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Received — 15 September 2026 ⏭

Toward Robust Personalized Alignment for LLMs: Mitigating Persona Drift in Multi-Turn Dialogue

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Youyuan Zhang · Siyuan Li · Fangming Liu · Jing Li
14 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2609.12373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persona drift remains a central challenge for personalized language models, as user profiles evolve over long interactions rather than remain permanently fixed. Models must therefore revise persistent persona states when preferences genuinely change, while avoiding updates driven by transient, ambiguous, or unresolved observations. We propose CORE, which separates turn-local evidence from persistent persona-state revision and selectively updates grounded user preferences through uncertainty-aware belief revision. We also introduce PERSIST, a held-out post-anchor benchmark for persona-state robustness under sequential interaction stress, covering ambiguity, conflict, and controlled social influence. Across ALOE, PersonaChat, and PERSIST, CORE improves personalized alignment and robustness, with complementary gains in normalized closed-slot state fidelity. Human evaluation and mechanistic controls further support explicit update control beyond stronger generation or persistent memory alone.

Beyond the Query: Do Retrieval Signals Improve Adaptive Multimodal RAG Routing?

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Qiaomu Li · Qiuyuan Zhang · Nong Ming
14 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2609.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive RAG often uses retrieval-time signals to decide whether another retrieval, reranking, or multimodal step should run. We ask whether these signals add routing value once the query itself is already known. Across document, audio, and video RAG, we compare matched query-only and query+retrieval routers while holding the optional actions, router family, training procedure, and evaluation fixed. On the held-out final evaluation, adding the tested retrieval signals does not produce a reliable routing improvement over the query-only baseline. Some retrieval signals are associated with whether a later step will help, but that predictability does not consistently lead to bet- ter RUN/SKIP decisions. The main lesson is therefore methodological: retrieval-state features should not be credited with routing value unless they improve over a matched query-only control. Our results do not show that routing or retrieval state is generally useless; they show that the incremental value of retrieval signals must be demonstrated rather than assumed.
Received — 13 September 2026 ⏭

Key Experimental Therapeutics and Knowledge Gaps in Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatohepatitis (MASH)

✇Omics in Hepatocellular
By: Hanyang Liu · Mingyuan Zhang · Frank Tacke
10 September 2026 at 18:00

Drug Des Devel Ther. 2026 Sep 5;20:543657. doi: 10.2147/DDDT.S543657. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) is not solely a disorder of hepatocellular lipid accumulation, but a multicellular disease driven by coordinated metabolic stress, sterile inflammation, fibrogenesis, and niche remodeling. Recent therapeutic progress with the provisional approval of resmetirom and semaglutide has validated MASH as a tractable clinical target. However, many experimental agents have shown limited or inconsistent efficacy, particularly for regression of hepatic fibrosis or cirrhosis, reflecting the biological heterogeneity and dynamic cellular architecture of the disease. Distinct from conventional pathway- or drug class-based reviews, we summarize emerging therapeutics through a liver cell-centered framework, integrating hepatocyte-directed metabolic therapies, immune-cell modulation, hepatic stellate cell-targeted antifibrotic strategies, niche-directed approaches involving liver sinusoidal endothelial cells and cholangiocytes, systemic multi-cell modulators, and precision-delivery technologies. We further compare how these interventions reshape pathogenic communication among hepatic and extrahepatic compartments, while emphasizing unresolved challenges in drug target selection, cellular specificity, disease-stage dependency, safety, and patient stratification. This perspective emphasizes the need to move from isolated pathway targeting toward cell- and network-informed therapeutic strategies supported by spatial multi-omics, human-relevant models, and precision delivery.

PMID:42719321 | PMC:PMC13557022 | DOI:10.2147/DDDT.S543657

Received — 10 September 2026 ⏭

Talking to Itself While Coding: What Makes Comments Help Code Generation?

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Dangfeng Pan · Zhensu Sun · Cenyuan Zhang · David Lo · Xiaoning Du
10 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2609.09242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate natural-language comments while writing code, and these comments become part of the context used to generate the code that follows. However, it remains unclear which properties of comments affect code-generation performance. We study this question through observational analyses and controlled interventions. On LiveCodeBench, neither comment frequency nor broad comment intent reliably predicts pass@1. We then prefill weaker recipient models with comment blocks written by stronger source models, allowing us to separate comment surface form from the solution content they convey. Comments from source solutions that pass the tests raise recipient pass@1 by 17.2% on average. In contrast, comments describing failed solutions provide no reliable gain, while comments written for a different problem reduce pass@1 by 20.8%. Finally, across a wide range of models and prompt variants, most recipient models show no significant recovery of the external-comment gain, and the best case recovers only 24%. These results show that comments help code generation not merely because they are comments, but because they can provide correct solution content that prompting cannot reliably elicit.

RAU: Reference-based Anatomical Understanding with Vision Language Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yiwei Li · Yikang Liu · Jiaqi Guo · Lin Zhao · Zheyuan Zhang · Xiao Chen · Boris Mailhe · Ankush Mukherjee · Terrence Chen · Shanhui Sun
10 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2509.22404v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Anatomical understanding, which is the ability to identify, localize, or segment anatomical structures, is critical in medical image analysis; however, its progress is constrained by the scarcity of expert-labeled data. A promising remedy is to leverage an annotated reference image to guide the interpretation of an unlabeled target. Although recent vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit non-trivial visual reasoning, their reference-based understanding and fine-grained localization remain limited. We introduce RAU, a framework for reference-based anatomical understanding with VLMs. We first show that a VLM learns to identify anatomical regions through relative spatial reasoning between reference and target images, trained on a moderately sized dataset. We validate this capability through visual question answering (VQA) and bounding box prediction. Next, we demonstrate that the VLM-derived spatial cues can be seamlessly integrated with the fine-grained segmentation capability of SAM2, enabling localization and pixel-level segmentation of small anatomical regions, such as vessel segments. Across two in-distribution and two out-of-distribution datasets, RAU consistently outperforms a SAM2 fine-tuning baseline using the same memory setup, yielding more accurate segmentations and more reliable localization. More importantly, its generalization ability to unseen modalities makes it scalable to unseen datasets, a property crucial for medical image applications. To the best of our knowledge, RAU is the first to explore the capability of VLMs for reference-based identification, localization, and segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images. Its promising performance highlights the potential of VLM-driven approaches for anatomical understanding in automated clinical workflows.
Received — 27 May 2026 ⏭

SHP1 expression in tumor-associated dendritic cells drives immunoevasion via impairing CD8<sup>+</sup> memory T cell responses

✇Oncogenesis - nature.com science feeds
By: Gao Yu · Yusheng Liang · Weize Yu · Gaojian Zhuang · Bing Li · Jiayi Huang · Jinghao Zheng · Xuanqi Yang · Leyun Wen · Xiaoming Tan · Yuan Zhang
15 May 2026 at 08:00

Oncogenesis, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41389-026-00627-z

SHP1 expression in tumor-associated dendritic cells drives immunoevasion via impairing CD8+ memory T cell responses

Machine learning-based identification of key genes underlying sex differences in hepatocellular carcinoma and targeted drug screening

✇Omics in Gastric
By: Zhen Wang · Jinghua Ning · Hongyuan Zhang · Qingfen Ruan · Yanhong Zhao · Run Qu · Congcong Lv · Yutong Wu · Weidong Liu · Xiaoyin Yang · Ziming Li · Yi Liang · Yuzhe Zhang
13 May 2026 at 18:00

Biomed Rep. 2026 Apr 24;24(6):74. doi: 10.3892/br.2026.2147. eCollection 2026 Jun.

ABSTRACT

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) shows a marked predominance in men, yet the molecular basis for this sex disparity remains unclear. The present study leveraged multi-omics data and machine learning algorithms to identify key genes associated with sex-specific differences in HCC and to screen for putative candidate compounds, aiming to provide new insights for sex-specific therapy. The mRNA expression data of male and female patients with HCC and paracancerous tissues were obtained from the GEO and TCGA databases. To mitigate overfitting, data were partitioned into independent training and testing sets. Candidate genes were screened by differential expression analysis and weighted gene co-expression network analysis. A total of four complementary algorithms, random forest, support vector machines, generalized linear models and extreme gradient boosting were used to identify key genes with high predictive capability. CYP17A1 and IRX3 were identified as the top differentially expressed core genes associated with HCC in men. Pan-cancer analysis showed that CYP17A1 was lowly expressed in the majority of tumors, but significantly highly expressed in HCC, rectal adenocarcinoma and gastric cancer (P<0.001). Functional cell-based assays showed that knockout of CYP17A1 inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion ability of HCC cells (P<0.001). Immunohistochemistry showed that CYP17A1 protein expression was significantly increased in HCC tissues from male patients when compared with that in paracancerous tissues (P<0.001), whereas there was no significant difference in female patient tissues (P>0.05). Notably, while IRX3 was identified computationally, its functional role remains to be experimentally validated. Molecular docking predicted a potential interaction between the natural compound Saikosaponin A and the CYP17A1 protein, and cellular assays revealed that it dose-dependently inhibits HCC cell malignant phenotypes. The present study suggests that CYP17A1 is associated with sex differences in HCC, potentially via the androgen signaling axis. Furthermore, IRX3 emerges as a novel hypothesis-generating candidate gene. Finally, the findings of the present study highlight Saikosaponin A as a putative therapeutic candidate for male patients with HCC, warranting further target-dependency investigations.

PMID:42125766 | PMC:PMC13158723 | DOI:10.3892/br.2026.2147

Received — 8 April 2026 ⏭

Cardinality Estimation for High Dimensional Similarity Queries with Adaptive Bucket Probing

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zhonghan Chen · Qintian Guo · Ruiyuan Zhang · Xiaofang Zhou
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.04603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of cardinality estimation for similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. Our goal is to design a framework that is lightweight, easy to construct, and capable of providing accurate estimates with satisfying online efficiency. We leverage locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to partition the vector space while preserving distance proximity. Building on this, we adopt the principles of classical multi-probe LSH to adaptively explore neighboring buckets, accounting for distance thresholds of varying magnitudes. To improve online efficiency, we employ progressive sampling to reduce the number of distance computations and utilize asymmetric distance computation in product quantization to accelerate distance calculations in high-dimensional spaces. In addition to handling static datasets, our framework includes updating algorithm designed to efficiently support large-scale dynamic scenarios of data updates.Experiments demonstrate that our methods can accurately estimate the cardinality of similarity queries, yielding satisfying efficiency.

Xpertbench: Expert Level Tasks with Rubrics-Based Evaluation

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xue Liu · Xin Ma · Yuxin Ma · Yongchang Peng · Duo Wang · Zhoufutu Wen · Ge Zhang · Kaiyuan Zhang · Xinyu Chen · Tianci He · Jiani Hou · Liang Hu · Ziyun Huang · Yongzhe Hui · Jianpeng Jiao · Chennan Ju · Yingru Kong · Yiran Li · Mengyun Liu · Luyao Ma · Fei Ni · Yiqing Ni · Yueyan Qiu · Yanle Ren · Zilin Shi · Zaiyuan Wang · Wenjie Yue · Shiyu Zhang · Xinyi Zhang · Kaiwen Zhao · Zhenwei Zhu · Shanshan Wu · Qi Zhao · Wenhao Huang
7 April 2026 at 12:00
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.

Document Parsing Unveiled: Techniques, Challenges, and Prospects for Structured Information Extraction

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Qintong Zhang · Bin Wang · Victor Shea-Jay Huang · Junyuan Zhang · Zhengren Wang · Hao Liang · Conghui He · Wentao Zhang
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2410.21169v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Document parsing (DP) transforms unstructured or semi-structured documents into structured, machine-readable representations, enabling downstream applications such as knowledge base construction and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of document parsing research. We propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing approaches into modular pipeline-based systems and unified models driven by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We provide a detailed review of key components in pipeline systems, including layout analysis and the recognition of heterogeneous content such as text, tables, mathematical expressions, and visual elements, and then systematically track the evolution of specialized VLMs for document parsing. Additionally, we summarize widely adopted evaluation metrics and high-quality benchmarks that establish current standards for parsing quality. Finally, we discuss key open challenges, including robustness to complex layouts, reliability of VLM-based parsing, and inference efficiency, and outline directions for building more accurate and scalable document intelligence systems.

Security Considerations for Artificial Intelligence Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Ninghui Li · Kaiyuan Zhang · Kyle Polley · Jerry Ma
7 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.12230v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This article, a lightly adapted version of Perplexity's response to NIST/CAISI Request for Information 2025-0035, details our observations and recommendations concerning the security of frontier AI agents. These insights are informed by Perplexity's experience operating general-purpose agentic systems used by millions of users and thousands of enterprises in both controlled and open-world environments. Agent architectures change core assumptions around code-data separation, authority boundaries, and execution predictability, creating new confidentiality, integrity, and availability failure modes. We map principal attack surfaces across tools, connectors, hosting boundaries, and multi-agent coordination, with particular emphasis on indirect prompt injection, confused-deputy behavior, and cascading failures in long-running workflows. We then assess current defenses as a layered stack: input-level and model-level mitigations, sandboxed execution, and deterministic policy enforcement for high-consequence actions. Finally, we identify standards and research gaps, including adaptive security benchmarks, policy models for delegation and privilege control, and guidance for secure multi-agent system design aligned with NIST risk management principles.

Decoding macrophage heterogeneity in the pulmonary fibrosis lung cancer transition

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Hanming Yu · Mengmeng Zhao · Qiuhong Li · Yuan Zhang
6 April 2026 at 18:00

Front Immunol. 2026 Mar 20;17:1787094. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2026.1787094. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) significantly increases the risk of lung cancer (LC), but the mechanisms underlying this transition remain unclear. This overview positions macrophage heterogeneity as a central node within the PF-LC continuum. First, we describe important subpopulations of profibrotic and pro-tumor macrophages, including SPP1+, MERTK+, TREM2+, and MARCO+ cells, using high-resolution spatial and single-cell omics technologies. Next, we analyze the fundamental mechanisms that determine their function: the fibrotic microenvironment (e.g., extracellular matrix stiffness, hypoxia) induces profound metabolic reprogramming (e.g., Warburg effect, lipid peroxidation) and stabilizes epigenetic memory (e.g., DNA methylation, histone modifications), locking them into a pathogenic state. This reprogramming occurs through two main pathways: (1) metabolic reprogramming, characterized by aerobic glycolytic conversion and dysregulated lipid metabolism, which stimulates both pathogenic functions and suppression of T cell activity; (2) Epigenetic modifications, including stabilized alterations in DNA methylation, histone modifications, and superactivator patterns, which maintain cells in a tumor-promoting phenotype. As central nodes of communication, these macrophages interact pathologically with fibroblasts and epithelial cells through secreted factors and extracellular vesicles, forming self-reinforcing feedback loops that promote disease progression. We are studying the crucial role of new technologies, particularly multi-omic spatial models and high-precision organoids, in fostering mechanistic discoveries. These discoveries pave the way for new macrophage-focused therapeutic strategies, including the precise stratification of patients using biomarkers from liquid biopsies (such as soluble SPP1 and MARCO) and the development of targeted drug delivery systems for the selective modulation of macrophage function, thus establishing a new paradigm for therapeutic interventions in pulmonary fibrosis with concomitant lung cancer.

PMID:41939908 | PMC:PMC13046558 | DOI:10.3389/fimmu.2026.1787094

Decoding macrophage heterogeneity in the pulmonary fibrosis lung cancer transition

✇Omics In Lung
By: Hanming Yu · Mengmeng Zhao · Qiuhong Li · Yuan Zhang
6 April 2026 at 18:00

Front Immunol. 2026 Mar 20;17:1787094. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2026.1787094. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) significantly increases the risk of lung cancer (LC), but the mechanisms underlying this transition remain unclear. This overview positions macrophage heterogeneity as a central node within the PF-LC continuum. First, we describe important subpopulations of profibrotic and pro-tumor macrophages, including SPP1+, MERTK+, TREM2+, and MARCO+ cells, using high-resolution spatial and single-cell omics technologies. Next, we analyze the fundamental mechanisms that determine their function: the fibrotic microenvironment (e.g., extracellular matrix stiffness, hypoxia) induces profound metabolic reprogramming (e.g., Warburg effect, lipid peroxidation) and stabilizes epigenetic memory (e.g., DNA methylation, histone modifications), locking them into a pathogenic state. This reprogramming occurs through two main pathways: (1) metabolic reprogramming, characterized by aerobic glycolytic conversion and dysregulated lipid metabolism, which stimulates both pathogenic functions and suppression of T cell activity; (2) Epigenetic modifications, including stabilized alterations in DNA methylation, histone modifications, and superactivator patterns, which maintain cells in a tumor-promoting phenotype. As central nodes of communication, these macrophages interact pathologically with fibroblasts and epithelial cells through secreted factors and extracellular vesicles, forming self-reinforcing feedback loops that promote disease progression. We are studying the crucial role of new technologies, particularly multi-omic spatial models and high-precision organoids, in fostering mechanistic discoveries. These discoveries pave the way for new macrophage-focused therapeutic strategies, including the precise stratification of patients using biomarkers from liquid biopsies (such as soluble SPP1 and MARCO) and the development of targeted drug delivery systems for the selective modulation of macrophage function, thus establishing a new paradigm for therapeutic interventions in pulmonary fibrosis with concomitant lung cancer.

PMID:41939908 | PMC:PMC13046558 | DOI:10.3389/fimmu.2026.1787094

Received — 4 April 2026 ⏭

Countering Catastrophic Forgetting of Large Language Models for Better Instruction Following via Weight-Space Model Merging

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Mengxian Lyu · Cheng Peng · Ziyi Chen · Mengyuan Zhang · Jieting Li Lu · Yonghui Wu
3 April 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2604.01538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have been adopted in the medical domain for clinical documentation to reduce clinician burden. However, studies have reported that LLMs often "forget" a significant amount of instruction-following ability when fine-tuned using a task-specific medical dataset, a critical challenge in adopting general-purpose LLMs for clinical applications. This study presents a model merging framework to efficiently adapt general-purpose LLMs to the medical domain by countering this forgetting issue. By merging a clinical foundation model (GatorTronLlama) with a general instruct model (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct) via interpolation-based merge methods, we seek to derive a domain-adapted model with strong performance on clinical tasks while retaining instruction-following ability. Comprehensive evaluation across medical benchmarks and five clinical generation tasks (e.g., radiology and discharge summarization) shows that merged models can effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, preserve clinical domain expertise, and retain instruction-following ability. In addition, our model merging strategies demonstrate training efficiency, achieving performance on par with fully fine-tuned baselines under severely constrained supervision (e.g., 64-shot vs. 256-shot). Consequently, weight-space merging constitutes a highly scalable solution for adapting open-source LLMs to clinical applications, facilitating broader deployment in resource-constrained healthcare environments.
Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭

Catgut implantation at acupoints improves anti-PD-1 inhibitor efficacy in lung cancer by inducing immune responses and remodeling the tumor microenvironment

✇Omics In Lung
By: Qian Wu · Ting Su · Yuanyuan Zhang · Yuerong Xiong · Xiaoyan Hu · Lijuan Shao · Size Chen
31 March 2026 at 18:00

Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2026 Mar 31;75(4):126. doi: 10.1007/s00262-026-04368-1.

ABSTRACT

While anti-programmed death-1 (anti-PD-1) therapy has revolutionized lung cancer treatment, its efficacy remains limited by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). We therefore investigated whether combining anti-PD-1 inhibitor with catgut embedding at the Zusanli acupoint (CIAA) could enhance anti-tumor immunity by reprogramming the TME in a lung cancer mouse model. Combining in vivo tumor monitoring, multi-parametric immune profiling (flow cytometry, IHC, ELISA), and multi-omics analyses (transcriptomics and metabolomics), we found that the combination therapy was associated with enhanced tumor growth inhibition. This effect correlated with a comprehensive TME transformation: conversion to an immunologically active state with increased effector immune cell infiltration (CD8⁺ T, CD4⁺ T, B cells, macrophages) and decreased regulatory T cells, coupled with suppression of pro-tumorigenic factors (VEGF, IL-6). Integrated omics analysis suggests that the combined treatment may modulate tumor-stroma interaction pathways (e.g., PI3K-Akt, focal adhesion) and rewire immunometabolic networks (e.g., tryptophan metabolism). Our study provides hypothesis-generating correlative data positioning CIAA as a potential adjunct capable of remodeling the TME to potentiate anti-PD-1 therapy in lung cancer.

PMID:41915222 | PMC:PMC13038699 | DOI:10.1007/s00262-026-04368-1

Catgut implantation at acupoints improves anti-PD-1 inhibitor efficacy in lung cancer by inducing immune responses and remodeling the tumor microenvironment

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Qian Wu · Ting Su · Yuanyuan Zhang · Yuerong Xiong · Xiaoyan Hu · Lijuan Shao · Size Chen
31 March 2026 at 18:00

Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2026 Mar 31;75(4):126. doi: 10.1007/s00262-026-04368-1.

ABSTRACT

While anti-programmed death-1 (anti-PD-1) therapy has revolutionized lung cancer treatment, its efficacy remains limited by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). We therefore investigated whether combining anti-PD-1 inhibitor with catgut embedding at the Zusanli acupoint (CIAA) could enhance anti-tumor immunity by reprogramming the TME in a lung cancer mouse model. Combining in vivo tumor monitoring, multi-parametric immune profiling (flow cytometry, IHC, ELISA), and multi-omics analyses (transcriptomics and metabolomics), we found that the combination therapy was associated with enhanced tumor growth inhibition. This effect correlated with a comprehensive TME transformation: conversion to an immunologically active state with increased effector immune cell infiltration (CD8⁺ T, CD4⁺ T, B cells, macrophages) and decreased regulatory T cells, coupled with suppression of pro-tumorigenic factors (VEGF, IL-6). Integrated omics analysis suggests that the combined treatment may modulate tumor-stroma interaction pathways (e.g., PI3K-Akt, focal adhesion) and rewire immunometabolic networks (e.g., tryptophan metabolism). Our study provides hypothesis-generating correlative data positioning CIAA as a potential adjunct capable of remodeling the TME to potentiate anti-PD-1 therapy in lung cancer.

PMID:41915222 | DOI:10.1007/s00262-026-04368-1

A monocyte-centered framework for predicting immunochemotherapy efficacy in lung squamous cell carcinoma patients

✇Omics In Lung
By: Jiangnan Zhao · Zijin Wang · Manyu Xiao · Yeyuan Zhang · Boxin Liu · Silin Chen · Yiping Tian · Dongqing Lv · Pingli Wang · Hai Song · Yuefeng Wu · Jian Liu · Kai Wang
30 March 2026 at 18:00

EMBO Mol Med. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1038/s44321-026-00410-y. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) comprising 20-30% of cases. Immunochemotherapy (IC) is the standard first-line treatment for advanced LUSC, yet reliable predictors of therapeutic response remain unavailable. Using single-cell multi-omics profiling of paired pre- and post-treatment tumor and blood samples, we observed that patients responding to IC exhibited significantly higher baseline levels of peripheral blood monocytes, tumor-infiltrating classical monocytes, and APOBEC3A+ monocytes across both compartments compared with non-responders. These associations were independently validated in additional cohorts using routine complete blood count testing and multiplex immunofluorescence analysis of native tumor tissues. Our findings reveal monocyte-related parameters as clinically accessible indicators that link systemic immunity with the tumor microenvironment and hold promise for predicting IC responsiveness in patients with LUSC.

PMID:41912871 | DOI:10.1038/s44321-026-00410-y

A monocyte-centered framework for predicting immunochemotherapy efficacy in lung squamous cell carcinoma patients

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Jiangnan Zhao · Zijin Wang · Manyu Xiao · Yeyuan Zhang · Boxin Liu · Silin Chen · Yiping Tian · Dongqing Lv · Pingli Wang · Hai Song · Yuefeng Wu · Jian Liu · Kai Wang
30 March 2026 at 18:00

EMBO Mol Med. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1038/s44321-026-00410-y. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) comprising 20-30% of cases. Immunochemotherapy (IC) is the standard first-line treatment for advanced LUSC, yet reliable predictors of therapeutic response remain unavailable. Using single-cell multi-omics profiling of paired pre- and post-treatment tumor and blood samples, we observed that patients responding to IC exhibited significantly higher baseline levels of peripheral blood monocytes, tumor-infiltrating classical monocytes, and APOBEC3A+ monocytes across both compartments compared with non-responders. These associations were independently validated in additional cohorts using routine complete blood count testing and multiplex immunofluorescence analysis of native tumor tissues. Our findings reveal monocyte-related parameters as clinically accessible indicators that link systemic immunity with the tumor microenvironment and hold promise for predicting IC responsiveness in patients with LUSC.

PMID:41912871 | DOI:10.1038/s44321-026-00410-y

Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

Residual Decoding: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via History-Aware Residual Guidance

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xinrong Chen · Xu Chu · Yingmin Qiu · Hengyuan Zhang · Jing Xiong · Shiyu Tang · Shuai Liu · Shaokang Yang · Cheng Yang · Hayden Kwok-Hay So · Ngai Wong
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2602.01047v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can reason from image-text inputs and perform well in various multimodal tasks. Despite this success, they are affected by language priors and often produce hallucinations. Hallucinations denote generated content that is grammatically and syntactically coherent, yet bears no match or direct relevance to visual input. To address this problem, we propose Residual Decoding (ResDec). It is a novel training-free method that uses historical information to aid decoding. The method relies on the internal implicit reasoning mechanism and token logits evolution mechanism of LVLMs to correct biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ResDec effectively suppresses hallucinations induced by language priors, significantly improves visual grounding, and reduces object hallucinations. In addition to mitigating hallucinations, ResDec also performs exceptionally well on comprehensive LVLM benchmarks, highlighting its broad applicability.

When Models Judge Themselves: Unsupervised Self-Evolution for Multimodal Reasoning

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zhengxian Wu · Kai Shi · Chuanrui Zhang · Zirui Liao · Jun Yang · Ni Yang · Qiuying Peng · Luyuan Zhang · Hangrui Xu · Tianhuang Su · Zhenyu Yang · Haonan Lu · Haoqian Wang
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.21289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in multimodal large language models has led to strong performance on reasoning tasks, but these improvements largely rely on high-quality annotated data or teacher-model distillation, both of which are costly and difficult to scale. To address this, we propose an unsupervised self-evolution training framework for multimodal reasoning that achieves stable performance improvements without using human-annotated answers or external reward models. For each input, we sample multiple reasoning trajectories and jointly model their within group structure. We use the Actor's self-consistency signal as a training prior, and introduce a bounded Judge based modulation to continuously reweight trajectories of different quality. We further model the modulated scores as a group level distribution and convert absolute scores into relative advantages within each group, enabling more robust policy updates. Trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on unlabeled data, our method consistently improves reasoning performance and generalization on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, offering a scalable path toward self-evolving multimodal models. The code are available at https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/LLM-Self-Judge.
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