arXiv:2609.12395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) combines explicit primitives with efficient rasterization, yet recent systems increasingly use neural networks to generate or share Gaussian parameters. We characterize this trend along five axes: attribute decoding, spatial sharing, view-conditioned decoding, topology generation, and amortized inference. An analysis of 19 representative methods shows that these choices address different limitations and cannot be reduced to a binary neural label. We also isolate three forms of neural parameterization in a controlled mip-NeRF 360 study. Sharing appearance and opacity improves reconstruction quality, while decoding geometric structure offers no further gain. The evidence favors selective neuralization: shared functions help when they capture reusable correlations without sacrificing the local geometric freedom of explicit splats.

arXiv:2609.12036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this technical report, we propose Pelican-Sim 1.0, a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions to support downstream learning and decision making. The model incorporates four key design features: (1) Unified action representation: a 28-dimensional action value space covering most mainstream embodiments, keeping one model valid across heterogeneous devices. (2) Action-visual injection: URDF- and camera-rendered action videos bridge actions and pixels, giving markedly better controllability across embodiments, scenes, and tasks (PSNR +0.904 over alternative fusion baselines). (3) Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE): sparse MoE layers add capacity for heterogeneous dynamics and absorb the action modality while reducing inter-modality conflict (FVD -6.530 vs. the dense backbone). (4) Efficient rollout generation: causal adaptation and few-step distillation yield a four-step autoregressive simulator, achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Benefiting from these designs, we train on approximately one million real-world and simulated trajectories and obtain large gains in action controllability and video quality: PSNR improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin, with the adapted EWMBench DYN score up 0.426 on RoboTwin. Relying on this, four downstream applications on RoboTwin succeed: 500 generated trajectories added to 50 demonstrations per task raise policy success from 70% to 93%; policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994 across five checkpoints; and relative success gains reach 47.7% for action selection and 20.3% for policy improvement. Qualitative generalization across trajectory, scene, object, embodiment, and viewpoint shifts highlights its potential as a general-purpose world model simulator.

Nature Biomedical Engineering, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41551-026-01787-4

Applying extensive chemical modifications to RNA motifs substantially enhances prime editing efficiency in vivo and can be applied for improved efficiencies across RNA-based editing systems.

Oncogene, Published online: 31 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03973-9

POC1A promotes the proliferation, metastasis and stemness of bladder cancer by stabilizing BMI1 via USP7

arXiv:2605.24686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into emotionally sensitive domains, the structural integrity of their emotional intelligence (EI) becomes a critical frontier for safety and alignment. Current benchmarks often conflate superficial politeness with deep affective reasoning, failing to distinguish between perceptual accuracy and interactive efficacy. Here, we introduce FACET (Functional Affective Competence and Empathy Test), a psychometrically grounded framework comprising 480 expert-crafted items. Unlike previous metrics, FACET is theoretically anchored in the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso four-branch ability model, operationalizing EI through perception, facilitation, understanding, and management of emotions. Through an evaluation of nine frontier models (including GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4), we demonstrate that emotional intelligence is not a monolithic capability but is fragmented across cognitive and interactive dimensions. While frontier models demonstrate robust proficiency in objective emotion recognition and social reasoning, this does not consistently translate to interactive success. We categorize these discrepancies into three distinct performance profiles: cognitive-dominant, interactive-dominant, and context-dependent. These typologies indicate that emotional skills do not scale uniformly with general intelligence or model size; rather, they are shaped by specific alignment paradigms. Notably, we identify hidden emotion recognition as a universal performance bottleneck across all architectures. Our results suggest that current RLHF processes may optimize for "stochastic empathy", a statistical mimicry of emotional syntax, at the expense of integrated affective reasoning. These findings challenge the assumption of linear emotional scaling and provide a rigorous roadmap for developing socially aware agents capable of genuine clinical resonance.

arXiv:2605.24079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data contamination is a known threat to the reliability of model evaluation. However, it remains underexplored in code large language models (LLMs), where contamination often goes beyond exact duplication. We present TRACER, a semantic-aware framework for fine-grained code contamination detection. TRACER models contamination using three levels of semantic overlap - Functionally Identical, Nearly Identical, and Shared Logic - and detects them through a coarse-to-fine pipeline. We also introduce the first benchmark for fine-grained code contamination detection, spanning three widely used benchmarks and three representative post-training datasets. TRACER achieves strong and consistent performance across multiple LLM backbones, with GPT-5 reaching an F1 score of 0.91 in fine-grained detection. In the binary setting, TRACER attains an F1 of 0.92, outperforming existing methods by 42%-217%. We further conduct ablation studies and error analysis to assess the contributions of individual components in TRACER.

arXiv:2512.23076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional states manifest as coordinated yet heterogeneous physiological responses across central and autonomic systems, posing a fundamental challenge for multimodal representation learning in affective computing. Learning such joint dynamics is further complicated by the scarcity and subjectivity of affective annotations, which motivates the use of self-supervised learning (SSL). However, most existing SSL approaches rely on pairwise alignment objectives, which are insufficient to characterize dependencies among more than two modalities and fail to capture higher-order interactions arising from coordinated brain and autonomic responses. To address this limitation, we propose Multimodal Functional Maximum Correlation (MFMC), a principled SSL framework that maximizes higher-order multimodal dependence through a Dual Total Correlation (DTC) objective. By deriving a tight sandwich bound and optimizing it using a functional maximum correlation analysis (FMCA) based trace surrogate, MFMC captures joint multimodal interactions directly, without relying on pairwise contrastive losses. Experiments on three public affective computing benchmarks demonstrate that MFMC consistently achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance under both subject-dependent and subject-independent evaluation protocols, highlighting its robustness to inter-subject variability. In particular, MFMC improves subject-dependent accuracy on CEAP-360VR from 78.9% to 86.8%, and subject-independent accuracy from 27.5% to 33.1% using the EDA signal alone. Moreover, MFMC remains within 0.8 percentage points of the best-performing method on the most challenging EEG subject-independent split of MAHNOB-HCI. Our code is available at https://github.com/DY9910/MFMC.

arXiv:2605.04700v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks on audio language models (ALMs) optimize audio perturbations to elicit unsafe generations, and they typically update the entire waveform densely throughout optimization. In this work, we investigate the necessity of such dense optimization by analyzing the structure of token-aligned gradients in ALMs. We find that gradient energy is highly non-uniform across audio tokens, indicating that only a small subset of token-aligned audio regions dominates the optimization signal. Motivated by this observation, we propose Token-Aware Gradient Optimization (TAGO), which enables sparse jailbreak optimization by retaining only waveform gradients aligned with audio tokens that have high gradient energy, while masking the remaining gradients at each iteration. Across three ALMs, TAGO outperforms baselines, and substantial sparsification preserves strong attack success rates (e.g. on Qwen3-Omni, $\mathrm{ASR}_{l}$ remains at 86% with a token retention ratio of 0.25, compared to 87% with full token retention). These results demonstrate that dense waveform updates are largely redundant, and we advocate that future audio jailbreak and safety alignment research should further leverage this heterogeneous token-level gradient structure.

Nature Cancer, Published online: 19 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s43018-026-01174-7

Tang et al. identify cysteinyl leukotriene receptor 1 (CysLTR1) as a critical regulator of tumor-induced myelopoiesis, suggesting CysLTR1 targeting to sensitize tumors to immune checkpoint blockade.

Oncogenesis, Published online: 08 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41389-026-00621-5

Ubiquitin-specific protease 11 suppresses cuproptosis in colorectal cancer by regulating the ubiquitination and stability of ISCU

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10416-8

A genome-to-genome association study identifies host and viral risk factors that interact to drive nasopharyngeal carcinoma endemicity in southern China.

arXiv:2604.04359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have been widely adopted in contemporary large language models (LLMs) due to their ability to improve generation quality while reducing the required input context length. In this work, we focus on RAG systems for long-document question answering. Current approaches suffer from a heavy reliance on LLM descriptions resulting in high resource consumption and latency, repetitive content across hierarchical levels, and hallucinations due to no or limited grounding in the source text. To improve both efficiency and factual accuracy through grounding, we propose GroundedKG-RAG, a RAG system in which the knowledge graph is explicitly extracted from and grounded in the source document. Specifically, we define nodes in GroundedKG as entities and actions, and edges as temporal or semantic relations, with each node and edge grounded in the original sentences. We construct GroundedKG from semantic role labeling (SRL) and abstract meaning representation (AMR) parses and then embed it for retrieval. During querying, we apply the same transformation to the query and retrieve the most relevant sentences from the grounded source text for question answering. We evaluate GroundedKG-RAG on examples from the NarrativeQA dataset and find that it performs on par with a state-of-the art proprietary long-context model at smaller cost and outperforms a competitive baseline. Additionally, our GroundedKG is interpretable and readable by humans, facilitating auditing of results and error analysis.

arXiv:2604.02368v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit plateauing performance on conventional benchmarks, a pivotal challenge persists: evaluating their proficiency in complex, open-ended tasks characterizing genuine expert-level cognition. Existing frameworks suffer from narrow domain coverage, reliance on generalist tasks, or self-evaluation biases. To bridge this gap, we present XpertBench, a high-fidelity benchmark engineered to assess LLMs across authentic professional domains. XpertBench consists of 1,346 meticulously curated tasks across 80 categories, spanning finance, healthcare, legal services, education, and dual-track research (STEM and Humanities). These tasks are derived from over 1,000 submissions by domain experts--including researchers from elite institutions and practitioners with extensive clinical or industrial experience--ensuring superior ecological validity. Each task uses detailed rubrics with mostly 15-40 weighted checkpoints to assess professional rigor. To facilitate scalable yet human-aligned assessment, we introduce ShotJudge, a novel evaluation paradigm that employs LLM judges calibrated with expert few-shot exemplars to mitigate self-rewarding biases. Our empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals a pronounced performance ceiling: even leading models achieve a peak success rate of only ~66%, with a mean score around 55%. Models also exhibit domain-specific divergence, showing non-overlapping strengths in quantitative reasoning versus linguistic synthesis.. These findings underscore a significant "expert-gap" in current AI systems and establish XpertBench as a critical instrument for navigating the transition from general-purpose assistants to specialized professional collaborators.

arXiv:2604.02029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.

arXiv:2508.14285v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a cost-effective way to incorporate information from a specific dataset. However, when a problem requires incorporating information from multiple datasets - as in few shot learning - generalization across datasets can be limited, driving up training costs. As a consequence, other approaches such as in-context learning are typically used in this setting. To address this challenge, we introduce an efficient method for adapting the weights of LLMs to multiple distributions, Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning for LoRA (ABMLL). This method builds on amortized Bayesian meta-learning for smaller models, adapting this approach to LLMs by reframing where local and global variables are defined in LoRA and using a new hyperparameter to balance reconstruction accuracy and the fidelity of task-specific parameters to the global ones. ABMLL supports effective generalization across datasets and scales to large models such as Llama3-8B and Qwen2-7B, outperforming existing methods on the CrossFit and Unified-QA datasets in terms of both accuracy and expected calibration error. We show that meta-learning can also be combined with in-context learning, resulting in further improvements in both these datasets and legal and chemistry applications.

arXiv:2603.29950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective collaboration requires teams to manage complex cognitive and emotional states through Socially Shared Regulation of Learning (SSRL). Physiological synchrony (i.e., longitudinal alignment in physiological signals) can indicate these states, but is hard to interpret on its own. We investigate the physiological and conversational dynamics of four medical dyads diagnosing a virtual patient case using an intelligent tutoring system. Semantic shifts in dialogue were correlated with transient physiological synchrony peaks. We also coded utterance segments for SSRL and derived cosine similarity using sentence embeddings. The results showed that activating prior knowledge featured significantly lower semantic similarity than simpler task execution. High physiological synchrony was associated with lower semantic similarity, suggesting that such moments involve exploratory and varied language use. Qualitative analysis triangulated these synchrony peaks as ``pivotal moments'': successful teams synchronized during shared discovery, while unsuccessful teams peaked during shared uncertainty. This research advances human-centered AI by demonstrating how biological signals can be fused with dialogues to understand critical moments in problem solving.

arXiv:2603.29602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-turn image editing paradigms are often confined to isolated single-step execution. Due to a lack of context-awareness and closed-loop feedback mechanisms, they are prone to error accumulation and semantic drift during multi-turn interactions, ultimately resulting in severe structural distortion of the generated images. For that, we propose \textbf{IMAGAgent}, a multi-turn image editing agent framework based on a "plan-execute-reflect" closed-loop mechanism that achieves deep synergy among instruction parsing, tool scheduling, and adaptive correction within a unified pipeline. Specifically, we first present a constraint-aware planning module that leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to precisely decompose complex natural language instructions into a series of executable sub-tasks, governed by target singularity, semantic atomicity, and visual perceptibility. Then, the tool-chain orchestration module dynamically constructs execution paths based on the current image, the current sub-task, and the historical context, enabling adaptive scheduling and collaborative operation among heterogeneous operation models covering image retrieval, segmentation, detection, and editing. Finally, we devise a multi-expert collaborative reflection mechanism where a central large language model (LLM) receives the image to be edited and synthesizes VLM critiques into holistic feedback, simultaneously triggering fine-grained self-correction and recording feedback outcomes to optimize future decisions. Extensive experiments on our constructed \textbf{MTEditBench} and the MagicBrush dataset demonstrate that IMAGAgent achieves performance significantly superior to existing methods in terms of instruction consistency, editing precision, and overall quality. The code is available at https://github.com/hackermmzz/IMAGAgent.git.

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 24 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02560-2

Boosting foundation models for rare eye disease diagnosis via a multimodal text-to-image generative framework

arXiv:2603.12744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib's definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework, specifically examining the performance gap between standard library problems and bespoke mathematical constructions. We introduce TaoBench, an undergraduate-level benchmark derived from Terence Tao's Analysis I, which formalizes analysis by constructing core mathematical concepts from scratch, without relying on standard Mathlib definitions, as well as by mixing from-scratch and MathLib constructions. For fair evaluation, we build an agentic pipeline that automatically extracts a compilable, self-contained local environment for each problem. To isolate the effect of definitional frameworks, we additionally translate every problem into a mathematically equivalent Mathlib formulation, yielding paired TaoBench-Mathlib statements for direct comparison. While state-of-the-art ATP models perform capably within the MathLib framework, performance drops by an average of roughly 26% on the definitionally equivalent Tao formulation. This indicates that the main bottleneck is limited generalization across definitional frameworks rather than task difficulty. TaoBench thus highlights a gap between benchmark performance and applicability, and provides a concrete foundation for developing and testing provers better aligned with research mathematics.