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PRAISE: Prefix-Based Rollout Reuse in Agentic Search Training

arXiv:2604.03675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic search, large language models (LLMs) are trained to perform multi-turn retrieval and reasoning for complex tasks such as multi-hop question answering (QA). However, current search-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods suffer from two core limitations: expensive long-horizon rollouts are under-utilized during training, and supervision is typically available only at the final answer, resulting in severe reward sparsity. We present Prefix-based Rollout reuse for Agentic search with Intermediate Step rEwards (PRAISE), a framework for improving both data efficiency and credit assignment in agentic search training. Given a complete search trajectory, PRAISE extracts prefix states at different search turns, elicits intermediate answers from them, and uses these prefixes both to construct additional training trajectories and to derive step-level rewards from performance differences across prefixes. Our method uses a single shared model for both search policy learning and prefix answer evaluation, enabling joint optimization without extra human annotations or a separate reward model. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks show that PRAISE consistently improves performance over strong baselines.

SoLA: Leveraging Soft Activation Sparsity and Low-Rank Decomposition for Large Language Model Compression

arXiv:2604.03258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but the billion-scale parameters pose deployment challenges. Although existing methods attempt to reduce the scale of LLMs, they require either special hardware support or expensive post-training to maintain model quality. To facilitate efficient and affordable model slimming, we propose a novel training-free compression method for LLMs, named "SoLA", which leverages \textbf{So}ft activation sparsity and \textbf{L}ow-r\textbf{A}nk decomposition. SoLA can identify and retain a minority of components significantly contributing to inference, while compressing the majority through low-rank decomposition, based on our analysis of the activation pattern in the feed-forward network (FFN) of modern LLMs. To alleviate the decomposition loss, SoLA is equipped with an adaptive component-wise low-rank allocation strategy to assign appropriate truncation positions for different weight matrices. We conduct extensive experiments on LLaMA-2-7B/13B/70B and Mistral-7B models across a variety of benchmarks. SoLA exhibits remarkable improvement in both language modeling and downstream task accuracy without post-training. For example, with a 30\% compression rate on the LLaMA-2-70B model, SoLA surpasses the state-of-the-art method by reducing perplexity from 6.95 to 4.44 and enhancing downstream task accuracy by 10\%.

Safe Decentralized Operation of EV Virtual Power Plant with Limited Network Visibility via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.03278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As power systems advance toward net-zero targets, behind-the-meter renewables are driving rapid growth in distributed energy resources (DERs). Virtual power plants (VPPs) increasingly coordinate these resources to support power distribution network (PDN) operation, with EV charging stations (EVCSs) emerging as a key asset due to their strong impact on local voltages. However, in practice, VPPs must make operational decisions with only partial visibility of PDN states, relying on limited, aggregated information shared by the distribution system operator. This work proposes a safety-enhanced VPP framework for coordinating multiple EVCSs under such realistic information constraints to ensure voltage security while maintaining economic operation. We develop Transformer-assisted Lagrangian Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (TL-MAPPO), in which EVCS agents learn decentralized charging policies via centralized training with Lagrangian regularization to enforce voltage and demand-satisfaction constraints. A transformer-based embedding layer deployed on each EVCS agent captures temporal correlations among prices, loads, and charging demand to improve decision quality. Experiments on a realistic 33-bus PDN show that the proposed framework reduces voltage violations by approximately 45% and operational costs by approximately 10% compared to representative multi-agent DRL baselines, highlighting its potential for practical VPP deployment.

RDFace: A Benchmark Dataset for Rare Disease Facial Image Analysis under Extreme Data Scarcity and Phenotype-Aware Synthetic Generation

arXiv:2604.03454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rare diseases often manifest with distinctive facial phenotypes in children, offering valuable diagnostic cues for clinicians and AI-assisted screening systems. However, progress in this field is severely limited by the scarcity of curated, ethically sourced facial data and the high similarity among phenotypes across different conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce RDFace, a curated benchmark dataset comprising 456 pediatric facial images spanning 103 rare genetic conditions (average 4.4 samples per condition). Each ethically verified image is paired with standardized metadata. RDFace enables the development and evaluation of data-efficient AI models for rare disease diagnosis under real-world low-data constraints. We benchmark multiple pretrained vision backbones using cross-validation and explore synthetic augmentation with DreamBooth and FastGAN. Generated images are filtered via facial landmark similarity to maintain phenotype fidelity and merged with real data, improving diagnostic accuracy by up to 13.7% in ultra-low-data regimes. To assess semantic validity, phenotype descriptions generated by a vision-language model from real and synthetic images achieve a report similarity score of 0.84. RDFace establishes a transparent, benchmark-ready dataset for equitable rare disease AI research and presents a scalable framework for evaluating both diagnostic performance and the integrity of synthetic medical imagery.

Unveiling Language Routing Isolation in Multilingual MoE Models for Interpretable Subnetwork Adaptation

arXiv:2604.03592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing a phenomenon we term Language Routing Isolation, in which high- and low-resource languages tend to activate largely disjoint expert sets. Through layer-stratified analysis, we further show that routing patterns exhibit a layer-wise convergence-divergence pattern across model depth. Building on these findings, we propose RISE (Routing Isolation-guided Subnetwork Enhancement), a framework that exploits routing isolation to identify and adapt language-specific expert subnetworks. RISE applies a tripartite selection strategy, using specificity scores to identify language-specific experts in shallow and deep layers and overlap scores to select universal experts in middle layers. By training only the selected subnetwork while freezing all other parameters, RISE substantially improves low-resource language performance while preserving capabilities in other languages. Experiments on 10 languages demonstrate that RISE achieves target-language F1 gains of up to 10.85% with minimal cross-lingual degradation.

Xpertbench: Expert Level Tasks with Rubrics-Based Evaluation

arXiv:2604.02368v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit plateauing performance on conventional benchmarks, a pivotal challenge persists: evaluating their proficiency in complex, open-ended tasks characterizing genuine expert-level cognition. Existing frameworks suffer from narrow domain coverage, reliance on generalist tasks, or self-evaluation biases. To bridge this gap, we present XpertBench, a high-fidelity benchmark engineered to assess LLMs across authentic professional domains. XpertBench consists of 1,346 meticulously curated tasks across 80 categories, spanning finance, healthcare, legal services, education, and dual-track research (STEM and Humanities). These tasks are derived from over 1,000 submissions by domain experts--including researchers from elite institutions and practitioners with extensive clinical or industrial experience--ensuring superior ecological validity. Each task uses detailed rubrics with mostly 15-40 weighted checkpoints to assess professional rigor. To facilitate scalable yet human-aligned assessment, we introduce ShotJudge, a novel evaluation paradigm that employs LLM judges calibrated with expert few-shot exemplars to mitigate self-rewarding biases. Our empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals a pronounced performance ceiling: even leading models achieve a peak success rate of only ~66%, with a mean score around 55%. Models also exhibit domain-specific divergence, showing non-overlapping strengths in quantitative reasoning versus linguistic synthesis.. These findings underscore a significant "expert-gap" in current AI systems and establish XpertBench as a critical instrument for navigating the transition from general-purpose assistants to specialized professional collaborators.

XModBench: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Capabilities and Consistency in Omni-Language Models

arXiv:2510.15148v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify audio, vision, and text understanding within a single framework. While existing benchmarks primarily evaluate general cross-modal question-answering ability, it remains unclear whether OLLMs achieve modality-invariant reasoning or exhibit modality-specific biases. We introduce XModBench, a large-scale tri-modal benchmark explicitly designed to measure cross-modal consistency. XModBench comprises 60,828 multiple-choice questions spanning five task families and systematically covers all six modality compositions in question-answer pairs, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of an OLLM's modality-invariant reasoning, modality disparity, and directional imbalance. Experiments show that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, (i) struggles with spatial and temporal reasoning, achieving less than 60% accuracy, (ii) reveals persistent modality disparities, with performance dropping substantially when the same semantic content is conveyed through audio rather than text, and (iii) shows systematic directional imbalance, exhibiting lower consistency when vision serves as context compared to text. These findings indicate that current OLLMs remain far from truly modality-invariant reasoning and position XModBench as a fundamental diagnostic tool for evaluating and improving cross-modal competence. All data and evaluation tools will be available at https://xingruiwang.github.io/projects/XModBench/.

Explainable Token-level Noise Filtering for LLM Fine-tuning Datasets

arXiv:2602.14536v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen remarkable advancements, achieving state-of-the-art results in diverse applications. Fine-tuning, an important step for adapting LLMs to specific downstream tasks, typically involves further training on corresponding datasets. However, a fundamental discrepancy exists between current fine-tuning datasets and the token-level optimization mechanism of LLMs: most datasets are designed at the sentence-level, which introduces token-level noise, causing negative influence to final performance. In this paper, we propose XTF, an explainable token-level noise filtering framework. XTF decomposes the complex and subtle contributions of token-level data to the fine-tuning process into three distinct and explicit attributes (reasoning importance, knowledge novelty, and task relevance), which can be assessed using scoring methods, and then masks the gradients of selected noisy tokens accordingly to optimize the performance of fine-tuned LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on three representative downstream tasks (math, code and medicine) across 7 mainstream LLMs. The results demonstrate that XTF can significantly improve downstream performance by up to 13.7% compared to regular fine-tuning. Our work highlights the importance of token-level dataset optimization, and demonstrates the potential of strategies based on attribute decomposition for explaining complex training mechanisms.

Elevation of Liver Elastic Value Following Radiofrequency Ablation Reflected Neutrophils Mediated Abscopal Effect in Liver Cancer

JHEP Rep. 2026 Mar 23:101824. doi: 10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality globally. Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a widely used treatment for HCC, but its efficacy is often limited by tumor relapse. Neutrophils, serve as a double-edged sword in tumor immunology, have recently been implicated in anti-tumor immunity post-RFA. Shear wave elastography (SWE) is a non-invasive examination for liver tissue, and associated with immune response. This study investigates the correlation between dynamic change of SWE values and neutrophils response following RFA, and explores potential adjuvant strategies for RFA.

METHODS: We conducted a comprehensive analysis using both clinical data from patients undergoing RFA (n=102) and experimental studies in mouse models (n=4-6 per group). Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and multi-omics analyses including multiplex immunofluorescence staining and flow cytometric analysis were performed to identify neutrophil subsets. To assess the therapeutic potential of neutrophils-activating therapy for enhancing anti-tumor immunity post-RFA, we tested CD40 agonist in combination with RFA in preclinical models.

RESULTS: We noticed that rising liver SWE values following RFA were significantly associated with reduce relapse (n=102, p<0.001), and demonstrated that this phenomenon was linked to the inflammatory environment induced by the infiltration of neutrophils (2.5-fold increase, p<0.001). scRNA-seq analysis identified neutrophil subsets characterized by high expression of interferon-stimulated genes, which exhibited potent anti-tumor activity via nitric oxide. Importantly, treatment with CD40 agonist significantly augmented this immune response, leading to reduced tumor growth in mice (149.6±38.12 mm3 vs 23.92±4.43 mm3, p=0.008).

CONCLUSIONS: We linked clinical features to neutrophil-mediated immunity post-RFA. Neutrophil-activating therapy like CD40 agonists may prevent HCC relapse after RFA.

PMID:41881314 | DOI:10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824

Vision-DeepResearch: Incentivizing DeepResearch Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.22060v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a broad range of vision tasks. However, constrained by the capacity of their internal world knowledge, prior work has proposed augmenting MLLMs by ``reasoning-then-tool-call'' for visual and textual search engines to obtain substantial gains on tasks requiring extensive factual information. However, these approaches typically define multimodal search in a naive setting, assuming that a single full-level or entity-level image query and few text query suffices to retrieve the key evidence needed to answer the question, which is unrealistic in real-world scenarios with substantial visual noise. Moreover, they are often limited in the reasoning depth and search breadth, making it difficult to solve complex questions that require aggregating evidence from diverse visual and textual sources. Building on this, we propose Vision-DeepResearch, which proposes one new multimodal deep-research paradigm, i.e., performs multi-turn, multi-entity and multi-scale visual and textual search to robustly hit real-world search engines under heavy noise. Our Vision-DeepResearch supports dozens of reasoning steps and hundreds of engine interactions, while internalizing deep-research capabilities into the MLLM via cold-start supervision and RL training, resulting in a strong end-to-end multimodal deep-research MLLM. It substantially outperforming existing multimodal deep-research MLLMs, and workflows built on strong closed-source foundation model such as GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude-4-Sonnet. The code will be released in https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.

The Current Landscape of Remote Digital Symptom Monitoring for Patients With Lung Cancer: Scoping Review

Background: Remote digital symptom monitoring systems (rSMS) have been increasingly used in recent years to monitor symptoms, health-related quality of life, and other patient-reported outcomes in lung cancer. Previous studies have demonstrated variability in study design, types of rSMS, and outcomes used to assess benefits for patients and health care systems. However, there remains a lack of synthesized evidence pertaining to the similarities and differences among rSMS, including their theoretical underpinnings, key functional components, and reported benefits and limitations. Objective: This review aims to identify and synthesize existing research to map the current landscape of rSMS in lung cancer, including the theoretical foundations for its development and implementation, as well as its types, applications, and outcomes. Methods: This scoping review followed the Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review framework and adhered to the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines. A comprehensive literature search was conducted from database inception to October 16, 2025, across 7 English-language databases and 3 Chinese-language databases (CNKI, WanFang, and SinoMed). Eligible studies were peer-reviewed original research articles examining rSMS among adults with lung cancer. Data were independently screened and extracted by 2 reviewers, with discrepancies resolved by a third reviewer. Quantitative data were extracted using a standardized form and synthesized descriptively. Content analysis was performed to analyze the qualitative data. Results: A total of 41 studies involving 11,765 patients and 85 health care providers were included. Twelve studies focused exclusively on advanced-stage lung cancer. Participants were generally middle-aged to older adults (mean ages 51‐74 y), with male participants typically comprising 30% to 50% across studies. Most studies were conducted in the United States (n=19). We identified 32 patient-reported outcome measures that were used either as core rSMS components or as study outcomes. Four common functional modules were observed across rSMS: data collection, data analysis, response systems, and patient education. Qualitative evidence was limited; the most frequently reported benefit was the promotion of patient-centered care. Health care providers raised concerns about uncertain effectiveness and increased workload. Conclusions: This scoping review highlights the promising role of rSMS in lung cancer care and provides a structured map of current evidence. It adds to prior literature in 3 ways. First, it summarizes how and how often theoretical frameworks are reported and applied in rSMS development and implementation. Second, it synthesizes and categorizes four common functional modules across systems. Third, it differentiates measures embedded as rSMS components from those used as evaluation outcomes. These contributions clarify current practices and methodological gaps and underscore the importance of theory-informed design, functional clarity, and stakeholder engagement in the development of patient-centered, clinically meaningful, and sustainable rSMS platforms. Trial Registration: OSF Registries 9637t; https://osf.io/9637t/overview

Effects of multisensory stimulation based on immersive virtual reality in postoperative neuropsychiatric recovery after gynecological laparoscopy

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 24 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02515-7

Effects of multisensory stimulation based on immersive virtual reality in postoperative neuropsychiatric recovery after gynecological laparoscopy

Deciphering lung adenocarcinoma heterogeneity: a multi-omics approach reveals nuclear division fibroblasts as prognosticators and therapeutic targets

J Transl Med. 2026 Mar 20. doi: 10.1186/s12967-026-08022-3. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is a predominant contributor to cancer‑related mortality globally. Lung‑associated fibroblasts (LAFs) are intricately linked to tumorigenesis and the tumor microenvironment (TME), but their heterogeneity and prognostic relevance in LUAD remain incompletely understood. This study aimed to systematically characterize LAF subsets across the spectrum of pulmonary disease, identify LAF subpopulations associated with LUAD prognosis, and construct a robust LAF‑based prognostic signature.

METHODS: We employed a multi-omics approach, leveraging bulk RNA data of 2719 patients from 19 LUAD cohorts, single-cell RNA (scRNA) sequencing data of 368,904 cells from 93 samples, and spatial transcriptomics data of 15,673 spots from 6 samples to characterize the landscape of LAFs across various stages of pulmonary disease. We employed multiple advanced machine learning algorithms to construct and validate a robust nuclear division LAFs (nLAFs) risk score (nLRS) prediction model.

RESULTS: We observed a dynamic and gradual increase in the proportion of LAFs during the progression of LUAD. Throughout this process, we identified nine LAFs subtypes and found nLAFs are significantly associated with the prognosis of LUAD. Utilizing 100 machine learning algorithm combinations and integrating nLAFs marker genes, we developed a five gene based nLRS model, which demonstrated superior performance than other 49 published models in predicting clinical outcomes for LUAD. Additionally, we observed distinct biological functions and immune cell infiltration in the TME between high and low nLRS groups. Exploratory analysis of pan-cancer immunotherapy cohorts suggested that patients with high nLRS scores may exhibit resistance to immunotherapy in some cancer types, but prospective validation in LUAD-specific cohorts is required. Conversely, high nLRS patients displayed increased sensitivity to chemotherapeutic and targeted therapies in preclinical models.

CONCLUSION: Our study introduces a candidate five-gene signature derived from nLAFs that may serve as a robust prognostic biomarker pending prospective validation, offering insights into personalized therapeutic strategies for LUAD patients.

PMID:41862916 | DOI:10.1186/s12967-026-08022-3

Risk-adaptive therapy guided by dynamic ctDNA in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Nature, Published online: 11 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10244-w

A clinical trial testing whether monitoring ctDNA clearance during treatment for nasopharyngeal cancer could be used to inform decisions about an individual’s subsequent therapeutic programme shows promising results.

Annealed Co-Generation: Disentangling Variables via Progressive Pairwise Modeling

arXiv:2603.06615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For multivariate co-generation in scientific applications, we advocate pairwise block rather than joint modeling of all variables. This design mitigates the computational burden and data imbalance. To this end, we propose an Annealed Co-Generation (ACG) framework that replaces high-dimensional diffusion modeling with a low-dimensional diffusion model, which enables multivariate co-generation by composing pairwise variable generations. We first train an unconditional diffusion model over causal variables that are disentangled into pairs. At inference time, we recover the joint distribution by coupling these pairwise models through shared common variables, enabling coherent multivariate generation without any additional training. By employing a three-stage annealing process-Consensus, Heating, and Cooling-our method enforces consistency across shared common variables and progressively constrains each pairwise data distribution to lie on a learnable manifold, while maintaining high likelihood within each pair. We demonstrate the framework's flexibility and efficacy on two distinct scientific tasks: flow-field completion and antibody generation. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Evo: Autoregressive-Diffusion Large Language Models with Evolving Balance

arXiv:2603.06617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce \textbf{Evo}, a duality latent trajectory model that bridges autoregressive (AR) and diffusion-based language generation within a continuous evolutionary generative framework. Rather than treating AR decoding and diffusion generation as separate paradigms, Evo reconceptualizes text generation as a latent flow: each token is associated with a vector-valued embedding that evolves over a progression variable $t_i \in [0, 1]$, indicating its semantic maturity. Low $t_i$ values correspond to confident AR-like refinement, while high values invoke diffusion-style planning, allowing the model to adaptively balance AR and diffusion based on uncertainty. Theoretically, we show that both AR and diffusion models emerge as discretizations of a shared probability flow, and we derive Evo's training objective from a unified variational ELBO. The model is implemented as a time-conditioned Transformer governed by a shared vector field, trained end-to-end to jointly infer latent codes and their progression times. During decoding, Evo performs efficient, semantics-aware refinement, achieving high-quality outputs without sacrificing speed. Empirically, Evo 8B achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive results on 15 diverse benchmarks, including reasoning (GSM8K, ARC-C), code generation (HumanEval, MBPP), and general language understanding, while maintaining fast inference speed. Our results demonstrate that Evo delivers a new paradigm for LLM design with strong generation quality, robust symbolic reasoning, and decoding efficiency.

Distilling and Adapting: A Topology-Aware Framework for Zero-Shot Interaction Prediction in Multiplex Biological Networks

arXiv:2603.06618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiplex Biological Networks (MBNs), which represent multiple interaction types between entities, are crucial for understanding complex biological systems. Yet, existing methods often inadequately model multiplexity, struggle to integrate structural and sequence information, and face difficulties in zero-shot prediction for unseen entities with no prior neighbourhood information. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework for zero-shot interaction prediction in MBNs by leveraging context-aware representation learning and knowledge distillation. Our approach leverages domain-specific foundation models to generate enriched embeddings, introduces a topology-aware graph tokenizer to capture multiplexity and higher-order connectivity, and employs contrastive learning to align embeddings across modalities. A teacher-student distillation strategy further enables robust zero-shot generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in interaction prediction for MBNs, providing a powerful tool for exploring various biological interactions and advancing personalized therapeutics.

CCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Complex Constraints, Control Flows, and Real-World Cases

arXiv:2603.07886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enhancing the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex instructions is critical for their deployment in real-world applications. However, existing evaluation methods often oversimplify instruction complexity as a mere additive combination of atomic constraints, failing to adequately capture the high-dimensional complexity arising from the intricate interplay of content and format, logical workflow control, and real-world applications. This leads to a significant gap between current evaluation practices and practical demands. To bridge this gap, we introduce CCR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to assess LLMs' adherence to complex instructions. CCR-Bench is characterized by: (1) deep entanglement of content and formatting requirements in task specifications; (2) instructions that involve intricate task decomposition, conditional reasoning, and procedural planning; and (3) evaluation samples derived entirely from real-world industrial scenarios. Extensive experiments on CCR-Bench demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models exhibit substantial performance deficiencies, clearly quantifying the gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of realworld instruction understanding. We believe that CCR-Bench offers a more rigorous and realistic evaluation framework, advancing the development of LLMs toward the next generation of models capable of understanding and executing complex tasks in industrial applications.
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