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LLM Agents as Social Scientists: A Human-AI Collaborative Platform for Social Science Automation

arXiv:2604.01520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional social science research often requires designing complex experiments across vast methodological spaces and depends on real human participants, making it labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale. Here we present S-Researcher, an LLM-agent-based platform that assists researchers in conducting social science research more efficiently and at greater scale by "siliconizing" both the research process and the participant pool. To build S-Researcher, we first develop YuLan-OneSim, a large-scale social simulation system designed around three core requirements: generality via auto-programming from natural language to executable scenarios, scalability via a distributed architecture supporting up to 100,000 concurrent agents, and reliability via feedback-driven LLM fine-tuning. Leveraging this system, S-Researcher supports researchers in designing social experiments, simulating human behavior with LLM agents, analyzing results, and generating reports, forming a complete human-AI collaborative research loop in which researchers retain oversight and intervention at every stage. We operationalize LLM simulation research paradigms into three canonical reasoning modes (induction, deduction, and abduction) and validate S-Researcher through systematic case studies: inductive reproduction of cultural dynamics consistent with Axelrod's theory, deductive testing of competing hypotheses on teacher attention validated against survey data, and abductive identification of a cooperation mechanism in public goods games confirmed by human experiments. S-Researcher establishes a new human--AI collaborative paradigm for social science, in which computational simulation augments human researchers to accelerate discovery across the full spectrum of social inquiry.

Curcumol Induces G1 Phase Arrest in SK-Hep-1 Cells by Targeting SKP2-Mediated p27 Degradation

Molecules. 2026 Mar 16;31(6):997. doi: 10.3390/molecules31060997.

ABSTRACT

CONTEXT: S-phase kinase-associated protein 2 (SKP2) is an oncogene and cell cycle regulator that mediates the ubiquitination of cell cycle regulators. Curcumol, a sesquiterpene natural product, has been reported to regulate SKP2-mediated ubiquitination degradation to overcome drug resistance in cancer cells. However, whether the cell cycle arrest effect of curcumol is related to SKP2's function in cancer cells and its mechanisms are still unclear.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the role of SKP2 in curcumol-induced cell cycle arrest and its underlying mechanisms.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Transcriptomic and proteomic analyses were used to screen the ubiquitination-related factors in curcumol treated hepatocellular carcinoma cells. Lentiviral overexpression, co-immunoprecipitation assays, ubiquitination analysis, and cell-line-derived xenograft (CDX) models were used to dissect the role and mechanisms of the identified ubiquitination-related factor in the cell cycle arrest effect of curcucmol.

RESULTS: Curcumol modulated the expression of CDK4, CDK6, Cyclin D1, p27 and SKP2. SKP2 was one candidate target of curcumol selected by multi-omics. Overexpressed SKP2 partially reversed curcumol-induced growth inhibition and G1-phase arrest. The increased expression of p27 induced by curcumol was attenuated by overexpressed SKP2. Curcumol impaired the interaction between SKP2 and p27, and led to the ubiquitination and degradation of p27. In vivo, curcumol effectively reduced tumor growth, and its antitumor effect was significantly mitigated by SKP2 overexpression.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Curcumol reduced SKP2 expression, weakened the interaction between SKP2 and p27, inhibited degradation of p27, and then induced G1 phase cell-cycle arrest in SK-Hep-1 cells.

PMID:41900096 | PMC:PMC13029316 | DOI:10.3390/molecules31060997

STRUCTUREDAGENT: Planning with AND/OR Trees for Long-Horizon Web Tasks

arXiv:2603.05294v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems for sequential decision-making. Such agents must perceive their environment, reason across multiple time steps, and take actions that optimize long-term objectives. However, existing web agents struggle on complex, long-horizon tasks due to limited in-context memory for tracking history, weak planning abilities, and greedy behaviors that lead to premature termination. To address these challenges, we propose STRUCTUREDAGENT, a hierarchical planning framework with two core components: (1) an online hierarchical planner that uses dynamic AND/OR trees for efficient search and (2) a structured memory module that tracks and maintains candidate solutions to improve constraint satisfaction in information-seeking tasks. The framework also produces interpretable hierarchical plans, enabling easier debugging and facilitating human intervention when needed. Our results on WebVoyager, WebArena, and custom shopping benchmarks show that STRUCTUREDAGENT improves performance on long-horizon web-browsing tasks compared to standard LLM-based agents.

DoAtlas-1: A Causal Compilation Paradigm for Clinical AI

arXiv:2602.19158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical foundation models generate narrative explanations but cannot quantify intervention effects, detect evidence conflicts, or validate literature claims, limiting clinical auditability. We propose causal compilation, a paradigm that transforms medical evidence from narrative text into executable code. The paradigm standardizes heterogeneous research evidence into structured estimand objects, each explicitly specifying intervention contrast, effect scale, time horizon, and target population, supporting six executable causal queries: do-calculus, counterfactual reasoning, temporal trajectories, heterogeneous effects, mechanistic decomposition, and joint interventions. We instantiate this paradigm in DoAtlas-1, compiling 1,445 effect kernels from 754 studies through effect standardization, conflict-aware graph construction, and real-world validation (Human Phenotype Project, 10,000 participants). The system achieves 98.5% canonicalization accuracy and 80.5% query executability. This paradigm shifts medical AI from text generation to executable, auditable, and verifiable causal reasoning.

Pailitao-VL: Unified Embedding and Reranker for Real-Time Multi-Modal Industrial Search

arXiv:2602.13704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we presented Pailitao-VL, a comprehensive multi-modal retrieval system engineered for high-precision, real-time industrial search. We here address three critical challenges in the current SOTA solution: insufficient retrieval granularity, vulnerability to environmental noise, and prohibitive efficiency-performance gap. Our primary contribution lies in two fundamental paradigm shifts. First, we transitioned the embedding paradigm from traditional contrastive learning to an absolute ID-recognition task. Through anchoring instances to a globally consistent latent space defined by billions of semantic prototypes, we successfully overcome the stochasticity and granularity bottlenecks inherent in existing embedding solutions. Second, we evolved the generative reranker from isolated pointwise evaluation to the compare-and-calibrate listwise policy. By synergizing chunk-based comparative reasoning with calibrated absolute relevance scoring, the system achieves nuanced discriminative resolution while circumventing the prohibitive latency typically associated with conventional reranking methods. Extensive offline benchmarks and online A/B tests on Alibaba e-commerce platform confirm that Pailitao-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance and delivers substantial business impact. This work demonstrates a robust and scalable path for deploying advanced MLLM-based retrieval architectures in demanding, large-scale production environments.

Resource-Efficient Personal Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with Collaborative Edge Computing

arXiv:2408.10746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a plethora of powerful applications at the network edge, such as intelligent personal assistants. Data privacy and security concerns have prompted a shift towards edge-based fine-tuning of personal LLMs, away from cloud reliance. However, this raises issues of computational intensity and resource scarcity, hindering training efficiency and feasibility. While current studies investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to mitigate resource constraints, our analysis indicates that these techniques are not sufficiently resource-efficient for edge devices. To tackle these challenges, we propose Pluto and Charon (PAC), a time and memory efficient collaborative edge AI framework for personal LLMs fine-tuning. PAC breaks the resource wall of personal LLMs fine-tuning with a sophisticated algorithm-system co-design. (1) Algorithmically, PAC implements a personal LLMs fine-tuning technique that is efficient in terms of parameters, time, and memory. It utilizes Parallel Adapters to circumvent the need for a full backward pass through the LLM backbone. Additionally, an activation cache mechanism further streamlining the process by negating the necessity for repeated forward passes across multiple epochs. (2) Systematically, PAC leverages edge devices in close proximity, pooling them as a collective resource for in-situ personal LLMs fine-tuning, utilizing a hybrid data and pipeline parallelism to orchestrate distributed training. The use of the activation cache eliminates the need for forward pass through the LLM backbone,enabling exclusive fine-tuning of the Parallel Adapters using data parallelism. Extensive evaluation based on prototype implementation demonstrates that PAC remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 8.64x end-to-end speedup and up to 88.16% reduction in memory footprint.
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