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

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

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

HAFMat: Hybrid Priors Guided Adaptive Fusion for Single-Image Human Material Estimation

Physically based rendering (PBR) material estimation is a fundamental appearance decomposition task with broad applications in virtual content creation, relighting, and digital human rendering. However, estimating PBR materials from a single human image remains highly ill-posed, since illumination, geometry, and reflectance are heavily entangled in the observed appearance. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose HAFMat, a hybrid-prior-guided framework for single-image human material estimation. Our method introduces guidance maps that encode complementary cues, including appearance, body geometry, structure, and prior material predictions from pre-trained models. A key observation is that these guidance cues are heterogeneous: some cues mainly provide texture-level constraints, while others convey higher-level semantic information. To exploit this property, we design a Multi-layer Adaptive Feature Fusion Mechanism, which adaptively fuses guidance features with decoder features at different stages. This design enables texture-dominant and semantic-dominant cues to guide material decoding at appropriate levels, leading to more accurate and physically plausible material estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in material estimation and downstream relighting.

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

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

作者:

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GradPower: Powering Gradients for Faster Language Model Pre-Training

arXiv:2505.24275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=(sign(g_i)|g_i|^p)_{i}$ for a fixed $p>0$, and then feeds the transformed gradient into a base optimizer. Notably, GradPower requires only a single-line code change and no modifications to the base optimizer's internal logic, including the hyperparameters. When applied to Adam (termed AdamPower), GradPower consistently achieves lower terminal loss across diverse architectures (LLaMA, Qwen2MoE), parameter scales (66M to 2B), datasets (C4, OpenWebText), and learning-rate schedules (cosine, warmup-stable-decay). The most pronounced gains are observed when training modern mixture-of-experts models with warmup-stable-decay schedules. GradPower also integrates seamlessly with other state-of-the-art optimizers, such as Muon, yielding further improvements. Finally, we provide theoretical analyses that reveal the underlying mechanism of GradPower and highlight the influence of gradient noise.

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

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

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

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

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

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Recursive Scaling in Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.18022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequence generation. Scaling MDMs is conventionally achieved by increasing the parameter count or the number of denoising steps. We introduce Recursive Masked Diffusion Models (R-MDMs), which add recursive depth as a third scaling axis by repeatedly applying the same denoising transformer within each diffusion step. Recursion enables iterative refinement of the output through parameter reuse, increasing effective model depth without increasing parameter count. Across structured generation tasks, including Sudoku and Countdown, we show that R-MDMs achieve substantially improved parameter efficiency: a model with $L$ recursive iterations often matches the performance of non-recursive baselines with roughly $L\times$ more parameters. Moreover, recursive refinement can partially substitute for additional denoising steps, allowing recursive models to reach the same generation quality with fewer forward passes at inference time. These results suggest that recursive depth is a practically useful scaling mechanism for MDMs, improving both parameter efficiency and the allocation of test-time compute.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Spatially Selective Self-Training for Unsupervised Building Change Detection

Unsupervised building change detection aims to learn building-change masks from unlabeled bi-temporal remote sensing images. Existing label-free methods often follow a discrepancy-to-mask paradigm, directly using temporal differences, frozen foundation-model responses, prompt-based outputs, or post-processing results as final change maps. Although these strategies provide annotation-free cues, they do not learn a task-specific building-change detector and remain vulnerable to the gap between generic temporal discrepancies and building-defined structural changes. In practice, such discrepancies are often noisy and task-irrelevant, as appearance shifts, registration errors, and non-building modifications can produce strong but misleading responses. To address this problem, we propose SST-CD, a spatially selective self-training framework that reformulates fully label-free building change detection as end-to-end detector learning under noisy pseudo supervision. SST-CD uses temporal discrepancies as candidate pseudo labels and trains the detector only on spatially reliable pixels, whose reliability is estimated by a local consistency criterion that filters inconsistent regions from supervision. To further stabilize noisy self-training, a lightweight feature adapter recalibrates bi-temporal features, while a prototype-based decoder produces compact change and no-change representations. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD show that SST-CD achieves F1 scores of 83.08%, 91.69%, and 86.60%, respectively, outperforming existing unsupervised and label-free baselines.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Ancestry Adjustment for Polygenic Scores

Modern polygenic risk scores (PRS) exhibit shifts correlated with ancestry, leading to erroneous predictions for non-European individuals when models are trained on predominantly European cohorts. Such shifts arise from, among other factors, (1) algorithmic limitations in the ability of PRS model training to detect causal variants, rather than nearby variants with ancestry-dependent correlations to the causal one, (2) under-representation of alleles with higher prevalence in non-European populations in the association study training, and (3) gene-by-environment interactions where the environment is correlated with genetic ancestry. Current ancestry-adjustment methodologies often discretize individuals into population categories and apply a simple affine mapping to reduce these genetic ancestry biases. However, such approaches provide suboptimal adjustments, particularly for admixed individuals. In this work, we introduce a detailed theoretical characterization of ancestry-dependent biases and propose novel methods based on non-parametric neighborhood techniques that provide more accurate empirical results and admit statistical consistency guarantees. Extensive experiments using the UK Biobank demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) may first be diagnosed antepartum, during labor, or postpartum. We utilized untargeted large-scale proteomics to identify pathways associated with HDP based on timing of onset. Methods: We performed a nested case-control study comparing differential protein expression, from the SomaScan 7K platform, based on timing of onset of HDP versus controls (referent) using first-trimester samples from the NuMoM2b-Heart Health Study, a multi-site cohort that followed nulliparous individuals from the first trimester. Associations of proteins with timing of onset of HDP, adjusted for co-variates, were assessed using logistic regression q value-based false discovery rates and pathway enrichment and differential expression analysis were conducted. Results: Of 1628 individuals included, 678 had HDP, of which 67% manifested antepartum (AP), 29% intrapartum (IP), and 3% postpartum (PP). After adjusting for co-variates, compared to controls, 698 proteins, 39 proteins, and 144 proteins were differentially expressed in those with HDP according to AP, IP, PP onset, respectively. There was little overlap in individual protein expression based on timing of HDP. Pathway enrichment and graphical summary analyses suggested distinct processes. Specifically, there was downregulation of angiogenic proteins in AP HDP, downregulation of immune-related proteins in IP HDP, and upregulation of complement activation promoting fibrotic changes leading to cardiac dysfunction in PP HDP. Conclusion: There are differences in first-trimester protein expression based on whether HDP first manifests AP, IP or PP. This raises the possibility that there may be distinct mechanistic phenotypes that could uniquely inform diagnostic and therapeutic targets for HDP.

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

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

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

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

17.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

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

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PHI-Reason: evidence-grounded species-level phage-host prediction from structured biological text profiles

Phage–host interaction (PHI) prediction is a fundamental problem in microbiology with applications in microbial ecology and microbiome engineering. Existing computational approaches typically convert phage and host information into numerical representations derived from sequence similarity, protein content, genome composition or reference databases, then score candidate hosts or train host-prediction models. Although effective, such representations often make it difficult to inspect which biological evidence supports a prediction. Here, we present PHI-Reason, a species-level PHI prediction framework that reformulates host prediction as constrained biological text reasoning. Instead of embedding phages and hosts directly as numerical vectors, PHI-Reason converts heterogeneous PHI-related evidence from phage genomes, host genomes, functional annotations, homology searches and biological metadata into modular natural-language profiles. A frozen large language model then performs species-level candidate-host ranking or pairwise PHI assessment by integrating the supplied evidence at inference time. Across species-level benchmarks, PHI-Reason achieved competitive host-prediction performance and recovered complementary correct assignments relative to established sequence- and reference-based methods. Its explicit profile design enabled systematic evidence perturbation and rationale-grounding analyses, showing that predictions depend on coherent multi-source biological evidence and that hallucination risk from unsupported or incomplete profiles can be made operationally measurable. These results position PHI-Reason as a constrained evidence-integration framework for species-level PHI prediction. Rather than replacing sequence-based predictors, it provides an interpretable layer that shows how far explicit biological evidence can support host inference, and where that evidence falls short.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

arXiv:2606.13608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Explaining RhythmFormer: A Systematic XAI Analysis of Periodic Sparse Attention for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) transformers achieve low heart-rate error on benchmarks, yet their decisions remain opaque–a growing concern as rPPG moves toward clinical heart rate estimation. Existing rPPG XAI is dominated by qualitative heatmap inspection without quantitative faithfulness metrics or physiology-grounded validation, leaving a gap between visual plausibility and auditable evidence. We address this gap. First, we adapt four attribution methods (raw attention, rollout, flow, Beyond Intuition) to RhythmFormer's bi-level routing attention with top-$k$ selection. Second, we introduce a skin coverage metric quantifying how much attribution mass falls on skin regions. Third, we adapt the SaCo faithfulness coefficient from its original classification setting to rPPG regression by using the MAE between original and perturbed predicted rPPG waveforms as the perturbation impact. Applying these tools, we quantify a multi-hop leakage effect under sparse top-$k$ routing: attention rollout and flow almost completely restores the connections that individual refined-attention layers explicitly set to zero. Beyond Intuition mitigates this via its value-projection-weighted rollout and gradient-supported mask, attaining the highest median refined skin coverage ($0.83$ vs. $0.57$ for vanilla rollout) and faithfulness ($F=0.92$) among the evaluated methods on UBFC-rPPG. Validation across diverse datasets and model variants is needed. A case study on a low-SaCo outlier further shows all four methods recovering consistently once an artefactual region is replaced, suggesting consistent SaCo behavior across attribution families in this illustrative case. Together, these metrics move XAI for rPPG toward auditable numerical evidence about spatial alignment and perturbation faithfulness, i.e. trustworthy rPPG XAI.

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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Global population frequencies of NAT2 star alleles observed in three large biobanks

NAT2 is an important pharmacogene which encodes the N-acetyltransferase 2 enzyme that is involved in the metabolism of multiple medications, and variants in this gene can affect patient response to these medications. CPIC has published a clinical guideline for prescribing hydralazine using NAT2 genotypes. Just prior to the guideline, updated NAT2 star allele numbering and definitions were released, differing somewhat from the historical nomenclature. Clinical pharmacogenomic testing panels often test for the most common star alleles, so knowledge of the most common updated NAT2 star alleles is critical for the implementation of the CPIC NAT2/hydralazine guideline. We first determine NAT2 diplotype frequencies from UK Biobank (UKBB) 200k phased genomes, then analyzed allele, diplotype, and phenotype population frequencies from the All of Us Research program, PennMedicine BioBank (PMBB) and UKBB 500k datasets. We found that analyzing NAT2 diplotypes from phased data provides critical information for algorithms designed to predict diplotypes from unphased data. We observed that NAT2*5, *6, and *4 were the most common star alleles in that order, and the top 11 most frequent NAT2 star alleles were the same across all biobanks. However, differences in star allele frequencies across biogeographical populations were observed. The largest difference led to a higher frequency of NAT2 poor metabolizer phenotypes as compared to rapid and intermediate metabolizer phenotypes in all global populations except in the EAS population, where NAT2 poor metabolizers were in the minority.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.