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Effect of the Maxing Huoqiao granule on nonsevere community-acquired pneumonia: A multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial

Pharmacol Res. 2026 Apr 9:108186. doi: 10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108186. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) remains a major global public health challenge with substantial morbidity and mortality. Although preclinical studies suggest that Maxing Huoqiao (MXHQ) granule may have therapeutic potential for pneumonia, high-quality clinical evidence is still limited. We conducted a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial at two tertiary hospitals in China to evaluate the clinical efficacy of MXHQ as adjunctive therapy and to explore its potential mechanisms in adults with nonsevere CAP receiving standard moxifloxacin treatment. A total of 96 patients were enrolled and randomized (1:1:1) to receive standard-dose MXHQ, low-dose MXHQ, or placebo in addition to moxifloxacin for 7 days, with a 14-day follow-up. The primary endpoint was clinical cure, defined as composite recovery of major respiratory symptoms, lung rales, and fever; secondary endpoints included symptom relief, radiographic improvement, and safety. Compared with placebo, standard-dose MXHQ was associated with a higher day-14 clinical cure rate (30.78% vs. 68.97%; RR = 0.45, 95% CI = 0.24-0.83; P < 0.01). Furthermore, the standard-dose intervention was correlated with a shorter time to relief and recovery of cough and sputum (P < 0.05), as well as improvements in symptom scores (P < 0.05) and promoting lesion absorption on chest CT (P < 0.05). Low-dose MXHQ showed no significant clinical benefit, whereas safety profiles were comparable across all groups. Transcriptomic analyses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells, complemented by a Streptococcus pneumonia animal model, indicated that the clinical benefits of MXHQ are linked to the modulation of inflammation and innate immunity. These omics and in vivo observations suggest a potential mechanism underlying the protective effects of MXHQ against inflammatory injury and promotion of tissue repair, involving the regulation of anti-inflammatory mediators and tissue repair-related factors. (Chictr.org.cn, ID Number: ChiCTR2400082095).

PMID:41966499 | DOI:10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108186

Not All Candidates are Created Equal: A Heterogeneity-Aware Approach to Pre-ranking in Recommender Systems

arXiv:2603.03770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most large-scale recommender systems follow a multi-stage cascade of retrieval, pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking. A key challenge at the pre-ranking stage arises from the heterogeneity of training instances sampled from coarse-grained retrieval results, fine-grained ranking signals, and exposure feedback. Our analysis reveals that prevailing pre-ranking methods, which indiscriminately mix heterogeneous samples, suffer from gradient conflicts: hard samples dominate training while easy ones remain underutilized, leading to suboptimal performance. We further show that the common practice of uniformly scaling model complexity across all samples is inefficient, as it overspends computation on easy cases and slows training without proportional gains. To address these limitations, this paper presents Heterogeneity-Aware Adaptive Pre-ranking (HAP), a unified framework that mitigates gradient conflicts through conflict-sensitive sampling coupled with tailored loss design, while adaptively allocating computational budgets across candidates. Specifically, HAP disentangles easy and hard samples, directing each subset along dedicated optimization paths. Building on this separation, it first applies lightweight models to all candidates for efficient coverage, and further engages stronger models on the hard ones, maintaining accuracy while reducing cost. This approach not only improves pre-ranking effectiveness but also provides a practical perspective on scaling strategies in industrial recommender systems. HAP has been deployed in the Toutiao production system for 9 months, yielding up to 0.4% improvement in user app usage duration and 0.05% in active days, without additional computational cost. We also release a large-scale industrial hybrid-sample dataset to enable the systematic study of source-driven candidate heterogeneity in pre-ranking.

EDU-MATRIX: A Society-Centric Generative Cognitive Digital Twin Architecture for Secondary Education

arXiv:2602.18705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-agent simulations often suffer from the "Agent-Centric Paradox": rules are hard-coded into individual agents, making complex social dynamics rigid and difficult to align with educational values. This paper presents EDU-MATRIX, a society-centric generative cognitive digital twin architecture that shifts the paradigm from simulating "people" to simulating a "social space with a gravitational field." We introduce three architectural contributions: (1) An Environment Context Injection Engine (ECIE), which acts as a "social microkernel," dynamically injecting institutional rules (Gravity) into agents based on their spatial-temporal coordinates; (2) A Modular Logic Evolution Protocol (MLEP), where knowledge exists as "fluid" capsules that agents synthesize to generate new paradigms, ensuring high dialogue consistency (94.1%); and (3) Endogenous Alignment via Role-Topology, where safety constraints emerge from the agent's position in the social graph rather than external filters. Deployed as a digital twin of a secondary school with 2,400 agents, the system demonstrates how "social gravity" (rules) and "cognitive fluids" (knowledge) interact to produce emergent, value-aligned behaviors (Social Clustering Coefficient: 0.72).

Anonymization-Enhanced Privacy Protection for Mobile GUI Agents: Available but Invisible

arXiv:2602.10139v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in automating complex smartphone tasks by leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and system-level control interfaces. However, this paradigm introduces significant privacy risks, as agents typically capture and process entire screen contents, thereby exposing sensitive personal data such as phone numbers, addresses, messages, and financial information. Existing defenses either reduce UI exposure, obfuscate only task-irrelevant content, or rely on user authorization, but none can protect task-critical sensitive information while preserving seamless agent usability. We propose an anonymization-based privacy protection framework that enforces the principle of available-but-invisible access to sensitive data: sensitive information remains usable for task execution but is never directly visible to the cloud-based agent. Our system detects sensitive UI content using a PII-aware recognition model and replaces it with deterministic, type-preserving placeholders (e.g., PHONE_NUMBER#a1b2c) that retain semantic categories while removing identifying details. A layered architecture comprising a PII Detector, UI Transformer, Secure Interaction Proxy, and Privacy Gatekeeper ensures consistent anonymization across user instructions, XML hierarchies, and screenshots, mediates all agent actions over anonymized interfaces, and supports narrowly scoped local computations when reasoning over raw values is necessary. Extensive experiments on the AndroidLab and PrivScreen benchmarks show that our framework substantially reduces privacy leakage across multiple models while incurring only modest utility degradation, achieving the best observed privacy-utility trade-off among existing methods. Code available at: https://github.com/one-step-beh1nd/gui_privacy_protection
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