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SPTLC2-driven sphingolipid reprogramming of neutrophils impairs anti-tumour immunity and drives liver cancer progression

Oncogene, Published online: 28 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03996-2

SPTLC2-driven sphingolipid reprogramming of neutrophils impairs anti-tumour immunity and drives liver cancer progression

RESCUE-BENCH: Towards Relation-Aware Multi-Party Emotional Support Conversation Systems

arXiv:2609.09657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing emotional support conversation systems mainly focus on one-on-one seeker-supporter interactions and individual emotional states, leaving interpersonal relations in multi-party scenarios underexplored. In this work, we introduce relation-aware emotional support conversation, a new task that evaluates whether LLMs can capture and utilize the evolving dynamics of relationships to offer more effective emotional support. We construct RESCUE (Relation-aware Emotional Support Conversation Understanding and Evaluation Benchmark) from real couple and family interview conversations, containing 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video. Based on rich annotations of socio-emotional and support-related dynamics, RESCUE defines six tasks that evaluate two core capabilities required for relation-aware emotional support: Relational Understanding and Relation-Sensitive Support. Experiments with ten LLMs show that current models perform relatively well on tasks relying on local emotional or intervention cues, but struggle with relation-intensive tasks such as relation pattern prediction, viewpoint prediction, and support strategy prediction. These findings reveal the limitations of current LLMs in modeling interpersonal relations and making relation-sensitive support decisions.

A Signal-Language Foundation Model for Broad-Spectrum Cardiovascular Assessment from Routine Electrocardiography

arXiv:2605.25446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is central to cardiovascular care, but conventional AI models are often restricted to common arrhythmias and may generalize poorly across populations or clinically subtle diseases. We developed ECG Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (ECGCLIP), a signal-language contrastive learning framework that aligns ECG waveforms with expert diagnostic reports. ECGCLIP was pre-trained on 2,837,962 ECG studies from 1,324,856 patients and evaluated on a held-out internal test set plus nine independent external cohorts comprising about 1.5 million ECGs. Evaluation covered 89 downstream tasks, including 45 ECG diagnoses, 39 echocardiographic targets, and 5 rare cardiac diseases, using PRAUC as the primary metric. ECGCLIP consistently improved performance over random initialization and Merl-R18 baselines. On the internal test set, ECGCLIP-R34 achieved strong performance for atrial fibrillation (PRAUC 0.900) and ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (PRAUC 0.383), with robust generalization across all external cohorts. It also improved low-prevalence and diagnostically elusive diseases, including Ebstein anomaly, constrictive pericarditis, dextrocardia, and cardiac amyloidosis, with internal PRAUC values of 0.253, 0.175, 0.121, and 0.201, respectively. ECGCLIP was data efficient, matching or exceeding full-dataset baseline performance with only 10% of training data. Feature visualization and saliency analysis suggested clinically meaningful representations aligned with established electrocardiographic criteria. These findings indicate that large-scale ECG-report contrastive pre-training can expand routine ECG interpretation beyond common arrhythmias toward broad cardiovascular assessment and opportunistic screening of echocardiographic and rare conditions.

Development and multi-center evaluation of domain-adapted speech recognition for human-AI teaming in real-world gastrointestinal endoscopy

arXiv:2604.01705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a critical interface for human-AI interaction in gastrointestinal endoscopy, yet its reliability in real-world clinical settings is limited by domain-specific terminology and complex acoustic conditions. Here, we present EndoASR, a domain-adapted ASR system designed for real-time deployment in endoscopic workflows. We develop a two-stage adaptation strategy based on synthetic endoscopy reports, targeting domain-specific language modeling and noise robustness. In retrospective evaluation across six endoscopists, EndoASR substantially improves both transcription accuracy and clinical usability, reducing character error rate (CER) from 20.52% to 14.14% and increasing medical term accuracy (Med ACC) from 54.30% to 87.59%. In a prospective multi-center study spanning five independent endoscopy centers, EndoASR demonstrates consistent generalization under heterogeneous real-world conditions. Compared with the baseline Paraformer model, CER is reduced from 16.20% to 14.97%, while Med ACC is improved from 61.63% to 84.16%, confirming its robustness in practical deployment scenarios. Notably, EndoASR achieves a real-time factor (RTF) of 0.005, significantly faster than Whisper-large-v3 (RTF 0.055), while maintaining a compact model size of 220M parameters, enabling efficient edge deployment. Furthermore, integration with large language models demonstrates that improved ASR quality directly enhances downstream structured information extraction and clinician-AI interaction. These results demonstrate that domain-adapted ASR can serve as a reliable interface for human-AI teaming in gastrointestinal endoscopy, with consistent performance validated across multi-center real-world clinical settings.

Derived Fields Preserve Fine-Scale Detail in Budgeted Neural Simulators

arXiv:2603.29224v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-scale-faithful neural simulation under fixed storage budgets remains challenging. Many existing methods reduce high-frequency error by improving architectures, training objectives, or rollout strategies. However, under budgeted coarsen-quantize-decode pipelines, fine detail can already be lost when the carried state is constructed. In the canonical periodic incompressible Navier-Stokes setting, we show that primitive and derived fields undergo systematically different retained-band distortions under the same operator. Motivated by this observation, we formulate Derived-Field Optimization (DerivOpt), a general state-design framework that chooses which physical fields are carried and how storage budget is allocated across them under a calibrated channel model. Across the full time-dependent forward subset of PDEBench, DerivOpt not only improves pooled mean rollout nRMSE, but also delivers a decisive advantage in fine-scale fidelity over a broad set of strong baselines. More importantly, the gains are already visible at input time, before rollout learning begins. This indicates that the carried state is often the dominant bottleneck under tight storage budgets. These results suggest a broader conclusion: in budgeted neural simulation, carried-state design should be treated as a first-class design axis alongside architecture, loss, and rollout strategy.

Cheers: Decoupling Patch Details from Semantic Representations Enables Unified Multimodal Comprehension and Generation

arXiv:2603.12793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent cutting-edge topic in multimodal modeling is to unify visual comprehension and generation within a single model. However, the two tasks demand mismatched decoding regimes and visual representations, making it non-trivial to jointly optimize within a shared feature space. In this work, we present Cheers, a unified multimodal model that decouples patch-level details from semantic representations, thereby stabilizing semantics for multimodal understanding and improving fidelity for image generation via gated detail residuals. Cheers includes three key components: (i) a unified vision tokenizer that encodes and compresses image latent states into semantic tokens for efficient LLM conditioning, (ii) an LLM-based Transformer that unifies autoregressive decoding for text generation and diffusion decoding for image generation, and (iii) a cascaded flow matching head that decodes visual semantics first and then injects semantically gated detail residuals from the vision tokenizer to refine high-frequency content. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that Cheers matches or surpasses advanced UMMs in both visual understanding and generation. Cheers also achieves 4x token compression, enabling more efficient high-resolution image encoding and generation. Notably, Cheers outperforms the Tar-1.5B on the popular benchmarks GenEval and MMBench, while requiring only 20% of the training cost, indicating effective and efficient (i.e., 4x token compression) unified multimodal modeling. We will release all code and data for future research.

Beyond Endpoints: Path-Centric Reasoning for Vectorized Off-Road Network Extraction

arXiv:2512.10416v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has advanced vectorized road extraction in urban settings, yet off-road environments remain underexplored and challenging. A significant domain gap causes advanced models to fail in wild terrains due to two key issues: lack of large-scale vectorized datasets and structural weakness in prevailing methods. Models such as SAM-Road employ a node-centric paradigm that reasons at sparse endpoints, making them fragile to occlusions and ambiguous junctions in off-road scenes, leading to topological errors. This work addresses these limitations in two complementary ways. First, we release WildRoad, a global off-road road network dataset constructed efficiently with a dedicated interactive annotation tool tailored for road-network labeling. Second, we introduce MaGRoad (Mask-aware Geodesic Road network extractor), a path-centric framework that aggregates multi-scale visual evidence along candidate paths to infer connectivity robustly. Extensive experiments show that MaGRoad achieves state-of-the-art performance on our challenging WildRoad benchmark while generalizing well to urban datasets. An efficient vertex extraction strategy also yields roughly 2.5X faster inference, improving practical applicability. Together, the dataset and path-centric paradigm provide a stronger foundation for mapping roads in the wild. We release both the dataset and code at this repository. We release both the dataset and code at https://github.com/xiaofei-guan/MaGRoad.

Enhancing Delta Compression in LLMs via SVD-based Quantization Error Minimization

arXiv:2506.11087v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with exceptional performance on specialized tasks, but it yields dense, high-dimensional delta parameters that pose severe storage and distribution challenges. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based compression offers a compact representation for such delta parameters, but existing methods adopt heuristic quantization without clarifying underlying mechanisms, leading to poor generalizability. In this work, we propose PrinMix, a rigorous SVD-based framework that models quantization as an optimization problem, grounding the design in mathematical mechanisms. We first theoretically derive quantization error and identify a key singular-value-dominated scaling mechanism, which mathematically proves the necessity of mix-precision quantization. We then model the quantization scheme as a 0/1 Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, which yields optimal bit-budget-constrained solutions without empirical assumptions. Furthermore, PrinMix integrates a Reconstruction Target Correction (RTC) method to compensate for errors from the $\mathbf{V}$-then-$\mathbf{U}$ sequential quantization process. Extensive experiments confirm PrinMix performs well: for 7B LLMs, PrinMix outperforms SOTA Delta-CoMe on challenging benchmarks by 22.3% on AIME2024 and 6.1% on GQA.
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