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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

R1-SyntheticVL: Is Synthetic Data from Generative Models Ready for Multimodal Large Language Model?

In this work, we aim to develop effective data synthesis techniques that autonomously synthesize multimodal training data for enhancing MLLMs in solving complex real-world tasks. To this end, we propose Collective Adversarial Data Synthesis (CADS), a novel and general approach to synthesize high-quality, diverse and challenging multimodal data for MLLMs. The core idea of CADS is to leverage collective intelligence to ensure high-quality and diverse generation, while exploring adversarial learning to synthesize challenging samples for effectively driving model improvement. Specifically, CADS operates with two cyclic phases, i.e., Collective Adversarial Data Generation (CAD-Generate) and Collective Adversarial Data Judgment (CAD-Judge). CAD-Generate leverages collective knowledge to jointly generate new and diverse multimodal data, while CAD-Judge collaboratively assesses the quality of synthesized data. In addition, CADS introduces an Adversarial Context Optimization mechanism to optimize the generation context to encourage challenging and high-value data generation. With CADS, we construct MMSynthetic-20K and train our model R1-SyntheticVL, which demonstrates superior performance on various benchmarks.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Breaking the Solver Bottleneck: Training Task Generators at the Learnable Frontier

The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model. As reasoning and agentic models improve, fixed task distributions saturate, while naive synthetic generation yields tasks that are trivial, impossible, or ill-posed. Training a task generator with RL to optimize validity and learnability can address this bottleneck, but direct optimization requires repeated solver rollouts per candidate. For software-engineering (SWE) tasks, a single rollout can take tens of minutes; solver-in-the-loop generator training is intractable. We introduce PROPEL, a solver-amortized framework for training task generators at the targeted solve rate. PROPEL trains a lightweight activation probe on a one-time labeled corpus of generated tasks and solver outcomes. The probe predicts target-solver pass rate from a frozen generator reference model and serves as a proxy for solve rate during generator optimization, reducing generator evaluation to a single forward pass. Across math, code, and software-engineering at multiple model scales, PROPEL shifts generation toward the targeted solve rate: for coding, tasks generated at the learnable frontier increase from $10.1\% \rightarrow 20.0\%$ for a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct solver and from $5.3\% \rightarrow 12.6\%$ for a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct solver. For SWE, PROPEL increases the share of generations at the targeted solve rate from $9.8\% \rightarrow 19.6\%$ for Qwen3.5-27B on repositories not seen during training of probe and generator.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Beyond External Load: Integrative Immune Monitoring Reveals Injury-Predictive Signals in the Athlete's Internal State

Abstract (already in the PDF; paste if a box is required): Injury risk prediction in elite football relies almost exclusively on external load metrics derived from GPS tracking, overlooking the molecular state of the athlete. We monitored 26 male players from FC Barcelona's first team across the 2025 calendar year, integrating GPS-derived training load with longitudinal blood-based immune monitoring (systemic inflammation and TCR-derived immune age). Immune age acceleration and inflammation were elevated in the 14 days preceding musculoskeletal injuries. A logistic regression model combining external load, inflammation, immune age acceleration, and career injury history reached an overall AUC of 0.678 and a mean per-player AUC of 0.754 (SD 0.146), improving on a GPS-only baseline of 0.541. Applied to 2026 data, the frozen model ranked players who later sustained non-contact musculoskeletal injuries high in the risk distribution. Together, our data suggest multimodal immune monitoring in elite football to reveal the athlete's internal physiological state, which carries injury-relevant information that external load alone does not capture.

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

SirenFNO: Efficient and Full Frequency Learning of Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Colab NAS: Obtaining lightweight task-specific convolutional neural networks following Occam's razor

The current trend of applying transfer learning from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem, with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present ColabNAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, in just 3.1 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

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

Minim: Privacy-Aware Minimal View for Agents via Trusted Local Sanitization

arXiv:2606.13949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM-powered autonomous agents increasingly rely on rich user interface (UI) state observations to achieve reliable action grounding in complex digital environments. However, many deployments transmit the full UI state to remote inference servers even when most elements are irrelevant to the current task, which can leak sensitive but unnecessary context such as authentication codes, private notifications, and background application states. We propose MINIM, a trusted local broker that performs privacy-aware minimization on the client side before any observation leaves the device. Grounded in Contextual Integrity (CI), MINIM learns a dual-score representation for each UI element by predicting an inherent sensitivity score (s) and a task-conditioned necessity score (n). These scores drive a ternary disclosure policy that keeps essential elements, abstracts sensitive attributes when needed, and removes task-irrelevant content. We optimize a CI-aware objective that penalizes necessity errors more strongly on high-risk content, enabling aggressive pruning while preserving task-critical information. Experiments on real-world UI observations derived from WebArena show that MINIM substantially reduces task-irrelevant sensitive leakage while preserving task-critical semantic context and the interactive affordances required for reliable agent actions.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Impact of Antidiabetic Medications on IgG and Plasma Protein N-Glycosylation in Type 2 Diabetes Patients

Introduction. Diabetes is a growing global health challenge, necessitating effective management strategies. Glycosylation, a highly regulated post-translational protein modification, has emerged as a pivotal factor in diabetes pathophysiology. However, the modulation of protein glycosylation by antidiabetic treatment is still largely unknown. This study explored the longitudinal effects of four distinct antidiabetic therapies - metformin, insulin, sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RA) - on plasma protein and immunoglobulin G (IgG) glycosylation in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Research Design and Methods. Plasma protein and IgG N-glycans were enzymatically released, purified and chromatographically profiled in a cohort of 124 patients, examined at four time points, to assess therapy-induced glycan alterations. Linear mixed models adjusting for covariates and multiple testing (FDR

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

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

scIsoAgent enables autonomous isoform-resolved characterization and sequence-informed interpretation of long-read single-cell transcriptomes

Alternative isoform usage can alter gene function independently of total gene expression, creating a need to resolve transcript isoforms at single-cell resolution. Long-read single-cell RNA sequencing meets this need by linking cellular identity to transcript isoforms and sequence-level features. Realizing its full biological value requires reproducible workflows that connect specialized long-read analysis with biological interpretation. Existing large language model (LLM)-based biomedical agents support general omics analysis, but are not designed for isoform-resolved long-read single-cell workflows. Here, we present scIsoAgent, an autonomous LLM-powered scientific agent for long-read single-cell RNA-seq analysis. scIsoAgent turns heterogeneous long-read single-cell inputs into traceable isoform-resolved workflows, using stage-aware planning and persistent computational context to support both execution and interpretation. Across complementary evaluations, this design improved the continuity from analysis planning to executable, interactive workflows compared with general-purpose LLM baselines. In real-data reanalysis, scIsoAgent recovered major findings from published long-read single-cell resources and extended a representative differential transcript usage event into a sequence-informed functional hypothesis. By linking full-length isoform sequences with model-inferred transcript properties, scIsoAgent connects observed isoform usage with potential sequence-level functional consequences. These results demonstrate that autonomous scientific agents can transform fragmented long-read single-cell analysis into coherent, reproducible workflows for isoform-resolved discovery and biological interpretation.

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

Representation Costs in Data Science: Foundations and the Quasi-Banach Spaces of Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.14954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a general framework for analyzing representation costs of parametric data-fitting methods through their parameter-space regularizers. From this abstract perspective, we define representation costs for arbitrary parametric models and reveal their induced (native) function spaces. This unifies recent function-space views of data-fitting methods. We also prove that many natural results hold in this abstract setting, including representer theorems for parametric methods on their native spaces. The framework also rigorously connects parametric methods with their equivalent nonparametric descriptions under sufficient overparameterization. Classical methods and their native spaces, such as kernel methods / reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, wavelets / Besov spaces, and shallow neural networks / variation spaces emerge as special cases of our abstract framework. A byproduct of "axiomatizing" the study of representation costs is that we also immediately obtain new results for deep neural networks: For depth-$L$ feedforward ReLU networks, their induced native spaces are $p$-normable quasi-Banach spaces with $p = 2/L$. This reveals that the inductive bias of deep neural networks (as given by the representation cost) cannot be captured by norms for depths $L > 2$.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

REPRODUCIBILITY OF 7T MRI MEASUREMENTS OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY AND VOLUME OF HIPPOCAMPAL SUBFIELDS

PURPOSE: The UK7T travelling head dataset was used to characterise the reproducibility of 7T measurements of the susceptibility of the hippocampal subfields, focusing on the Cornu Ammonis (CA1, CA2 and CA3), dentate gyrus (DG), subiculum (SUB), tail of the hippocampus (TAIL) and entorhinal cortex (ERC). METHODS: Susceptibility maps were created from whole-brain 3D single-echo GRE data (TE=20 ms; 0.7 mm isotropic resolution) using Multi-Scale Dipole Inversion. Automatic Segmentation of Hippocampal Subfields (ASHS) was applied to high resolution T1- and T2-weighted images for segmentation. The mean magnetic susceptibility and volume of hippocampal subfields was evaluated in 50 data sets, comprising 5 repeat acquisitions on 10 healthy participants (age 32 + or -6 years; 3 female). RESULTS: Averaging over subjects, susceptibility values spanned an 18ppb range over the hippocampus (ranging from -13.3ppb in DG to 4.7ppb in ERC). Susceptibility values in the larger hippocampal subfields showed a consistent pattern of variation across subjects, being generally more positive in ERC and SUB than in CA1 and more positive in CA1 than in DG and TAIL. The standard deviation of subfield susceptibilities over subjects ranged from 8.2ppb in the TAIL to 1.7ppb in CA1, and the average standard deviation across repeated measurements, which ranges from 1.7 to 4 ppb, was less than half of the inter-participant standard deviation in all subfields. Susceptibility values in the smaller subfields (CA2 and CA3) were more variable, but ICC(2,k) values for all subfields were >0.82. CONCLUSION: The reported data characterises the variation and reproducibility of hippocampal subfield susceptibility measurements at 7T.

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

PACE-RAG: Patient-Aware Contextual and Evidence-Constrained RAG for Clinical Drug Recommendation

Drug recommendation requires a deep understanding of individual patient context, especially for complex conditions like Parkinson's disease. While LLMs possess broad medical knowledge, they fail to capture the subtle nuances of actual prescribing patterns. Existing RAG methods also struggle with these complexities because guideline-based retrieval remains too generic and similar-patient retrieval often replicates majority patterns without accounting for the unique clinical nuances of individual patients. To bridge this gap, we propose PACE-RAG (Patient-Aware Contextual and Evidence-Constrained RAG). Rather than directly copying frequent medications from retrieved patients, PACE-RAG personalizes recommendations by first extracting patient-specific clinical features, retrieving cases around these features, and then refining the final prescription using the patient's current symptoms, active medication history, and focus-specific prescribing tendencies. By analyzing treatment patterns tailored to specific clinical features, PACE-RAG generates patient-specific medication recommendations along with an explainable clinical summary. Evaluated on a Parkinson's cohort and the MIMIC-IV benchmark using Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B, PACE-RAG achieved state-of-the-art performance, reaching F1 scores of 80.84% and 47.22%, respectively. These results suggest that PACE-RAG is a robust and clinically grounded framework for personalized decision support. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ChaeYoungHuh/PACE-RAG.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

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

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

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

IMPACTeen: Intentions, Manipulation, Persuasion, Annotations, and Consequences in Teen Communication Dataset

IMPACTeen is a dataset of textual social influence scenarios spanning interpersonal, media-based, and digital settings in an adolescent context. It contains 1,021 texts, 5,100 individual annotation records, and gold labels for social influence techniques, with each text annotated from five distinct perspectives: teenagers, parents, psychologists, communication experts, and teachers. The resource was constructed through constrained LLM generation, followed by a two-step human editing and validation phase aimed at ensuring youth-context realism. A multi-dimensional annotation covered influence presence, techniques, intentions, consequences, resistance, reactions, and annotation confidence. The dataset supports research on social influence detection, annotator disagreement, cross-lingual modeling, and the training and evaluation of language models. The dataset was created in Polish and is accompanied by a corresponding English version.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests for replacing or expanding laboratory testing in Ethiopia

Background: In low- and middle-income countries, laboratory testing to rapidly detect measles outbreaks is limited by infrastructure availability and high costs. This study estimates the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) if implemented nationally in Ethiopia to either replace or expand current testing. Methods: An agent-based model to simulate measles outbreaks was calibrated to Ethiopian measles surveillance data. Modelled outbreak outcomes were aggregated over a 10-year period. Scenarios included using RDTs to (1) replace laboratory testing; (2) replace epidemiological linkage; and (3) increase case detection, in addition to replacing laboratory testing and epidemiological linkage. Testing and outbreak response costs (in 2025 US$) were obtained from Ethiopian Public Health Institute from a government perspective. Total costs and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for each scenario were compared to baseline. Results: All scenarios were cost saving compared to baseline. Replacing laboratory testing with RDTs saved US$4.2M (3.2M-4.9M) over 10-years, but due to very low testing rates the benefits of eliminating laboratory testing delays were offset by missed cases from the lower RDT sensitivity, leading to similar outbreak detection times and DALYs. Replacing epidemiological linkage with RDTs had similar DALYs but increased the cost savings to US$9.7M. Using RDTs to double case detection reduced outbreak detection time from 113 to 80 days, averted 17,000 DALYs, and saved US$4.3M. Conclusions: In Ethiopia, use of measles RDTs could be cost saving, and if used to expand testing could prevent measles infections through faster outbreak detection and response.

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

Trust Without Trusting: A Recomputable Trust Protocol for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2605.06738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents already transact at production scale – 69,000 bots, 165 million transactions, $50 million in volume on a single marketplace – and any party can verify a signed credential without a central service. In an open agent world that covers most of what trust requires: there are no universal borders, and each party chooses for itself whom to deal with. Borders appear only where a closed space draws one – a marketplace, a platform, or a consortium sets house rules. Whoever draws the border holds the authority to apply it, and may apply it as they choose, behind closed doors. This paper addresses the gap that opens there: when you rely on someone else's border, how do you check that they applied their own published rules – taking no one's word for it, and handing the check to no new trusted party? Our answer is the Combined Evidence Protocol (CEP): a five-condition predicate any party recomputes from anchored data, turning "did the boundary-owner follow its own admission rules" into a fact anyone verifies rather than a claim anyone believes. The move that secures optimistic rollups secures this – correctness rests on recomputation, so the measurement belongs to everyone and the oracle problem dissolves. Its load-bearing setting is a consortium of co-equal, mutually distrusting peers under a shared charter, each able to verify, independently, that the rules they jointly agreed are the rules being applied. CEP belongs to the family of trustless systems – optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, verifiable ML, self-sovereign-identity predicates. The infrastructure beneath it is live: a W3C VC + DID trust layer running since March 2026, anchored on Base L2, continuing arXiv:2605.06738 and standing on its own.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Molecular glue degraders of HuR suppress BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer

作者:

BRAF gain-of-function mutations, particularly BRAF(V600E), affect roughly 10% of all patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), and portend poor prognosis with limited therapeutic interventions. BRAF inhibitors such as encorafenib are ineffective due to MAPK pathway reactivation driven by BRAF dimerization. Combined inhibition of BRAF and EGFR, although approved therapies, results in short survival benefits and frequent treatment resistance and relapse1–3. Here, through rational chemical library design coupled with parallel proteomic screening, we identified dHuR as a molecular glue degrader of human antigen R (HuR), an RNA-binding protein that drives tumour growth, invasion and therapy resistance. dHuR binds to the CRBN ubiquitin ligase to create a unique benzofuran-tethered composite surface to recruit HuR as a neosubstrate by engaging its β-hairpin G-loop degron, as revealed by the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the ternary complex. dHuR abrogated BRAF expression by inducing its exon 18 skipping, and demonstrated superior suppression of BRAF-mutant CRC tumours including those gaining resistance to BRAF inhibitors. Finally, we performed kinome library CRISPR screening and revealed that inactivation of EGFR or MEK enhanced dHuR cytotoxicity, thus establishing a combinatorial strategy to treat patients with refractory BRAF-mutant CRC. Molecular glue degraders of the RNA-binding protein HuR have therapeutic potential for BRAF-mutant cancers.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.