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Advancing cancer detection and treatment using longitudinal routine clinical data

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.
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MMSDH facilitates ACSL4 propionylation to counteract ferroptosis upon hypoxia and impairs PDAC chemotherapy efficacy

Nature Cancer, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s43018-026-01236-w

Zheng et al. describe how hypoxia-induced methylmalonate semialdehyde dehydrogenase lactylation promotes acyl-CoA synthetase long-chain family member 4 propionylation and degradation, thereby suppressing ferroptosis induced by chemotherapy, and develop a blocking peptide that increased chemotherapy efficacy in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
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A Signal-Language Foundation Model for Broad-Spectrum Cardiovascular Assessment from Routine Electrocardiography

arXiv:2605.25446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is central to cardiovascular care, but conventional AI models are often restricted to common arrhythmias and may generalize poorly across populations or clinically subtle diseases. We developed ECG Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (ECGCLIP), a signal-language contrastive learning framework that aligns ECG waveforms with expert diagnostic reports. ECGCLIP was pre-trained on 2,837,962 ECG studies from 1,324,856 patients and evaluated on a held-out internal test set plus nine independent external cohorts comprising about 1.5 million ECGs. Evaluation covered 89 downstream tasks, including 45 ECG diagnoses, 39 echocardiographic targets, and 5 rare cardiac diseases, using PRAUC as the primary metric. ECGCLIP consistently improved performance over random initialization and Merl-R18 baselines. On the internal test set, ECGCLIP-R34 achieved strong performance for atrial fibrillation (PRAUC 0.900) and ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (PRAUC 0.383), with robust generalization across all external cohorts. It also improved low-prevalence and diagnostically elusive diseases, including Ebstein anomaly, constrictive pericarditis, dextrocardia, and cardiac amyloidosis, with internal PRAUC values of 0.253, 0.175, 0.121, and 0.201, respectively. ECGCLIP was data efficient, matching or exceeding full-dataset baseline performance with only 10% of training data. Feature visualization and saliency analysis suggested clinically meaningful representations aligned with established electrocardiographic criteria. These findings indicate that large-scale ECG-report contrastive pre-training can expand routine ECG interpretation beyond common arrhythmias toward broad cardiovascular assessment and opportunistic screening of echocardiographic and rare conditions.
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StructBreak: Structural Cognitive Overload-Induced Safety Failures in MLLMs

arXiv:2605.25534v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at structural reasoning yet suffer from a sharp logical brittleness in structural consistency. We term this phenomenon Structural Cognitive Overload (SCO), a byproduct of the contention between deep reasoning and safety alignment. However, prior work has predominantly targeted typographic and pixel-level perturbations, leaving the study of SCO largely unexplored. To this end, we propose StructBreak, an automated end-to-end framework designed to quantify SCO. By leveraging StructBreak, we uncover a novel higher-order cognitive overload attack paradigm; notably, this attack operates under a practical black-box setting, requiring no internal model access. Consequently, we utilize this framework to establish a comprehensive benchmark spanning ten diverse threat scenarios. Empirical evaluations on six leading MLLMs reveal that SCO readily triggers toxic generation, yielding a 92% average ASR (up to 97% on Gemini 2.5). To elucidate the mechanism of SCO, we further conduct model-level interpretations spanning attention dynamics, latent space topology, and geometric analysis. Our findings reveal that StructBreak acts as a novel structural channel to circumvent safety filters. Furthermore, the limited efficacy of inherent safety mechanisms underscores that current alignment paradigms are insufficient for the era of complex multimodal reasoning.
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Circulating Tumor Cells in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma: The Systemic Execution Hub of Metastasis

Pharmacol Res. 2026 May 17:108253. doi: 10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108253. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) exemplifies early systemic dissemination, with circulating tumor cells (CTCs) at its core. We advance a unified conceptual framework that positions CTCs as the systemic execution hub of PDAC metastasis, dynamic entity that coordinates the metastatic cascade via four cardinal functions: Seeding, Adapting, Engineering, and Signaling. Integrating eco-evolutionary dynamics, this hub actively drives phenotypic selection, niche remodeling, and immune evasion, while providing real-time biologic intelligence through liquid biopsy. Robust clinical correlation has not yet translated into routine practice because of technical variability, biological complexity, and a lack of interventional evidence. We therefore propose an evidence-driven, phased roadmap: grounded in prospective clinical cohort data, progressing from immediate multi-center technical standardization and pragmatic trials, such as minimal residual disease (MRD)-triggered salvage therapy, to mid-term biomarker-driven adjuvant trials and long-term integration into multimodal liquid biopsy ecosystems, aimed at intercepting this execution hub. By reframing CTCs from correlative indicators to actionable therapeutic targets and dynamic sentinels, this framework charts a path toward transforming the management of this recalcitrant systemic disease.

PMID:42150733 | DOI:10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108253

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Scaling Teams or Scaling Time? Memory Enabled Lifelong Learning in LLM Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2604.03295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems can scale along two distinct dimensions: by increasing the number of agents and by improving through accumulated experience over time. Although prior work has studied these dimensions separately, their interaction under realistic cost constraints remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual scaling view of multi-agent systems that jointly considers team size and lifelong learning ability, and we study how memory design shares this landscape. To this end, we propose \textbf{LLMA-Mem}, a lifelong memory framework for LLM multi-agent systems under flexible memory topologies. We evaluate LLMA-Mem on \textsc{MultiAgentBench} across coding, research, and database environments. Empirically, LLMA-Mem consistently improves long-horizon performance over baselines while reducing cost. Our analysis further reveals a non-monotonic scaling landscape: larger teams do not always produce better long-term performance, and smaller teams can outperform larger ones when memory better supports the reuse of experience. These findings position memory design as a practical path for scaling multi-agent systems more effectively and more efficiently over time.
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GPA: Learning GUI Process Automation from Demonstrations

arXiv:2604.01676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: GUI Process Automation (GPA) is a lightweight but general vision-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which enables fast and stable process replay with only a single demo. Addressing the fragility of traditional RPA and the non-deterministic risks of current vision language model-based GUI agents, GPA introduces three core benefits: (1) Robustness via Sequential Monte Carlo-based localization to handle rescaling and detection uncertainty; (2) Deterministic and Reliability safeguarded by readiness calibration; and (3) Privacy through fast, fully local execution. This approach delivers the adaptability, robustness, and security required for enterprise workflows. It can also be used as an MCP/CLI tool by other agents with coding capabilities so that the agent only reasons and orchestrates while GPA handles the GUI execution. We conducted a pilot experiment to compare GPA with Gemini 3 Pro (with CUA tools) and found that GPA achieves higher success rate with 10 times faster execution speed in finishing long-horizon GUI tasks.
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GPA: Learning GUI Process Automation from Demonstrations

arXiv:2604.01676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: GUI Process Automation (GPA) is a lightweight but general vision-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which enables fast and stable process replay with only a single demo. Addressing the fragility of traditional RPA and the non-deterministic risks of current vision language model-based GUI agents, GPA introduces three core benefits: (1) Robustness via Sequential Monte Carlo-based localization to handle rescaling and detection uncertainty; (2) Deterministic and Reliability safeguarded by readiness calibration; and (3) Privacy through fast, fully local execution. This approach delivers the adaptability, robustness, and security required for enterprise workflows. It can also be used as an MCP/CLI tool by other agents with coding capabilities so that the agent only reasons and orchestrates while GPA handles the GUI execution. We conducted a pilot experiment to compare GPA with Gemini 3 Pro (with CUA tools) and found that GPA achieves higher success rate with 10 times faster execution speed in finishing long-horizon GUI tasks.
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Confidence Calibration under Ambiguous Ground Truth

arXiv:2603.22879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Confidence calibration assumes a unique ground-truth label per input, yet this assumption fails wherever annotators genuinely disagree. Post-hoc calibrators fitted on majority-voted labels, the standard single-label targets used in practice, can appear well-calibrated under conventional evaluation yet remain substantially miscalibrated against the underlying annotator distribution. We show that this failure is structural: under simplifying assumptions, Temperature Scaling is biased toward temperatures that underestimate annotator uncertainty, with true-label miscalibration increasing monotonically with annotation entropy. To address this, we develop a family of ambiguity-aware post-hoc calibrators that optimise proper scoring rules against the full label distribution and require no model retraining. Our methods span progressively weaker annotation requirements: Dirichlet-Soft leverages the full annotator distribution and achieves the best overall calibration quality across settings; Monte Carlo Temperature Scaling with a single annotation per example (MCTS S=1) matches full-distribution calibration across all benchmarks, demonstrating that pre-aggregated label distributions are unnecessary; and Label-Smooth Temperature Scaling (LS-TS) operates with voted labels alone by constructing data-driven pseudo-soft targets from the model's own confidence. Experiments on four benchmarks with real multi-annotator distributions (CIFAR-10H, ChaosNLI) and clinically-informed synthetic annotations (ISIC~2019, DermaMNIST) show that Dirichlet-Soft reduces true-label ECE by 55-87% relative to Temperature Scaling, while LS-TS reduces ECE by 9-77% without any annotator data.
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3DCity-LLM: Empowering Multi-modality Large Language Models for 3D City-scale Perception and Understanding

arXiv:2603.23447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While multi-modality large language models excel in object-centric or indoor scenarios, scaling them to 3D city-scale environments remains a formidable challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose 3DCity-LLM, a unified framework designed for 3D city-scale vision-language perception and understanding. 3DCity-LLM employs a coarse-to-fine feature encoding strategy comprising three parallel branches for target object, inter-object relationship, and global scene. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce 3DCity-LLM-1.2M dataset that comprises approximately 1.2 million high-quality samples across seven representative task categories, ranging from fine-grained object analysis to multi-faceted scene planning. This strictly quality-controlled dataset integrates explicit 3D numerical information and diverse user-oriented simulations, enriching the question-answering diversity and realism of urban scenarios. Furthermore, we apply a multi-dimensional protocol based on text-similarity metrics and LLM-based semantic assessment to ensure faithful and comprehensive evaluations for all methods. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that 3DCity-LLM significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a promising and meaningful direction for advancing spatial reasoning and urban intelligence. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SYSU-3DSTAILab/3D-City-LLM.
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MemReward: Graph-Based Experience Memory for LLM Reward Prediction with Limited Labels

arXiv:2603.19310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have been driven by reinforcement-learning-based post-training, which requires multiple rollouts with rewards. However, obtaining ground truth labels for the calculation of rewards on a scale often requires expensive human labeling or time-consuming verification procedures. For instance, evaluating mathematical proofs demands expert review, and open-ended question answering lacks definitive ground truth. When ground truth labels are scarce, the effectiveness of reinforcement learning fine-tuning can be constrained. We introduce MemReward, a graph-based experience memory framework: an initial LLM policy generates rollouts for each query, each comprising a thinking process and a final answer, and these rollouts are stored as experience memory. Queries, thinking processes, and answers form nodes in a heterogeneous graph with similarity and structural edges; a GNN trained on labeled rollouts propagates rewards to unlabeled rollouts during online optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-3B and 1.5B in mathematics, question answering, and code generation demonstrate that MemReward, with only 20% labels, achieves 97.3% of Oracle performance on 3B and 96.6% on 1.5B, surpassing Oracle in out-of-domain tasks. Performance scales smoothly with label budget, reaching 99.4% of Oracle at 70% labels.
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AWPD: Frequency Shield Network for Agnostic Watermark Presence Detection

arXiv:2603.06723v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Invisible watermarks, as an essential technology for image copyright protection, have been widely deployed with the rapid development of social media and AIGC. However, existing invisible watermark detection heavily relies on prior knowledge of specific algorithms, leading to limited detection capabilities for ``unknown watermarks'' in open environments. To this end, we propose a novel task named Agnostic Watermark Presence Detection (AWPD), which aims to identify whether an image carries a copyright mark without requiring decoding information. We construct the UniFreq-100K dataset, comprising large-scale samples across various invisible watermark embedding algorithms. Furthermore, we propose the Frequency Shield Network (FSNet). This model deploys an Adaptive Spectral Perception Module (ASPM) in the shallow layers, utilizing learnable frequency gating to dynamically amplify high-frequency watermark signals while suppressing low-frequency semantics. In the deep layers, the network introduces Dynamic Multi-Spectral Attention (DMSA) combined with tri-stream extremum pooling to deeply mine watermark energy anomalies, forcing the model to precisely focus on sensitive frequency bands. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FSNet exhibits superior zero-shot detection capabilities on the AWPD task, outperforming existing baseline models. Code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.
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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.
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CORE-Acu: Structured Reasoning Traces and Knowledge Graph Safety Verification for Acupuncture Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2603.08321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show significant potential for clinical decision support (CDS), yet their black-box nature -- characterized by untraceable reasoning and probabilistic hallucinations -- poses severe challenges in acupuncture, a field demanding rigorous interpretability and safety. To address this, we propose CORE-Acu, a neuro-symbolic framework for acupuncture clinical decision support that integrates Structured Chain-of-Thought (S-CoT) with knowledge graph (KG) safety verification. First, we construct the first acupuncture Structured Reasoning Trace dataset and a schema-constrained fine-tuning framework. By enforcing an explicit causal chain from pattern identification to treatment principles, treatment plans, and acupoint selection, we transform implicit Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) reasoning into interpretable generation constraints, mitigating the opacity of LLM-based CDS. Furthermore, we construct a TCM safety knowledge graph and establish a ``Generate--Verify--Revise'' closed-loop inference system based on a Symbolic Veto Mechanism, employing deterministic rules to intercept hallucinations and enforce hard safety boundaries. Finally, we introduce the Lexicon-Matched Entity-Reweighted Loss (LMERL), which corrects terminology drift caused by the frequency--importance mismatch in general optimization by adaptively amplifying gradient contributions of high-risk entities during fine-tuning. Experiments on 1,000 held-out cases demonstrate CORE-Acu's superior entity fidelity and reasoning quality. Crucially, CORE-Acu achieved 0/1,000 observed safety violations (95\% CI: 0--0.37\%), whereas GPT-4o exhibited an 8.5\% violation rate under identical rules. These results establish CORE-Acu as a robust neuro-symbolic framework for acupuncture clinical decision support, guaranteeing both reasoning auditability and strict safety compliance.
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Learning Unbiased Cluster Descriptors for Interpretable Imbalanced Concept Drift Detection

arXiv:2603.06757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unlabeled streaming data are usually collected to describe dynamic systems, where concept drift detection is a vital prerequisite to understanding the evolution of systems. However, the drifting concepts are usually imbalanced in most real cases, which brings great challenges to drift detection. That is, the dominant statistics of large clusters can easily mask the drifting of small cluster distributions (also called small concepts), which is known as the `masking effect'. Considering that most existing approaches only detect the overall existence of drift under the assumption of balanced concepts, two critical problems arise: 1) where the small concept is, and 2) how to detect its drift. To address the challenging concept drift detection for imbalanced data, we propose Imbalanced Cluster Descriptor-based Drift Detection (ICD3) approach that is unbiased to the imbalanced concepts. This approach first detects imbalanced concepts by employing a newly designed multi-distribution-granular search, which ensures that the distribution of both small and large concepts is effectively captured. Subsequently, it trains a One-Cluster Classifier (OCC) for each identified concept to carefully monitor their potential drifts in the upcoming data chunks. Since the detection is independently performed for each concept, the dominance of large clusters is thus circumvented. ICD3 demonstrates highly interpretability by specifically locating the drifted concepts, and is robust to the changing of the imbalance ratio of concepts. Comprehensive experiments with multi-aspect ablation studies conducted on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of ICD3 against the state-of-the-art counterparts.
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Yo'City: Personalized and Boundless 3D Realistic City Scene Generation via Self-Critic Expansion

arXiv:2511.18734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic 3D city generation is fundamental to a wide range of applications, including virtual reality and digital twins. However, most existing methods rely on training a single diffusion model, which limits their ability to generate personalized and boundless city-scale scenes. In this paper, we present Yo'City, a novel agentic framework that enables user-customized and infinitely expandable 3D city generation by leveraging the reasoning and compositional capabilities of off-the-shelf large models. Specifically, Yo'City first conceptualizes the city through a top-down planning strategy that defines a hierarchical "City-District-Grid" structure. The Global Planner determines the overall layout and potential functional districts, while the Local Designer further refines each district with detailed grid-level descriptions. Subsequently, the grid-level 3D generation is achieved through a "produce-refine-evaluate" isometric image synthesis loop, followed by image-to-3D generation. To simulate continuous city evolution, Yo'City further introduces a user-interactive, relationship-guided expansion mechanism, which performs scene graph-based distance- and semantics-aware layout optimization, ensuring spatially coherent city growth. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a diverse benchmark dataset and design six multi-dimensional metrics that assess generation quality from the perspectives of semantics, geometry, texture, and layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Yo'City consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation aspects.
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Learning Order Forest for Qualitative-Attribute Data Clustering

arXiv:2603.03387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental approach to understanding data patterns, wherein the intuitive Euclidean distance space is commonly adopted. However, this is not the case for implicit cluster distributions reflected by qualitative attribute values, e.g., the nominal values of attributes like symptoms, marital status, etc. This paper, therefore, discovered a tree-like distance structure to flexibly represent the local order relationship among intra-attribute qualitative values. That is, treating a value as the vertex of the tree allows to capture rich order relationships among the vertex value and the others. To obtain the trees in a clustering-friendly form, a joint learning mechanism is proposed to iteratively obtain more appropriate tree structures and clusters. It turns out that the latent distance space of the whole dataset can be well-represented by a forest consisting of the learned trees. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the joint learning adapts the forest to the clustering task to yield accurate results. Comparisons of 10 counterparts on 12 real benchmark datasets with significance tests verify the superiority of the proposed method.
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