Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in

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

Detect Before You Leap: Mirage Detection in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question. This failure mode, recently described as mirage (mirage2026), is especially concerning in medical and document VQA, where a plausible but visually ungrounded answer may be mistaken for image-based evidence. We study the complementary problem of pre-release mirage detection: given an image-question pair, determine whether the VLM should answer or abstain before generation. To that end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Text-Conditioned Layer-wise Internal Alignment (TC-LIA) method that probes patch-token representations across the layers of a CLIP ViT-H/14 vision encoder. The key idea is to project layer-wise image patch tokens into the final CLIP embedding space and measure their similarity with the question embedding, thereby tracking whether question-relevant visual evidence emerges across vision layers. TC-LIA summarizes this alignment trajectory using final image-text cosine similarity, late-layer top-k patch-text alignment, early-to-late gain, and layer-wise slope. These features are combined with pixel-statistic based blank/noise detection, zero-shot domain routing, and structured VLM self-assessment in an ensemble. Across five VQA domains with related, unrelated-real, and blank/noise inputs, and across twelve VLM backbones, Qwen2.5-VL-32B achieves the highest three-class detection accuracy of 94.7% with a 3.0% mirage rate, while Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves 94.6% accuracy with a lower 2.8% mirage rate. Baseline mirage rates span 21.7-66.6%.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Context Modeling

Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens – a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address. KGERMAR addresses this by constructing dynamic, context-specific knowledge graphs from input text during inference, enabling domain-adaptive retrieval that leverages both semantic similarity and explicit entity relationships. The framework performs real-time entity and relation extraction to build contextual knowledge graphs, then integrates graph-structural embeddings with textual semantics through a multi-component memory architecture. Three memory banks – contextual, semantic, and structural – are maintained with retrieval signals fused via learned weights to capture both surface-level semantics and deeper relational patterns. Evaluated on SlimPajama (84.7K training examples), WikiText-103 (4,358 examples), PG-19 (100 examples), and Proof-pile (46.3K examples), KGERMAR achieves up to 8.5\% lower perplexity and 2–2.5x better memory efficiency than memory-augmented baselines across context lengths from 1K to 32K tokens, with superior in-context learning performance across five NLU tasks. The dynamic knowledge graph construction approach advances memory-augmented language modeling by enabling domain-specific knowledge representation that adapts to input contexts rather than relying on fixed knowledge bases.

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

Feynman Kac Reweighted Schrödinger Bridge Matching for Surface-Based Tau PET Harmonization

arXiv:2606.17420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tau PET imaging is central to tracking Alzheimer's disease progression, but systematic differences between scanners, protocols, and radiotracers across sites introduce nonbiological variability that inflates biomarker variance, reduces sensitivity to disease effects, and can bias downstream clinical assessments. Harmonization methods aim to remove these site-induced shifts while preserving biologically meaningful signal, yet existing approaches struggle when source and target cohorts differ in subgroup composition, risking conflation of site effects with biological variation such as tau-positivity status. We propose the Feynman Kac Reweighted Schröodinger Bridge Matching (FKRSBM) model to address this problem. Rather than routing data through a Gaussian noise prior as in diffusion-based methods, FKRSBM learns a direct stochastic transport process between source and target distributions via entropy-regularized optimal transport. To enforce biologically consistent transport, FKRSBM incorporates a subgroup-aware endpoint proposal derived from a Feynman Kac reweighting of the reference bridge measure, implemented entirely through stratified importance sampling at the data level and requiring no changes to the underlying bridge-matching solver or network architecture. For surface-based neuroimaging, FKRSBM employs a spherical convolutional backbone operating on cortical meshes to perform vertex-level harmonization. We evaluate the method on tau PET SUVR maps, harmonizing PI-2620 data from the HABS-HD cohort into the AV-1451 domain of ADNI. Compared against ComBat, CycleGAN, a diffusion-based method (DF), and unregularized Diffusion Schröodinger Bridge Matching (DSBM), FKRSBM achieves superior distributional alignment, reduced tau-positivity sign mismatch, stronger APOE subgroup alignment, and improved downstream disease classification performance.

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

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

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

ML Inference Scheduling with Predictable Latency

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

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

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

A Stationarity-and-Coupling Criterion for Training-Free Time-Lagged Spectral Embeddings of Multivariate Time Series

arXiv:2606.13823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study training-free fixed-length descriptors for multivariate time series and ask not merely whether such a descriptor performs well, but when it can be expected to work at all. Our object of study is $D(\tau)$, built from a time-lagged correlation matrix truncated at the Marchenko-Pastur edge so that only signal-bearing eigenvalues survive and classified by cosine similarity to class centroids with zero learned parameters. The central contribution is not the descriptor but a falsifiable applicability criterion for it. Working from a stationary Gaussian VAR(1) model, we argue that $D(\tau)$ separates two classes when the signals are approximately stationary and the class information lives in their cross-channel temporal coupling rather than in marginal per-channel power. We derive, semi-formally, three consequences: a distinguishability condition, why the static ($\tau=0$) covariance collapses to chance, and why a stationary but power-discriminated paradigm defeats the descriptor. The criterion is operational: a two-part pre-flight test – an augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity check and a power-baseline saturation check – predicts applicability before any training. We validate both halves on a mixed assortment. On four paradigms that satisfy the criterion (Sleep-EDF, BCI-IV-2a, MIT-BIH, ESC-50) the descriptor is competitive with strong baselines at a fraction of their cost, reaching $88.5\pm4.5\%$ under 20-subject leave-one-subject-out on Sleep-EDF on a single CPU thread. On three that violate it – non-stationary ERPs, and financial-volatility and wearable-stress regimes that are power-discriminated – it fails exactly as the pre-flight predicts, and these negatives are the more informative half. We are explicit that $D(\tau)$ is not the most accurate representation; its value is a compact, training-free embedding whose domain of validity is known in advance.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

RetroMol: Parsing a shared encoding from natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters

Natural products such as polyketides and nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are important sources of bioactive compounds, including many antibiotics. Many of them are assembled by modular enzyme complexes and further modified and diversified by tailoring reactions encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Although natural products and their coding BGCs describe different data modalities of the same biochemical process, a unified language to jointly describe their biochemistry is lacking. Here we introduce a sequence-based representation of the core biosynthesis of modular natural products, which we call primary sequences, that bridges chemical structures and BGCs. We also present RetroMol, an algorithm that parses either natural product structures or their encoding BGCs into their primary sequences of natural product building blocks. RetroMol allows for similarity scoring between natural products and BGCs, enabling the retrieval of compounds, BGCs, and a combination of the two, based on their biosynthetic similarity. This can, for instance, be used to retrieve biosynthetically similar but structurally dissimilar compounds, or link natural products to candidate coding BGCs in large experimental datasets. We demonstrate the latter by rediscovering the nocardichelin B BGC as a proof of principle. We also exemplify the utility of biosynthetic similarity by showing various pairs of biosynthetically similar compounds with low structural similarity. Together, these results establish primary sequences as a shared biosynthetic encoding for natural product comparison and BGC prioritization.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation

Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use.

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

UniReason-Med: A Shared Grounded Reasoning Interface for 2D-to-3D Transfer in Medical VQA

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

The recount3 Python package for programmatic access to uniformly processed RNA-seq data

The recount3 online resource provides tens of thousands of uniformly processed RNA-seq samples across human and mouse from major sequencing repositories like the Sequence Read Archive. While access to these datasets has traditionally been centered in the R/Bioconductor ecosystem, the growing prominence of Python in bioinformatics and machine learning necessitates native, efficient tooling for Python users. Therefore, we present the recount3 Python package with robust application programming interface (API) and command-line interface (CLI) for discovering, downloading, and materializing recount3 resources. The software orchestrates uniform resource locator (URL) resolution, persistent on-disk caching, and the automatic parsing of data into analysis-ready data structures, including Pandas DataFrames and BiocPy RangedSummarizedExperiment objects. The recount3 Python package drastically lowers the barrier to entry for large-scale utilization of RNA-seq data in Python-based computational pipelines, bridging the gap between massive public transcriptomic data and modern machine learning ecosystems.

17.
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.

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

C2FL: Clustered Continual Federated Learning under Spatial and Temporal Drift

arXiv:2606.18003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) increasingly rely on machine learning to let each node learn from locally sensed data, aligning its behavior with the surrounding environment. Scaling this intelligence, however, raises fundamental challenges: sensed data is often privacy-sensitive, preventing centralized collection; nodes are mobile, traversing regions where nearby nodes perceive similar phenomena while distant ones observe radically different conditions, creating natural spatial clusters; and these distributions evolve over time due to mobility, introducing temporal drift that makes local models progressively stale. These dynamics arise across domains - vehicular sensing, drone-based monitoring, smartphone crowdsensing - yet the interplay of privacy, spatial heterogeneity, and temporal drift severely undermines conventional learning strategies. Therefore, we propose C2FL, a fully distributed Federated Learning (FL) approach where nodes self-organize into learning groups through spatial clustering, reflecting the geographic structure of the environment. To counteract temporal drift, each node combines experience replay with a dwell-time-aware adaptive averaging step, progressively incorporating the regional consensus as it remains longer within the same area, while preserving previously acquired knowledge under evolving distributions. We evaluate our approach on synthetic experiments that systematically reproduce spatial and temporal shifts, showing that standard federated strategies degrade significantly under these conditions and that our method restores robust collective adaptation.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optical Creation of Synthetic Microgravity for Quantum Degenerate Gases

arXiv:2606.14985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Microgravity environments provide unique opportunities for ultracold-atom experiments by enabling long interrogation times and reduced acceleration-induced dynamics. However, their realization has largely been restricted to specialized facilities such as drop towers, sounding rockets, and space-based laboratories. Here we realize synthetic microgravity for quantum degenerate gases using optically engineered force landscapes that compensate Earth's gravity to the milli-g level while maintaining continuous confinement of the atomic ensemble. These force landscapes are generated by dynamically painted optical dipole potentials and calibrated in situ through Bloch oscillations in a vertical optical lattice, enabling precise control of the residual acceleration. We use this capability to demonstrate matter-wave beam splitting with arm separations of several hundred microns. We further implement a Bloch-band atom interferometer in which interaction-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed through controlled three-dimensional expansion in the synthetic microgravity potential. This reduction of mean-field effects restores near-$\sqrt{N}$ scaling of interferometric sensitivity for large quantum degenerate ensembles. Our results establish a versatile platform for realizing synthetic microgravity with trapped quantum gases in terrestrial laboratories, bringing the advantages of microgravity experiments to continuously operating systems and opening new opportunities for quantum sensing, matter-wave interferometry, and precision measurements.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

LivePI: More Realistic Benchmarking of Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection

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

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

eCNNTO: A Highly Generalizable ConvNet for Accelerating Topology Optimization

arXiv:2606.19921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work proposes an element-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accelerate density-based Topology Optimization (TO), termed eCNNTO. TO generally undergoes a large number of iterations, where finite element analysis is performed in every iteration, leading to the efficiency bottleneck especially when dense meshes are used to achieve high-resolution designs. To address this limitation, eCNNTO is proposed to build upon Kallioras et al. (2020), where a Deep Belief Network (DBN) was trained for every element to predict its near-optimal density from its early history, thereby skipping the great majority of iterations and significantly accelerating the TO procedure. However, the method lacks spatial correlations among neighboring elements and may lead to disconnected features in the final structure. The proposed method employs CNN with residual connections to address this issue. On top of it, a novel training strategy is introduced to further enhance the optimization efficiency, where the training dataset consists of the final stage density histories rather than early ones. This change can also help reduce the required training data size. eCNNTO requires only a small dataset to train and yet it can be generalized to problems with largely different boundary conditions, loading cases, design domain geometries, mesh resolutions, as well as non-design domains. In the end, the generalization capabilities and efficiency of eCNNTO are demonstrated through a variety of examples in two and three dimensions, achieving up to 90% and 97% reduction of iterations, respectively.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.