Nature Biomedical Engineering, Published online: 06 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41551-026-01786-5

A nanoscale metal–organic framework (MOF)-based cancer vaccine platform enables coordinated antigen presentation and innate immune activation, resulting in tumour regression, immune memory and protection against metastasis.

Liu et al. develop Oncoformer, a multimodal transformer that reads routine laboratory tests and chest X-rays already collected in everyday care. Across more than 3.6 million individuals, it detects cancer, infers tumor stage, and stratifies treatment response and recurrence risk, pointing toward risk-adapted cancer care built on data already in hand.

Background: Chinese men who have sex with men living with HIV (MSMLWH) experience substantial psychological distress driven by minority stress and HIV-related challenges. However, culturally tailored digital mental health interventions that address HIV-specific maladaptive cognitive schemas and culturally specific psychosocial stressors remain scarce in China. Objective: This study aimed to systematically adapt an evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention Effective Skills to Empower Effective Men (ESTEEM) into a WeChat (Tencent) Mini-Program–based intervention (iESTEEM) specifically for Chinese MSMLWH and to evaluate its preliminary feasibility and usability. Methods: We used a three-phase user-centered design approach guided by the Assessment, Decision, Adaptation, Production, Topical Experts, Integration, Training, and Testing (ADAPT-ITT) framework. The study proceeded in three phases: (1) a qualitative needs assessment using semistructured interviews with 20 MSMLWH (mean age 23.25, SD 3.08 years); (2) systematic intervention adaptation and platform development, including theater testing (n=5); and (3) a 2-week pilot study involving 10 MSMLWH and five counselors to evaluate feasibility, usability, and acceptability through focus groups and objective platform analytics. Results: Phase 1 identified 3 major themes of psychological distress: persistent health anxiety fueled by catastrophizing, intersectional stigma internalization, the disclosure dilemma, and intimacy barriers rooted in defectiveness and shame schemas. Participants also prioritized anonymity and bite-sized learning. Guided by these findings, iESTEEM was developed as a counselor-assisted, privacy-preserving WeChat Mini-Program incorporating HIV-specific scenarios, multimodal learning modules, and a back-end risk-alert system. During the 2-week pilot, participants logged into the platform 14.1 (SD 6.7) times per person and completed 134.3 (SD 103.1) minutes of learning activities; all participants accessed module 1, and 90% (9/10) accessed modules 2‐5. Anxiety scores decreased from 8.9 (SD 2.3) to 7.2 (SD 3.0), whereas depression scores remained stable. All participants expressed a willingness to continue using the program and to recommend it to peers. Participants and counselors endorsed its contextual relevance, privacy protections, and clinical utility. Conclusions: This study provides a theory- and evidence-informed model for culturally adapting digital mental health interventions for highly stigmatized populations. By integrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-affirmative CBT principles, HIV-specific adaptations, and a privacy-preserving, counselor-assisted WeChat Mini-Program, iESTEEM demonstrated promising preliminary feasibility, acceptability, and engagement among Chinese MSMLWH. These findings support the potential of culturally tailored digital interventions to expand access to psychological support for this stigmatized population in resource-constrained settings. Ongoing randomized controlled trials will further evaluate its efficacy, implementation outcomes, and mechanism of action. Trial Registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2400080263; https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=216926

arXiv:2609.12851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical benchmarks are dominated by single-turn, multiple-choice clinical cases that poorly reflect real consultations. Practically, clinicians elicit evidence interactively and patient communication varies widely. We introduce MedRoundsQA, a multi-turn diagnostic benchmark derived from 1,387 board-exam cases across 17 specialties. Each case is converted into a structured 24-slot clinical record, and then instantiated as controlled doctor-patient dual-agent dialogues under varying patient personas, with the underlying clinical content held fixed. We further classify cases by difficulty using model-based uncertainty to enable easy-to-hard analysis. Evaluations of fifteen LLM doctor agents show that (i) moving from a single-turn diagnosis on the standardized records to multi-turn consultations causes large degradations of roughly 13-39 points; (ii) more turns reliably improves question relevance, but diagnostic accuracy exhibits diminishing returns and typically plateaus after 6-12 turns; and (iii) patient persona differences can shift diagnosis accuracy by about 7-8 points (lowest to highest education), highlighting equity risks that single-turn benchmarks miss.

arXiv:2609.10522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.

Science, Ahead of Print.

arXiv:2605.23989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that challenge trustworthiness. This survey provides a focused examination of trustworthy agentic AI through two core dimensions that are critical for high-risk deployments: Safety and Robustness, and Privacy and System Security. For each dimension, we clarify key concepts, identify where risks emerge along the agent workflow, and summarize stage-targeted mitigation strategies. Other trustworthiness aspects (value alignment, transparency, fairness, and accountability) are discussed as relevant context rather than parallel chapters. To support consistent comparison and deployment decisions, we consolidate evaluation into a unified metrics-and-benchmarks hub, emphasizing both outcome and process signals (e.g., constraint violations, trace completeness, and adversarial success rates) and offering scenario-to-metric guidance for release gating. We conclude by outlining open challenges such as self-evolving agents, runtime monitoring and verification, privacy-preserving personalization, and the trust-utility trade-off, and present a case study of real-world security failures in open-source agentic systems. Our goal is to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners building trustworthy agentic systems in high-stakes environments.

arXiv:2605.24005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality process data. While self-alignment via endogenous rewards offers a solution, mining valid supervision faces three challenges: (1) Label Noise via Mimetic Bias, where rewards prioritize statistical likelihood over logical truth, creating a "correctness illusion" that masks compounding errors; (2) Coarse-Grained Supervision, where sparse global outcomes (e.g., in GRPO) fail to provide granular guidance, treating reasoning chains as monolithic; and (3) Distributional Collapse, where signals fail to generalize without amplifying pre-training biases. To address these, we introduce LC-ERD (Logic-Consistent Endogenous Reward Decomposition), a framework framing self-alignment as latent structure mining. We derive a Variational Logic Potential by aggregating consensus from the model's Latent Logic Expertise (LLE) to denoise the reasoning manifold, and introduce a Multi-Agent Value Decomposition protocol based on the IGM principle to quantify individual step utility. Experiments show LC-ERD delivers a robust self-evolution path, uncovering trade-offs between logic consistency and accuracy while identifying high-value reasoning patterns missed by standard rewards. Our code is available at https://github.com/Reinhardmannn/LC-ERD.

arXiv:2605.25160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile GUI agents powered by large language models have progressed rapidly, creating urgent needs for realistic and comprehensive evaluation. Existing benchmarks prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for the difficulty of constructing rewards on real applications, leaving a gap between benchmark settings and real-world usage. Moreover, most benchmarks focus on basic grounding and navigation, with limited coverage of complex, long-horizon interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce SimuWoB, a fully synthetic benchmark for mobile GUI agents with 120 challenging tasks spanning diverse types and difficulty levels. We build a robust virtual environment generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity tasks and environments, and automatically provides valid rewards for each task. Each environment is deployed as a backend-free webpage accessible via URL, enabling efficient and reproducible evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on several state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents. The average success rate is only 27.92%, dropping to 17.82% on long-horizon tasks, which reveals substantial weaknesses in current agents under complex scenarios. Evaluation result comparison with real-world sample tasks demonstrate that agent assessments based on our synthetic environment generalize well. We further provide diagnostic insights across key capability dimensions and discuss implications for future mobile GUI agent development.

arXiv:2605.26114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present MobileGym, a browser-hosted, lightweight, fully controllable environment for everyday mobile use, targeting interaction fidelity without replicating proprietary backends. It enables two capabilities previously out of reach for everyday apps: verifiable outcome signals through deterministic state-based judging over structured JSON state, and scalable online RL through low-cost parallel rollouts. The full environment state is captured, configured, forked, and compared as structured JSON, and a single server can host hundreds of parallel instances, with about 400 MB memory per instance and about 3 s cold start. A layered state model and a declarative task-definition framework keep state programmability and task creation practical at scale, and a single programmatic judging mechanism delivers both deterministic evaluation verdicts and dense RL rewards. The accompanying MobileGym-Bench provides 416 parameterized task templates, including 256 test and 160 train templates, over 28 apps, with deterministic judges and a structured AnswerSheet protocol that avoids free-text matching failures. In a Sim-to-Real case study, GRPO on Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct gains +12.8 percentage points on the 256-task test set, and on a 59-task real-device signal subset, real-device execution retains 95.1% of the simulation-side training gain. Project page: https://mobilegym.github.io.

arXiv:2605.19409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual Model Merging (CMM) enables rapid customization of foundation models by sequentially incorporating task-adapted models without repeated retraining. However, existing merging rules usually update the deployed model through fixed algebraic or projection-based operations, providing limited control over how much previously accumulated knowledge should be retained relative to the incoming task model. This limitation leads to unstable retention and performance degradation in long task streams, and becomes more pronounced when tasks have heterogeneous utilities. We propose ODE-driven Merging (ODE-M), a controllable framework that formulates each continual merge as a trajectory in parameter space rather than a one-step endpoint update. Motivated by mode connectivity, ODE-M constructs a barrier-aware trajectory using a rectified time-dependent velocity field, where lightweight first-order feedback from a small calibration set suppresses loss-increasing motion while preserving progress toward the incoming model. The next merged model is then obtained by selecting an operating point along this trajectory through a utility-aware time schedule, providing an explicit mechanism for balancing retained historical knowledge and incoming task expertise. Extensive experiments on standard CMM benchmarks show that ODE-M consistently improves over strong continual merging baselines across CLIP ViT backbones, stream lengths, and heterogeneous task-utility settings.

arXiv:2605.22715v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As wearable and mobile devices become increasingly embedded in daily life, they offer a practical way to continuously sense human motion in the wild. But inertial signals are highly dependent on the sensing setup, including body location, mounting position, sensor orientation, device hardware, and sampling protocol. This setup dependence makes it difficult to learn motion representations that transfer across devices and datasets, and limits the broader use of wearable IMUs beyond closed-set recognition. We introduce AnyMo, a geometry-aware framework for setup-agnostic human motion modeling. AnyMo uses physics-grounded IMU simulation over dense body-surface placements to generate diverse and plausible synthetic signals, pre-trains a graph encoder from paired synthetic placement views and masked partial observations, tokenizes multi-position IMU into full-body motion tokens, and aligns these tokens with an LLM for motion-language understanding. We evaluate AnyMo on three complementary tasks: zero-shot activity recognition across 14 unseen downstream datasets, cross-modal retrieval, and wearable IMU motion captioning, where it improves average Accuracy/F1/R@2 by 11.7\%/11.6\%/22.6\% on HAR, increases zero-shot IMU-to-text and text-to-IMU retrieval MRR by 15.9\% and 28.6\%, respectively, and improves zero-shot captioning BERT-F1 by 18.8\%. These results support AnyMo as a generalist model for wearable motion understanding in the wild. Project page: https://baiyuchen.com/project/AnyMo.

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10384-z

ThermoCas9, a genome-editing enzyme that is sensitive to the DNA methylation status of the target locus, is characterized and shows promise for targeting hypomethylated DNA regions in cancer cells.

Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10416-8

A genome-to-genome association study identifies host and viral risk factors that interact to drive nasopharyngeal carcinoma endemicity in southern China.

A mitochondrial transplantation approach rescues mitochondrial deficiency and prevents mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, Leigh syndrome, and Parkinson’s disease in cellular and mouse models.

arXiv:2604.03302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in image and video understanding, their ability to comprehend the physical world has become an increasingly important research focus. Despite their improvements, current MLLMs struggle significantly with high-level physics reasoning. In this work, we investigate the first step of physical reasoning, i.e., intuitive physics understanding, revealing substantial limitations in understanding the dynamics of continuum objects. To isolate and evaluate this specific capability, we introduce two fundamental benchmark tasks: Next Frame Selection (NFS) and Temporal Coherence Verification (TCV). Our experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art MLLMs perform poorly on these foundational tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Scene Dynamic Field (SDF), a concise approach that leverages physics simulators within a multi-task fine-tuning framework. SDF substantially improves performance, achieving up to 20.7% gains on fluid tasks while showing strong generalization to unseen physical domains. This work not only highlights a critical gap in current MLLMs but also presents a promising cost-efficient approach for developing more physically grounded MLLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/andylinx/Scene-Dynamic-Field.

arXiv:2604.04461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to proprietary and domain-specific corpora that contain sensitive information, creating a tension between formal privacy guarantees and efficient deployment through model compression. Differential privacy (DP), typically enforced via DP-SGD, provides record-level protection but often incurs substantial utility loss in autoregressive generation, where optimization noise can amplify exposure bias and compounding errors along long rollouts. Existing approaches to private distillation either apply DP-SGD to both teacher and student, worsening computation and the privacy--utility tradeoff, or rely on DP synthetic text generation from a DP-trained teacher, avoiding DP on the student at the cost of DP-optimizing a large teacher and introducing an offline generation pipeline. We propose \textbf{Differentially Private On-Policy Distillation (DP-OPD)}, a synthesis-free framework that enforces privacy solely through DP-SGD on the student while leveraging a frozen teacher to provide dense token-level targets on \emph{student-generated} trajectories. DP-OPD instantiates this idea via \emph{private generalized knowledge distillation} on continuation tokens. Under a strict privacy budget ($\varepsilon=2.0$), DP-OPD improves perplexity over DP fine-tuning and off-policy DP distillation, and outperforms synthesis-based DP distillation (Yelp: 44.15$\rightarrow$41.68; BigPatent: 32.43$\rightarrow$30.63), while substantially simplifying the training pipeline. In particular, \textbf{DP-OPD collapses private compression into a single DP student-training loop} by eliminating DP teacher training and offline synthetic text generation. Code will be released upon publication at https://github.com/khademfatemeh/dp_opd.

arXiv:2601.00263v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Counterfactuals refer to minimally edited inputs that cause a model's prediction to change, serving as a promising approach to explaining the model's behavior. Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating English counterfactuals and demonstrate multilingual proficiency. However, their effectiveness in generating multilingual counterfactuals remains unclear. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on multilingual counterfactuals. We first conduct automatic evaluations on both directly generated counterfactuals in the target languages and those derived via English translation across six languages. Although translation-based counterfactuals offer higher validity than their directly generated counterparts, they demand substantially more modifications and still fall short of matching the quality of the original English counterfactuals. Second, we find the patterns of edits applied to high-resource European-language counterfactuals to be remarkably similar, suggesting that cross-lingual perturbations follow common strategic principles. Third, we identify and categorize four main types of errors that consistently appear in the generated counterfactuals across languages. Finally, we reveal that multilingual counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) yields larger model performance improvements than cross-lingual CDA, especially for lower-resource languages. Yet, the imperfections of the generated counterfactuals limit gains in model performance and robustness.