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Received — 8 April 2026 ⏭

Social Media Intervention Based on the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model Promotes HIV Testing and Reduces High-Risk Behaviors Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in Resource-Limited Settings in China: Randomized Controlled Trial

✇Journal of Medical Internet Research
By: Huanzhuo Mai · Jianyuan Liu · Liping Cheng · Hao Liang · Ping Cui · Qin Yao · Qin Cao · Heng Zhang · Wenping Liao · Shiran He · Xing Yang · Ping Cen · Jiegang Huang
8 April 2026 at 01:30
Background: Social media intervention may enhance HIV prevention among men who have sex with men, but the effect of this intervention in resource-limited settings remains unclear. Objective: This randomized controlled trial evaluated whether a social media intervention grounded in the information-motivation-behavioral skills (IMB) model could be beneficial for HIV prevention among men who have sex with men in resource-limited settings. Methods: Participants were recruited in Nanning, China, between April 2023 and April 2024. Eligible participants were randomly assigned to either the social media intervention group or the routine HIV prevention services control group. Participants in the intervention group received a 3-month social media intervention, which included completing video-based tasks. Baseline surveys were conducted, followed by follow-up surveys every 3 months, for a total of 2 follow-ups. Outcomes included HIV testing uptake, high-risk behavior, AIDS-related knowledge, safe sex self-efficacy, and attitude. Results: A total of 180 eligible men who have sex with men were enrolled (90 per group). Follow-up rates were 97.8% (88/90) and 95.5% (86/90) for the intervention and control groups, respectively. At the follow-ups, the intervention group demonstrated significantly higher uptake of HIV testing, a lower proportion of participants reporting high-risk sexual behaviors, and higher condom use self-efficacy compared to the control group (all

Combee: Scaling Prompt Learning for Self-Improving Language Model Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hanchen Li · Runyuan He · Qizheng Zhang · Changxiu Ji · Qiuyang Mang · Xiaokun Chen · Lakshya A Agrawal · Wei-Liang Liao · Eric Yang · Alvin Cheung · James Zou · Kunle Olukotun · Ion Stoica · Joseph E. Gonzalez
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.04247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in prompt learning allow large language model agents to acquire task-relevant knowledge from inference-time context without parameter changes. For example, existing methods (like ACE or GEPA) can learn system prompts to improve accuracy based on previous agent runs. However, these methods primarily focus on single-agent or low-parallelism settings. This fundamentally limits their ability to efficiently learn from a large set of collected agentic traces. It would be efficient and beneficial to run prompt learning in parallel to accommodate the growing trend of learning from many agentic traces or parallel agent executions. Yet without a principled strategy for scaling, current methods suffer from quality degradation with high parallelism. To improve both the efficiency and quality of prompt learning, we propose Combee, a novel framework to scale parallel prompt learning for self-improving agents. Combee speeds up learning and enables running many agents in parallel while learning from their aggregate traces without quality degradation. To achieve this, Combee leverages parallel scans and employs an augmented shuffle mechanism; Combee also introduces a dynamic batch size controller to balance quality and delay. Evaluations on AppWorld, Terminal-Bench, Formula, and FiNER demonstrate that Combee achieves up to 17x speedup over previous methods with comparable or better accuracy and equivalent cost.

TreeGaussian: Tree-Guided Cascaded Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Consistent 3D Gaussian Scene Segmentation and Understanding

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Jingbin You · Zehao Li · Hao Jiang · Xinzhu Ma · Shuqin Gao · Honglong Zhao · Congcong Zheng · Tianlu Mao · Feng Dai · Yucheng Zhang · Zhaoqi Wang
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.03309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a real-time, differentiable representation for neural scene understanding. However, existing 3DGS-based methods struggle to represent hierarchical 3D semantic structures and capture whole-part relationships in complex scenes. Moreover, dense pairwise comparisons and inconsistent hierarchical labels from 2D priors hinder feature learning, resulting in suboptimal segmentation. To address these limitations, we introduce TreeGaussian, a tree-guided cascaded contrastive learning framework that explicitly models hierarchical semantic relationships and reduces redundancy in contrastive supervision. By constructing a multi-level object tree, TreeGaussian enables structured learning across object-part hierarchies. In addition, we propose a two-stage cascaded contrastive learning strategy that progressively refines feature representations from global to local, mitigating saturation and stabilizing training. A Consistent Segmentation Detection (CSD) mechanism and a graph-based denoising module are further introduced to align segmentation modes across views while suppressing unstable Gaussian points, enhancing segmentation consistency and quality. Extensive experiments, including open-vocabulary 3D object selection, 3D point cloud understanding, and ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Learning Additively Compositional Latent Actions for Embodied AI

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hangxing Wei · Xiaoyu Chen · Chuheng Zhang · Tim Pearce · Jianyu Chen · Alex Lamb · Li Zhao · Jiang Bian
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.03340v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent action learning infers pseudo-action labels from visual transitions, providing an approach to leverage internet-scale video for embodied AI. However, most methods learn latent actions without structural priors that encode the additive, compositional structure of physical motion. As a result, latents often entangle irrelevant scene details or information about future observations with true state changes and miscalibrate motion magnitude. We introduce Additively Compositional Latent Action Model (AC-LAM), which enforces scene-wise additive composition structure over short horizons on the latent action space. These AC constraints encourage simple algebraic structure in the latent action space~(identity, inverse, cycle consistency) and suppress information that does not compose additively. Empirically, AC-LAM learns more structured, motion-specific, and displacement-calibrated latent actions and provides stronger supervision for downstream policy learning, outperforming state-of-the-art LAMs across simulated and real-world tabletop tasks.

Persistent Cross-Attempt State Optimization for Repository-Level Code Generation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Ruwei Pan · Jiangshuai Wang · Qisheng Zhang · Yueheng Zhu · Linhao Wu · Zixiong Yang · Yakun Zhang · Lu Zhang · Hongyu Zhang
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.03632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in repository-level code generation. However, solving the same repository-level task often requires multiple attempts, while existing methods still optimize each attempt in isolation and do not preserve or reuse task-specific state across attempts. In this paper, we propose LiveCoder, a novel framework for repository-level code generation based on cross-attempt knowledge optimization. LiveCoder maintains persistent task-specific state from prior attempts to guide subsequent generation. This state includes success knowledge, which captures reusable signals from previously strong repositories, failure knowledge, which records unsuccessful outcomes and their diagnostic signals, and a historical-best repository, which preserves the strongest result found so far and prevents regression. These components collectively transform repeated repository generation into a persistent, knowledge-driven optimization process. We evaluate LiveCoder using four frontier LLMs on two representative repository-level code generation benchmarks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LiveCoder, improving the functional score by up to 22.94 percentage points, increasing repository reuse to 81.58%, and reducing cost by up to 53.63% on RAL-Bench while maintaining broadly stable non-functional quality.

Agentization of Digital Assets for the Agentic Web: Concepts, Techniques, and Benchmark

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Linyao Chen · Bo Huang · Qinlao Zhao · Shuai Shao · Zhi Han · Zicai Cui · Ziheng Zhang · Guangtao Zeng · Wenzheng Tang · Yikun Wang · Yuanjian Zhou · Zimian Peng · Yong Yu · Weiwen Liu · Hiroki Kobayashi · Weinan Zhang
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.04226v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic Web, as a new paradigm that redefines the internet through autonomous, goal-driven interactions, plays an important role in group intelligence. As the foundational semantic primitives of the Agentic Web, digital assets encapsulate interactive web elements into agents, which expand the capacities and coverage of agents in agentic web. The lack of automated methodologies for agent generation limits the wider usage of digital assets and the advancement of the Agentic Web. In this paper, we first formalize these challenges by strictly defining the A2A-Agentization process, decomposing it into critical stages and identifying key technical hurdles on top of the A2A protocol. Based on this framework, we develop an Agentization Agent to agentize digital assets for the Agentic Web. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we propose A2A-Agentization Bench, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentization quality in terms of fidelity and interoperability. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively activates the functional capabilities of digital assets and enables interoperable A2A multi-agent collaboration. We believe this work will further facilitate scalable and standardized integration of digital assets into the Agentic Web ecosystem.

KLong: Training LLM Agent for Extremely Long-horizon Tasks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yue Liu · Yingwei Ma · Yibo Miao · Yanhao Li · Yuchong Xie · Xinlong Yang · Zhiyuan Hu · Flood Sung · Jiaheng Zhang · Bryan Hooi
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2602.17547v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces KLong, an open-source LLM agent trained to solve extremely long-horizon tasks. The principle is to first cold-start the model via trajectory-splitting SFT, then scale it via progressive RL training. Specifically, we first activate basic agentic abilities of a base model with a comprehensive SFT recipe. Then, we introduce Research-Factory, an automated pipeline that generates high-quality training data by collecting research papers and constructing evaluation rubrics. Using this pipeline, we build thousands of long-horizon trajectories distilled from Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Thinking). To train with these extremely long trajectories, we propose a new trajectory-splitting SFT, which preserves early context, progressively truncates later context, and maintains overlap between sub-trajectories. In addition, to further improve long-horizon task-solving capability, we propose a novel progressive RL, which schedules training into multiple stages with progressively extended timeouts. Experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalization of KLong, as shown in Figure 1. Notably, our proposed KLong (106B) surpasses Kimi K2 Thinking (1T) by 11.28% on PaperBench, and the performance improvement generalizes to other coding benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and MLE-bench.

ToG-Bench: Task-Oriented Spatio-Temporal Grounding in Egocentric Videos

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Qi'ao Xu · Tianwen Qian · Yuqian Fu · Kailing Li · Yang Jiao · Jiacheng Zhang · Xiaoling Wang · Liang He
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2512.03666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A core capability towards general embodied intelligence lies in localizing task-relevant objects from an egocentric perspective, formulated as Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG). Despite recent progress, existing STVG studies remain largely confined to object-centric and descriptive instructions, neglecting the task-oriented reasoning that is crucial for embodied agents to accomplish goal-directed interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{ToG-Bench}, the first task-oriented spatio-temporal video grounding benchmark for egocentric videos. ToG-Bench is characterized by three key features: (1) \textbf{Task-oriented Grounding}, which requires identifying and localizing objects based on intended tasks rather than straightforward descriptions; (2) \textbf{Explicit-Implicit Dual Grounding}, where target objects can be either explicitly mentioned or implicitly inferred by contextual reasoning; (3) \textbf{One-to-Many Grounding}, where a single instruction may correspond to multiple objects involved in task execution. Built upon videos sourced from ScanNet, ToG-Bench comprises 100 annotated clips with 2,704 task-oriented grounding instructions, constructed via a semi-automated pipeline that combines foundation model annotation and human refinement. In addition, we introduce a set of task-level evaluation metrics tailored for multi-object and explicit-implicit object grounding, and systematically benchmark seven state-of-the-art MLLMs. Extensive experiments reveal the intrinsic challenges of task-oriented STVG and substantial performance gaps across explicit-implicit and multi-object grounding, highlighting the difficulty of bridging perception and interaction in embodied scenarios. Data and code will be released at: \href{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}..
Received — 4 April 2026 ⏭

CogBias: Measuring and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Large Language Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Fan Huang · Songheng Zhang · Haewoon Kwak · Jisun An
3 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.01366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal representations and can be mitigated through targeted intervention remains an open question. We define LLM cognitive bias as systematic, reproducible deviations from correct answers in tasks with computable ground-truth baselines, and introduce LLM CogBias, a benchmark organized around four families of cognitive biases: Judgment, Information Processing, Social, and Response. We evaluate three LLMs and find that cognitive biases emerge systematically across all four families, with magnitudes and debiasing responses that are strongly family-dependent: prompt-level debiasing substantially reduces Response biases but backfires for Judgment biases. Using linear probes under a contrastive design, we show that these biases are encoded as linearly separable directions in model activation space. Finally, we apply activation steering to modulate biased behavior, achieving 26--32\% reduction in bias score (fraction of biased responses) while preserving downstream capability on 25 benchmarks (Llama: negligible degradation; Qwen: up to $-$19.0pp for Judgment biases). Despite near-orthogonal bias representations across models (mean cosine similarity 0.01), steering reduces bias at similar rates across architectures ($r(246)$=.621, $p$
Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭

Predicting Neuromodulation Outcome for Parkinson's Disease with Generative Virtual Brain Model

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Siyuan Du · Siyi Li · Shuwei Bai · Ang Li · Haolin Li · Mingqing Xiao · Yang Pan · Dongsheng Li · Weidi Xie · Yanfeng Wang · Ya Zhang · Chencheng Zhang · Jiangchao Yao
1 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.29176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parkinson's disease (PD) affects over ten million people worldwide. Although temporal interference (TI) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) are promising therapies, inter-individual variability limits empirical treatment selection, increasing non-negligible surgical risk and cost. Previous explorations either resort to limited statistical biomarkers that are insufficient to characterize variability, or employ AI-driven methods which is prone to overfitting and opacity. We bridge this gap with a pretraining-finetuning framework to predict outcomes directly from resting-state fMRI. Critically, a generative virtual brain foundation model, pretrained on a collective dataset (2707 subjects, 5621 sessions) to capture universal disorder patterns, was finetuned on PD cohorts receiving TI (n=51) or DBS (n=55) to yield individualized virtual brains with high fidelity to empirical functional connectivity (r=0.935). By constructing counterfactual estimations between pathological and healthy neural states within these personalized models, we predicted clinical responses (TI: AUPR=0.853; DBS: AUPR=0.915), substantially outperforming baselines. External and prospective validations (n=14, n=11) highlight the feasibility of clinical translation. Moreover, our framework provides state-dependent regional patterns linked to response, offering hypothesis-generating mechanistic insights.

AGFT: Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yubo Cui · Xianchao Guan · Zijun Xiong · Zheng Zhang
1 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.29410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing classification-guided adversarial fine-tuning methods often disrupt pre-trained cross-modal alignment, weakening visual-textual correspondence and degrading zero-shot performance. In this paper, we propose an Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning (AGFT) framework that enhances zero-shot adversarial robustness while preserving the cross-modal semantic structure. Unlike label-based methods that rely on hard labels and fail to maintain the relative relationships between image and text, AGFT leverages the probabilistic predictions of the original model for text-guided adversarial training, which aligns adversarial visual features with textual embeddings via soft alignment distributions, improving zero-shot adversarial robustness. To address structural discrepancies introduced by fine-tuning, we introduce a distribution consistency calibration mechanism that adjusts the robust model output to match a temperature-scaled version of the pre-trained model predictions. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that AGFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving zero-shot adversarial robustness.

LaSM: Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism for Defending Pop-up Attack on GUI Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zihe Yan · Zhuosheng Zhang · Jiaping Gui · Gongshen Liu
1 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2507.10610v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong decision-making abilities in screen-based interaction tasks. However, they remain highly vulnerable to pop-up-based environmental injection attacks, where malicious visual elements divert model attention and lead to unsafe or incorrect actions. Existing defense methods either require costly retraining or perform poorly under inductive interference. In this work, we systematically study how such attacks alter the attention behavior of GUI agents and uncover a layer-wise attention divergence pattern between correct and incorrect outputs. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{LaSM}, a \textit{Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism} that selectively amplifies attention and MLP modules in critical layers. LaSM improves the alignment between model saliency and task-relevant regions without additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the defense success rate and exhibits strong robustness, while having negligible impact on the model's general capabilities. Our findings reveal that attention misalignment is a core vulnerability in MLLM agents and can be effectively addressed through selective layer-wise modulation. Our code can be found in https://github.com/YANGTUOMAO/LaSM.

Robust transcriptomic hallmarks targeting intratumor heterogeneity in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Pancreatic)
By: Youpei Lin · Lihua Peng · Haichao Zhao · Penghui Lin · Lv Chen · Zunyun Gong · Jian Lin · Dongbing Liu · Xupeng Yang · Xiangze Song · Mao Zhang · Shuyi Ji · Junhua Rao · Huijuan Luo · Yifei Cheng · Xiaofang Chen · Guohe Song · Hao Hou · Dongning Rao · Tiancheng Zhang · Weiren Liu · Shu Zhang · Gaoyang Xu · Juan Zhang · Liyun Xiao · Yan Liang · Yang Liu · Yuhan Chen · Zhirou Cui · Xiaoying Wang · Jian Zhou · Qiang Gao · Kui Wu · Jia Fan
31 March 2026 at 18:00

Cell Rep Med. 2026 Mar 30:102708. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2026.102708. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) undermines transcriptome-based stratification in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA). Here, we integrate multi-omics data from multi-region, single-region, and single-cell RNA sequencing cohorts to systematically characterize gene expression ITH. We uncover that immune and stromal heterogeneity are primary drivers of ITH, leading to misclassification of a median 27.8% of tumors by existing subtyping systems. To overcome this, we identify a low-intratumor-heterogeneity/high-intertumor-variability (LIHV) gene set and develop an ITH-insensitive classification system defining five subgroups: inflammatory (SI), metabolic (SII), atypical (SIII-1), immune-silent (SIII-2), and neurodegenerative (SIII-3). These subgroups exhibit distinct clinical outcomes, molecular features, immune landscapes, and therapeutic vulnerabilities. GPRC5A and VTCN1 serve as robust immunohistochemical biomarkers for SI and SIII tumors, while serum CEA and CA19-9 identify inflammatory iCCA. Therapeutically, HSP90 inhibition synergizes with anti-PD1 in inflammatory iCCA, whereas combined anti-PD1 and anti-TIM3 suppresses neurodegenerative iCCA. Collectively, our study provides a robust molecular framework and actionable therapeutic strategies for iCCA.

PMID:41916296 | DOI:10.1016/j.xcrm.2026.102708

Dynamic Targetable Extracellular Vesicle Surface Proteins Monitor Depth of Response to CAR T Therapy

✇MRD
By: Chen Zhao · Lei Qiu · Ning An · Yong Ju · Jacqueline Ziqian Yang · Hyoyong Kim · Ryan Y Zhang · Junseok Lee · Jingjing He · Liang-Yan Chen · Yaya Xu · Yue Ma · Emily Ren · Sophie Pan · Pranay Sashikanth · Jina Kim · Di Wang · Peiling Zhang · Jianlin Hu · Yang Gao · Yuhan Bao · Yanhua Tu · Li Wang · Zhili Wang · Zhicheng Zhang · Renjun Pei · Edwin M Posadas · Sungyong You · Wanxing Chai-Ho · Tasha L Lin · Sarah M Larson · Dinesh S Rao · Hsian-Rong Tseng · Na Sun · Chunrui Li · Yazhen Zhu
27 March 2026 at 18:00

Res Sq [Preprint]. 2026 Mar 18:rs.3.rs-8913641. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8913641/v1.

ABSTRACT

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) represent a promising liquid biopsy platform in multiple myeloma (MM). We developed an MM EV Surface Protein Assay to quantify and dynamically monitor four MM EV subpopulations defined by targetable MM surface proteins (BCMA, CD38, GPRC5D, and CD319) across 336 serial blood samples from 45 relapsed/refractory MM (RRMM) patients treated with anti-BCMA chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. All four MM EV subpopulations significantly decreased in 43 patients with initial response, while BCMA+, GPRC5D+, and CD319+ MM EVs increased in 19 patients with progression, and antigen escape was detected by BCMA+ MM EVs. MM EV subpopulations differentiated minimal residual disease (MRD) status and complemented MRD for detecting early relapse before clinical progression. Notably, CD319+ MM EVs were early predictors of progression-free and overall survival in MRD-negative patients. This assay enables noninvasive monitoring of deep response, progression, and antigen escape, and stratifies survival in MRD-negative patients with RRMM.

PMID:41890853 | PMC:PMC13015583 | DOI:10.21203/rs.3.rs-8913641/v1

Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

OmniDiT: Extending Diffusion Transformer to Omni-VTON Framework

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Weixuan Zeng · Pengcheng Wei · Huaiqing Wang · Boheng Zhang · Jia Sun · Dewen Fan · Lin HE · Long Chen · Qianqian Gan · Fan Yang · Tingting Gao
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.19643v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the rapid advancement of Virtual Try-On (VTON) and Try-Off (VTOFF) technologies, existing VTON methods face challenges with fine-grained detail preservation, generalization to complex scenes, complicated pipeline, and efficient inference. To tackle these problems, we propose OmniDiT, an omni Virtual Try-On framework based on the Diffusion Transformer, which combines try-on and try-off tasks into one unified model. Specifically, we first establish a self-evolving data curation pipeline to continuously produce data, and construct a large VTON dataset Omni-TryOn, which contains over 380k diverse and high-quality garment-model-tryon image pairs and detailed text prompts. Then, we employ the token concatenation and design an adaptive position encoding to effectively incorporate multiple reference conditions. To relieve the bottleneck of long sequence computation, we are the first to introduce Shifted Window Attention into the diffusion model, thus achieving a linear complexity. To remedy the performance degradation caused by local window attention, we utilize multiple timestep prediction and an alignment loss to improve generation fidelity. Experiments reveal that, under various complex scenes, our method achieves the best performance in both the model-free VTON and VTOFF tasks and a performance comparable to current SOTA methods in the model-based VTON task.
Received — 17 March 2026 ⏭

Unraveling the Link Between Azathioprine and Acute Pancreatitis: Integrating Network Toxicology, Machine Learning, and Mendelian Randomization

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Zhijun Xie · Hang Lei · Pengcheng Zhang · Zhi Li · Wenfu Tang
15 March 2026 at 18:00

CPT Pharmacometrics Syst Pharmacol. 2026 Mar;15(3):e70178. doi: 10.1002/psp4.70178.

ABSTRACT

Azathioprine (AZA), a widely used immunosuppressant, can induce acute pancreatitis (AP), yet the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. This study employed an integrative multiomics strategy-combining network toxicology, machine learning, Mendelian randomization (MR), and molecular docking-to elucidate the biological basis of AZA-induced AP. AZA-associated genes were first identified through bioinformatics databases and analyzed using protein-protein interaction networks and GO/KEGG functional enrichment. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression and support vector machine recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) were applied to prioritize key differentially expressed genes for diagnostic modeling. MR was then used to examine potential causal links between gene expression and AP risk, followed by molecular docking to assess AZA-protein interactions. Sixty-eight candidate genes related to AZA-induced AP were identified. Enrichment analyses indicated involvement in lipid metabolic regulation, inflammatory pathways, and energy homeostasis. Machine learning highlighted seven key genes-CES1, CTSK, JAK1, NR3C2, PLIN5, WEE1, and RORA-as central to AP development. MR analysis further demonstrated that decreased expression of CES1 and CTSK may mediate AZA-related AP susceptibility. Docking simulations revealed strong, specific binding between AZA and both CES1 and CTSK. Overall, this study identifies CES1 and CTSK as genetically protective factors and mechanistic mediators in AZA-triggered AP. These findings offer new molecular insights into the genomic and biochemical pathways underlying this adverse drug reaction.

PMID:41832938 | DOI:10.1002/psp4.70178

LINC-AC092535.5 regulates MICAL2 mRNA level to inhibit p53-mediated ferroptosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

✇Oncogene - Issue - nature.com science feeds
By: Siyu Zhang · Wenyue Chen · Ji Yang · Zhen Ge · Yan Kong · Haiou Yan · Lili Bao · Ying Shan · Zhiyuan Yang · Wenhui Chen · Si Pan · Yiwen You · Bo You · Qicheng Zhang
14 March 2026 at 08:00

Oncogene, Published online: 14 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03714-y

LINC-AC092535.5 regulates MICAL2 mRNA level to inhibit p53-mediated ferroptosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma
Received — 11 March 2026 ⏭

RECAP: Local Hebbian Prototype Learning as a Self-Organizing Readout for Reservoir Dynamics

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Heng Zhang
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.06639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust perception in brains is often attributed to high-dimensional population activity together with local plasticity mechanisms that reinforce recurring structure. In contrast, most modern image recognition systems are trained by error backpropagation and end-to-end gradient optimization, which are not naturally aligned with local computation and local plasticity. We introduce RECAP (Reservoir Computing with Hebbian Co-Activation Prototypes), a bio-inspired learning strategy for robust image classification that couples untrained reservoir dynamics with a self-organizing Hebbian prototype readout. RECAP discretizes time-averaged reservoir responses into activation levels, constructs a co-activation mask over reservoir unit pairs, and incrementally updates class-wise prototype matrices via a Hebbian-like potentiation-decay rule. Inference is performed by overlap-based prototype matching. The method avoids error backpropagation and is naturally compatible with online prototype updates. We illustrate the resulting robustness behavior on MNIST-C, where RECAP remains robust under diverse corruptions without exposure to corrupted training samples.

Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Pengcheng Jiang · Jiacheng Lin · Zhiyi Shi · Zifeng Wang · Luxi He · Yichen Wu · Ming Zhong · Peiyang Song · Qizheng Zhang · Heng Wang · Xueqiang Xu · Hanwen Xu · Pengrui Han · Dylan Zhang · Jiashuo Sun · Chaoqi Yang · Kun Qian · Tian Wang · Changran Hu · Manling Li · Quanzheng Li · Hao Peng · Sheng Wang · Jingbo Shang · Chao Zhang · Jiaxuan You · Liyuan Liu · Pan Lu · Yu Zhang · Heng Ji · Yejin Choi · Dawn Song · Jimeng Sun · Jiawei Han
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2512.16301v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are moving beyond prompting alone. ChatGPT marked the rise of general-purpose LLM assistants, DeepSeek showed that on-policy reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can improve reasoning and tool use, and OpenClaw highlights a newer direction in which agents accumulate persistent memory and reusable skills. Yet the research landscape remains fragmented across post-training, retrieval, memory, and skill systems. This survey studies these developments under a single notion of \emph{adaptation}: improving an agent, its tools, or their interaction after pretraining. We organize the field with a four-paradigm framework spanning agent adaptation and tool adaptation. On the agent side, A1 (tool-execution-signaled) and A2 (agent-output-signaled) improve the agent itself through supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. On the tool side, T1 (agent-agnostic) provides reusable pre-trained modules any agent can call, while T2 (agent-supervised) uses the agent's outputs to train memory systems, skill libraries, or lightweight subagents. Using this framework, we review post-training methods, adaptive memory architectures, and agent skills; compare their trade-offs in cost, flexibility, and generalization; and summarize evaluation practices across deep research, software development, computer use, and drug discovery. We conclude by outlining open problems in agent-tool co-adaptation, continual learning, safety, and efficient deployment.

CaMeLs Can Use Computers Too: System-level Security for Computer Use Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hanna Foerster · Tom Blanchard · Kristina Nikoli\'c · Ilia Shumailov · Cheng Zhang · Robert Mullins · Nicolas Papernot · Florian Tram\`er · Yiren Zhao
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2601.09923v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss. The only known robust defense is architectural isolation that strictly separates trusted task planning from untrusted environment observations. However, applying this design to Computer Use Agents (CUAs) -- systems that automate tasks by viewing screens and executing actions -- presents a fundamental challenge: current agents require continuous observation of UI state to determine each action, conflicting with the isolation required for security. We resolve this tension by demonstrating that UI workflows, while dynamic, are structurally predictable. We introduce Single-Shot Planning for CUAs, where a trusted planner generates a complete execution graph with conditional branches before any observation of potentially malicious content, providing provable control flow integrity guarantees against arbitrary instruction injections. Although this architectural isolation successfully prevents instruction injections, we show that additional measures are needed to prevent Branch Steering attacks, which manipulate UI elements to trigger unintended valid paths within the plan. We evaluate our design on OSWorld, and retain up to 57% of the performance of frontier models while improving performance for smaller open-source models by up to 19%, demonstrating that rigorous security and utility can coexist in CUAs.
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