Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 18 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03054-y

Solid tumors are sensitized to anti‑PD‑L1 immunotherapy by engineered E. coli to produce nitric oxide.

arXiv:2603.06739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesis in research code execution. Given a research repository, documentation, and a target execution setting, agents must construct an environment that successfully executes at runtime. Evaluations on diverse research repositories reveal a substantial gap in current SOTA agents, with failures dominated by incomplete dependency resolution and brittle version coupling. ResearchEnvBench provides a realistic testbed for advancing autonomous agents toward reproducible scientific research.

arXiv:2602.21534v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (ARL) has rapidly gained attention as a promising paradigm for training agents to solve complex, multi-step interactive tasks. Despite encouraging early results, ARL remains highly unstable, often leading to training collapse. This instability limits scalability to larger environments and longer interaction horizons, and constrains systematic exploration of algorithmic design choices. In this paper, we first propose ARLArena, a stable training recipe and systematic analysis framework that examines training stability in a controlled and reproducible setting. ARLArena first constructs a clean and standardized testbed. Then, we decompose policy gradient into four core design dimensions and assess the performance and stability of each dimension. Through this fine-grained analysis, we distill a unified perspective on ARL and propose SAMPO, a stable agentic policy optimization method designed to mitigate the dominant sources of instability in ARL. Empirically, SAMPO achieves consistently stable training and strong performance across diverse agentic tasks. Overall, this study provides a unifying policy gradient perspective for ARL and offers practical guidance for building stable and reproducible LLM-based agent training pipelines.

arXiv:2411.12876v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) organize computation as a discrete stack of layers whose parameters are independently stored and learned, with the number of layers fixed as an architectural hyperparameter. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: can network parameterization itself be modeled as a continuous dynamical system? We introduce Puppet-CNN, a framework that represents convolutional layer parameters as states evolving along a learned parameter flow governed by a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE). Under this formulation, layer parameters are generated through continuous evolution in parameter space, and the effective number of generated layers is determined by the integration horizon of the learned dynamics, which can be modulated by input complexity to enable input-adaptive computation. We validate this formulation on standard image classification benchmarks and demonstrate that continuous parameter dynamics can achieve competitive predictive performance while substantially reducing stored trainable parameters. These results suggest that viewing neural network parameterization through the lens of dynamical systems provides a structured and flexible design space for adaptive convolutional models.

arXiv:2411.15199v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion models typically generate data through a fixed denoising trajectory that is shared across all samples. However, generation targets can differ in complexity, suggesting that a single pre-defined diffusion process may not be optimal for every input. In this work, we investigate input-adaptive generative dynamics for diffusion models, where the generation process itself adapts to the conditions of each sample. Instead of relying on a fixed diffusion trajectory, the proposed framework allows the generative dynamics to adjust across inputs according to their generation requirements. To enable this behavior, we train the diffusion backbone under varying horizons and noise schedules, so that it can operate consistently under different input-adaptive trajectories. Experiments on conditional image generation show that diffusion trajectories can vary across inputs while maintaining generation quality and reducing the average number of sampling steps. These results provide a proof of the concept that diffusion processes can benefit from input-adaptive generative dynamics rather than relying on a single fixed trajectory.

arXiv:2603.03781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory is fundamental for personalized agents capable of accumulating knowledge, reasoning over user experiences, and adapting across time. However, existing memory benchmarks primarily target declarative memory, specifically semantic and episodic types, where all information is explicitly presented in dialogues. In contrast, real-world actions are also governed by non-declarative memory, including habitual and procedural types, and need to be inferred from diverse digital traces. To bridge this gap, we introduce Lifebench, which features densely connected, long-horizon event simulation. It pushes AI agents beyond simple recall, requiring the integration of declarative and non-declarative memory reasoning across diverse and temporally extended contexts. Building such a benchmark presents two key challenges: ensuring data quality and scalability. We maintain data quality by employing real-world priors, including anonymized social surveys, map APIs, and holiday-integrated calendars, thus enforcing fidelity, diversity and behavioral rationality within the dataset. Towards scalability, we draw inspiration from cognitive science and structure events according to their partonomic hierarchy; enabling efficient parallel generation while maintaining global coherence. Performance results show that top-tier, state-of-the-art memory systems reach just 55.2\% accuracy, highlighting the inherent difficulty of long-horizon retrieval and multi-source integration within our proposed benchmark. The dataset and data synthesis code are available at https://github.com/1754955896/LifeBench.

arXiv:2603.03482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to down-stream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesize new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

arXiv:2603.02220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) remains a challenging problem due to the intricate entanglement of intraperiod-fluctuations and interperiod-trends. While recent advances have attempted to reshape 1D sequences into 2D period-phase representations, they suffer from two principal limitations.Firstly, treating reshaped tensors as static images results in a topological mismatch, as standard spatial operators sever chronological continuity at grid boundaries. Secondly, relying on uniform fixed-size representations allocates modeling capacity inefficiently and fails to provide the adaptive resolution required for compressible, non-stationary temporal patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce TimeGS, a novel framework that fundamentally shifts the forecasting paradigm from regression to 2D generative rendering. By reconceptualizing the future sequence as a continuous latent surface, TimeGS utilizes the inherent anisotropy of Gaussian kernels to adaptively model complex variations with flexible geometric alignment. To realize this, we introduce a Multi-Basis Gaussian Kernel Generation (MB-GKG) block that synthesizes kernels from a fixed dictionary to stabilize optimization, and a Multi-Period Chronologically Continuous Rasterization (MP-CCR) block that enforces strict temporal continuity across periodic boundaries. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that TimeGS attains state-of-the-art performance.

arXiv:2602.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) are predominantly restricted to 2D perception, relying on RGB video and monaural audio. This design choice introduces a fundamental dimensionality mismatch that precludes reliable source localization and spatial reasoning in complex 3D environments. We address this limitation by presenting JAEGER, a framework that extends AV-LLMs to 3D space, to enable joint spatial grounding and reasoning through the integration of RGB-D observations and multi-channel first-order ambisonics. A core contribution of our work is the neural intensity vector (Neural IV), a learned spatial audio representation that encodes robust directional cues to enhance direction-of-arrival estimation, even in adverse acoustic scenarios with overlapping sources. To facilitate large-scale training and systematic evaluation, we propose SpatialSceneQA, a benchmark of 61k instruction-tuning samples curated from simulated physical environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses 2D-centric baselines across diverse spatial perception and reasoning tasks, underscoring the necessity of explicit 3D modelling for advancing AI in physical environments. Our source code, pre-trained model checkpoints and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

arXiv:2602.18702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long video understanding is challenging due to rich and complicated multimodal clues in long temporal range.Current methods adopt reasoning to improve the model's ability to analyze complex video clues in long videos via text-form reasoning.However,the existing literature suffers from the fact that the text-only reasoning under fixed video context may exacerbate hallucinations since detailed crucial clues are often ignored under limited video context length due to the temporal redundancy of long videos.To address this gap,we propose Video-TwG,a curriculum reinforced framework that employs a novel Think-with-Grounding paradigm,enabling video LLMs to actively decide when to perform on-demand grounding during interleaved text-video reasoning, selectively zooming into question-relevant clips only when necessary.Video-TwG can be trained end-to-end in a straightforward manner, without relying on complex auxiliary modules or heavily annotated reasoning tracesIn detail,we design a Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy, where the model first learns think-with-grounding behavior on a small short-video GQA dataset with grounding labels,and then scales to diverse general QA data with videos of diverse domains to encourage generalization. Further, to handle complex think-with-grounding reasoning for various kinds of data,we propose TwG-GRPO algorithm which features the fine-grained grounding reward, self-confirmed pseudo reward and accuracy-gated mechanism.Finally,we propose to construct a new TwG-51K dataset that facilitates training. Experiments on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and MLVU show that Video-TwG consistently outperforms strong LVU baselines.Further ablation validates the necessity of our Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy and shows our TwG-GRPO better leverages diverse unlabeled data to improve grounding quality and reduce redundant groundings without sacrificing QA performance.

arXiv:2602.07849v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on edge devices is challenged by resource constraints and performance degradation under distribution shifts. While test-time adaptation (TTA) can counteract such shifts, existing methods are too resource-intensive for on-device deployment. To address this challenge, we propose LQA, a lightweight, quantized-adaptive framework for VLMs that combines a modality-aware quantization strategy with gradient-free test-time adaptation. We introduce Selective Hybrid Quantization (SHQ) and a quantized, gradient-free adaptation mechanism to enable robust and efficient VLM deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Experiments across both synthetic and real-world distribution shifts show that LQA improves overall adaptation performance by 4.5\%, uses less memory than full-precision models, and significantly outperforms gradient-based TTA methods, achieving up to 19.9$\times$ lower memory usage across seven open-source datasets. These results demonstrate that LQA offers a practical pathway for robust, privacy-preserving, and efficient VLM deployment on edge devices.