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01.
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.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents

作者:

Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate – a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline – at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

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

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A Two-Stage Interpretable Framework for Predicting Plant-Derived Small RNA Targets on Human 3'UTRs

作者:

Can plant-derived small RNAs target human mRNA 3'UTRs via complementary base pairing and produce experimentally detectable regulatory effects? This question concerns not only the fundamental feasibility of cross-kingdom RNA regulation but also the technological pathway for screening plant-derived active small nucleic acids. Existing miRNA target prediction tools are predominantly designed for endogenous miRNA-mRNA systems, exhibiting notable limitations when applied to cross-species small RNA inputs and small-sample wet-lab experimental adaptation. In this study, we developed a two-layer prediction framework, MetaLulu-AI. The first layer builds upon publicly available human miRNA-mRNA 3'UTR interaction data, utilizing XGBoost to learn foundational binding rules on human 3'UTRs based on 41 interpretable computational features, including seed region pairing types, local context sequence composition, site positioning, and RNA secondary structures. The second layer is tailored to the experimental system of plant-derived small RNAs and human target genes. It introduces 40 experimental samples using significant changes in endogenous protein expression as the regulatory standard (determined by Western blot or ELISA 48 hours post-transfection of small RNAs via Lipo3000). Using 52-dimensional computational features and the optimal transcript scores from the first layer as inputs, this layer employs TabPFN for experimental label adaptation. The first-layer dataset consists of 38,752 training samples, 5,536 validation samples, and 11,073 testing samples (totaling 55,361), with a positive-to-negative sample ratio of approximately 1:5.4. On the randomly split test set, the model achieved an AUC of 0.9686, a recall of 0.8523, a precision of 0.8080, and an accuracy of 0.9452 (at a decision threshold of 0.4797). Group-based splitting revealed that the model maintains high discriminative power for unseen genes (AUC = 0.9541), though its generalization ability for completely unseen miRNAs decreases (AUC = 0.7390). For the 40 experimental samples in the second layer, the TabPFN model achieved an average AUC of 0.7406 {+/-} 0.092 across ten repeated 70/30 random splits, outperforming the baseline of directly using the first-layer scores (0.3563 {+/-} 0.149); the average AUC in a 5-fold cross-validation was 0.770 {+/-} 0.177. SHAP analysis demonstrated a clear divergence in the discriminative basis of the two models: the first layer relies more heavily on the thermodynamics of the small RNA itself and the quality of canonical seed sites, whereas the second layer focuses more on the local UTR environment and statistical site features. Although the current second-layer results are constrained by sample size and gene coverage, this framework serves as a preliminary observation of the adaptation mechanism for cross-kingdom regulation experiments, and motivating future large-scale validation. Under stricter leave-one-gene-out and leave-one-small-RNA-out evaluation, the adapter exceeded the first-layer score baseline but only matched the majority-class baseline, underscoring that entity-level generalization is not yet established.

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

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

08.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Mapping and engineering the human cell–cell interactome

Efforts to systematically understand how cell interactions tune tissue-level function have motivated transformative advances in single-cell transcriptomics and spatial profiling. Although these technologies can measure molecular states in individual cells and their spatial mapping within tissues, they also reveal that there exists a fundamental knowledge gap of how cells influence each other in context. In this Perspective, we propose an initiative to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome: a functional atlas of how all major human cell types communicate. We highlight how recent innovations can make this vision achievable. As a first moonshot, we propose the ‘Billion Cell×Cell Project’, which systematically characterizes the outcomes of defined cell–cell dyads across diverse cell types and conditions. We envision this multistage initiative will produce progressively deeper insights and unlock additional avenues for therapeutic discovery. We call on the scientific community to join us in building the tools, datasets and models that will decode and rewrite the language of life between cells. Di Carlo and colleagues discuss technologies required to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome and the therapeutic avenues such an atlas could unlock.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Brain age gap correlates with DTI-derived microstructural abnormalities in multiple sclerosis.

Background: Brain age gap (BAG) is increased in multiple sclerosis (MS), but whether it reflects microstructural pathology beyond conventional atrophy remains unclear. Objective: To test whether BAG is elevated in MS and correlates with conventional and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) abnormalities relative to healthy controls. Methods: A case-control study of 43 people with MS and 18 healthy controls was performed. BAG was estimated from T1-weighted MRI using brainageR. Controls were used as MRI reference distributions. MRI values were expressed as deviation z-scores and correlated with BAG within MS. Conventional MRI and DTI domains were analysed using age/sex-adjusted partial correlations with domain-wise Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction, where appropriate. Results: BAG was higher in MS than controls (4.79 vs -2.58 years; p

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Marginal Alignment Does Not Guarantee Joint-Distribution Fidelity: An Official-Reference Audit of Nemotron-Personas-Korea with Cross-Locale Replication

Synthetic persona datasets cite alignment with official demographics as a basis for trust, yet downstream users consume them as joint structures across age, sex, region, occupation, education, name, and institutional status. Marginal alignment does not imply that these joints are preserved. We propose the Independence-Assumption Footprint (IAF), an audit primitive that operates on the attribute combinations a dataset card itself documents as treated independently. For each such combination, IAF compares the synthetic joint against an external official or institutional reference, using direct joint tables where available and rule-implied checks otherwise. Applied to NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Korea (one million Korean synthetic personas), IAF finds that NPK aligns with KOSIS marginals while three joints fail. The major-by-occupation distribution against the KEIS graduate universe carries a large conditional mismatch. The age profile of military service is institutionally inconsistent. Female representation in male-dominated occupations is substantially over-flattened toward parity, with the strict screening verdict mapping-dependent and age-robust under direct standardisation. A transferability demonstration across six further NPK locales finds locale-dependent rather than universal diagnostics, with reference-taxonomy cardinality confounding cross-locale flag counts. For synthetic personas used as silicon samples, marginal claims must therefore be paired with disclosure-anchored joint audits before reuse. The released audit artefacts (reference manifests, occupational crosswalks, derived metrics, reproducibility scripts) instantiate this protocol on the NPK family and are released for retargeting at other synthetic persona resources.

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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-20

EpiLink: a simulation-based compatibility model for genomic transmission clustering in infectious disease surveillance

Identifying recently linked infections from pathogen genome sequences is central to infectious disease surveillance, yet many clustering approaches rely on fixed genetic distance thresholds whose relationship to transmission is often unclear. This limitation is especially important in rapidly growing outbreaks and superspreading events, where many cases may be sampled close together in time and share little genetic variation, making true transmission links difficult to distinguish from other closely related infections. Supervised models can improve discrimination, but they require labelled transmission data that are rarely available during outbreak response. We developed EpiLink, a threshold-free method that estimates whether two cases are compatible with recent transmission. Here, compatibility means how well the observed genetic distance and sampling-time difference between two cases fit what would be expected if they were linked by defined recent transmission scenarios. EpiLink simulates plausible recent transmission histories while accounting for uncertainty in infection timing, testing delay, and mutation accumulation, then assigns higher scores to pairs whose observed differences are typical of those simulations. EpiLink was evaluated using both synthetic and empirical SARS-CoV-2 outbreak data from the 2020 Boston epidemic. Two EpiLink variants were compared to a logistic regression model trained on labelled transmission data. One EpiLink variant assumed deterministic mutation accumulation, with genetic differences proportional to elapsed evolutionary time; the other accounted for stochasticity by sampling mutation counts from a Poisson distribution. The logistic regression model performed better at distinguishing linked from unlinked pairs, but EpiLink achieved comparable clustering accuracy. In the Boston data, EpiLink recovered clusters enriched for documented conference and skilled nursing facility outbreaks. EpiLink thus provides an interpretable, simulation-based approach for identifying recent transmission clusters when fixed thresholds are difficult to justify and labelled transmission data are unavailable.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Scalable Deep Unfolding of Conic Optimizers

arXiv:2606.13825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep unfolding (DU) accelerates iterative optimizers by introducing learnable components and training them through unrolled iterations, but extending DU to the large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) common in robotics has remained limited. Unrolling a full-update conic solver such as COSMO exposes two obstacles that prior work on learned conic solvers has not: backpropagating through the per-iteration linear-system solve incurs memory quadratic in the problem size once the coefficient matrix is formed explicitly, and backpropagating through the positive semidefinite (PSD) cone projection becomes numerically unstable when eigenvalues coincide. We address the first obstacle with a matrix-free implicit differentiation rule that operates entirely through matrix-vector products, reducing memory from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ and enabling backpropagation at scales where direct factorization runs out of memory. We address the second with a backward rule based on the Dalečkii–Krein representation of the Fréchet derivative, which remains well-defined under repeated eigenvalues. Together these make it possible to learn lightweight hyperparameter policies and warm-starts for a full-update conic solver. We evaluate on nonlinear covariance steering problems solved via sequential convex programming (SCP), as well as standalone SDPs and second-order cone programs ranging from max-cut and Lovász $\vartheta$ SDPs to robust estimation and control problems. The learned policies outperform state-of-the-art solvers across all problems, and can provide up to a 50$\times$ speedup depending on the class. When used as a subroutine in SCP, the learned approach delivers over a 30$\times$ speedup compared to COSMO.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets without entanglement in multipartite systems

arXiv:2606.20380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Genuine nonlocality arises when a set of multipartite orthogonal states is locally indistinguishable under any bipartition of the subsystems. The entanglement-assisted discrimination of such genuinely nonlocal orthogonal product sets has attracted significant attention in quantum information. Based on the criterion of local irreducibility, genuine nonlocality is classified into Type I (reducible) and Type II (irreducible). We present entanglement-assisted discrimination schemes for both types of genuinely nonlocal sets that use minimal resources. For low-dimensional cases, Type I sets require only a single EPR pair, whereas Type II sets necessitate only one GHZ state. We extend these protocols to higher-dimensional systems: the discrimination of Type I sets requires only one maximally entangled state in a two-qutrit system, while that of Type II sets similarly demands a single maximally entangled state in a three-qutrit system. For $n$-partite ($n > 3$) systems, Type I sets continue to require only one maximally entangled state, whereas Type II sets necessitate just one additional EPR pair compared to their Type I counterparts. These results provide a robust framework for the efficient discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets using minimal quantum resources.

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

Automated Byzantine-Resilient Clustered Decentralized Federated Learning for Battery Intelligence in Connected EVs

arXiv:2605.21115v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for managing electric vehicle (EV) battery data in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling privacy-preserving tasks such as anomaly detection and capacity estimation. However, most existing frameworks rely on centralized aggregation schemes, which pose critical limitations in terms of security and trust. To address these challenges, we propose ABC-DFL, an automated Byzantine-resilient clustered decentralized federated learning (C-DFL) framework for connected EVs. The proposed incentive-driven C-DFL system replaces the central server with an open-permissioned blockchain, featuring a new dynamic Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance (QBFT) protocol and an oracle-based aggregation layer, to enhance trust, security, and automation. At the core of ABC-DFL lies FLECA (Filtered Layered Enhanced Clustering Aggregation), a robust hierarchical aggregation protocol that mitigates Byzantine attacks by having each EV filter malicious updates using an adaptive threshold based on deviations from its reference model update. Oracle nodes, responsible for inter-group aggregation, employ robust clustering to isolate and aggregate model updates from trustworthy EV groups. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that FLECA matches FedProx convergence under benign conditions and significantly outperforms existing defenses with attack impact scores below 0.10 in adaptive adversarial scenarios. Furthermore, several learning experiments with multitask models confirm the effectiveness and fairness of the incentive mechanism. Finally, on-chain and off-chain benchmarks validate the practicality of ABC-DFL.

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

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

MOSAIC: Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier for Robust Epigenomic Classification of Acute Leukemia in Clinical Cohorts with Variable Tumor Purity

DNA methylation-based classification offers a rapid diagnostic complement to conventional molecular workflows in acute leukemia. Existing classifiers are trained on array-derived reference cohorts whose construction favors specimens with adequate tumor content, leaving clinically relevant low-purity specimens underrepresented and classifier robustness in this regime uncharacterized. On held-out low-purity specimens, existing classifiers were concordant with expert pathology in only 7 of 10 (MARLIN) and 5 of 10 (ALMA) cases, motivating a classifier built to maintain accuracy at low tumor purity. We developed MOSAIC (Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier), a neural network classifier built to maintain accuracy across the full range of tumor purities encountered in clinical practice. MOSAIC is a neural network trained on publicly available array-based methylation data augmented with native methylation calls from Oxford Nanopore sequencing. MOSAIC was evaluated on low-purity specimens held out entirely from training. On these held-out low-blast leukemia specimens, all below 25% blasts and including a case at 1.4%, MOSAIC was concordant with expert pathology in every case, recovering the correct subtype where diluted disease signal would otherwise be mistaken for normal or unrelated tissue. Gradient-based saliency analysis showed that the network relies on a partially distinct set of discriminative CpG probes when classifying low-blast specimens. MOSAIC demonstrates that augmenting training with clinically representative clinical specimens yields methylation-based leukemia classification that maintains effectiveness under the variable tumor purity of real clinical cohorts.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation

Cascaded speech translation (ST) systems suffer from error propagation when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs incorrect transcripts. We present the first systematic categorization of ASR errors for Vietnamese ST, classifying substitution errors by phonetic cause and quantifying their impact on downstream Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance using Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. We confirm that most ASR substitution errors arise from phonetic confusions rather than random noise, and that these phonetic errors significantly degrade ST quality. Motivated by this finding, we propose Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation (PiDA), which generates ASR-like corruptions by substituting words with phonetically similar alternatives using phonetic word embeddings. Fine-tuning on a PiDA-augmented version of FLEURS Vietnamese-English improves translation of erroneous ASR outputs (up to +2.04 BLEU over standard fine-tuning) while also slightly improving clean-text performance.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

arXiv:2606.13892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

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

On Surjectivity of Neural Networks: Can you elicit any behavior from your model?

arXiv:2508.19445v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given a trained neural network, can any specified output be generated by some input? Equivalently, does the network correspond to a function that is surjective? In generative models, surjectivity implies that any output, including harmful or undesirable content, can in principle be generated by the networks, raising concerns about model safety and jailbreak vulnerabilities. In this paper, we prove that many fundamental building blocks of modern neural architectures, such as networks with pre-layer normalization and linear-attention modules, are almost always surjective. As corollaries, widely used generative frameworks, including GPT-style transformers and diffusion models with deterministic ODE solvers, admit inverse mappings for arbitrary outputs. By studying surjectivity of these modern and commonly used neural architectures, we contribute a formalism that sheds light on their unavoidable vulnerability to a broad class of adversarial attacks.

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

Parameter-Efficient Adapter Tuning for Tabular-Image Multimodal Learning

作者:

Tabular-image multimodal learning aims to improve predictive modeling by jointly using structured tabular attributes and visual data. Although pretrained encoders provide strong modality-specific representations, full fine-tuning can be computationally expensive, while keeping encoders frozen may limit task-specific adaptation. We propose the Tabular-Image Adapter (TI-Adapter), a modality-specific adapter-based fine-tuning framework for efficient multimodal adaptation. TI-Adapter freezes the pretrained tabular encoder and learns an adapter after the extracted tabular embedding, while adapting the image branch with embedding-level and bottleneck-level adapters instead of full fine-tuning. Experiments on 20 tabular-image datasets show that TI-Adapter achieves competitive or better predictive performance than full fine-tuning while using substantially fewer trainable parameters. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of adapter placement for balancing performance and practical efficiency.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.