❌

Normal view

Combee: Scaling Prompt Learning for Self-Improving Language Model Agents

arXiv:2604.04247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in prompt learning allow large language model agents to acquire task-relevant knowledge from inference-time context without parameter changes. For example, existing methods (like ACE or GEPA) can learn system prompts to improve accuracy based on previous agent runs. However, these methods primarily focus on single-agent or low-parallelism settings. This fundamentally limits their ability to efficiently learn from a large set of collected agentic traces. It would be efficient and beneficial to run prompt learning in parallel to accommodate the growing trend of learning from many agentic traces or parallel agent executions. Yet without a principled strategy for scaling, current methods suffer from quality degradation with high parallelism. To improve both the efficiency and quality of prompt learning, we propose Combee, a novel framework to scale parallel prompt learning for self-improving agents. Combee speeds up learning and enables running many agents in parallel while learning from their aggregate traces without quality degradation. To achieve this, Combee leverages parallel scans and employs an augmented shuffle mechanism; Combee also introduces a dynamic batch size controller to balance quality and delay. Evaluations on AppWorld, Terminal-Bench, Formula, and FiNER demonstrate that Combee achieves up to 17x speedup over previous methods with comparable or better accuracy and equivalent cost.

ACT: Agentic Classification Tree

arXiv:2509.26433v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When used in high-stakes settings, AI systems are expected to produce decisions that are transparent, interpretable and auditable, a requirement increasingly expected by regulations. Decision trees such as CART provide clear and verifiable rules, but they are restricted to structured tabular data and cannot operate directly on unstructured inputs such as text. In practice, large language models (LLMs) are widely used for such data, yet prompting strategies such as chain-of-thought or prompt optimization still rely on free-form reasoning, limiting their ability to ensure trustworthy behaviors. We present the Agentic Classification Tree (ACT), which extends decision-tree methodology to unstructured inputs by formulating each split as a natural-language question, refined through impurity-based evaluation and LLM feedback via TextGrad. Experiments on text benchmarks show that ACT matches or surpasses prompting-based baselines while producing transparent and interpretable decision paths.

Cerebra: A Multidisciplinary AI Board for Multimodal Dementia Characterization and Risk Assessment

arXiv:2603.21597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern clinical practice increasingly depends on reasoning over heterogeneous, evolving, and incomplete patient data. Although recent advances in multimodal foundation models have improved performance on various clinical tasks, most existing models remain static, opaque, and poorly aligned with real-world clinical workflows. We present Cerebra, an interactive multi-agent AI team that coordinates specialized agents for EHR, clinical notes, and medical imaging analysis. These outputs are synthesized into a clinician-facing dashboard that combines visual analytics with a conversational interface, enabling clinicians to interrogate predictions and contextualize risk at the point of care. Cerebra supports privacy-preserving deployment by operating on structured representations and remains robust when modalities are incomplete. We evaluated Cerebra using a massive multi-institutional dataset spanning 3 million patients from four independent healthcare systems. Cerebra consistently outperformed both state-of-the-art single-modality models and large multimodal language model baselines. In dementia risk prediction, it achieved AUROCs up to 0.80, compared with 0.74 for the strongest single-modality model and 0.68 for language model baselines. For dementia diagnosis, it achieved an AUROC of 0.86, and for survival prediction, a C-index of 0.81. In a reader study with experienced physicians, Cerebra significantly improved expert performance, increasing accuracy by 17.5 percentage points in prospective dementia risk estimation. These results demonstrate Cerebra's potential for interpretable, robust decision support in clinical care.

Generalist biological artificial intelligence in modeling the language of life

Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 20 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03064-w

This Review discusses the promises and pitfalls of biological AI algorithms and presents a vision for generalist biological artificial intelligence, in which models can perform diverse tasks across biological domains.

A clinical environment simulator for dynamic AI evaluation

Nature Medicine, Published online: 12 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04252-6

The authors propose a framework for clinical AI evaluation within simulated digital hospital environments that capture the evolving constraints, and cascading effects, of clinical decisions.

HumanLM: Simulating Users with State Alignment Beats Response Imitation

arXiv:2603.03303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate how specific users respond to a given context, enabling more user-centric applications that rely on user feedback. However, existing user simulators mostly imitate surface-level patterns and language styles, which fail to reflect the underlying states of real users (e.g., beliefs and emotions). To address these limitations, we propose a novel training framework, HumanLM, which builds user simulators that accurately reflect real users. Our key insight is that, in addition to generating responses, the model should generate natural-language latent states that align with ground-truth responses through reinforcement learning. These latent states correspond to a set of psychologically grounded state dimensions that drive how real users respond. HumanLM further synthesizes these aligned latent states into responses that accurately represent real users. For extensive evaluation, we develop Humanual, a comprehensive benchmark for simulating real users based on public data. Humanual consists of six large-scale datasets with 26k users and 216k responses in total, spanning diverse tasks such as generating user responses to daily life issues, political blogs, and chat sessions with LLM assistants. Across datasets, HumanLM significantly outperforms alternative approaches, achieving an average relative improvement of 16.3% in alignment scores from an LLM judge. In a real-time simulation study with 111 participants, HumanLM achieves the highest similarity to real user responses and competitive human-likeness scores.
❌