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Received — 10 September 2026 ⏭

The DreAM-plus integrative RNA switch enhances transient AAV expression and reduces side effects of gene editing

✇Molecular Therapy
By: Yueyang Zhang · Yuhan Yang · Zhanzhao Liu · Yue Li · Yizhe Xue · Zihan Zhang · Gonglie Chen · Jin Liu · Mengying He · Tian Lu · Yaohua Zhang · Dongyu Zhao · Ke Yang · Lei Miao · Fei Gao · Yuxuan Guo
10 August 2026 at 08:00
This study developed a multi-layer inducible RNA switch that achieves transient expression of gene-delivery vectors in hepatic and non-hepatic tissues. As an exemplary application, this RNA switch triggers pulsive expression of gene editors that reduces the off-target effects and immunotoxicity of gene editing.

Structured light–matter interaction in semiconductor cavity quantum electrodynamics

✇Nature Nanotechnology
By: Shunfa Liu · Jiantao Ma · Hanqing Liu · Yangpeng Wang · Xueshi Li · Haiqiao Ni · Zhichuan Niu · Kai Zou · Yun Meng · Xiaolong Hu · Xuehua Wang · Jin Liu
8 September 2026 at 08:00

Nature Nanotechnology, Published online: 08 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41565-026-02275-1

Structured light–matter interaction at the single-photon level is demonstrated in a coupled quantum-dot–micropillar system, enabling cavity-enhanced single-photon emission with spin-locked orbital angular momentum and tunable spin–orbit entanglement.

MADS: Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation for Diverse Persuasion Data Generation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Mingjin Li · Yu Liu · Huayi Liu · Xiang Ye · Chao Jiang · Hongguang Zhang · Yu Ruan
10 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2510.05124v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose MADS (Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation), a scalable framework for generating persuasive multi-turn dialogues via agent self-play. MADS employs three coordinated agents: User Agents designed to simulate diverse persona-driven behaviors by leveraging personality signifiers such as Zodiac Signs and MBTI types, a Dialog Agent executing task-oriented persuasion strategies and an Optimization Agent evaluating and refining dialogue outcomes. We further validate its effectiveness through users' Chain-of-Attitude (CoA) modeling and dedicated LLMs' persuasion assessment. This approach enables low-cost generation of training data without human annotation, addressing key industry challenges such as lack of user data, cold-start evaluation difficulties, and prompt inefficiency. Applied to a real-world marketing scenario, MADS significantly improved the persuasion capacity of small LLMs, increasing the organic traffic conversion rate by 22.4% (from 1.83% to 2.24%) , demonstrating clear business value.
Received — 27 May 2026 ⏭

Multi-Omics Identification of Biomarkers for High-Altitude Pulmonary Hypertension

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Zhe Chen · Linhong Pang · Yidan Zheng · Li Xu · Mingjing Tang · Ziwen Zhao · Tianyu Wang · Jin Li · Yunfei Zhou · Lin Duo · Wenlong Zhu · Zhiling Luo · Fei Li · Da Zhu
26 May 2026 at 18:00

J Cardiovasc Dev Dis. 2026 Apr 30;13(5):195. doi: 10.3390/jcdd13050195.

ABSTRACT

(1) Aim: The incidence of high-altitude pulmonary hypertension (HAPH) has risen in recent years and is expected to continue increasing; however, its diagnosis remains challenging. In this study, we employed proteomics and metabolomics to identify the proteins and metabolic biomarkers that contribute to the development of HAPH. (2) Methods: We applied integrated proteomics and metabolomics to match blood samples from 40 HAPH patients and 40 healthy controls in Yunnan's high-altitude regions to characterize molecular profiles, identify biomarkers, and develop a predictive model. (3) Results: Proteomic analysis identified four proteins (A2IPH7, K1C14, PSME2, SERPINE2) commonly dysregulated in HAPH patients from two high-altitude regions. SERPINE2 was notably downregulated and showed a negative correlation with clinical severity, which was further validated in HAPH rat lung tissues and supported by UK Biobank data for idiopathic PAH. Concurrent metabolomics uncovered 11 shared metabolites, largely acyl fatty acids, enriched in pathways such as unsaturated fatty acid synthesis. Integration of these multi-omics data enabled the development of a robust predictive model. (4) Conclusion: Our study identified key protein and metabolic biomarkers involved in HAPH development, which were validated in animal models. Based on these findings, a predictive model was developed, highlighting SERPINE2 and 11 metabolites as promising targets for the prediction and prevention of HAPH.

PMID:42188081 | DOI:10.3390/jcdd13050195

Multi-Omics Identification of Biomarkers for High-Altitude Pulmonary Hypertension

✇Omics In Lung
By: Zhe Chen · Linhong Pang · Yidan Zheng · Li Xu · Mingjing Tang · Ziwen Zhao · Tianyu Wang · Jin Li · Yunfei Zhou · Lin Duo · Wenlong Zhu · Zhiling Luo · Fei Li · Da Zhu
26 May 2026 at 18:00

J Cardiovasc Dev Dis. 2026 Apr 30;13(5):195. doi: 10.3390/jcdd13050195.

ABSTRACT

(1) Aim: The incidence of high-altitude pulmonary hypertension (HAPH) has risen in recent years and is expected to continue increasing; however, its diagnosis remains challenging. In this study, we employed proteomics and metabolomics to identify the proteins and metabolic biomarkers that contribute to the development of HAPH. (2) Methods: We applied integrated proteomics and metabolomics to match blood samples from 40 HAPH patients and 40 healthy controls in Yunnan's high-altitude regions to characterize molecular profiles, identify biomarkers, and develop a predictive model. (3) Results: Proteomic analysis identified four proteins (A2IPH7, K1C14, PSME2, SERPINE2) commonly dysregulated in HAPH patients from two high-altitude regions. SERPINE2 was notably downregulated and showed a negative correlation with clinical severity, which was further validated in HAPH rat lung tissues and supported by UK Biobank data for idiopathic PAH. Concurrent metabolomics uncovered 11 shared metabolites, largely acyl fatty acids, enriched in pathways such as unsaturated fatty acid synthesis. Integration of these multi-omics data enabled the development of a robust predictive model. (4) Conclusion: Our study identified key protein and metabolic biomarkers involved in HAPH development, which were validated in animal models. Based on these findings, a predictive model was developed, highlighting SERPINE2 and 11 metabolites as promising targets for the prediction and prevention of HAPH.

PMID:42188081 | DOI:10.3390/jcdd13050195

mRNA vaccines engage unconventional pathways in CD8<sup>+</sup> T cell priming

✇Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds
By: Suin Jo · Lijin Li · Chandrani Thakur · Kevin A. Telfer · Hussein Sultan · Ray A. Ohara · Michelle He · Giri Nam · Jing Chen · Feiya Ou · Monia Draghi · Nicholas M. Valiante · Robert D. Schreiber · Gwendalyn J. Randolph · Naresha Saligrama · Theresa L. Murphy · William E. Gillanders · Kenneth M. Murphy
15 April 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10353-6

mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle vaccines do not require type 1 conventional dendritic (cDC1) cells or the WDFY4-dependent cross-presentation pathway for CD8+ T cell priming but, instead, engage both cDC1 and cDC2 cells redundantly.
Received — 8 April 2026 ⏭

Why Attend to Everything? Focus is the Key

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hengshuai Yao · Xing Chen · Ahmed Murtadha · Jin Li · Shuai Shao · Yasin Abbasi Yadkori · Guan Wang · Mingli Yuan · William Chen · Sen Song
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.03260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Focus, a method that learns which token pairs matter rather than approximating all of them. Learnable centroids assign tokens to groups; distant attention is restricted to same-group pairs while local attention operates at full resolution. Because all model weights stay frozen, Focus is purely additive: centroid-only training (as few as 148K parameters) improves domain perplexity with zero degradation on downstream benchmarks--from 124M to 70B parameters, across five attention architectures. No existing efficient attention method achieves this in the retrofit setting. At 124M, Focus surpasses full attention (30.3 vs 31.4 PPL); trained from scratch at 7B scale (2B tokens), Focus again beats full attention (13.82 vs 13.89 PPL). At inference, restricting each token to its top-k highest-scoring groups discretizes the soft routing into a hard sparsity pattern, yielding 2x speedup while beating the pretrained baseline (41.3 vs 42.8 PPL); decomposing this pattern into two standard FlashAttention calls reaches 8.6x wall-clock speedup at 1M tokens with no custom kernels. Unlike LoRA, centroid routing preserves alignment: instruction-tuned models retain TruthfulQA scores after adaptation, while LoRA degrades at every learning rate and rank. Sinkhorn normalization enforces balanced groups as a hard constraint, and the resulting groups discover interpretable linguistic categories without supervision.
Received — 4 April 2026 ⏭

DR-LoRA: Dynamic Rank LoRA for Fine-Tuning Mixture-of-Experts Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Guanzhi Deng · Bo Li · Ronghao Chen · Xiujin Liu · Zhuo Han · Huacan Wang · Lijie Wen · Linqi Song
3 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2601.04823v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prominent paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs). Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, are widely adopted to adapt pretrained MoE LLMs to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches typically assign identical LoRA ranks to all expert modules, ignoring the heterogeneous specialization of pretrained experts. This uniform allocation leads to a resource mismatch: task-relevant experts are under-provisioned, while less relevant ones receive redundant parameters. To address this, we propose DR-LoRA, a Dynamic Rank LoRA framework for fine-tuning pretrained MoE models. Specifically, DR-LoRA initializes all expert LoRA modules with a small active rank and uses an expert saliency score, which combines routing frequency and gradient-based rank importance, to identify which experts would benefit most from additional capacity. It then periodically expands the active ranks of the task-critical expert LoRA, progressively constructing a heterogeneous rank distribution tailored to the target task. Experiments on three MoE models across six tasks show that DR-LoRA consistently outperforms LoRA and other strong baselines, demonstrating that task-adaptive heterogeneous rank allocation is an effective strategy to improve active capacity utilization in MoE fine-tuning.

Efficient amyloid-β degradation in Alzheimer’s disease using SPYTACs

✇Cell
By: Fei Teng · Jing Liu · Tongtong Cui · Xiangtian Tan · Kailun Liu · Zongren Hou · Li Zhou · Yuanzhi Xie · Rongqi Li · Da Li · Bojin Li · Dongmei Wang · Qi Zhou · Baoyang Hu · Wei Li
4 March 2026 at 08:00
SPYTAC is a synthetic peptide-programmed targeted protein degradation platform harnessing LRP1 to drive lysosomal degradation of extracellular amyloid-β in the brain and periphery. In 5×FAD mice, SPYTAC treatment efficiently degrades amyloid-β, preserves neurons, and improves cognition with reduced neuroinflammation and microhemorrhage when compared with antibody therapy.
Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭

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

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Guoqing Feng · Zheng Dong · Limei Ke · Weilai Zhou · Yu Tian · Xingtian Li · Wenxin Xiang · Yanjun Li · Qi Huang · Linfeng Liu · Bo Yin · Shouyi Yan · Jianxiu Liu · Xindong Ma · Huaiyong Chen · Miao He · Ke Hao · Sijin Liu · Qian Di
30 March 2026 at 18:00

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

Received — 17 March 2026 ⏭

Spend Less, Reason Better: Budget-Aware Value Tree Search for LLM Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yushu Li · Wenlong Deng · Jiajin Li · Xiaoxiao Li
16 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.12634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a dominant paradigm for improving LLM agent reliability, yet current approaches treat compute as an abundant resource, allowing agents to exhaust token and tool budgets on redundant steps or dead-end trajectories. Existing budget-aware methods either require expensive fine-tuning or rely on coarse, trajectory-level heuristics that cannot intervene mid-execution. We propose the Budget-Aware Value Tree (BAVT), a training-free inference-time framework that models multi-hop reasoning as a dynamic search tree guided by step-level value estimation within a single LLM backbone. Another key innovation is a budget-conditioned node selection mechanism that uses the remaining resource ratio as a natural scaling exponent over node values, providing a principled, parameter-free transition from broad exploration to greedy exploitation as the budget depletes. To combat the well-known overconfidence of LLM self-evaluation, BAVT employs a residual value predictor that scores relative progress rather than absolute state quality, enabling reliable pruning of uninformative or redundant tool calls. We further provide a theoretical convergence guarantee, proving that BAVT reaches a terminal answer with probability at least $1-\epsilon$ under an explicit finite budget bound. Extensive evaluations on four multi-hop QA benchmarks across two model families demonstrate that BAVT consistently outperforms parallel sampling baselines. Most notably, BAVT under strict low-budget constraints surpasses baseline performance at $4\times$ the resource allocation, establishing that intelligent budget management fundamentally outperforms brute-force compute scaling.
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭

Taming Preconditioner Drift: Unlocking the Potential of Second-Order Optimizers for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Junkang Liu · Fanhua Shang · Hongying Liu · Jin Liu · Weixin An · Yuanyuan Liu
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.19271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Second-order optimizers can significantly accelerate large-scale training, yet their naive federated variants are often unstable or even diverge on non-IID data. We show that a key culprit is \emph{preconditioner drift}: client-side second-order training induces heterogeneous \emph{curvature-defined geometries} (i.e., preconditioner coordinate systems), and server-side model averaging updates computed under incompatible metrics, corrupting the global descent direction. To address this geometric mismatch, we propose \texttt{FedPAC}, a \emph{preconditioner alignment and correction} framework for reliable federated second-order optimization. \texttt{FedPAC} explicitly decouples parameter aggregation from geometry synchronization by: (i) \textbf{Alignment} (i.e.,aggregating local preconditioners into a global reference and warm-starting clients via global preconditioner); and (ii) \textbf{Correction} (i.e., steering local preconditioned updates using a global preconditioned direction to suppress long-term drift). We provide drift-coupled non-convex convergence guarantees with linear speedup under partial participation. Empirically, \texttt{FedPAC} consistently improves stability and accuracy across vision and language tasks, achieving up to $5.8\%$ absolute accuracy gain on CIFAR-100 with ViTs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedPAC-8B24.

Efficient endometrial carcinoma screening via cross-modal synthesis and gradient distillation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Dongjing Shan · Yamei Luo · Jiqing Xuan · Lu Huang · Jin Li · Mengchu Yang · Zeyu Chen · Fajin Lv · Yong Tang · Chunxiang Zhang
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.19822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early detection of myometrial invasion is critical for the staging and life-saving management of endometrial carcinoma (EC), a prevalent global malignancy. Transvaginal ultrasound serves as the primary, accessible screening modality in resource-constrained primary care settings; however, its diagnostic reliability is severely hindered by low tissue contrast, high operator dependence, and a pronounced scarcity of positive pathological samples. Existing artificial intelligence solutions struggle to overcome this severe class imbalance and the subtle imaging features of invasion, particularly under the strict computational limits of primary care clinics. Here we present an automated, highly efficient two-stage deep learning framework that resolves both data and computational bottlenecks in EC screening. To mitigate pathological data scarcity, we develop a structure-guided cross-modal generation network that synthesizes diverse, high-fidelity ultrasound images from unpaired magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, strictly preserving clinically essential anatomical junctions. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight screening network utilizing gradient distillation, which transfers discriminative knowledge from a high-capacity teacher model to dynamically guide sparse attention towards task-critical regions. Evaluated on a large, multicenter cohort of 7,951 participants, our model achieves a sensitivity of 99.5\%, a specificity of 97.2\%, and an area under the curve of 0.987 at a minimal computational cost (0.289 GFLOPs), substantially outperforming the average diagnostic accuracy of expert sonographers. Our approach demonstrates that combining cross-modal synthetic augmentation with knowledge-driven efficient modeling can democratize expert-level, real-time cancer screening for resource-constrained primary care settings.

Rethinking LoRA for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning in Large Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Jin Liu · Yinbin Miao · Ning Xi · Junkang Liu
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.19926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large vision models (LVMs) and large language models (LLMs) under differentially private federated learning (DPFL) is hindered by a fundamental privacy-utility trade-off. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a promising parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, reduces computational and communication costs by introducing two trainable low-rank matrices while freezing pre-trained weights. However, directly applying LoRA in DPFL settings leads to performance degradation, especially in LVMs. Our analysis reveals three previously underexplored challenges: (1) gradient coupling caused by the simultaneous update of two asymmetric low-rank matrices, (2) compounded noise amplification under differential privacy, and (3) sharpness of the global aggregated model in the parameter space. To address these issues, we propose LA-LoRA (\textbf{L}ocal \textbf{A}lternating \textbf{LoRA}), a novel approach that decouples gradient interactions and aligns update directions across clients to enhance robustness under stringent privacy constraints. Theoretically, LA-LoRA strengthens convergence guarantees in noisy federated environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LA-LoRA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Swin Transformer and RoBERTa models, showcasing robustness to DP noise and broad applicability across both LVMs and LLMs. For example, when fine-tuning the Swin-B model on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset under a strict privacy budget ($\epsilon = 1$), LA-LoRA outperforms the best baseline, RoLoRA, by 16.83\% in test accuracy. Code is provided in \repolink.

DP-FedAdamW: An Efficient Optimizer for Differentially Private Federated Large Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Jin Liu · Yinbin Miao · Ning Xi · Junkang Liu
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.19945v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Balancing convergence efficiency and robustness under Differential Privacy (DP) is a central challenge in Federated Learning (FL). While AdamW accelerates training and fine-tuning in large-scale models, we find that directly applying it to Differentially Private FL (DPFL) suffers from three major issues: (i) data heterogeneity and privacy noise jointly amplify the variance of second-moment estimator, (ii) DP perturbations bias the second-moment estimator, and (iii) DP amplify AdamW sensitivity to local overfitting, worsening client drift. We propose DP-FedAdamW, the first AdamW-based optimizer for DPFL. It restores AdamW under DP by stabilizing second-moment variance, removing DP-induced bias, and aligning local updates to the global descent to curb client drift. Theoretically, we establish an unbiased second-moment estimator and prove a linearly accelerated convergence rate without any heterogeneity assumption, while providing tighter $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP guarantees. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of DP-FedAdamW across language and vision Transformers and ResNet-18. On Tiny-ImageNet (Swin-Base, $\varepsilon=1$), DP-FedAdamW outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 5.83\%. The code is available in Appendix.
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