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

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

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

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attenuation Patch against SAR Object Detection

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in SAR target detection tasks but remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing SAR-specific attack methods can effectively deceive detectors; however, they often introduce noticeable perturbations and are largely confined to digital domain, neglecting physical implementation constrains for attacking SAR systems. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Attenuation Patch (AAP) method is proposed that employs energy-constrained optimization strategy coupled with an attenuation-based deployment framework to achieve a seamless balance between attack effectiveness and stealthiness. More importantly, AAP exhibits strong potential for physical realization by aligning with signal-level electronic jamming mechanisms. Experimental results show that AAP effectively degrades detection performance while preserving high imperceptibility, and shows favorable transferability across different models. This study provides a physical grounded perspective for adversarial attacks on SAR target detection systems and facilitates the design of more covert and practically deployable attack strategies. The source code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

作者:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Error Correction Codes for Truncated SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theories

作者:

arXiv:2511.13721v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct two quantum error correction codes for pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the electric basis truncated at the electric flux $j_max=1/2$, which are applicable on quasi-1D plaquette chains, 2D honeycomb and 3D triamond and hyperhoneycomb lattices. The first code converts Gauss's law at each vertex into a stabilizer while the second only uses half of the vertices and is locally the carbon code. Both codes are able to correct single-qubit errors. The electric and magnetic terms in the SU(2) Hamiltonian are expressed in terms of logical gates in both codes. The logical-gate Hamiltonian in the first code exactly matches the spin Hamiltonian for gauge singlet states found in previous work.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dynamically Optimal Unraveling Schemes for Simulating Lindblad Equations

arXiv:2509.19887v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic unraveling schemes are powerful computational tools for simulating Lindblad equations, offering significant reductions in memory requirements. However, this advantage is accompanied by increased stochastic uncertainty, and the question of optimal unraveling remains open. In this work, we investigate unraveling schemes driven by Brownian motion or Poisson processes and present a comprehensive parametric characterization of these approaches. For the case of a single Lindblad operator and one noise term, this parametric family provides a complete description for unraveling scheme with pathwise norm-preservation. We further analytically derive dynamically optimal quantum state diffusion (DO-QSD) and dynamically optimal quantum jump process (DO-QJP) that minimize the growth rate of the variance of an observable locally in time. Compared to jump process ansatz, DO-QSD offers two notable advantages: firstly, the variance for DO-QSD can be rigorously shown not to exceed that of any jump-process ansatz locally in time; secondly, it has very simple expressions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DO-QSD scheme may achieve substantial reductions in the variance of observables and the resulting simulation error.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

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

Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory

arXiv:2509.06697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exchange rate forecasting remains a challenging problem, particularly for emerging economies, where the observed time series exhibit pronounced long-memory dependence, nonlinear dynamics, and sensitivity to macro-financial drivers. Classical models such as ARFIMA capture long-range persistence but fail to adequately represent nonlinear relationships, while modern machine learning approaches often neglect the underlying long-memory structure in macroeconomic series. To address this gap, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that integrates ARFIMA-based long-memory modeling with neural networks for nonlinear function approximation, while incorporating exogenous macroeconomic and uncertainty indicators. The framework provides a unified approach for capturing persistence, nonlinear dynamics, and external shocks. We establish asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process and develop conformal prediction intervals for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Empirical results for BRIC exchange rates show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms a broad range of forecasting benchmarks across multiple horizons, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling long-memory dependence in exchange rate dynamics. The `narfima' R package provides an implementation of our approach.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improve Large Language Model Systems with User Logs

Scaling training data and model parameters has long driven progress in large language models (LLMs), but this paradigm is increasingly constrained by the scarcity of high-quality data and diminishing returns from rising computational costs. As a result, recent work is increasing the focus on continual learning from real-world deployment, where user interaction logs provide a rich source of authentic human feedback and procedural knowledge. However, learning from user logs is challenging due to their unstructured and noisy nature. Vanilla LLM systems often struggle to distinguish useful feedback signals from noisy user behavior, and the disparity between user log collection and model optimization (e.g., the off-policy optimization problem) further strengthens the problem. To this end, we propose UNO (User log-driveN Optimization), a unified framework for improving LLM systems (LLMsys) with user logs. UNO first distills logs into semi-structured rules and preference pairs, then employs query-and-feedback-driven clustering to manage data heterogeneity, and finally quantifies the cognitive gap between the model's prior knowledge and the log data. This assessment guides the LLMsys to adaptively filter out noisy feedback and construct different modules for primary and reflective experiences extracted from user logs, thereby improving future responses. Extensive experiments show that UNO achieves state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency, significantly outperforming Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and memory-based baselines. We have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/bebr2/UNO .

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

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

arXiv:2606.18457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.

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

LLM Features Can Hurt GNNs: Concatenation Interference on Homophilous Graph Benchmarks

Adding LLM-generated node features to graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely reported to improve accuracy on standard benchmarks. We document a contrasting observation: when LLM features are introduced through pure input concatenation (rather than joint training, distillation, or prompt-conditioning), they can systematically degrade accuracy on the same homophilous benchmarks where end-to-end LLM pipelines succeed. With an MLP backbone on the Planetoid public split and bag-of-words original features, concatenating SBERT-encoded GPT-4o-mini TAPE features reduces PubMed test accuracy by -17.0 +/- 0.3 pp and Cora by -4.3 +/- 0.6 pp (CiteSeer -0.6 +/- 0.8 pp, within seed noise). The drop attenuates as we relax each condition (GCN / GCNII / GAT backbones, random splits, smaller encoders) and reverses on medium-homophily WikiCS (+4.4 pp) and ogbn-arxiv (+11.7 pp). To predict when concatenation helps versus hurts, we report a simple measure of LLM-alone discriminability, Delta_sig. Across 9 datasets Delta_sig correlates with the concatenation cost more strongly than homophily at point estimate (r^2 = 0.38 vs. 0.06; N=9, bootstrap CIs overlap). The bootstrap-best change-point is tau = 13.8 pp, and the rule "Delta_sig

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Fanconi Anemia as a Window into Premalignant Field Cancerization of the Oral Mucosa

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) evolves through stepwise clonal expansion within genetically altered mucosa fields, yet actionable biomarkers remain undefined. Leveraging Fanconi anemia (FA), a cancer predisposition syndrome with extreme HNSCC risk due to defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair, we profiled premalignant changes in the oral cavity using noninvasive brush biopsies. Consistent with our prior demonstration of genomic instability in FA-associated SCCs, we detected pathogenic TP53 variants in 26% and copy number alterations in 60.5% in clinically normal-appearing oral mucosa of individuals with FA. These subclinical clonal expansions define candidate biomarkers of early clonal evolution amenable to serial sampling for risk stratification and prevention studies. Since FA-associated SCCs share genomic features with sporadic HNSCC, these findings may extend to the broader population. We also identify somatic reversion of a pathogenic FANCB variant, providing evidence of genomic self-correction and suggesting a potential avenue for gene-based cancer prevention in FA.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

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

CoVEBench: Can Video Editing Models Handle Complex Instructions?

While recent text-guided video editing models excel at elementary tasks (e.g., style transfer, object insertion), real-world user requests are highly compositional. A single prompt often demands multiple coupled edits, such as modifying subjects, actions, and camera views, while strictly preserving unrelated spatiotemporal content. Existing benchmarks, heavily constrained by isolated edits and coarse global metrics, fail to diagnose how models handle such complex workflows. To address this gap, we introduce CoVEBench, a compositional video editing benchmark comprising 416 curated source videos, 626 multi-point editing instructions, and 9,990 fine-grained checklist items. Covering diverse editing dimensions, CoVEBench evaluates models via MLLM-judged instruction compliance and video fidelity, alongside automated metrics for video quality. Extensive experiments reveal that compositional editing remains a profound challenge: current models frequently omit edits, violate preservation constraints, or introduce artifacts when handling multiple operations simultaneously. CoVEBench provides a challenging, diagnostic testbed to advance video editing toward realistic user workflows.

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

GrapNet: A Programmable Dynamic-Architecture Neural Graph Substrate

作者:

arXiv:2606.18923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programmability is a missing first-class interface in fixed-tensor neural networks: editing a relation, freezing a subgraph, auditing a local function, or changing the execution backend should be an operation on the neural program rather than ad-hoc parameter surgery. GrapNet studies this graph-as-network setting. The graph is the architecture and executable program, not an input data graph. Each compute node owns its next-layer child references and a trainable allocation vector aligned with those references; deleting a relation physically removes both the child reference and the corresponding allocation coordinate. Structural rules and execution policies live outside the node core, so the same child-owned graph can be grown, frozen, structurally edited, grouped into trainable family blocks, routed by attention over active relations, or lowered to dense snapshots after topology stabilizes. GrapNet composes with conventional modules through a vector-valued parent interface: dense layers, CNN encoders, ResNet feature extractors, attention blocks, and transformer representations can all feed one sensory GrapNode per coordinate. The evaluation is organized as a programmability stress suite rather than as a new replay benchmark. In a matched ten-seed Split Fashion-MNIST study, a plastic GrapNet+ER head reaches 63.16 percent seen-class accuracy versus 51.08 percent for a parameter-larger dense MLP+ER under the same seen-class loss and replay memory, with paired delta 12.08 points and p=1.3e-5. On Split CIFAR-10 with a frozen ImageNet ResNet-18 encoder, the same substrate improves the online head over MLP-256 by 3.81 points, with p=0.0026. These results support GrapNet as an editable neural graph substrate whose core value is structural programmability with faithful execution views.

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

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

arXiv:2606.14551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can LLMs Accurately Score Medical Diagnoses and Clinical Reasoning?

arXiv:2604.14892v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating medical AI systems using expert clinician panels is costly and slow, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as alternative adjudicators. Here, we evaluate an LLM Jury, composed of three frontier AI models, for scoring 3334 diagnoses on 300 real-world low- and middle-income country (LMIC) hospital cases. Both LLM- and clinician-generated diagnoses are scored against expert panel diagnoses across four dimensions: diagnosis, differential diagnosis, clinical reasoning, and negative treatment risk. The LLM Jury scores are compared with expert and independent re-scoring panel scores to assess error metrics, inter-rater agreement, severe-risk errors, and the effect of post hoc calibration using isotonic regression. In our data, we find that: (i) the uncalibrated LLM Jury scores preserve ordinal agreement with the expert clinician panel scores, but are systematically lower; (ii) the probability of severe-risk errors is lower for the LLM Jury than the human expert re-score panels; (iii) the LLM Jury combined with LLM diagnoses can be used to identify diagnoses at high risk of error, enabling targeted expert review and improved panel efficiency; (iv) the calibrated LLM Jury scores and rankings of diagnosing agents show excellent agreement with those of the primary expert panels; (v) LLM Jury models show no self-preference bias, they did not score diagnoses generated by their own underlying model or models from the same vendor more (or less) favourably than those generated by other models. Together, these results provide evidence that a calibrated LLM Jury is a trustworthy and reliable proxy for expert clinician evaluation in medical AI benchmarking. Confirming these findings in other clinical settings is an important direction for future work.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

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

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

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

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

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

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A Poisson Process Life Expectancy framework for optimising patient lifetime during chemotherapy

Cancer therapy balances between two competing objectives - treatment efficacy against the tumour and the risk of treatment related severe adverse events, including patient death. Most existing optimal control theory (OCT) formulations rely on optimising heuristic cost functionals that lack direct clinical interpretability. In clinical practice treatment efficacy and patient tolerability are primarily assessed through survival metrics and adverse event rates. Here we introduce the Continuous Lifetime Payoff (CLP), a novel OCT objective functional that directly links treatment decisions to patient survival. It explicitly incorporates tumour dynamics, tumour eradication, and patient mortality from tumour progression, drug-related toxicity and age. We fit age-related mortality from life tables and infer parameters from simulated survival data. The CLP provides a clinically grounded framework for optimising chemotherapy regimens.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Brain morphology in Anorexia Nervosa and its subtypes: A multi-cohort study of individual participant data

by Fabio Bernardoni, Dominic Arold, Luis Schoppik, Klaas Bahnsen, Ruiyang Ge, Clara Moreau, Lasse Bang, Federico D’Agata, Giovanni Abbate-Daga, Christian K. Tamnes, Iain Campbell, Owen O’Daly, Ulrike Schmidt, Guido Frank, Stefanie Horndasch, Andreas Hess, Arnd Dörfler, Hans-Christoph Friederich, Joe Simon, Angela Favaro, Luca Lavagnino, Christina E. Wierenga, Amanda Bischoff-Grethe, Amy E. Miles, Allan Kaplan, Aristotle Voineskos, Paul A. M. Smeets, Annemarie A. van Elburg, Unna Danner, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Laura Berner, Neda Jahanshad, Sophia Frangou, Joseph A. King, Paul Thompson, Stefan Ehrlich Background In a recent coordinated meta-analysis of neuroimaging data, we reported gray matter (GM) alterations in acutely underweight patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). Here, we extend these findings by examining individual variation in brain structure within AN, individual-level differentiation between AN and healthy controls (HC), and differences between AN subtypes, with potential relevance for understanding clinical heterogeneity. Methods and findings We analyzed individual-level data from 11 international sites in the ENIGMA Eating Disorders Working Group, including 570 female participants with AN and 739 HC. We examined cortical thickness, cortical surface area and subcortical volumes in AN versus HC using three complementary approaches: (i) group-level differences in a mega-analysis correcting for age effects, (ii) frequencies of extreme deviations (infra-/supranormal; z  1.96) based on normative reference models by the CentileBrain Initiative, and (iii) individual-level classification performance using machine learning. The same analytic framework was applied to compare AN restricting versus binge-eating/purging subtype, additionally correcting for BMI effects.Mega-analyses reinforced previous meta-analytic findings of pronounced and widespread GM deficits in AN compared to HC. Normative modelling revealed that the frequency of infranormal z-scores (23/68 cortical thickness, 13/14 subcortical volume metrics) and supranormal z-scores (35/68 cortical thickness, 17/68 cortical surface area metrics) was significantly higher in AN than expected based on reference data. Individuals with AN could be reliably differentiated from HC using machine-learning classifiers (ROC–AUC = 0.75–0.81). In contrast, neither group-level differences nor frequency of extreme z-scores differed between AN subtypes, and individuals with different subtypes could not be reliably differentiated from each other. Importantly, the observational design cannot distinguish neurobiological differences related to AN from the effects of starvation or low BMI in the AN versus HC analyses. The lack of differences between subtypes does not exclude brain structural differences between AN subtypes that might be detectable with other modalities or analytic approaches. Conclusion Using a mega-analytic approach, we confirm widespread GM deficits in AN, show that these alterations are (in some patients) extreme, and demonstrate that they enable robust classification with superior performance compared to most MRI-based psychiatric classification studies. The absence of differences between AN subtypes may reflect shared neurobiology, though other imaging modalities may reveal distinctions beyond brain structure.