fully maximized, i.e., both the transitional and survival probabilities are approximately equal. Our study reveals that the imaginarity, as a resource, can be harnessed not solely from the presence of a complex phase in the mixing matrix but also from the intrinsic quantum dynamics of time evolution itself. We further extend our analysis to explore the dynamics of three-flavor neutrino mixing, incorporating the effects of a nonzero $CP$ phase.
We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.
arXiv:2602.19172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Realizable online regression can behave very differently from online classification. Even without any margin or stochastic assumptions, realizability may enforce horizon-free (finite) cumulative loss under metric-like losses, even when the analogous classification problem has an infinite mistake bound. We study realizable online regression in the adversarial model under losses that satisfy an approximate triangle inequality (approximate pseudo-metrics). Recent work of Attias et al. shows that the minimax realizable cumulative loss is characterized by the scaled Littlestone/online dimension $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$, but this quantity can be difficult to analyze. Our main technical contribution is a generic potential method that upper bounds $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$ by a concrete Dudley-type entropy integral that depends only on covering numbers of the hypothesis class under the induced sup pseudo-metric. We define an entropy potential $\Phi(\mathcal{H})=\int_{0}^{diam(\mathcal{H})} \log N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)\,d\varepsilon$, where $N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)$ is the $\varepsilon$-covering number of $\mathcal{H}$, and show that for every $c$-approximate pseudo-metric loss, $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}(\mathcal{H})\le O(c)\,\Phi(\mathcal{H})$. In particular, polynomial metric entropy implies $\Phi(\mathcal{H})d$, otherwise infinite), and for bounded-norm $k$-ReLU networks separate regression (finite loss, even $\widetilde O(k^2)$, and $O(1)$ for one ReLU) from classification (impossible already for $k=2,d=1$).
By combining chemistry and biology with AI modelling, Layla Hosseini-Gerami is finding and reviving therapeutics with ‘huge potential’. By combining chemistry and biology with AI modelling, Layla Hosseini-Gerami is finding and reviving therapeutics with ‘huge potential’.
Multimorbidity is the dominant clinical reality of primary care, yet the temporal dynamics governing when and how persistent comorbidity associations emerge remain poorly characterised. Most large-scale comorbidity studies adopt a single observation window after an index diagnosis, implicitly assuming that associations detectable at one year are equally detectable at five. Using 11 years of electronic health records from 5,821,197 individuals in Catalan primary care, we applied a matched cohort design across nine complementary follow-up windows, five cumulative (0-1 to 0-5 years) and four conditional (1-2 to 4-5 years), to 1,315 index diseases, identifying 144,030 significant directed comorbidity associations in the five-year network. We found that 60.1% of these associations required at least three years of follow-up and were undetectable in shorter-window analyses, demonstrating that observation window length is a primary determinant of which comorbidities can be observed. To organise this temporal heterogeneity, we introduce the biological clock of multimorbidity: a two-dimensional framework that positions ICD-10 disease categories according to their rates of cumulative signal attenuation and the persistence of conditional risk. This framework identifies four reproducible temporal patterns (episodic, chronic stable, chronic progressive, and transient-persistent) that are robust under bootstrap resampling, leave-one-disease-out sensitivity analysis, and alternative clustering approaches. The biological clock is systematically modulated by sex, with Blood/Immune and Musculoskeletal disorders showing the largest sex differences in temporal dynamics. Network analysis identified 19 disease "initiators" that generate broad downstream comorbidity burdens and 21 "sinks" representing convergent endpoints of multiple disease trajectories. Comparison with hospital-based Danish data from 6,909,676 individuals showed that shared associations were 2.7-fold enriched over chance expectation (hypergeometric test, p
arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0
Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the cost of accessing and processing the Key-Value (KV) cache. Despite evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning, since incorporating values incurs prohibitive overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. Rather than replacing KV selection, ART dynamically terminates redundant KV traversal on top of existing dense or sparse attention policies. We introduce a stability-based criterion that monitors both magnitude and directional changes of intermediate attention outputs and provideds a theoretical characterization of the resulting truncation error. Experiments on the LongBench and RULER Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks show that ART increases the generation throughput of existing KV-cache methods by up to 20%, without compromising the result quality.
arXiv:2606.18379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based retrieval at billion-node scale requires jointly solving three tightly coupled problems – graph construction, representation learning, and real-time serving – yet existing work addresses each in isolation. We present RankGraph-2, a framework deployed at Meta that co-designs all three lifecycle stages for similarity-based retrieval (U2U2I and U2I2I), where each stage's requirements shape the others. Serving requires a co-learned cluster index to avoid expensive online KNN – this pushes index co-training into the training objective. Training benefits from the observation that similarity-based retrieval tolerates pre-computed neighborhoods, eliminating online graph infrastructure – this requires construction to produce self-contained data. Construction must also support hour-level refresh for item coverage. Acting on these cascading requirements, RankGraph-2 reduces hundreds of trillions of edges to hundreds of billions via subsampling with popularity bias correction, pre-computes multi-hop neighborhoods via personalized PageRank, and co-learns a residual-quantization cluster index that reduces serving computational cost by 83%. This lifecycle co-design enables a simple architecture to achieve 3.8 x higher recall than a GAT + Deep Graph Infomax model on a bipartite graph and 2.1 x higher than PyTorch-BigGraph on item retrieval. RankGraph-2 delivers up to +0.96% CTR and +2.75% CVR, and has powered 20+ retrieval launches across major surfaces.
AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.