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Dense RNA motif modifications enable robust in vivo prime editing and enhance efficiencies of diverse editing systems

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.
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MERIT: Memory-Enhanced Retrieval for Interpretable Knowledge Tracing

arXiv:2603.22289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge Tracing (KT) models students' evolving knowledge states to predict future performance, serving as a foundation for personalized education. While traditional deep learning models achieve high accuracy, they often lack interpretability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities but struggle with limited context windows and hallucinations. Furthermore, existing LLM-based methods typically require expensive fine-tuning, limiting scalability and adaptability to new data. We propose MERIT (Memory-Enhanced Retrieval for Interpretable Knowledge Tracing), a training-free framework combining frozen LLM reasoning with structured pedagogical memory. Rather than updating parameters, MERIT transforms raw interaction logs into an interpretable memory bank. The framework uses semantic denoising to categorize students into latent cognitive schemas and constructs a paradigm bank where representative error patterns are analyzed offline to generate explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales. During inference, a hierarchical routing mechanism retrieves relevant contexts, while a logic-augmented module applies semantic constraints to calibrate predictions. By grounding the LLM in interpretable memory, MERIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets without gradient updates. This approach reduces computational costs and supports dynamic knowledge updates, improving the accessibility and transparency of educational diagnosis.
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VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs

arXiv:2603.23481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-Action Models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising framework for embodied intelligence, learning implicit world dynamics from raw video streams to produce temporally consistent action predictions. Although such models demonstrate strong performance on long-horizon tasks through visual reasoning, they remain limited in contact-rich scenarios where critical interaction states are only partially observable from vision alone. In particular, fine-grained force modulation and contact transitions are not reliably encoded in visual tokens, leading to unstable or imprecise behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Video-Tactile Action Model (VTAM), a multimodal world modeling framework that incorporates tactile perception as a complementary grounding signal. VTAM augments a pretrained video transformer with tactile streams via a lightweight modality transfer finetuning, enabling efficient cross-modal representation learning without tactile-language paired data or independent tactile pretraining. To stabilize multimodal fusion, we introduce a tactile regularization loss that enforces balanced cross-modal attention, preventing visual latent dominance in the action model. VTAM demonstrates superior performance in contact-rich manipulation, maintaining a robust success rate of 90 percent on average. In challenging scenarios such as potato chip pick-and-place requiring high-fidelity force awareness, VTAM outperforms the pi 0.5 baseline by 80 percent. Our findings demonstrate that integrating tactile feedback is essential for correcting visual estimation errors in world action models, providing a scalable approach to physically grounded embodied foundation models.
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Overcoming missing data in spatial metabolomics with machine learning imputation to accelerate downstream discovery

iScience. 2026 Mar 3;29(4):115203. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.115203. eCollection 2026 Apr 17.

ABSTRACT

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI)-based spatial metabolomics exhibits extensive missing values; yet, practical guidance on how imputation choices affect both imputation accuracy and downstream spatial analyses remains limited. In this study, we evaluated eight imputation methods, including both existing approaches and a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based method specifically designed for spatial metabolomics data, to identify suitable approaches for spatial metabolomics. To enable comprehensive assessment, we developed an evaluation framework focusing on two objective criteria: (a) imputation accuracy and (b) preservation of spatial cluster structure. We assembled six benchmark datasets spanning mouse brain and liver, human kidney and stomach, and plant seed sections, and conducted controlled dropout simulations of missing values. Across both evaluation dimensions, including imputation accuracy and preservation of spatial cluster structure, RF ranked first overall, and GCN ranked second in both dimensions. Overall, this systematic, dual-perspective benchmark study provides guidance for selecting imputation strategies in spatial metabolomics research.

PMID:41869568 | PMC:PMC12999350 | DOI:10.1016/j.isci.2026.115203

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Scalable LLM Reasoning Acceleration with Low-rank Distillation

arXiv:2505.07861v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Due to long generations, large language model (LLM) math reasoning demands significant computational resources and time. While many existing efficient inference methods have been developed with excellent performance preservation on language tasks, they often severely degrade math performance. In this paper, we propose Caprese, a resource-efficient distillation method to recover lost capabilities from deploying efficient inference methods, focused primarily in feedforward blocks. With original weights unperturbed, roughly 1% of additional parameters, and only 20K synthetic training samples, we are able to recover much if not all of the reasoning capabilities lost from efficient inference for thinking LLMs and without harm to language tasks for instruct LLMs. Moreover, Caprese slashes the number of active parameters (~2B cut for Gemma 2 9B and Llama 3.1 8B) and integrates cleanly into existing model layers to reduce latency (>16% time-to-next-token reduction) while encouraging response brevity (up to 8.5% fewer tokens).
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