arXiv:2601.04577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While AI innovation accelerates rapidly, the intellectual process behind breakthroughs -- how researchers identify gaps, synthesize prior work, and generate insights -- remains poorly understood. The lack of structured data on scientific reasoning hinders systematic analysis and development of AI research agents. We introduce Sci-Reasoning, the first dataset capturing the intellectual synthesis behind high-quality AI research. Using community-validated quality signals and an LLM-accelerated, human-verified pipeline, we trace Oral and Spotlight papers across NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR (2023-2025) to its key predecessors, articulating specific reasoning links in a structured format. Our analysis identifies 15 distinct thinking patterns, with three dominant strategies accounting for 52.7%: Gap-Driven Reframing (24.2%), Cross-Domain Synthesis (18.0%), and Representation Shift (10.5%). The most powerful innovation recipes combine multiple patterns: Gap-Driven Reframing + Representation Shift, Cross-Domain Synthesis + Representation Shift, and Gap-Driven Reframing + Cross-Domain Synthesis. This dataset enables quantitative studies of scientific progress and provides structured reasoning trajectories for training the next generation AI research agents.

arXiv:2601.04703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic search has emerged as a promising paradigm for complex information seeking by enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with tool use. However, prevailing systems rely on monolithic agents that suffer from structural bottlenecks, including unconstrained reasoning outputs that inflate trajectories, sparse outcome-level rewards that complicate credit assignment, and stochastic search noise that destabilizes learning. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{M-ASK} (Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge), a framework that explicitly decouples agentic search into two complementary roles: Search Behavior Agents, which plan and execute search actions, and Knowledge Management Agents, which aggregate, filter, and maintain a compact internal context. This decomposition allows each agent to focus on a well-defined subtask and reduces interference between search and context construction. Furthermore, to enable stable coordination, M-ASK employs turn-level rewards to provide granular supervision for both search decisions and knowledge updates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that M-ASK outperforms strong baselines, achieving not only superior answer accuracy but also significantly more stable training dynamics.\footnote{The source code for M-ASK is available at https://github.com/chenyiqun/M-ASK.}

arXiv:2601.04486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Detection systems that utilize machine learning are progressively implemented at Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to help an analyst to filter through high volumes of security alerts. Practically, such systems tend to reveal probabilistic results or confidence scores which are ill-calibrated and hard to read when under pressure. Qualitative and survey based studies of SOC practice done before reveal that poor alert quality and alert overload greatly augment the burden on the analyst, especially when tool outputs are not coherent with decision requirements, or signal noise. One of the most significant limitations is that model confidence is usually shown without expressing that there are asymmetric costs in decision making where false alarms are much less harmful than missed attacks. The present paper presents a decision-sensitive trust signal correspondence scheme of SOC alert triage. The framework combines confidence that has been calibrated, lightweight uncertainty cues, and cost-sensitive decision thresholds into coherent decision-support layer, instead of making changes to detection models. To enhance probabilistic consistency, the calibration is done using the known post-hoc methods and the uncertainty cues give conservative protection in situations where model certainty is low. To measure the model-independent performance of the suggested model, we apply the Logistic Regression and the Random Forest classifiers to the UNSW-NB15 intrusion detection benchmark. According to simulation findings, false negatives are greatly amplified by the presence of misaligned displays of confidence, whereas cost weighted loss decreases by orders of magnitude between models with decision aligned trust signals. Lastly, we describe a human-in-the-loop study plan that would allow empirically assessing the decision-making of the analysts with aligned and misaligned trust interfaces.

arXiv:2601.04758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the USPTO adjudicates thousands of ex parte appeals each year, requiring the integration of technical understanding and legal reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in patent and legal practice, their use has remained limited to lightweight tasks, with no established means of systematically evaluating their capacity for structured legal reasoning in the patent domain. In this work, we introduce PILOT-Bench, the first PTAB-centric benchmark that aligns PTAB decisions with USPTO patent data at the case-level and formalizes three IRAC-aligned classification tasks: Issue Type, Board Authorities, and Subdecision. We evaluate a diverse set of closed-source (commercial) and open-source LLMs and conduct analyses across multiple perspectives, including input-variation settings, model families, and error tendencies. Notably, on the Issue Type task, closed-source models consistently exceed 0.75 in Micro-F1 score, whereas the strongest open-source model (Qwen-8B) achieves performance around 0.56, highlighting a substantial gap in reasoning capabilities. PILOT-Bench establishes a foundation for the systematic evaluation of patent-domain legal reasoning and points toward future directions for improving LLMs through dataset design and model alignment. All data, code, and benchmark resources are available at https://github.com/TeamLab/pilot-bench.

arXiv:2601.04761v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Manual observation and monitoring of individual cows for disease detection present significant challenges in large-scale farming operations, as the process is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to reduced accuracy. The reliance on human observation often leads to delays in identifying symptoms, as the sheer number of animals can hinder timely attention to each cow. Consequently, the accuracy and precision of disease detection are significantly compromised, potentially affecting animal health and overall farm productivity. Furthermore, organizing and managing human resources for the manual observation and monitoring of cow health is a complex and economically demanding task. It necessitates the involvement of skilled personnel, thereby contributing to elevated farm maintenance costs and operational inefficiencies. Therefore, the development of an automated, low-cost, and reliable smart system is essential to address these challenges effectively. Although several studies have been conducted in this domain, very few have simultaneously considered the detection of multiple common diseases with high prediction accuracy. However, advancements in Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Cyber-Physical Systems have enabled the automation of cow health monitoring with enhanced accuracy and reduced operational costs. This study proposes an IoT-enabled Cyber-Physical System framework designed to monitor the daily activities and health status of cow. A novel ML algorithm is proposed for the diagnosis of common cow diseases using collected physiological and behavioral data. The algorithm is designed to predict multiple diseases by analyzing a comprehensive set of recorded physiological and behavioral features, enabling accurate and efficient health assessment.

arXiv:2601.04790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems utilizing large language models often assign authoritative roles to improve performance, yet the impact of authority bias on agent interactions remains underexplored. We present the first systematic analysis of role-based authority bias in free-form multi-agent evaluation using ChatEval. Applying French and Raven's power-based theory, we classify authoritative roles into legitimate, referent, and expert types and analyze their influence across 12-turn conversations. Experiments with GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 reveal that Expert and Referent power roles exert stronger influence than Legitimate power roles. Crucially, authority bias emerges not through active conformity by general agents, but through authoritative roles consistently maintaining their positions while general agents demonstrate flexibility. Furthermore, authority influence requires clear position statements, as neutral responses fail to generate bias. These findings provide key insights for designing multi-agent frameworks with asymmetric interaction patterns.

arXiv:2601.05148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology -- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment. In this report, we present Atlas 2, Atlas 2-B, and Atlas 2-S, three pathology vision foundation models which bridge these shortcomings by showing state-of-the-art performance in prediction performance, robustness, and resource efficiency in a comprehensive evaluation across eighty public benchmarks. Our models were trained on the largest pathology foundation model dataset to date comprising 5.5 million histopathology whole slide images, collected from three medical institutions Charit\'e - Universt\"atsmedizin Berlin, LMU Munich, and Mayo Clinic.

arXiv:2601.01802v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To develop a reliable AI for psychological assessment, we introduce \texttt{PsychEval}, a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark designed to address three key challenges: \textbf{1) Can we train a highly realistic AI counselor?} Realistic counseling is a longitudinal task requiring sustained memory and dynamic goal tracking. We propose a multi-session benchmark (spanning 6-10 sessions across three distinct stages) that demands critical capabilities such as memory continuity, adaptive reasoning, and longitudinal planning. The dataset is annotated with extensive professional skills, comprising over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. \textbf{2) How to train a multi-therapy AI counselor?} While existing models often focus on a single therapy, complex cases frequently require flexible strategies among various therapies. We construct a diverse dataset covering five therapeutic modalities (Psychodynamic, Behaviorism, CBT, Humanistic Existentialist, and Postmodernist) alongside an integrative therapy with a unified three-stage clinical framework across six core psychological topics. \textbf{3) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?} We establish a holistic evaluation framework with 18 therapy-specific and therapy-shared metrics across Client-Level and Counselor-Level dimensions. To support this, we also construct over 2,000 diverse client profiles. Extensive experimental analysis fully validates the superior quality and clinical fidelity of our dataset. Crucially, \texttt{PsychEval} transcends static benchmarking to serve as a high-fidelity reinforcement learning environment that enables the self-evolutionary training of clinically responsible and adaptive AI counselors.

Background: Structured medication reviews (SMRs) are an essential component of medication optimization, especially for patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. However, the process remains challenging due to the complexities of patient data, time constraints, and the need for coordination among health care professionals (HCPs). This study explores HCPs’ perspectives on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted tools to enhance the SMR process, with a focus on the potential benefits of and barriers to adoption. Objective: This study aims to identify the key user requirements for AI-assisted tools to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SMRs, specifically for patients with multimorbidity, complex polypharmacy, and frailty. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted involving focus groups and semistructured interviews with HCPs and patients in the United Kingdom. Participants included physicians, pharmacists, clinical pharmacologists, psychiatrists from primary and secondary care, a policy maker, and patients with multimorbidity. Data were analyzed using a hybrid inductive and deductive thematic analysis approach to identify themes related to AI-assisted tool functionality, workflow integration, user-interface visualization, and usability in the SMR process. Results: Four major themes emerged from the analysis: innovative AI potential, optimizing electronic patient record visualization, functionality of the AI tool for SMRs, and facilitators of and barriers to AI tool implementation. HCPs identified the potential of AI to support patient identification and prioritizing those at risk of medication-related harm. AI-assisted tools were viewed as essential in detecting prescribing gaps, drug interactions, and patient risk trajectories over time. Participants emphasized the importance of presenting patient data in an intuitive format, with a patient interface for shared decision-making. Suggestions included color-coding blood results, highlighting critical medication reviews, and providing timelines of patient medical histories. HCPs stressed the need for AI tools to integrate seamlessly with existing electronic patient record systems and provide actionable insights without overwhelming users with excessive notifications or “pop-up” alerts. Factors influencing the uptake of AI-assisted tools included the need for user-friendly design, evidence of tool effectiveness (though some were skeptical about the predictive accuracy of AI models), and addressing concerns around digital exclusion. Conclusions: The findings highlight the potential for AI-assisted tools to streamline and optimize the SMR process, particularly for patients with multimorbidity and complex polypharmacy. However, successful implementation depends on addressing concerns related to workflow integration, user acceptance, and evidence of effectiveness. User-centered design is crucial to ensure that AI-assisted tools support HCPs in delivering high-quality, patient-centered care while minimizing cognitive overload and alert fatigue.

Background: The rapid growth of social media as an information channel has enabled the swift spread of inaccurate or false health information, significantly impacting public health. This widespread dissemination of misinformation has caused confusion, eroded trust in health authorities, led to noncompliance with health guidelines, and encouraged risky health behaviors. Understanding the dynamics of misinformation on social media is essential for devising effective public health communication strategies. Objective: This study aims to present a comprehensive and automated approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to detect misinformation on social media, uncover the underlying causes and themes, and generate refutation arguments, facilitating control of its spread and promoting public health outcomes by inoculating people against health misinformation. Methods: We use two datasets to train three LLMs, namely BERT, T5, and GPT-2, to classify documents into two categories: misinformation and non-misinformation. Additionally, we employ a separate dataset to identify misinformation topics. To analyze these topics, we applied three topic modeling algorithms—Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Top2Vec, and BERTopic—and selected the optimal model based on performance evaluated across three metrics. Using a prompting approach, we extract sentence-level representations for the topics to uncover their underlying themes. Finally, we design a prompt text capable of identifying misinformation themes effectively. Codes are available at https://github.com/SamiraMalek/MDIP-MDIS. Results: The trained BERT model demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving 98% accuracy in classifying misinformation and non-misinformation, with a 44% reduction in false positive rates for AI-generated misinformation. Among the three topic modeling approaches employed, BERTopic outperformed the others, achieving the highest metrics with a Coherence Value (CV) of 0.41, Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) of -0.086, and Inverted RBO (IRBO) of 0.99. To address the issue of unclassified documents, we developed an algorithm to assign each document to its closest topic. Additionally, we proposed a novel method using prompt engineering to generate sentence-level representations for each topic, achieving a 99.6% approval rate as "appropriate" or "somewhat appropriate" by three independent raters. We further designed a prompt text to identify themes of misinformation topics and developed another prompt capable of detecting misinformation themes with 82% accuracy. Conclusions: This study presents a comprehensive and automated approach to addressing health misinformation on social media using advanced machine learning and natural language processing techniques. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering, the system effectively detects misinformation, identifies underlying themes, and provides explanatory responses to combat its spread. The proposed method was tested on an English-language COVID-19–related dataset and has not been evaluated on real-world online social media data; the experiments were conducted offline.

In less than a year, new Medicaid eligibility restrictions may lead millions of people to lose coverage and then miss potentially lifesaving cancer screenings like colonoscopies or mammograms. A new analysis estimates that Americans may miss more than a million cancer screenings for colorectal, breast, or lung cancer over the two years after the new policy takes effect.

“I see patients every day that come to me with cancer and are asymptomatic, but their life gets turned upside down because they are told they have cancer,” said Adrian Diaz, a surgical oncologist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors on the paper, published Thursday in JAMA Oncology. “In a positive way, we catch it early. It’s potentially treatable, curable. Seeing that number, over a million patients, who will not have that opportunity — I was taken aback.”

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Background: The rapid growth of user-generated web-based health information increases the complexity of cancer information seeking. One promising strategy for promoting high-quality cancer information consumption is through targeted interventions that are intentionally designed to reach individuals in the web-based spaces they occupy. However, there is a paucity of evidence-based information on the best strategies for designing and implementing web-based health behavior change interventions to improve individuals’ cancer-related knowledge and prevent cancer. Objective: This study aimed to develop and pilot test a theory-based intervention via the web to reduce 6 cancer risk factors among rural emerging adults (EAs) through community-engaged research. Methods: This mixed methods evaluation describes the development of a web-based cancer prevention intervention aimed at rural EAs aged 18-26 years in the United States and delivered in Facebook private groups. The intervention was guided by behavior change theory and cocreated with EA and Stakeholder Organization Advisory Boards to ensure relevance, accessibility, and appropriateness. We report on 3 formative surveys, a pilot intervention, protocol development, and the community-engaged process for intervention development. Descriptive statistics were applied to the surveys and pilot intervention baseline results to produce means and SDs using R. Results: We developed posts (n=400) for a Facebook feed aimed at reducing 6 cancer risk behaviors (unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity, tobacco use, alcohol use, sun exposure, and human papillomavirus infection) with iterative input from the EA and stakeholder advisory boards. Formative surveys with rural EAs (n=297) and a pilot study of the intervention with this population (n=26) were conducted. In the pilot study, the intervention reached participants across rural counties, with sustained engagement (post views=1060, reactions=346, comments=72) over a one-month period. Key modifications to the intervention content and design emerged from both advisory boards, the formative surveys, and the pilot intervention, focusing on using perceived reliable sources and direct links to source material. Conclusions: This web-based cancer prevention intervention is scalable and delivers engaging, evidence-informed health information to rural EAs. We offer key insights into the design and implementation of web-based cancer prevention interventions for EAs by describing the resources, timelines, and expertise needed to design and implement the intervention. Considerations for fully engaging EA and community stakeholder partners are presented, and we discuss how their involvement resulted in modifications that strengthened the intervention. Finally, we highlight the importance of theory-based health-behavior messaging, digital messaging skillsets, and platform-tailored dissemination strategies for maximizing web-based intervention acceptability. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05618158; https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05618158

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 07 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02324-4

An autonomous agentic workflow for clinical detection of cognitive concerns using large language models