Satellite imagery reveals increasing volatility in human night-time activity

Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Tian Li · Zhuosen Wang · Christopher C. M. Kyba · Miguel O. Román · Karen C. Seto · Yun Yang · Shi Qiu · Theres Kuester · Michail Fragkias · Xiang Chen · Thomas H. Meyer · Chadwick D. Rittenhouse · Xiaonan Tai · Mari Cullerton · Falu Hong · Ashley Grinstead · Kexin Song · Ji Won Suh · Xiucheng Yang · Virginia L. Kalb · Chengbin Deng · Zhe Zhu

8 April 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 08 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10260-w

Daily satellite data reveal that Earth’s artificial lights at night are highly volatile, with frequent brightening and dimming between 2014 and 2022.

DIRECT: Video Mashup Creation via Hierarchical Multi-Agent Planning and Intent-Guided Editing

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Ke Li · Maoliang Li · Jialiang Chen · Jiayu Chen · Zihao Zheng · Shaoqi Wang · Xiang Chen

7 April 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2604.04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video mashup creation represents a complex video editing paradigm that recomposes existing footage to craft engaging audio-visual experiences, demanding intricate orchestration across semantic, visual, and auditory dimensions and multiple levels. However, existing automated editing frameworks often overlook the cross-level multimodal orchestration to achieve professional-grade fluidity, resulting in disjointed sequences with abrupt visual transitions and musical misalignment. To address this, we formulate video mashup creation as a Multimodal Coherency Satisfaction Problem (MMCSP) and propose the DIRECT framework. Simulating a professional production pipeline, our hierarchical multi-agent framework decomposes the challenge into three cascade levels: the Screenwriter for source-aware global structural anchoring, the Director for instantiating adaptive editing intent and guidance, and the Editor for intent-guided shot sequence editing with fine-grained optimization. We further introduce Mashup-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with tailored metrics for visual continuity and auditory alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIRECT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both objective metrics and human subjective evaluation. Project page and code: https://github.com/AK-DREAM/DIRECT

Group Representational Position Encoding

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Yifan Zhang · Zixiang Chen · Yifeng Liu · Zhen Qin · Huizhuo Yuan · Kangping Xu · Yang Yuan · Quanquan Gu · Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

3 April 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2512.07805v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present GRAPE (Group Representational Position Encoding), a unified framework for positional encoding based on group actions. GRAPE unifies two families of mechanisms: (i) multiplicative rotations (Multiplicative GRAPE) in $\operatorname{SO}(d)$ and (ii) additive logit biases (Additive GRAPE) arising from unipotent actions in the general linear group $\mathrm{GL}$. In Multiplicative GRAPE, a position $n \in \mathbb{Z}$ (or $t \in \mathbb{R}$) acts as $\mathbf{G}(n) = \exp(n \, \omega \, \mathbf{L})$ with a rank-2 skew-symmetric generator $\mathbf{L} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, yielding a relative, compositional, norm-preserving map with a closed-form matrix exponential. RoPE is recovered exactly when the $d/2$ planes correspond to canonical coordinate pairs with a log-uniform spectrum. Learned commuting subspaces and compact non-commuting mixtures strictly extend this geometry to capture cross-subspace feature coupling at $O(d)$ and $O(r d)$ cost per head, respectively. In Additive GRAPE, additive logits arise from rank-1 (or low-rank) unipotent actions, recovering ALiBi and the Forgetting Transformer (FoX) as exact special cases while preserving an exact relative law and streaming cacheability. Overall, GRAPE provides a principled design space for positional geometry in long-context models, subsuming RoPE and ALiBi as special cases. Project page: https://github.com/model-architectures/GRAPE.

Metabolite-gated vascular contractility switch: OXGR1 activation mechanism enables agonist therapy for rosacea erythema

Cell

By: Wenqin Xiao · Yan Zhu · Xinjie Tang · Kongkai Zhu · Weifeng Zhang · Mengting Chen · Kui Cai · San Xu · Zheng Wu · Mei Wang · Jiayi Liu · Linglong Long · Zixin Tan · Aike Wu · Songqi Zhou · Zhixiang Zhao · Yan Tang · Yingxue Huang · Ben Wang · Fangfen Liu · Qian Wang · Fan Yang · Dan Jian · Wei Shi · Hongfu Xie · Xiang Chen · Lulu Guo · Zhili Deng · Jinpeng Sun · Ji Li

5 March 2026 at 08:00

Xiao et al. identify α-KG as a rosacea-associated metabolite that activates the OXGR1-Gq-MYL9 axis in the vascular smooth muscle cells to boost contractility and suppress pathological vasodilation underlying erythema. Cryo-EM reveals a bipartite-acid pocket of OXGR1 that enables structure-guided development of A-1, a selective agonist that alleviates erythema in rosacea-like models.

Dynamic Cogeneration of Bug Reproduction Test in Agentic Program Repair

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Runxiang Cheng · Michele Tufano · Jos\'e Cambronero · Renyao Wei · Sherry Shi · Grant Uy · Pat Rondon · Franjo Ivan\v{c}i\'c

1 April 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2601.19066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating promising fixes and aiding fix generation. In practice, when developers submit a patch, they often implement the BRT alongside the fix. Our experience deploying agentic APR reveals that developers similarly desire a BRT within AI-generated patches to increase their confidence. However, canonical APR systems tend to generate BRTs and fixes separately, and focus on producing only the fix in the final patch. In this paper, we study agentic APR in the context of cogeneration, where the APR agent is instructed to generate both a fix and a BRT in the same patch. We evaluate the effectiveness of different cogeneration strategies on 120 human-reported bugs at Google and characterize different cogeneration strategies by their influence on APR agent behavior. We develop and evaluate patch selectors that account for test change information to select patches with plausible fixes (and plausible BRTs). Finally, we analyze the root causes of failed cogeneration trajectories. Importantly, we show that cogeneration allows the APR agent to generate BRTs for at least as many bugs as a dedicated BRT agent, without compromising the generation rate of plausible fixes, thereby reducing engineering effort in maintaining and coordinating separate generation pipelines for fix and BRT at scale.

Targeting FTO shows therapeutic potential in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by modulating microRNA biogenesis

Oncogene - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Wei Zhou · Chunyan Wang · Changhao Li · Pengxiang Chen · Yuchen Liu · Hongyuan Mao · Pengfei Zhu · Yuxiao Gong · Yufeng Cheng · Lin Zhang

1 April 2026 at 08:00

Oncogene, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03754-4

Targeting FTO shows therapeutic potential in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by modulating microRNA biogenesis

CircRNA-encoded RIPK1-98 protein drives lung adenocarcinoma progression

(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)

By: Qi Sun · Runqiu Chi · Xiao Zhang · Tianxiang Chen · Xin Xu · Lifang Ma · Xiaoting Tian · Yayou Miao · Yongchun Yu · Rui Kang · Guido Kroemer · Yi Shi · Daolin Tang · Jiayi Wang

13 March 2026 at 18:00

Dev Cell. 2026 Mar 12:S1534-5807(26)00079-1. doi: 10.1016/j.devcel.2026.02.014. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Unexplored biological matter-including uncharacterized genetic elements, molecular entities, and microbial components-remains poorly understood. Here, we use integrated multi-omics approaches to identify and characterize previously unrecognized protein products encoded by circular RNAs (circRNAs) in human tissue specimens and to delineate their roles in the progression of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). The transcription of precursor mRNA by RNA polymerase Ⅱ subunit A (RPB1) is crucial for the biogenesis of these potential circRNA-encoded proteins. Functional and translational analyses link their expression to distinct pathological stages of LUAD in patients. The protein RIPK1-98, encoded by circRIPK1, was identified as functionally distinct from its parental gene product, receptor-interacting serine/threonine kinase 1 (RIPK1). RIPK1-98 modulates cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2)-dependent cell-cycle regulation, thereby facilitating tumor proliferation in cellular and animal models. Together, these findings suggest that RIPK1-98 serves as a biomarker for cell-cycle progression in LUAD and highlight its potential as a therapeutic target to counteract resistance to first-line treatments, such as osimertinib.

PMID:41825439 | DOI:10.1016/j.devcel.2026.02.014

CircRNA-encoded RIPK1-98 protein drives lung adenocarcinoma progression

Omics In Lung

By: Qi Sun · Runqiu Chi · Xiao Zhang · Tianxiang Chen · Xin Xu · Lifang Ma · Xiaoting Tian · Yayou Miao · Yongchun Yu · Rui Kang · Guido Kroemer · Yi Shi · Daolin Tang · Jiayi Wang

13 March 2026 at 18:00

Dev Cell. 2026 Mar 12:S1534-5807(26)00079-1. doi: 10.1016/j.devcel.2026.02.014. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Unexplored biological matter-including uncharacterized genetic elements, molecular entities, and microbial components-remains poorly understood. Here, we use integrated multi-omics approaches to identify and characterize previously unrecognized protein products encoded by circular RNAs (circRNAs) in human tissue specimens and to delineate their roles in the progression of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). The transcription of precursor mRNA by RNA polymerase Ⅱ subunit A (RPB1) is crucial for the biogenesis of these potential circRNA-encoded proteins. Functional and translational analyses link their expression to distinct pathological stages of LUAD in patients. The protein RIPK1-98, encoded by circRIPK1, was identified as functionally distinct from its parental gene product, receptor-interacting serine/threonine kinase 1 (RIPK1). RIPK1-98 modulates cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2)-dependent cell-cycle regulation, thereby facilitating tumor proliferation in cellular and animal models. Together, these findings suggest that RIPK1-98 serves as a biomarker for cell-cycle progression in LUAD and highlight its potential as a therapeutic target to counteract resistance to first-line treatments, such as osimertinib.

PMID:41825439 | DOI:10.1016/j.devcel.2026.02.014

FinToolBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Jiaxuan Lu · Kong Wang · Yemin Wang · Qingmei Tang · Hongwei Zeng · Xiang Chen · Jiahao Pi · Shujian Deng · Lingzhi Chen · Yi Fu · Kehua Yang · Xiao Sun

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.08262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the financial domain is driving a paradigm shift from passive information retrieval to dynamic, agentic interaction. While general-purpose tool learning has witnessed a surge in benchmarks, the financial sector, characterized by high stakes, strict compliance, and rapid data volatility, remains critically underserved. Existing financial evaluations predominantly focus on static textual analysis or document-based QA, ignoring the complex reality of tool execution. Conversely, general tool benchmarks lack the domain-specific rigor required for finance, often relying on toy environments or a negligible number of financial APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinToolBench, the first real-world, runnable benchmark dedicated to evaluating financial tool learning agents. Unlike prior works limited to a handful of mock tools, FinToolBench establishes a realistic ecosystem coupling 760 executable financial tools with 295 rigorous, tool-required queries. We propose a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond binary execution success, assessing agents on finance-critical dimensions: timeliness, intent type, and regulatory domain alignment. Furthermore, we present FATR, a finance-aware tool retrieval and reasoning baseline that enhances stability and compliance. By providing the first testbed for auditable, agentic financial execution, FinToolBench sets a new standard for trustworthy AI in finance. The tool manifest, execution environment, and evaluation code will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

DARC: Disagreement-Aware Alignment via Risk-Constrained Decoding

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Mingxi Zou · Jiaxiang Chen · Junfan Li · Langzhang Liang · Qifan Wang · Xu Yinghui · Zenglin Xu

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.08145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based alignment methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO) typically optimize a single scalar objective, implicitly averaging over heterogeneous human preferences. In practice, systematic annotator and user-group disagreement makes mean-reward maximization brittle and susceptible to proxy over-optimization. We propose **Disagreement-Aware Alignment via Risk-Constrained Decoding (DARC)**, a retraining-free inference-time method that frames response selection as distributionally robust, risk-sensitive decision making. Given multiple preference samples or scalable disagreement proxies, DARC reranks candidates by maximizing a *KL-robust (entropic)* satisfaction objective, and provides simple deployment controls that cap or penalize the corresponding entropic risk premium relative to the mean, enabling explicit risk budgets without retraining. We provide theoretical characterization linking this decoding rule to principled pessimism and KL-based distributionally robust optimization. Experiments on alignment benchmarks show that DARC reduces disagreement and tail risk while maintaining competitive average quality under noisy, heterogeneous feedback.

Prompt Optimization Via Diffusion Language Models

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Shiyu Wang · Haolin Chen · Liangwei Yang · Jielin Qiu · Rithesh Murthy · Ming Zhu · Zixiang Chen · Silvio Savarese · Caiming Xiong · Shelby Heinecke · Huan Wang

24 February 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2602.18449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries, model responses, and optional feedback, our method enables flexible, span-level prompt updates without requiring gradient access or modifying the downstream language model. Across diverse benchmarks (e.g., $\tau$-bench, SST-2, SST-5), DLM-optimized prompts consistently improve the performance of a frozen target LLM (e.g., GPT-4o-mini). We further show that moderate diffusion step counts provide the best balance between refinement quality and stability. These results highlight diffusion-based prompt optimization as a general, model-agnostic, and scalable approach for enhancing LLM performance through iterative prompt refinement.

Group Representational Position Encoding

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Yifan Zhang · Zixiang Chen · Yifeng Liu · Zhen Qin · Huizhuo Yuan · Kangping Xu · Yang Yuan · Quanquan Gu · Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

24 February 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2512.07805v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present GRAPE (Group Representational Position Encoding), a unified framework for positional encoding based on group actions. GRAPE unifies two families of mechanisms: (i) multiplicative rotations (Multiplicative GRAPE) in $\operatorname{SO}(d)$ and (ii) additive logit biases (Additive GRAPE) arising from unipotent actions in the general linear group $\mathrm{GL}$. In Multiplicative GRAPE, a position $n \in \mathbb{Z}$ (or $t \in \mathbb{R}$) acts as $\mathbf{G}(n) = \exp(n \, \omega \, \mathbf{L})$ with a rank-2 skew-symmetric generator $\mathbf{L} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, yielding a relative, compositional, norm-preserving map with a closed-form matrix exponential. RoPE is recovered exactly when the $d/2$ planes correspond to canonical coordinate pairs with a log-uniform spectrum. Learned commuting subspaces and compact non-commuting mixtures strictly extend this geometry to capture cross-subspace feature coupling at $O(d)$ and $O(r d)$ cost per head, respectively. In Additive GRAPE, additive logits arise from rank-1 (or low-rank) unipotent actions, recovering ALiBi and the Forgetting Transformer (FoX) as exact special cases while preserving an exact relative law and streaming cacheability. Overall, GRAPE provides a principled design space for positional geometry in long-context models, subsuming RoPE and ALiBi as special cases. Project page: https://github.com/model-architectures/GRAPE.

STaRR: Spatial-Temporal Token-Dynamics-Aware Responsive Remasking for Diffusion Language Models

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Xinhao Sun · Huaijin Zhao · Maoliang Li · Zihao Zheng · Jiayu Chen · Yun Liang · Xiang Chen

24 February 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2601.04205v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable parallel decoding via iterative denoising, where remasking strategies play a critical role in balancing inference speed and output quality. Existing methods predominantly rely on static confidence thresholds, overlooking the spatial-temporal dynamics of token confidence, causing unnecessary remasking. We propose Spatial-Temporal Token-Dynamics-Aware Responsive Remasking (STaRR), a training-free framework that dynamically adapts remasking decisions based on token confidence evolution. STaRR introduces two metrics, temporal variance and spatial deviance, to guide fine-grained, step-wise dynamic thresholding. We further introduce a step-wise dynamic thresholding strategy, further enhanced with responsiveness optimizations for scalability and robustness. Experiments show that STaRR achieves an average speedup of 4.1 and up to 8.9 while maintaining comparable accuracy.

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