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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Edits

作者:

arXiv:2606.19172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal memory in a language model is two problems: content and reasoning skill. The brain keeps the two apart (a sparse, local engram in the hippocampus for each episode, a slow neocortex for the shared skills that interpret it), so a new fact need not overwrite everything else. Most personalization today keeps a user's facts outside the weights, in a natural-language memory file or a retrieval index. When facts are written into the model instead, the standard recipe is the per-user LoRA adapter, which does the opposite of the brain, folding content and skill into one global weight delta. Writing a user's facts as a LoRA contaminates text unrelated to them; writing the same facts as local Engram rows leaves it mathematically untouched, resulting in a roughly 33,000x smaller memory footprint. We therefore propose User as Engram: store a user's content as surgical edits to the hash-keyed memory table of an Engram model, and carry the reasoning skill in one shared adapter. This layered design matches per-user LoRA's direct recall while delivering 5.6x higher indirect-reasoning accuracy on average, and never makes a single user worse at reasoning than the untouched base. The edit is a glass box: writing a fact switches on its lookup at exactly the trigger, adds the value the answer needs, leaves every other position unchanged to the last bit, and fails if written into the wrong layer. Because different users' facts land in disjoint hash slots, their edits compose: many users live in one shared table at once, stacking additively and losslessly, where a per-user LoRA, a single global weight delta, admits only one. Upon retrieval, a per-user Engram table does not grow with the population the retriever must search, so past ~100 facts it overtakes a retrieval pipeline on a 2.5x larger model.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CombEval: A Framework for Evaluating Combinatorial Counting in Large Language Models

We present CombEval, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating combinatorial counting in large language models. CombEval represents each problem as a typed Cofola specification over entities, combinatorial objects, object dependencies, and constraints, enabling controlled generation of natural-language counting problems with exact solver-verified answers. Unlike static collections, CombEval supports systematic variation of object type, entity scale, constraint count, and reasoning depth. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct and code-augmented settings and find that models remain brittle on ordered objects, indistinguishable elements, relatively positional constraints, and nested object dependencies. Error analysis further identifies failures in constraint interpretation and counting principles. CombEval provides a diagnostic testbed for studying when and why LLMs fail at combinatorial reasoning. The code and generated benchmark suites are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/YuxuZhou-CN/combination-problem-generation}.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

作者:

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum models with the Yang-Lee phase transition

arXiv:2606.19732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present four different $1+1$D quantum models that realize the Yang-Lee (YL) phase transition under a deformation that preserves $PT$ symmetry. These are the antiferromagnetic Ising spin chain in transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields, the massive Schwinger model, the Blume-Capel model, and the three-state quantum clock model. Using the state-operator correspondence, we identify the YL critical point, compute the scaling dimensions of the lowest operators in each model, and find perfect agreement with the exact results for the YL criticality in two dimensions. Using bosonization for the Schwinger model and the Polyakov-Hubbard transformation for the other models, we show that in all of these quantum models the YL critical point is described, as expected, by a massless bosonic field with an $i \phi^3$ interaction. In the quantum clock model, this critical field interacts with a massive bosonic field, and we identify the massless and massive states in the Hamiltonian spectrum. In addition, we numerically compute the two-point function of $\phi$ at the Yang-Lee critical point and show that it grows with distance, in agreement with theoretical expectations.

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

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

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

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FreeBridge: Variational Schrödinger Bridges for Cellular Transition Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition. Perturbation modeling therefore reduces to inferring stochastic transport between control and treated populations observed only as separate marginals. While recent generative models achieve strong end-point alignment, boundary consistency does not determine intermediate evolution: multiple stochastic processes may connect identical marginals while traversing regions unsupported by observed single-cell morphologies. We introduce FreeBridge, a Schrödinger Bridge formulation for single-cell transition modeling under endpoint-only supervision. FreeBridge defines atomic states as instance-segmented single-cell representations, establishing a fixed cellular manifold, and learns stochastic transport constrained within this geometry via empirical latent support regularization. Across BBBC021, RxRx1, and JUMP, FreeBridge maintains competitive or improved endpoint fidelity and mechanism-of-action retention under a unified evaluation protocol; on BBBC021, it further reduces intermediate support violations. These findings highlight the importance of geometric grounding for biologically interpretable perturbation dynamics. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/FreeBridge/.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design

arXiv:2606.17286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-enabled authoritarianism is not confined to autocracies. In this paper, we provide greater transparency by investigating and mapping the lifecycles of six AI systems deployed in different political regimes, ranging from the US to China. By drawing on an extensive range of sources (academic publications, investigative research reports, third-party evaluations, media interviews, government procurement notices), we conduct a systematic, qualitative comparison across systems to identify the critical technical and operational features that enable authoritarianism within their respective political contexts. We find that enabling features include the centralization and co-optation of administrative data for law enforcement and political punishment, regulatory gaps that fail to deter misuse, weak user compliance that nullifies human oversight mechanisms, and the encoding of protected group traits that identify members of vulnerable populations. We find that these features are present across systems deployed in autocratic and democratic regimes, albeit in varying configurations. We also find that both centralized and fragmented AI systems can contribute to authoritarianism by exploiting governance gaps: centralized systems directed by executive authorities, particularly within security and military institutions, are often not subjected to formal oversight mechanisms, while fragmented systems diffuse accountability between stakeholders, paving the way for entrenchment. These findings reveal that AI-enabled authoritarianism is distributed, resulting from design and operational choices made by developers, administrators, and users alike. We conclude with recommendations for developers and policymakers to mitigate these risks.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

作者:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

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

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

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

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Witnessing Spin-Orbital Entanglement using Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering

arXiv:2512.06718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement plays a central role in quantum technologies, yet its characterization and control in materials remain challenging. Recent developments in spectrum-based entanglement witnesses have enabled new strategies for quantifying many-body entanglement in macroscopic materials. Here, we develop a protocol for detecting spin-orbital entanglement using experiment-accessible resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Central to our approach is the construction of a Hermitian generator from experimentally measurable spectra, which allows us to compute the quantum Fisher information (QFI) available in spin–orbital systems. The resulting QFI provides upper bounds for $k$-producible states and thus serves as a robust witness of spin-orbital entanglement. To account for realistic experimental limitations, we further extend our framework to include relaxed QFI bounds applicable to measurements lacking full polarization resolution.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Recognizing and Reconstructing a Multi-Unit Floor Plan

Digital twins have a major potential to form a significant part of urban management in emergency planning, as they allow more efficient designing of the escape routes, better orientation in exceptional situations, and faster rescue intervention. Nevertheless, creating the twins still remains a largely manual effort, due to a lack of 3D-representations, which are available only in limited amounts for some new buildings. Thus, in this paper we aim to synthesize 3D information from commonly available 2D architectural floor plans. We propose two novel pixel-wise segmentation methods based on the MDA-Unet and MACU-Net architectures with improved skip connections, an attention mechanism, and a training objective together with a reconstruction part of the pipeline, which vectorizes the segmented plans to create a 3D model. The proposed methods are compared with two other state-of-the-art techniques and several benchmark datasets. On the commonly used CubiCasa benchmark dataset, our methods have achieved the mean F1 score of 0.86 over five examined classes, outperforming the other pixel-wise approaches tested. We have also made our code publicly available to support research in the field.

21.
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.

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

Towards Global AI-Driven Cervical Cancer Screening

The global elimination of cervical cancer is a key public health goal set by the World Health Organization (WHO), with screening programs reducing mortality by up to 80%. However, access to experts and biopsy services is limited in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs). Deep learning (DL)-based algorithms offer promising support for screening, but most existing approaches have been developed and validated on private datasets from single countries. We present the first DL-based approach to cervical cancer screening validated on data from multiple countries. Technically, we phrase the problem of detecting and classifying lesions in colposcopy images as a multi-task learning problem, in which we simultaneously perform image-level classification and lesion segmentation. Our model was trained on a private data set of acid stain colposcopy images with manually generated lesion segmentation masks and corresponding histopathological results, employing extensive data augmentation to address image variability. In an in-distribution validation with pathology results serving as ground truth, our algorithm outperformed medical experts (Balanced Accuracy: 0.68 vs 0.64) in CIN1- (Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 or lower) versus CIN2+ (grade 2 or higher) classification. External validation on four colposcopy data sets from four countries featuring radical differences in prevalence and patient characteristics yielded superior performance of our method compared to baseline methods. Performance variability across countries was high with AUC values ranging from 0.54 - 0.80. Overall, algorithm performance varied with age, transformation zone (cervical area most prone to lesion development), presence of comorbidities and pathognomonic signs, with comorbidities having by far the largest negative effect. Future work should focus on improving model robustness and generalizability.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

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

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.