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Received — 27 May 2026 ⏭

Hera: Learning Long-Horizon Coordination for Device-Cloud Collaborative LLM Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yuxin Zhang · Mengxue Hu · Zheng Lin · Xiaoyi Fan · Fan Xie · Zihan Fang · Jing Yang · Wenjun Zhu · Zhiwen Chen · Chengfei Lv · Zhe Chen
26 May 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2605.24598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents excel at solving complex long-horizon tasks through autonomous interaction with environments. However, their real-world deployment faces a fundamental device--cloud dilemma: on-device models are efficient but often brittle, while cloud models are stronger but costly in computation. State-of-the-art LLM device--cloud routers usually make coarse task-level decisions, which cannot adapt to the changing difficulty of multi-step agent interactions. To address this issue, we present Hera, a step-level device--cloud LLM agent coordinator for long-horizon tasks achieving a strong performance--cost Pareto frontier. Hera adopts a novel two-stage training paradigm: (1) imitation learning for cold-start, followed by (2) reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes task success and cloud usage efficiency. The first stage casts step-level routing as a supervised classification problem: the device agent is replayed on cloud trajectories, with each state labeled by the agreement between device and cloud actions. In the second stage, we perform cost-aware reinforcement learning by grouping identical states across trajectories and updating Hera with labels favoring higher expected return and fewer future cloud calls. We evaluate Hera on ALFWorld, WebShop, and AppWorld, where it consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving 92.5% of the cloud-only success rate with cloud use in only 46.3% of steps.

Can China’s Great Green Wall shape efforts to keep the world’s deserts at bay?

✇Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds
By: Lilin Zheng · Annah Lake Zhu · Qiuxia Dong · Michael E. Meadows · David S. G. Thomas · Xin Gao · Jiaojun Zhu · Xiaobo Wang · Zilong Xia · Alex De Sherbinin · Ruishan Chen
15 April 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01102-w

Grand anti-desertification schemes often fail when trees die and funding dries up — yet one project has broken the mould.
Received — 14 March 2026 ⏭

NFATC2::NUTM2 Fusion Defines a Novel Primary Pulmonary Epithelial Tumor With a Distinctive Immunophenotype

✇Pulmonary nodule
By: Lanlan Feng · Qiao Liu · Xiaoyan Liu · Shumei Wang · Junting Li · Yu Han · Xiaorong Mu · Yuanyuan Wang · Junfeng Jiang · Chun Wu · Xiujuan Han · Shaojun Zhu · Fuqin Zhang · Jing Tian · Zhuo Wang · Wei Zhang · Li Gong
13 March 2026 at 18:00

Am J Surg Pathol. 2026 Jun 1;50(6):695-704. doi: 10.1097/PAS.0000000000002533. Epub 2026 Mar 13.

ABSTRACT

With the application of molecular techniques in pathologic diagnosis, several novel primary pulmonary epithelial tumors have been continuously discovered and classified under the WHO classification of thoracic tumors. Recently, a pulmonary tumor with NFATC2 :: NUTM2B fusion was first documented, but the spectrum of NFATC2::NUTM2 fusion variants and their associated pathologic features remains incompletely characterized. Coincidentally, we also found and described 6 primary pulmonary tumors harboring recurrent NFATC2::NUTM2A/E fusions through integrated genomic analysis. These patients, including 4 females and 2 males, with a median age of 53 years, presented with incidentally detected peripheral lung nodules composed of monotonous epithelioid cells arranged in cords, nests, and trabeculae within a prominent desmoplastic stroma. All tumors exhibited a consistent immunophenotype: CK5/6+/GATA3+/calponin+/EMA+/DOG1 (perinuclear dot-like staining)/p63-. High-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) analysis showed the structural variation of NFATC2::NUTM2E in all 6 cases, whereas RNA sequencing detected the fusion transcripts in 5 cases ( NFATC2::NUTM2A , n=2; NFATC2::NUTM2E , n=3). Ultrastructural examination of 1 case suggested epithelial differentiation. All patients remained disease-free after complete resection (median follow-up: 24 mo; range: 9 to 41 mo). These findings define a novel primary pulmonary tumor entity driven by NFATC2::NUTM2 fusions, and characterized by a distinctive immunophenotype, expanding the spectrum of NUTM2 -associated neoplasms. Our study underscores the utility of multiomics approaches for characterizing rare neoplasms and provides a diagnostic framework for this entity.

PMID:41821426 | DOI:10.1097/PAS.0000000000002533

NFATC2::NUTM2 Fusion Defines a Novel Primary Pulmonary Epithelial Tumor With a Distinctive Immunophenotype

✇Omics In Lung
By: Lanlan Feng · Qiao Liu · Xiaoyan Liu · Shumei Wang · Junting Li · Yu Han · Xiaorong Mu · Yuanyuan Wang · Junfeng Jiang · Chun Wu · Xiujuan Han · Shaojun Zhu · Fuqin Zhang · Jing Tian · Zhuo Wang · Wei Zhang · Li Gong
13 March 2026 at 18:00

Am J Surg Pathol. 2026 Mar 13. doi: 10.1097/PAS.0000000000002533. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

With the application of molecular techniques in pathologic diagnosis, several novel primary pulmonary epithelial tumors have been continuously discovered and classified under the WHO classification of thoracic tumors. Recently, a pulmonary tumor with NFATC2::NUTM2B fusion was first documented, but the spectrum of NFATC2::NUTM2 fusion variants and their associated pathologic features remains incompletely characterized. Coincidentally, we also found and described 6 primary pulmonary tumors harboring recurrent NFATC2::NUTM2A/E fusions through integrated genomic analysis. These patients, including 4 females and 2 males, with a median age of 53 years, presented with incidentally detected peripheral lung nodules composed of monotonous epithelioid cells arranged in cords, nests, and trabeculae within a prominent desmoplastic stroma. All tumors exhibited a consistent immunophenotype: CK5/6+/GATA3+/calponin+/EMA+/DOG1 (perinuclear dot-like staining)/p63-. High-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) analysis showed the structural variation of NFATC2::NUTM2E in all 6 cases, whereas RNA sequencing detected the fusion transcripts in 5 cases (NFATC2::NUTM2A, n=2; NFATC2::NUTM2E, n=3). Ultrastructural examination of 1 case suggested epithelial differentiation. All patients remained disease-free after complete resection (median follow-up: 24 mo; range: 9 to 41 mo). These findings define a novel primary pulmonary tumor entity driven by NFATC2::NUTM2 fusions, and characterized by a distinctive immunophenotype, expanding the spectrum of NUTM2-associated neoplasms. Our study underscores the utility of multiomics approaches for characterizing rare neoplasms and provides a diagnostic framework for this entity.

PMID:41821426 | DOI:10.1097/PAS.0000000000002533

Received — 11 March 2026 ⏭

AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustration

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zhen Lin · Qiujie Xie · Minjun Zhu · Shichen Li · Qiyao Sun · Enhao Gu · Yiran Ding · Ke Sun · Fang Guo · Panzhong Lu · Zhiyuan Ning · Yixuan Weng · Yue Zhang
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.06674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-quality scientific illustrations are essential for communicating complex scientific and technical concepts, yet existing automated systems remain limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. We present AutoFigure-Edit, an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. By combining long-context understanding, reference-guided styling, and native SVG editing, it enables efficient creation and refinement of high-quality scientific illustrations. To facilitate further progress in this field, we release the video at https://youtu.be/10IH8SyJjAQ, full codebase at https://github.com/ResearAI/AutoFigure-Edit and provide a website for easy access and interactive use at https://deepscientist.cc/.

Alignment--Process--Outcome: Rethinking How AIs and Humans Collaborate

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Haichang Li · Anjun Zhu · Arpit Narechania
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.08017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world collaboration, alignment, process structure, and outcome quality do not exhibit a simple linear or one-to-one correspondence: similar alignment may accompany either rapid convergence or extensive multi-branch exploration, and lead to different results. Existing accounts often isolate these dimensions or focus on specific participant types, limiting structural accounts of collaboration. We reconceptualize collaboration through two complementary lenses. The task lens models collaboration as trajectory evolution in a structured task space, revealing patterns such as advancement, branching, and backtracking. The intent lens examines how individual intents are expressed within shared contexts and enter situated decisions. Together, these lenses clarify the structural relationships among alignment, decision-making, and trajectory structure. Rather than reducing collaboration to outcome quality or treating alignment as the sole objective, we propose a unified dynamic view of the relationships among alignment, process, and outcome, and use it to re-examine collaboration structure across Human-Human, AI-AI, and Human-AI settings.

PEPA: a Persistently Autonomous Embodied Agent with Personalities

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Kaige Liu · Yang Li · Lijun Zhu · Weinan Zhang
10 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.00117v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Living organisms exhibit persistent autonomy through internally generated goals and self-sustaining behavioral organization, yet current embodied agents remain driven by externally scripted objectives. This dependence on predefined task specifications limits their capacity for long-term deployment in dynamic, unstructured environments where continuous human intervention is impractical. We propose that personality traits provide an intrinsic organizational principle for achieving persistent autonomy. Analogous to genotypic biases shaping biological behavioral tendencies, personalities enable agents to autonomously generate goals and sustain behavioral evolution without external supervision. To realize this, we develop PEPA, a three-layer cognitive architecture that operates through three interacting systems: Sys3 autonomously synthesizes personality-aligned goals and refines them via episodic memory and daily self-reflection; Sys2 performs deliberative reasoning to translate goals into executable action plans; Sys1 grounds the agent in sensorimotor interaction, executing actions and recording experiences. We validate the framework through real-world deployment on a quadruped robot in a multi-floor office building. Operating without reliance on fixed task specifications, the robot autonomously arbitrates between user requests and personality-driven motivations, navigating elevators and exploring environments accordingly. Quantitative analysis across five distinct personality prototypes demonstrates stable, trait-aligned behaviors. The results confirm that personality-driven cognitive architectures enable sustained autonomous operation characteristic of persistent embodied systems. Code and demo videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pepa-persistent/.
Received — 17 February 2026 ⏭

DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Kaiwen Zheng · Huayu Chen · Haotian Ye · Haoxiang Wang · Qinsheng Zhang · Kai Jiang · Hang Su · Stefano Ermon · Jun Zhu · Ming-Yu Liu
17 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2509.16117v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable GRPO-style training, yet they inherit fundamental drawbacks, including solver restrictions, forward-reverse inconsistency, and complicated integration with classifier-free guidance (CFG). We introduce Diffusion Negative-aware FineTuning (DiffusionNFT), a new online RL paradigm that optimizes diffusion models directly on the forward process via flow matching. DiffusionNFT contrasts positive and negative generations to define an implicit policy improvement direction, naturally incorporating reinforcement signals into the supervised learning objective. This formulation enables training with arbitrary black-box solvers, eliminates the need for likelihood estimation, and requires only clean images rather than sampling trajectories for policy optimization. DiffusionNFT is up to $25\times$ more efficient than FlowGRPO in head-to-head comparisons, while being CFG-free. For instance, DiffusionNFT improves the GenEval score from 0.24 to 0.98 within 1k steps, while FlowGRPO achieves 0.95 with over 5k steps and additional CFG employment. By leveraging multiple reward models, DiffusionNFT significantly boosts the performance of SD3.5-Medium in every benchmark tested.

VoiceBridge: General Speech Restoration with One-step Latent Bridge Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Chi Zhang · Zehua Chen · Kaiwen Zheng · Jun Zhu
17 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2509.25275v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridge models have been investigated in speech enhancement but are mostly single-task, with constrained general speech restoration (GSR) capability. In this work, we propose VoiceBridge, a one-step latent bridge model (LBM) for GSR, capable of efficiently reconstructing 48 kHz fullband speech from diverse distortions. To inherit the advantages of data-domain bridge models, we design an energy-preserving variational autoencoder, enhancing the waveform-latent space alignment over varying energy levels. By compressing waveform into continuous latent representations, VoiceBridge models~\textit{various} GSR tasks with a~\textit{single} latent-to-latent generative process backed by a scalable transformer. To alleviate the challenge of reconstructing the high-quality target from distinctively different low-quality priors, we propose a joint neural prior for GSR, uniformly reducing the burden of the LBM in diverse tasks. Building upon these designs, we further investigate bridge training objective by jointly tuning LBM, decoder and discriminator together, transforming the model from a denoiser to generator and enabling \textit{one-step GSR without distillation}. Extensive validation across in-domain (\textit{e.g.}, denoising and super-resolution) and out-of-domain tasks (\textit{e.g.}, refining synthesized speech) and datasets demonstrates the superior performance of VoiceBridge. Demos: https://VoiceBridgedemo.github.io/.
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