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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AI SciBrief as a Gateway to Research: A Framework for Onboarding Students into New Research Areas

Students at all levels of higher education face a significant barrier in the form of information overload, which often paralyzes the initial stages of the research process and suppresses motivation. In response, this article introduces a pedagogical framework that leverages AI SciBrief, a platform powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) designed to automatically generate digests of scientific trends. We describe how this multidisciplinary tool - with initial coverage in finance, medicine, and education - can be integrated into the curriculum to overcome this "entry barrier." The framework provides concrete methodologies for utilizing these digests to facilitate topic selection for term papers, accelerate literature reviews for dissertations, and enable postgraduate students to continuously monitor emerging trends. We conclude that AI SciBrief functions as a "gateway to research" effectively reducing students' cognitive load and empowering them to transition more rapidly from information searching to knowledge creation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Constrained Semantic Decompression in LLMs through Persian Proverb-Conditioned Story Generation

Transforming a dense, abstract proverb into an engaging and morally faithful narrative requires deep cultural understanding and robust semantic grounding. We frame this problem as a constrained semantic decompression task and study proverb-conditioned story generation as a testbed for abstraction-to-realization in large language models (LLMs). Focusing on Persian, we introduce the Proverb Aligned Narrative Dataset (PAND), pairing proverbs with human-written stories and explicit meanings. By a hybrid evaluation framework that combines human-calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge with structural metrics, we analyze model behavior across multiple prompting regimes. Our findings reveal a persistent decompression gap: current LLMs often achieve strong surface-level fluency while failing to faithfully instantiate the underlying moral and causal structure encoded in proverbs. We further show that explicit reasoning and iterative refinement can partially mitigate these failures, suggesting that many decompression errors arise from difficulties in translating abstract meaning into narrative form rather than a complete lack of relevant knowledge. Our proposed task naturally extends to other forms of compressed cultural knowledge.

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

A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating Next Action Predictions in Spreadsheets

arXiv:2606.13802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work. In spreadsheets, despite being much more common, such auto-completion features are virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark for systems that observe a sequence of user actions in a spreadsheet and predict future actions. Two challenges are (1) the absence of edit histories in public spreadsheet corpora and (2) the complex space of spreadsheet actions (spatial, temporal, composite). To address (1), we manually curate 52 sequences of 12K actions that recreate spreadsheets from public corpora, seeded by parametrized heuristics and LLM refinement. To address (2), we propose an online evaluation that expects a prediction after each user action, accepts or rejects that prediction, updates the future actions upon acceptance, and repeats this until the target spreadsheet is obtained. We use multiple baseline predictors (including zero-shot LLMs, fine-tuned SLMs, and classical models) and analyze different properties that our benchmark teaches us, including but not limited to: properties of saved actions and false positives, efficiency, effect of user profiles, effect of triggers, and effect of context.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

TMO: ASYMMETRIC CROSS-MODAL ATTENTION FOR LEARNINGCELL-STATE-DEPENDENT REGULATORY LAGS FROM SINGLE-CELL MULTIOMIC DATA

Abstract Background: Single-cell multi-omics technologies simultaneously measure chromatin accessibility (ATAC) and gene expression (RNA), providing a unique window into the temporal ordering of regulatory events during differentiation. However, most computational models treat the two modalities symmetrically, ignoring the directional relationship between chromatin and transcription, and existing lag-aware methods estimate a single global lag per gene, failing to capture cell-state-dependent dynamics. Methods and Results: We introduce Temporal Multi-Omics (TMO), a deep learning framework that learns signed, cell-state-conditional regulatory lags ({Delta}{tau}) using asymmetric cross-modal attention. TMO projects RNA and ATAC into 50 latent components each, tokenises each cell as a sequence of 100 tokens, and uses a two-pass transformer in which a data-driven lag prior - derived from a sliding-window cross-correlation function - directly biases attention asymmetrically. On four independent 10x Multiome datasets (mouse brain, human brain, mouse kidney, human PBMC), the asymmetric model achieves Lag Concordance Scores (LCS) of 0.988-0.999, compared to 0.048-0.108 for an architecturally identical symmetric baseline. A stratified 80/20 held-out experiment confirms that the learned component-lag ordering generalises to unseen cells (held-out LCS 0.85-0.99). Clustered {Delta}{tau} heatmaps show positive {Delta}{tau} (ATAC-led priming) in early pseudotime and negative {Delta}{tau} (RNA-led, activity-dependent regulation) in late pseudotime; the ATAC-RNA correlation heatmap exhibits a U-shaped pattern indicative of developmental decoupling. Components with the most positive {Delta}{tau} are enriched for chromatin organization and stem cell differentiation (FDR < 0.05), while those with the most negative {Delta}{tau} are enriched for synaptic signalling and immune activation. Ablating the cell-state information from the lag predictor reduces the LCS and collapses per-component temporal dynamics (KS p [&le;] 0.039 in all four tissues), proving that TMOs dynamic lag patterns depend on cell-state conditioning. Independent ChIP-seq validation for four transcription factors (PAX5, Pax6, ASCL1, Hnf4) confirms highly significant separation between target genes and expression-matched background (p < 10-4 in all cases). Two Multiome Perturb-seq screens provide causal validation: SMARCB1 knockout shows a directional trend (1.5-fold target shift, p = 0.056, n = 147 perturbed cells), and SMARCE1 knockout reaches statistical significance (p = 0.0089, n = 3,394 perturbed cells). Gene-level cross-correlation independently validates that the regulatory lag signal is present in the raw data, and TMO further identifies rare, statistically significant biphasic gene programs where the regulatory direction reverses across pseudotime. Conclusions: TMO is the first method to make regulatory lag a learnable, cell-state-conditional, and architecturally encoded parameter. It is scalable, interpretable, and open-source, providing a powerful tool for studying regulatory timing in development, disease, and perturbation screens.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Indefinite Quantum Causality

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Fully Geometric Multi-Hop Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Transitive Relations

arXiv:2505.12369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning on knowledge graphs requires faithfully mapping the logical semantics to latent space. Current geometric embedding methods show to be useful on this task by mapping entities to geometric regions and logical operations to latent transformations. While a geometric embedding can provide a direct interpretability framework for query answering, current methods have only leveraged the geometric construction of entities, failing to map logical operations to pure geometric transformations and, instead, using neural components to learn these operations. On the other hand, purely neural-based methods outperform geometric methods, but they lack interpretability in the latent space. We introduce GeometrE, a geometric embedding method for multi-hop reasoning, that maps every logical operation to a purely geometric operation in the latent space. Additionally, we introduce a transitive loss function and show that, unlike existing methods, it can preserve the logical rule for all a,b,c: r(a,b) and r(b,c) -> r(a,c). Our experiments show that GeometrE outperforms current state-of-the-art geometric methods and remains competitive with existing neural-based methods on standard benchmark datasets.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Uniform integrability of the distance to the nearest leaf in random trees

arXiv:2606.15339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the distance from the root to the nearest leaf, the analogous quantity for a uniformly chosen vertex, and its protection number, in size-conditioned simply generated trees. We prove a uniform exponential tail bound for each of these quantities, valid for arbitrary offspring distributions. As a consequence, these random variables are uniformly integrable of every order. This yields convergence of all moments to those of the corresponding local limit. The argument is probabilistic and unified across the three quantities.

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

Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026

The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark datasets with mean boundary errors below 15 ms. Adaptation and cross-language remapping are effective for languages outside MFA's training distribution, and pronunciation probability modeling and phonological rules provide gains in specific conditions.

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

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

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

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Neighborhood socioeconomic status associated with post-stroke cognitive impairment: a retrospective cohort study

Background: Late complications after stroke (LCAS), including cognitive symptoms, impact quality of life and recovery. It is not known if neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (SES) influence LCAS. This study assessed associations between SES measures, including neighborhood income inequality (Gini) and area deprivation index (ADI), and cognitive symptoms after acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in a hospital leveraging active surveillance of LCAS. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 512 patients hospitalized with AIS at Tufts Medical Center with subsequent follow-up (between zero and three months or between three and twelve months) in the Stroke Clinic from 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2022. Using ZIP code data, patients were characterized as low Gini (low inequality) and high ADI (high deprivation) (Gini = 5) by state medians. These variables were combined, indicating patients who were living in both a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood to evaluate the effects of living in a homogeneously deprived area. There were 206 and 281 patients in the low Gini and high ADI groups respectively. 140 patients lived in a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood. The multivariable logistic analysis assessed the likelihood of cognitive symptoms, adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, sex, NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), thrombolysis, active LCAS surveillance, poverty, and ADI-Gini combination. Results: There were no associations between high ADI (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.67 ? 1.57) or low Gini (OR: 1.74, 95% CI: 0.98 ? 3.07) alone and cognitive symptoms after AIS. However, the combined variable demonstrated increased likelihood of cognitive symptoms in the high ADI-low Gini group (OR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.08 ? 3.06). Conclusions: This study suggests that individuals living in homogeneously deprived neighborhoods report higher likelihood of cognitive symptoms after AIS. Further studies with increased power are needed to investigate the underlying causes of these disparities and to develop interventions to reduce these complications.

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

Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

arXiv:2606.14821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

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

TIGER: Inverting Transformer Gradients via Embedding-Subspace Distance Optimization

arXiv:2606.18312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning allows multiple clients to jointly train a shared model by sending gradient updates to a central server while keeping raw inputs local. However, prior gradient inversion attacks show that these updates can reveal enough information to reconstruct client inputs. Existing attacks on transformers either optimize dummy inputs to match the true client updates, which is costly and unstable for modern models, or exploit the low rank of attention gradients to identify a subspace containing the true layer embeddings, followed by a discrete membership test for candidate tokens. However, this token test is brittle under numerical noise, i.e., from quantization or Differential Privacy (DP), and scales poorly for encoder models with non-causal attention. We introduce TIGER, a continuous gradient inversion attack that turns this subspace signal into a differentiable objective. Instead of searching over tokens or matching full gradients, TIGER directly optimizes token embeddings to minimize their distance to the subspace. Our experiments demonstrate that on encoder-only models, TIGER substantially improves both reconstruction quality and runtime over existing attacks, while on decoder models, TIGER is more robust than prior subspace-based attacks, enabling the first successful reconstructions in DP-defended federated learning settings.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Systematic AI-Driven Drug Repurposing via Clinical Trial Data Mining: A Framework and Six Cross-Therapeutic Case Studies.

作者:

Drug repurposing, the application of approved or shelved compounds to new therapeutic indications, offers a cost- and time-efficient alternative to de novo drug discovery. However, the systematic identification of repurposing candidates from the rapidly expanding body of clinical trial data remains a significant challenge. Here we present a publicly accessible AI-powered tool that mines the ClinicalTrials.gov registry to identify approved drugs with under-explored therapeutic potential in high-value disease areas. The tool integrates natural language processing, mechanism-of-action pathway analysis, and trial density scoring to surface candidates where biological plausibility is high and clinical trial coverage is sparse. We demonstrate the tool's utility across six cross-therapeutic case studies spanning oncology, cardiology, neurology, rare diseases, immunology, and infectious disease. Key findings include: the identification of Zonisamide as an under-explored combination candidate for obesity alongside GLP-1 receptor agonists; mechanistic validation of SGLT2 inhibitors in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF); and a novel cross-domain mapping of anti-TNF biologics to early-stage neurodegeneration via shared neuroinflammatory pathways. The tool is freely accessible and designed to lower the barrier for academic and industry researchers to systematically pursue repurposing opportunities.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Adversarial Concept Search: Predicting Compositional Errors From Feature Geometry

arXiv:2606.13934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans cannot always intuit what scenarios are most challenging to LLMs. Hoping to capture challenging edge cases, developers either design problems to be difficult for humans or curate extensive benchmarks. What if we could instead anticipate which scenarios a model will fail on? In this paper, we use an LLM's representational geometry to predict which concept combinations it will fail on. We attribute this compositional failure to interference between salient features. In tasks that require systematic composition - toy programmatic settings, multihop reasoning, multilingual factual recall - we find that when a pair of concepts is encoded near-orthogonally, the model reliably composes them. When their linear encodings are close, producing interference, the model fails to compose them. Our method reliably anticipates failure modes across different compositional tasks, without evaluating specific inputs. These results lay the groundwork to use representational geometry to identify high-risk examples, construct targeted stress tests, and provide a scalable foundation for active learning in real-world deployment.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding

Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

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

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

25.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Adaptive deep brain stimulation for dynamic gait control in Parkinson’s disease: a randomized feasibility trial

A randomized crossover study of five patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) demonstrates that gait-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared with continuous stimulation. Gait dysfunction in PD is a major source of disability and is often insufficiently treated by continuous deep brain stimulation (cDBS). Although adaptive DBS (aDBS) has shown efficacy for other motor symptoms using β-based, state-driven neural signals, gait is a dynamic, cyclical behavior that may require temporally precise modulation. Here we evaluated a behavior-contingent aDBS approach that synchronizes stimulation to gait phase. We reported a single-center, blinded, randomized, crossover study evaluating the feasibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers to drive aDBS. The primary outcome was feasibility of successful identification of gait-phase biomarkers to implement aDBS. Five participants with PD undergoing pallidal DBS and subdural electrode paddle implantation were enrolled. We successfully identified personalized gait-phase biomarkers from cortical or pallidal field potentials in all five patients and embedded them into a bidirectional neurostimulator. During acute in-clinic testing, aDBS improved step variability and step symmetry versus cDBS. Three participants subsequently completed a double-blinded, multi-day crossover phase. In this setting, aDBS maintained general motor symptom control, reduced falls and yielded patient-specific gait improvements. No adverse events occurred and aDBS was well tolerated. These findings establish the feasibility of biomarker-driven, movement-synchronized neuromodulation and support the development of a larger randomized trial to determine clinical efficacy. ClinicalTrial.gov registration: NCT04675398 . A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.