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A Signal-Language Foundation Model for Broad-Spectrum Cardiovascular Assessment from Routine Electrocardiography

arXiv:2605.25446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is central to cardiovascular care, but conventional AI models are often restricted to common arrhythmias and may generalize poorly across populations or clinically subtle diseases. We developed ECG Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (ECGCLIP), a signal-language contrastive learning framework that aligns ECG waveforms with expert diagnostic reports. ECGCLIP was pre-trained on 2,837,962 ECG studies from 1,324,856 patients and evaluated on a held-out internal test set plus nine independent external cohorts comprising about 1.5 million ECGs. Evaluation covered 89 downstream tasks, including 45 ECG diagnoses, 39 echocardiographic targets, and 5 rare cardiac diseases, using PRAUC as the primary metric. ECGCLIP consistently improved performance over random initialization and Merl-R18 baselines. On the internal test set, ECGCLIP-R34 achieved strong performance for atrial fibrillation (PRAUC 0.900) and ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (PRAUC 0.383), with robust generalization across all external cohorts. It also improved low-prevalence and diagnostically elusive diseases, including Ebstein anomaly, constrictive pericarditis, dextrocardia, and cardiac amyloidosis, with internal PRAUC values of 0.253, 0.175, 0.121, and 0.201, respectively. ECGCLIP was data efficient, matching or exceeding full-dataset baseline performance with only 10% of training data. Feature visualization and saliency analysis suggested clinically meaningful representations aligned with established electrocardiographic criteria. These findings indicate that large-scale ECG-report contrastive pre-training can expand routine ECG interpretation beyond common arrhythmias toward broad cardiovascular assessment and opportunistic screening of echocardiographic and rare conditions.

Integrative multi-omics and experimental validation reveal UBE2C as a central hub gene and prognostic biomarker in hepatocellular carcinoma

Int Immunopharmacol. 2026 May 19;183:116866. doi: 10.1016/j.intimp.2026.116866. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a lethal malignancy with a high recurrence rate and limited treatment options. Ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2 C (UBE2C) is implicated in various cancers, yet its impact on the HCC immune landscape remains incompletely understood. Herein, hub genes in HCC were identified, by integrating co-expression networks and protein-protein interaction analyses, from the TCGA, GEO, and CPTAC databases. Their expression was analysed using a single-cell transcriptomic database and verified in HCC tissues and cell lines via quantitative reverse transcription-PCR and immunoblotting. Functional roles of UBE2C were assessed using in vitro knockdown experiments and an in vivo subcutaneous tumour model. The tumour immune microenvironment was profiled using spatial transcriptomics, RNA-seq data, and ssGSEA. A prognostic nomogram was constructed based on multivariate Cox regression. UBE2C was identified as a significantly upregulated hub gene in HCC. Single-cell RNA-seq revealed predominant expression of UBE2C in hepatocytes, with dynamic upregulation along differentiation trajectories. UBE2C knockdown suppressed proliferation, induced apoptosis, and inhibited tumour growth. Spatial transcriptomics highlighted UBE2C-high regions within proliferative niches exhibiting immunosuppressive traits-including TGFB1 enrichment, impaired CXCL9-CXCR3 signalling, and exclusion of cytotoxic T cells-which were reduced in immunotherapy responders. UBE2C expression correlated with immune checkpoint genes and specific immune cell subsets. A UBE2C-based nomogram integrating T stage and tumour stage robustly predicted patient survival, and miR-300 and miR-381-3p were identified as potential upstream regulators. These findings establish UBE2C as a key driver of HCC progression and a biomarker for prognosis and immunotherapy stratification.

PMID:42155390 | DOI:10.1016/j.intimp.2026.116866

ST-BiBench: Benchmarking Multi-Stream Multimodal Coordination in Bimanual Embodied Tasks for MLLMs

arXiv:2602.08392v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced the landscape of embodied AI, yet transitioning to synchronized bimanual coordination introduces formidable challenges in multi-stream multimodal integration. We introduce ST-BiBench, a comprehensive multi-tier framework for evaluating spatio-temporal multimodal coordination. Our approach centers on Strategic Coordination Planning, assessing high-level cross-modal reasoning over multiple action and perception streams. To investigate the "proximity paradox"-where semantically coherent plans fail to align with spatially grounded visual inputs-we incorporate Foundational Spatial Grounding to verify workspace awareness and arm-selection logic. Furthermore, we probe model frontiers through Fine-Grained Action Control, investigating whether MLLMs can directly synthesize high-dimensional continuous action modalities (16-Dim) from complex multimodal metadata. Evaluating 30+ state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover a persistent and pervasive "coordination paradox"-a significant gap between high-level strategic reasoning and fine-grained physical execution. Results reveal that while frontier MLLMs excel at logic-driven strategy, they frequently suffer from perception-logic disconnection and multi-stream interference during multimodal fusion. ST-BiBench provides a platform for identifying critical bottlenecks in multi-stream multimodal fusion and cross-modal alignment for complex embodied tasks.

ASI-Evolve: AI Accelerates AI

arXiv:2603.29640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can AI accelerate the development of AI itself? While recent agentic systems have shown strong performance on well-scoped tasks with rapid feedback, it remains unclear whether they can tackle the costly, long-horizon, and weakly supervised research loops that drive real AI progress. We present ASI-Evolve, an agentic framework for AI-for-AI research that closes this loop through a learn-design-experiment-analyze cycle. ASI-Evolve augments standard evolutionary agents with two key components: a cognition base that injects accumulated human priors into each round of exploration, and a dedicated analyzer that distills complex experimental outcomes into reusable insights for future iterations. To our knowledge, ASI-Evolve is the first unified framework to demonstrate AI-driven discovery across three central components of AI development: data, architectures, and learning algorithms. In neural architecture design, it discovered 105 SOTA linear attention architectures, with the best discovered model surpassing DeltaNet by +0.97 points, nearly 3x the gain of recent human-designed improvements. In pretraining data curation, the evolved pipeline improves average benchmark performance by +3.96 points, with gains exceeding 18 points on MMLU. In reinforcement learning algorithm design, discovered algorithms outperform GRPO by up to +12.5 points on AMC32, +11.67 points on AIME24, and +5.04 points on OlympiadBench. We further provide initial evidence that this AI-for-AI paradigm can transfer beyond the AI stack through experiments in mathematics and biomedicine. Together, these results suggest that ASI-Evolve represents a promising step toward enabling AI to accelerate AI across the foundational stages of development, offering early evidence for the feasibility of closed-loop AI research.

AI-guided multi-omics analysis identifies NPC1-modulated susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection under PM(2.5) exposure

Nat Commun. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-71196-3. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Exposure to airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been linked to increased risk of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, by leveraging a fine-tuned foundation model of single-cell transcriptomics, we uncover shared transcriptional signatures between PM2.5 exposure and SARS-CoV-2 infection. We further validate this association using population-level epidemiological analyses and perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify genetic variants that modulate infection risk under PM2.5 exposure. In addition, we identify NPC1 as a key modulator involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection efficiency under virus-laden PM2.5 exposure through integrative functional genomic analyses and in vitro experiments. Our findings suggest that PM2.5 facilitates viral entry through an NPC1-modulated endo-lysosomal pathway, providing a mechanistic explanation for observed pollution-related susceptibility. By integrating artificial intelligence (AI)-guided transcriptomics, epidemiology, GWAS, functional genomics, and in vitro verification, our study elucidates how environmental and genetic factors jointly influence SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility. This work highlights how AI-assisted multi-omics integration systematically decodes the health impacts of environmental exposures from molecular to population levels and informs air quality policy and infectious disease preparedness.

PMID:41912520 | DOI:10.1038/s41467-026-71196-3

CN-Buzz2Portfolio: A Chinese-Market Dataset and Benchmark for LLM-Based Macro and Sector Asset Allocation from Daily Trending Financial News

arXiv:2603.22305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from static Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment analysis and event extraction to acting as dynamic decision-making agents in complex financial environments. However, the evolution of LLMs into autonomous financial agents faces a significant dilemma in evaluation paradigms. Direct live trading is irreproducible and prone to outcome bias by confounding luck with skill, whereas existing static benchmarks are often confined to entity-level stock picking and ignore broader market attention. To facilitate the rigorous analysis of these challenges, we introduce CN-Buzz2Portfolio, a reproducible benchmark grounded in the Chinese market that maps daily trending news to macro and sector asset allocation. Spanning a rolling horizon from 2024 to mid-2025, our dataset simulates a realistic public attention stream, requiring agents to distill investment logic from high-exposure narratives instead of pre-filtered entity news. We propose a Tri-Stage CPA Agent Workflow involving Compression, Perception, and Allocation to evaluate LLMs on broad asset classes such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) rather than individual stocks, thereby reducing idiosyncratic volatility. Extensive experiments on nine LLMs reveal significant disparities in how models translate macro-level narratives into portfolio weights. This work provides new insights into the alignment between general reasoning and financial decision-making, and all data, codes, and experiments are released to promote sustainable financial agent research.

Effects of multisensory stimulation based on immersive virtual reality in postoperative neuropsychiatric recovery after gynecological laparoscopy

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 24 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02515-7

Effects of multisensory stimulation based on immersive virtual reality in postoperative neuropsychiatric recovery after gynecological laparoscopy

MoKus: Leveraging Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer for Knowledge-Aware Concept Customization

arXiv:2603.12743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept customization typically binds rare tokens to a target concept. Unfortunately, these approaches often suffer from unstable performance as the pretraining data seldom contains these rare tokens. Meanwhile, these rare tokens fail to convey the inherent knowledge of the target concept. Consequently, we introduce Knowledge-aware Concept Customization, a novel task aiming at binding diverse textual knowledge to target visual concepts. This task requires the model to identify the knowledge within the text prompt to perform high-fidelity customized generation. Meanwhile, the model should efficiently bind all the textual knowledge to the target concept. Therefore, we propose MoKus, a novel framework for knowledge-aware concept customization. Our framework relies on a key observation: cross-modal knowledge transfer, where modifying knowledge within the text modality naturally transfers to the visual modality during generation. Inspired by this observation, MoKus contains two stages: (1) In visual concept learning, we first learn the anchor representation to store the visual information of the target concept. (2) In textual knowledge updating, we update the answer for the knowledge queries to the anchor representation, enabling high-fidelity customized generation. To further comprehensively evaluate our proposed MoKus on the new task, we introduce the first benchmark for knowledge-aware concept customization: KnowCusBench. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that MoKus outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the cross-model knowledge transfer allows MoKus to be easily extended to other knowledge-aware applications like virtual concept creation and concept erasure. We also demonstrate the capability of our method to achieve improvements on world knowledge benchmarks.

UniG2U-Bench: Do Unified Models Advance Multimodal Understanding?

arXiv:2603.03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models have recently demonstrated strong generative capabilities, yet whether and when generation improves understanding remains unclear. Existing benchmarks lack a systematic exploration of the specific tasks where generation facilitates understanding. To this end, we introduce UniG2U-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark categorizing generation-to-understanding (G2U) evaluation into 7 regimes and 30 subtasks, requiring varying degrees of implicit or explicit visual transformations. Extensive evaluation of over 30 models reveals three core findings: 1) Unified models generally underperform their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and Generate-then-Answer (GtA) inference typically degrades performance relative to direct inference. 2) Consistent enhancements emerge in spatial intelligence, visual illusions, or multi-round reasoning subtasks, where enhanced spatial and shape perception, as well as multi-step intermediate image states, prove beneficial. 3) Tasks with similar reasoning structures and models sharing architectures exhibit correlated behaviors, suggesting that generation-understanding coupling induces class-consistent inductive biases over tasks, pretraining data, and model architectures. These findings highlight the necessity for more diverse training data and novel paradigms to fully unlock the potential of unified multimodal modeling.
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