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Levetiracetam therapeutically targets GABAergic synapses in diffuse midline glioma

Nature Medicine, Published online: 17 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04646-6

Results of this study show in experimental models and data from patient cohorts that the antiseizure medication levetiracetam is associated with longer survival and reduced tumor growth in diffuse midline glioma, but not hemispheric high-grade glioma, by selectively dampening GABAergic synaptic signaling, independently of its canonical SV2A-mediated primary antiseizure mechanism.
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Type 1 interferon perturbates clonal competition by reshaping human blood development

Nat Genet. 2026 Sep 15. doi: 10.1038/s41588-026-02751-3. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Inflammation accelerates evolutionary dynamics of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in clonal hematopoiesis and myeloid neoplasms. We studied HSCs, progenitors and immune cells from patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms at baseline and following interferon-α (IFNα) treatment, the only therapy to deplete mutated stem cells. We deployed single-cell multiomics methods that distinguish the IFNα effects on mutated stem cells from the admixed wild-type HSCs, with respect to their differentiation, transcriptomes, immunophenotypes and chromatin accessibility. IFNα simultaneously activated HSCs into two polarized states: a lymphoid progenitor expansion associated with an anti-inflammatory state and an inflammatory myeloid progenitor state derived from HSCs. The augmented lymphoid differentiation balanced the typical myeloproliferative-neoplasm-induced myeloid bias, associated with normalized blood counts. Somatic mutations modified the effects of IFNα on HSC differentiation and cell cycle entry rates. Clonal fitness upon IFNα exposure was due to resistance of CALR- or JAK2-mutated stem cells to differentiate into inflammatory myeloid progenitors.

PMID:42745000 | DOI:10.1038/s41588-026-02751-3

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Broadly neutralizing antibodies in adult males living with HIV undergoing analytical treatment interruption: secondary and exploratory outcomes of the phase II randomized controlled RIO trial

Nature Medicine, Published online: 15 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04644-8

In the phase 2 RIO trial, there was delayed viral rebound and resistance to broadly neutralizing antibodies 3BNC117-LS and 10-1074-LS in adult males living with HIV undergoing analytical treatment interruption, and initial reservoir sensitivity to autologous antibodies was associated with a longer time to rebound.
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Predicting cellular responses to perturbation across diverse contexts with State

Modeling perturbation effects across large single-cell populations requires flexibility to capture heterogeneity. By training over sets of cells in a shared embedding space, State outperforms baselines at generalizing effects to new contexts. Cell-Eval, the framework used for this comparison, provides a comprehensive benchmark for future models.
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The sex and reproductive plasticity of intestinal muscles instruct gut size

Adult intestinal size plasticity is driven not only by epithelial stem cells but also by remodeling of the surrounding visceral musculature. Sex- and reproduction-dependent muscle remodeling controls gut size and transit, revealing the intestinal muscle as an active regulator of adult organ adaptation.
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Anonymization of Portuguese Clinical Notes Using Large Language Models and Quantum-Enhanced Hybrid Architectures: Comparative Evaluation Study

Background: The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has generated large-scale repositories of highly sensitive clinical information, emphasizing the need for robust anonymization strategies to enable secondary use for research while safeguarding patient privacy. Conventional rule-based and machine learning approaches for deidentifying medical text face limitations with the linguistic complexity, variability, and context dependence inherent to clinical documentation. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), combined with emerging quantum computing paradigms, present novel opportunities to enhance the accuracy, scalability, and resilience of health care data anonymization. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of LLM-based and quantum-enhanced hybrid architectures for medical text anonymization, assessing the effectiveness and computational efficiency across multiple entity types in Portuguese clinical notes. Methods: We constructed a gold-standard corpus of 1000 Portuguese outpatient clinical notes, manually annotated by 5 trained researchers for 5 protected-entity categories: patient names, dates, identifiers, organizations, and geographic locations. Four anonymization strategies were evaluated: 2 stand-alone LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B-instruct and Llama-3.3-70B-instruct) and 2 quantum-enhanced hybrid models (Dynex-QML with 8B and 70B base models) incorporating quantum optimization via Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations. The quantum-enhanced approach transforms the final attention layer of the LLM into a global constraint satisfaction problem solved via neuromorphic quantum annealing. Model performance was measured on a held-out test set of 500 notes using precision, recall, and -score metrics. Computational efficiency was quantified through end-to-end processing time. Results: The quantum-enhanced Dynex-QML-70B model achieved the highest overall performance with a macro-score of 0.855 (95% CI 0.823‐0.880), outperforming the stand-alone Llama-3.3-70B (0.726, 95% CI 0.704‐0.747), Dynex-QML-8B (0.733, 95% CI 0.709‐0.756), and Llama-3.1-8B (0.602, 95% CI 0.588‐0.615). Compared with Llama 3.3 70B, Dynex-QML (Llama 70B) improved macro-score by 0.128 (95% CI 0.091‐0.163; empirical 2-sided bootstrap
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From Collaboration to Capability: Internalizing Routed LLM Experts into Compact Reasoners

arXiv:2609.12578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A compact controller can coordinate stronger experts by selecting whom to consult, formulating requests, and integrating their responses. We study whether learning from both the controller's decisions and the experts' reasoning and code improves its generation after expert removal. We introduce \textsc{Rivet} for \emph{collaboration internalization}: expert-augmented reinforcement learning applies a shared outcome signal to controller decisions and returned expert spans, and verified trajectory internalization consolidates complete successful interactions through format-aware supervised training. The deployed controller generates reasoning, code, and interaction structure with local Python execution and no external LLM. Across seven competition-mathematics benchmarks, RIVET-1.7B and RIVET-4B achieve average accuracies of $28.25\%$ and $44.16\%$; Stage~II improves RIVET-4B's accuracy after expert removal by $6.49$ points, and GPQA-Diamond results provide evidence of generalization to scientific reasoning. Ablations show gains from ordinary trajectory supervision and additional format weighting, supporting the effectiveness of training on the content and structure of verified collaborations.
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Implicit Personality Representations in Humans and LLMs

arXiv:2609.12704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A century of psychology has found that the trait words people use to describe one another vary, but the relational structure among those traits, which ones go together and which oppose, is strikingly consistent across raters and cultures. We test whether the LLM (Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct) reproduces this structure in its internal trait representations. From millions of crowd-sourced personality ratings of fictional characters, we build a human implicit-personality matrix over hundreds of traits; from contrastive model activations, we build a matching matrix over the same traits. The two relational structures align strongly (Mantel r = 0.77), and the agreement holds trait by trait as well as in aggregate. Two dominant axes of the model's trait representations recover the social and intellectual dimensions long known to organize human personality impressions, social warmth and intellectual competence. On held-out dialogue, projecting model activations onto these directions yields personality profiles that agree with human ratings. This work establishes a framework that enables comprehensive, human-grounded comparison between internal model trait geometry and the shared structure of human personality impressions.
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How Good Are Frontier Models at Physics? Expert Re-Grading Reveals Broken Evaluations and Near-Saturation of Leading Benchmarks

arXiv:2609.13009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low reported scores on leading physics benchmarks, including those featured in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026), suggest that frontier language models still struggle with advanced physics, a demanding test of their scientific reasoning and quantitative problem-solving abilities. Yet this impression does not always align with domain experts' experiences using these models in their work. We revisit these reported findings by evaluating frontier models on six widely used physics benchmarks and auditing them with experts, focusing on text-only problems with verifiable final answers. For each subfield of physics, faculty and graduate researchers with relevant expertise carefully review problem statements, reference solutions, and model responses to distinguish genuine model errors from grader errors, incorrect reference solutions, and ambiguous or underspecified questions. Most audited cases initially evaluated as incorrect reflect these benchmarking issues rather than errors in the models' physics reasoning. We then ask experts to address these benchmarking issues by correcting erroneous reference solutions and repairing or excluding flawed questions. We find that GPT-5.6-Sol's measured mean@4 rises from 47.3% to 78.7% on HLE-Physics and from 61.0% to 87.2% on CMT-Benchmark, while its corrected pass@4 reaches 94.4% on the 54 retained CritPt challenges. Corrected scores are computed on the retained evaluation subsets following expert review. Scores on the audited subsets of UGPhysics, PRISM-Physics, and PHYBench also rise substantially after correction. These findings suggest that current benchmarks substantially understate frontier models' ability to solve well-posed physics problems. Near-saturation on these closed-ended tasks highlights the need for more demanding, expert-validated evaluations.
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Amortized Low-Rank Adaptation for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.12278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models let agents plan by predicting the consequences of their actions, but changes in the environment can make them inaccurate. We study the problem of adapting a world model to an unknown test-time environment, drawn from a known environment family, using only a few episodes of interaction. Existing approaches trade off computational cost against expressivity, i.e., the range of models a method can produce. For example, in-context learning is computationally cheap but limited in expressivity, and gradient-based adaptation is expressive but computationally expensive. We present CLAW (Context-conditioned Low-rank Adaptation of World models), which addresses this tradeoff by using a hypernetwork to generate low-rank (LoRA) adapters at test time. During pretraining, we simulate adaptation to a variety of environments and jointly train the hypernetwork and base world model. At test time, we freeze the base model and use a forward pass of the hypernetwork to generate adapters from a small batch of test-time transitions. We evaluate CLAW in locomotion and manipulation environment families that vary in dynamics, embodiment, and reward. We show that, using only seconds of test-time data, CLAW outperforms gradient-based adaptation and in-context learning during online adaptation. We also show that CLAW avoids overfitting in data-scarce regimes, that its advantage comes from the expressive adapters rather than context conditioning, and that pretraining the hypernetwork jointly with the base model outperforms training it post hoc.
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MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

arXiv:2609.12419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is typically performed on-policy, keeping training data close to the current policy but limiting learning to trajectories that the policy can discover itself. Off-policy methods such as supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, can leverage external knowledge beyond the base model's capabilities, but may suffer from large distribution shift. The key challenge is thus to expand exploration without sacrificing learnability. In this work, we introduce Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning (MInTRL), which expands the exploration frontier through sparse, local interventions in otherwise on-policy rollouts. During generation, a judge-intervention policy periodically reviews the current policy's output, replaces erroneous suffixes with short corrections, and immediately returns control to the policy. During training, MInTRL adopts a sequence-level advantage-regression objective that eliminates the need for importance sampling. We show that sparse, local interventions can substantially improve coverage beyond finite-budget on-policy sampling while preserving the overall on-policy nature of the resulting trajectories. Across math and code benchmarks, MInTRL consistently outperforms standard on-policy and off-policy baselines. Ablations show that MInTRL remains effective with self-intervention and across different judge policies, while performance peaks at moderate intervention intensity, highlighting the importance of intervening minimally. These results establish minimal intervention as an effective paradigm for enhancing on-policy RL.
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Direct Preference Density Alignment for Conversational Audio Equalization

arXiv:2609.12607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model alignment typically relies on learned proxy reward models, which significantly increase the memory footprint during training and are notoriously prone to instability and reward hacking. While offline methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) bypass the reward model, they lose the ability to perform online exploration. If no optimization constraints are applied, this can lead to format collapse in bounded, continuous spaces. To resolve this, we propose Direct Preference Density Alignment: An alternative framework that removes the need for a learned proxy reward model while strictly preserving the benefits of online reinforcement learning. We leverage large-scale user data (approximately 90,000 samples) to construct non-parametric preference density maps, establishing an empirical reward surface. In addition to removing the reward model, Direct Preference Density Alignment enables the combination of the online structural grounding of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with the targeted offline refinement of DPO. We show that this GRPO+DPO combination achieves the highest performance, and in a blind audio equalization listening test, enables a 1.5B-parameter model to achieve perceptual parity with a carefully prompt-engineered GPT-4o mini baseline, using only a fraction of the inference compute.
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A Graph-Based Approach for Mapping Kernel-Level Telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK

arXiv:2609.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mapping observed system behavior to standardized frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK is essential for threat-informed defense, but remains largely manual. Existing automated methods depend on Cyber Threat Intelligence reports, which offer only retrospective accounts of attacks. Low-level telemetry, i.e. kernel-level system calls, instead provides evidence of adversary behavior, yet its volume and complexity have limited its use for automated mapping. We present a methodology that collects kernel-level events via eBPF, correlates attacker commands into a provenance graph, and derives compact graph representations suitable for LLM-based reasoning. These representations are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework using both pure LLM prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounded in the ATT&CK knowledge base, producing ranked technique candidates along with supporting rationales. We implement this methodology as an end-to-end pipeline, named Trace2ATT&CK and evaluate it on 347 Linux Atomic Red Team tests using locally deployed open-weights LLMs. RAG consistently improves ATT&CK mapping performance over pure prompting, while provenance graph substantially outperforms raw telemetry. These results show that local inference over graph-based behavioral descriptions can make automated ATT&CK mapping from kernel-level telemetry operationally viable, without compromising data confidentiality.
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3D CT-to-PET Translation via Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion

arXiv:2609.12860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) provide complementary anatomical and functional information for cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. However, the widespread use of PET is limited by high radiation exposure, elevated costs, and restricted availability. To address these limitations, deep learning-based CT-to-PET translation has emerged as a promising approach for synthesizing PET-like information directly from CT images, although accurately modeling the large cross-modal gap remains challenging. In this work, we propose a 3D CT-to-PET translation framework based on latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion (BBDM). The method consists of two stages. First, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is trained on paired CT-PET patches, integrating contrastive learning to improve latent alignment between anatomical and metabolic representations. Second, a BBDM is trained in the latent space to translate CT latent representations into their corresponding PET counterparts. The translated PET latents are then decoded and stitched to reconstruct the final 3D PET volume. We evaluate the proposed approach on two publicly available datasets. Quantitative results based on image fidelity and lesion-level PET-specific metrics demonstrate improved performance compared with competing methods. In particular, the proposed approach improves PET signal fidelity, better preserves clinically relevant uptake patterns, and shows improved performance in preserving small-lesion metabolic activation, paving the way for virtual imaging applications.
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Attention Quantization for Tabular Foundation Models

arXiv:2609.13031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the recent rise and adoption of tabular foundation models, optimizing their inference performance becomes an emerging field for efficiency research. While the models are architecturally similar to transformer-based large language models (LLMs), the size and serving patterns differ significantly. We show that the focus should be on the attention calculation and less on weight or KV cache quantization, which are more popular in LLMs. We develop a quantization strategy for queries, keys, and values to FP8 and use explicit FP8 matrix multiplication instructions to speed up the attention calculation. We find that it is crucial to align the quantization error in the test rows with the quantization error in the training rows, as otherwise the accuracy drops drastically. Our Triton kernel achieves a speedup up to 1.7x over regular 16-bit kernels, and we show that on TabPFN-v3 and TabICLv2 there is no relevant accuracy loss across TabArena and BeyondArena.
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Unified CT and MRI Pancreas Segmentation for Label-Efficient Cross-Modality Subregion Transfer

arXiv:2609.13043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust medical image segmentation across imaging modalities is challenging because of large differences in appearance and intensity distributions. Models trained on a single modality often show substantial performance drops when applied to unseen domains. In this work, we develop a unified 3D pancreas segmentation framework that applies domain-adversarial learning to 4,604 heterogeneous CT and MRI scans to learn anatomical representations. A shared nnU-Net encoder-decoder is trained for whole-pancreas segmentation, with a latent domain discriminator encouraging CT-MRI feature alignment. The learned encoder is subsequently transferred to pancreatic head-body-tail segmentation using limited MRI-only subregion annotations. An average Dice score of 87.31% on the in-distribution test set and Dice scores ranging from 84.20% to 88.09% across external OOD datasets were achieved in whole pancreas segmentation. Dice scores of 80.53% on MRI and 83.05% on CT were achieved for downstream subregion segmentation, without using CT subregion annotations. These results demonstrate that a unified anatomical representation can support both cross-modality pancreas segmentation and label-efficient downstream transfer.
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Involving before Evolving: A Vision for Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twin Engineering

arXiv:2609.13071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise Digital Twins (EDTs) promise data-driven decision support at organizational scale, but realizing them requires navigating siloed departments, tacit knowledge, and high-stakes decisions with long-horizon consequences. Existing approaches involve domain experts during model development but focus less on early organizational buy-in in EDTs. We present a vision for trustworthy EDT engineering grounded in an `involving before evolving' paradigm: rapidly involving stakeholders through a working prototype before evolving toward federation and full interoperability. Our three-stage approach combines foundation models for rapid prototyping, an ontological backbone for federated interoperability, and observability tooling for stakeholder trust. We ground our vision in an ongoing collaboration with Michelin, a multinational manufacturer, where an initial prototype has helped support stakeholder buy-in.
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MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

arXiv:2609.13072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained control of language model behaviors (e.g., steering) is among the more actionable outcomes of interpretability research. For binary concepts such as refusal, a single direction in activation space often suffices for steering. However, many concepts are not binary: Animals and Countries contain many subcategories, each with multiple instances. For these concepts, the search space over possible representation geometries is far larger than for binary concepts; it is thus not clear what geometries are most appropriate, nor what methods are most effective at recovering them. In this work, we introduce MAxBench, a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations based on sampling from the recovered concept representation. We use MAxBench to compare 10 localization methods (covering 5 geometry types) across 6 concepts and 4 models. Using this framework, we find that (i) affine subspaces steer more reliably and have greater recall than rank-one or linear subspaces; (ii) much of this advantage is due to better non-zero offsets rather than the choice of bases; (iii) manifold steering is competitive with the best methods when applicable; and (iv) no method consistently outperforms prompting, in alignment with prior findings on binary concepts. These findings underscore the importance of expanding the scope of interpretability research and meta-evaluation to concepts with more varied structure.
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