Ran Score: a LLM-based Evaluation Score for Radiology Report Generation

By: Ran Zhang · Yucong Lin · Zhaoli Su · Bowen Liu · Danni Ai · Tianyu Fu · Deqiang Xiao · Jingfan Fan · Yuanyuan Wang · Mingwei Gao · Yuwan Hu · Shuya Gao · Jingtao Li · Jian Yang · Hong Song · Hongliang Sun

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.22935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chest X-ray report generation and automated evaluation are limited by poor recognition of low-prevalence abnormalities and inadequate handling of clinically important language, including negation and ambiguity. We develop a clinician-guided framework combining human expertise and large language models for multi-label finding extraction from free-text chest X-ray reports and use it to define Ran Score, a finding-level metric for report evaluation. Using three non-overlapping MIMIC-CXR-EN cohorts from a public chest X-ray dataset and an independent ChestX-CN validation cohort, we optimize prompts, establish radiologist-derived reference labels and evaluate report generation models. The optimized framework improves the macro-averaged score from 0.753 to 0.956 on the MIMIC-CXR-EN development cohort, exceeds the CheXbert benchmark by 15.7 percentage points on directly comparable labels, and shows robust generalization on the ChestX-CN validation cohort. Here we show that clinician-guided prompt optimization improves agreement with a radiologist-derived reference standard and that Ran Score enables finding-level evaluation of report fidelity, particularly for low-prevalence abnormalities.

OmniDiT: Extending Diffusion Transformer to Omni-VTON Framework

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Weixuan Zeng · Pengcheng Wei · Huaiqing Wang · Boheng Zhang · Jia Sun · Dewen Fan · Lin HE · Long Chen · Qianqian Gan · Fan Yang · Tingting Gao

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.19643v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the rapid advancement of Virtual Try-On (VTON) and Try-Off (VTOFF) technologies, existing VTON methods face challenges with fine-grained detail preservation, generalization to complex scenes, complicated pipeline, and efficient inference. To tackle these problems, we propose OmniDiT, an omni Virtual Try-On framework based on the Diffusion Transformer, which combines try-on and try-off tasks into one unified model. Specifically, we first establish a self-evolving data curation pipeline to continuously produce data, and construct a large VTON dataset Omni-TryOn, which contains over 380k diverse and high-quality garment-model-tryon image pairs and detailed text prompts. Then, we employ the token concatenation and design an adaptive position encoding to effectively incorporate multiple reference conditions. To relieve the bottleneck of long sequence computation, we are the first to introduce Shifted Window Attention into the diffusion model, thus achieving a linear complexity. To remedy the performance degradation caused by local window attention, we utilize multiple timestep prediction and an alignment loss to improve generation fidelity. Experiments reveal that, under various complex scenes, our method achieves the best performance in both the model-free VTON and VTOFF tasks and a performance comparable to current SOTA methods in the model-based VTON task.

The dual regulatory role of METTL14-mediated m<sup>6</sup>A modification in tumorigenesis and its underlying mechanisms

Omics in Hepatocellular

By: Yulan Yang · Lemuge Chao · Xudong Ao · Junqing Liang

20 March 2026 at 18:00

Front Oncol. 2026 Mar 4;16:1771313. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2026.1771313. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A), as the most abundant RNA epitranscriptional modification in eukaryotes, its key component of the methyltransferase complex, METTL14, not only cooperates in catalyzing m⁶A deposition but also has functions independent of methyltransferase activity. This article systematically reviews the dual regulatory role of METTL14 in tumors and its molecular mechanisms, mainly organizing the relevant research in a logical sequence of "tumor suppressive effect - tumor promoting effect - controversial or context-dependent". Studies have shown that METTL14 often plays a tumor suppressive role in tumors such as hepatocellular carcinoma and colorectal cancer, while in pancreatic cancer and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, it mostly promotes malignant progression, showing a high degree of context dependence. This article focuses on two key mechanisms: on the one hand, METTL14 precisely regulates the processing, stability, and function of non-coding RNAs (including miRNAs, lncRNAs, and circRNAs) through m⁶A modification, reshaping the competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network; on the other hand, it shapes an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment by directly upregulating immune checkpoints such as PD-L1, mediating metabolism-immune interactions, and regulating the function of immune cells. Its functional duality also stems from the selective regulation of key pathways such as PI3K/AKT, as well as the differential interpretation by different m⁶A readers (such as YTHDF2 and IGF2BPs). Given the close association of these mechanisms with clinical prognosis, the expression level of METTL14 shows significant potential as a prognostic marker and therapeutic target; in the future, it is necessary to combine single-cell multi-omics and other technologies to analyze its dynamic regulatory network in specific tumor contexts and explore precise treatment strategies based on synthetic lethality or targeting downstream effector molecules.

PMID:41858346 | PMC:PMC12995618 | DOI:10.3389/fonc.2026.1771313

Hypoxia-related and immune phenotype-related fusion model for non-invasive prognostication of hepatocellular carcinoma treated by TACE: a multicentre study

Omics in Hepatocellular

By: Yusheng Guo · Guilin Zhang · Xiaona Fu · Shanshan Jiang · Yi Li · Shanmei Li · Xiaofang Guo · Xiaolin Zhang · Chang Zhao · Rong Ding · Lei Yu · Xuegang Yang · Kai Zhao · Yuxin Sun · QiuPing Liu · YuDong Zhang · Xuhua Duan · Hui Zhao · Jiahua Zou · Bin Liang · Lian Yang · Chuansheng Zheng · Xuefeng Kan

19 March 2026 at 18:00

Gut. 2026 Mar 30:gutjnl-2025-337938. doi: 10.1136/gutjnl-2025-337938. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Survival outcomes after transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE) vary in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients, and existing prognostic scores and imaging models often lack generalisability and biological interpretability.

OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a multimodal prognostication model for HCC that allows for a precise assessment of survival outcomes of HCC patients receiving TACE therapy.

DESIGN: This study enrolled 1448 HCC patients, including a TACE cohort (n=1349), a biomarker subset from a randomised trial (n=41), a single-cell RNA sequencing cohort and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) HCC cohort (n=50). Pre-treatment contrast-enhanced CT images were used to construct deep learning and conventional radiomic models. The early-fusion and late-fusion models (LFMs) were compared, and a clinical-radiologic model (CRM) was formed by integrating the better-performing LFM with clinical variables. Using TCGA data and single-cell transcriptomic profiles, the differences between high-score and low-score groups in tumour immune microenvironment, cellular functional states and key signalling pathways were investigated.

RESULTS: The CRM effectively stratified patients' survival across multiple independent cohorts and achieved more granular risk stratification than the existing clinical models. Multi-omic analyses revealed that in the LFM high-score group, myelocytomatosis oncogene was activated, epithelial-mesenchymal transition enhanced, glycolysis upregulated and hypoxia pathway activated. Single-cell transcriptomic data confirmed that virtually all cell types in high-risk patients scored high in hypoxia, and cytotoxic T cells had a reduced cytotoxic activity.

CONCLUSION: The CRM model can non-invasively predict the prognosis of HCC patients treated by TACE therapy.

PMID:41856522 | DOI:10.1136/gutjnl-2025-337938

Tuning the sensitivity of mechanosensory receptors through histidine scanning

Cell

By: Yuanhao Wang · Yuhan Wang · Wenjie Yuan · Mingyu Fan · Xiaojing Wang · Anhui Wang · Yanling Bao · Yajing Zhang · Jia Chi Tan · Jianglai Wang · Junshuang Liu · Tianqi Huang · Zixuan Han · Biling Pei · Lijuan Chen · Zhengxu Ren · Xueqing Wang · Lanxin Hu · Siqi Wu · Mengke Pang · Sifan Wang · Zihuan Yang · Jiaze Li · Delian Huang · Shuai Shao · Huairui Yuan · Ling Wu · Yinnian Feng · Penghui Zhou · Guohui Li · Bo Sun · Chenqi Xu · Nicholas R.J. Gascoigne · Xiang Zhao

18 February 2026 at 08:00

Histidine scanning represents a broadly applicable technique for the identification of critical interaction sites within TCRs and other mechanosensory receptors to enhance receptor signaling strength and augment therapeutic efficacy via the catch bond mechanism.

Diagnosing Retrieval Bias Under Multiple In-Context Knowledge Updates in Large Language Models

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Boyu Qiao · Sean Guo · Xian Yang · Kun Li · Wei Zhou · Songlin Hu · Yunya Song

16 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.12271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are widely used in knowledge-intensive tasks where the same fact may be revised multiple times within context. Unlike prior work focusing on one-shot updates or single conflicts, multi-update scenarios contain multiple historically valid versions that compete at retrieval, yet remain underexplored. This challenge resembles the AB-AC interference paradigm in cognitive psychology: when the same cue A is successively associated with B and C, the old and new associations compete during retrieval, leading to bias. Inspired by this, we introduce a Dynamic Knowledge Instance (DKI) evaluation framework, modeling multi-updates of the same fact as a cue paired with a sequence of updated values, and assess models via endpoint probing of the earliest (initial) and latest (current) states. Across diverse LLMs, we observe that retrieval bias intensifies as updates increase, earliest-state accuracy stays high while latest-state accuracy drops substantially. Diagnostic analyses of attention, hidden-state similarity, and output logits further reveal that these signals become flatter and weakly discriminative on errors, providing little stable basis for identifying the latest update. Finally, cognitively inspired heuristic intervention strategies yield only modest gains and do not eliminate the bias. Our results reveal a persistent challenge in tracking and following knowledge updates in long contexts.

SRAM-Based Compute-in-Memory Accelerator for Linear-decay Spiking Neural Networks

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Hongyang Shang · Shuai Dong · Yahan Yang · Junyi Yang · Peng Zhou · Arindam Basu

16 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.12739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a biologically inspired alternative to conventional deep networks, offering event-driven and energy-efficient computation. However, their throughput remains constrained by the serial update of neuron membrane states. While many hardware accelerators and Compute-in-Memory (CIM) architectures efficiently parallelize the synaptic operation (W x I) achieving O(1) complexity for matrix-vector multiplication, the subsequent state update step still requires O(N) time to refresh all neuron membrane potentials. This mismatch makes state update the dominant latency and energy bottleneck in SNN inference. To address this challenge, we propose an SRAM-based CIM for SNN with Linear Decay Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LD-LIF) Neuron that co-optimizes algorithm and hardware. At the algorithmic level, we replace the conventional exponential membrane decay with a linear decay approximation, converting costly multiplications into simple additions while accuracy drops only around 1%. At the architectural level, we introduce an in-memory parallel update scheme that performs in-place decay directly within the SRAM array, eliminating the need for global sequential updates. Evaluated on benchmark SNN workloads, the proposed method achieves a 1.1 x to 16.7 x reduction of SOP energy consumption, while providing 15.9 x to 69 x more energy efficiency, with negligible accuracy loss relative to original decay models. This work highlights that beyond accelerating the (W x I) computation, optimizing state-update dynamics within CIM architectures is essential for scalable, low-power, and real-time neuromorphic processing.

SortScrews: A Dataset and Baseline for Real-time Screw Classification

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Tianhao Fu · Bingxuan Yang · Juncheng Guo · Shrena Sribalan · Yucheng Chen

16 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.13027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic identification of screw types is important for industrial automation, robotics, and inventory management. However, publicly available datasets for screw classification are scarce, particularly for controlled single-object scenarios commonly encountered in automated sorting systems. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{SortScrews}$, a dataset for casewise visual classification of screws. The dataset contains 560 RGB images at $512\times512$ resolution covering six screw types and a background class. Images are captured using a standardized acquisition setup and include mild variations in lighting and camera perspective across four capture settings. To facilitate reproducible research and dataset expansion, we also provide a reusable data collection script that allows users to easily construct similar datasets for custom hardware components using inexpensive camera setups. We establish baseline results using transfer learning with EfficientNet-B0 and ResNet-18 classifiers pretrained on ImageNet. In addition, we conduct a well-explored failure analysis. Despite the limited dataset size, these lightweight models achieve strong classification accuracy, demonstrating that controlled acquisition conditions enable effective learning even with relatively small datasets. The dataset, collection pipeline, and baseline training code are publicly available at https://github.com/ATATC/SortScrews.

VideoTemp-o3: Harmonizing Temporal Grounding and Video Understanding in Agentic Thinking-with-Videos

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Wenqi Liu · Yunxiao Wang · Shijie Ma · Meng Liu · Qile Su · Tianke Zhang · Haonan Fan · Changyi Liu · Kaiyu Jiang · Jiankang Chen · Kaiyu Tang · Bin Wen · Fan Yang · Tingting Gao · Han Li · Yinwei Wei · Xuemeng Song

16 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2602.07801v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In long-video understanding, conventional uniform frame sampling often fails to capture key visual evidence, leading to degraded performance and increased hallucinations. To address this, recent agentic thinking-with-videos paradigms have emerged, adopting a localize-clip-answer pipeline in which the model actively identifies relevant video segments, performs dense sampling within those clips, and then produces answers. However, existing methods remain inefficient, suffer from weak localization, and adhere to rigid workflows. To solve these issues, we propose VideoTemp-o3, a unified agentic thinking-with-videos framework that jointly models video grounding and question answering. VideoTemp-o3 exhibits strong localization capability, supports on-demand clipping, and can refine inaccurate localizations. Specifically, in the supervised fine-tuning stage, we design a unified masking mechanism that encourages exploration while preventing noise. For reinforcement learning, we introduce dedicated rewards to mitigate reward hacking. Besides, from the data perspective, we develop an effective pipeline to construct high-quality long video grounded QA data, along with a corresponding benchmark for systematic evaluation across various video durations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on both long video understanding and grounding.

BitDance: Scaling Autoregressive Generative Models with Binary Tokens

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Yuang Ai · Jiaming Han · Shaobin Zhuang · Weijia Mao · Xuefeng Hu · Ziyan Yang · Zhenheng Yang · Yali Wang · Huaibo Huang · Xiangyu Yue · Hao Chen

16 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2602.14041v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present BitDance, a scalable autoregressive (AR) image generator that predicts binary visual tokens instead of codebook indices. With high-entropy binary latents, BitDance lets each token represent up to $2^{256}$ states, yielding a compact yet highly expressive discrete representation. Sampling from such a huge token space is difficult with standard classification. To resolve this, BitDance uses a binary diffusion head: instead of predicting an index with softmax, it employs continuous-space diffusion to generate the binary tokens. Furthermore, we propose next-patch diffusion, a new decoding method that predicts multiple tokens in parallel with high accuracy, greatly speeding up inference. On ImageNet 256x256, BitDance achieves an FID of 1.24, the best among AR models. With next-patch diffusion, BitDance beats state-of-the-art parallel AR models that use 1.4B parameters, while using 5.4x fewer parameters (260M) and achieving 8.7x speedup. For text-to-image generation, BitDance trains on large-scale multimodal tokens and generates high-resolution, photorealistic images efficiently, showing strong performance and favorable scaling. When generating 1024x1024 images, BitDance achieves a speedup of over 30x compared to prior AR models. We release code and models to facilitate further research on AR foundation models. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/BitDance.

LINC-AC092535.5 regulates MICAL2 mRNA level to inhibit p53-mediated ferroptosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Oncogene - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Siyu Zhang · Wenyue Chen · Ji Yang · Zhen Ge · Yan Kong · Haiou Yan · Lili Bao · Ying Shan · Zhiyuan Yang · Wenhui Chen · Si Pan · Yiwen You · Bo You · Qicheng Zhang

14 March 2026 at 08:00

Oncogene, Published online: 14 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03714-y

LINC-AC092535.5 regulates MICAL2 mRNA level to inhibit p53-mediated ferroptosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Multi-Omics Characterization of Lactate-Associated Molecular Subtypes in Lung Cancer Suggests a Role for DKK1 in Lactate-Linked Migration, Invasion, and Lactylation Programs

(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)

By: Hang Yu · Xiao-Bin An · Jin-Cheng Xu · Zhen Zhang · Long-Kai Yang · Long Qin · Qing-Sui Li · Chen-Hong Li · Xu Su · Dan Yang · Ning Wang · Jun-Nan Guo

14 March 2026 at 18:00

Cancers (Basel). 2026 Feb 25;18(5):735. doi: 10.3390/cancers18050735.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Lactate accumulation is increasingly recognized as a feature of tumor metabolic reprogramming that can coincide with immune dysregulation and aggressive phenotypes. The prognostic and immunologic relevance of lactate-associated heterogeneity in lung cancer remains to be clarified.

METHODS: We curated lactate-related genes and identified prognostic candidates in lung cancer cohorts. Consensus clustering was applied to define lactate-associated molecular subtypes, followed by characterization of survival and tumor microenvironment features. A LASSO-based gene signature was developed to generate an individual-level risk score and an integrated nomogram. Multi-omics analyses were used to evaluate concordance between transcriptomic and proteomic alterations. Single-cell transcriptomic data were analyzed to explore cellular heterogeneity in lactate-related programs. In vitro assays evaluated the response of candidate genes to lactate exposure and assessed cell migration and invasion under proliferation-inhibited conditions after genetic perturbation.

RESULTS: Two lactate-associated molecular subtypes were identified with distinct overall survival and divergent immune microenvironment features. Subtype 1 was associated with better outcomes and a more immune-inflamed profile, whereas Subtype 2 was associated with poorer outcomes and a myeloid-enriched, immunosuppressive contexture. Pathway analyses indicated subtype-associated differences in extracellular matrix-related processes and apoptosis-associated signaling. We developed an 11-gene prognostic signature and nomogram that stratified patients by risk across TCGA and GEO cohorts. Multi-omics integration highlighted ANLN, FGA, and DKK1 as consistently dysregulated at both transcript and protein levels. Among these candidates, DKK1 showed lactate-responsive induction in vitro. DKK1 perturbation altered lactate-enhanced migratory and invasive phenotypes and was accompanied by changes in intracellular lactate levels and global protein lactylation, supporting a potential feedforward relationship between lactate exposure, DKK1 expression, and lactylation.

CONCLUSIONS: This study characterizes lactate-associated molecular heterogeneity in lung cancer and provides a lactate-related subtype framework and prognostic risk model for patient stratification. The findings nominate DKK1 as a lactate-responsive candidate linked to migration/invasion phenotypes and lactate/lactylation changes in vitro.

PMID:41827671 | PMC:PMC12985219 | DOI:10.3390/cancers18050735

Diverse genomic and transcriptomic heterogeneity in EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma between exon 19 del and exon 21 L858R

(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)

By: Yuwen Yang · Sitan Qiao · Dongchen Sun · Zhonghan Zhang · Yuanyuan Zhao · Jianhua Zhan · Yan Huang · Hongyun Zhao · Yunpeng Yang · Kui Wu · Xinlan Zhou · Lanjun Zhang · Hao Long · Haoxian Yang · Junye Wang · Xin Wang · Zhesheng Wen · Lin Zhang · Li Zhang · Wenfeng Fang · Xin Zhao · Yaxiong Zhang

14 March 2026 at 18:00

Cell Commun Signal. 2026 Mar 14. doi: 10.1186/s12964-026-02793-4. Online ahead of print.

NO ABSTRACT

PMID:41826981 | DOI:10.1186/s12964-026-02793-4

Multi-Omics Characterization of Lactate-Associated Molecular Subtypes in Lung Cancer Suggests a Role for DKK1 in Lactate-Linked Migration, Invasion, and Lactylation Programs

Omics In Lung

By: Hang Yu · Xiao-Bin An · Jin-Cheng Xu · Zhen Zhang · Long-Kai Yang · Long Qin · Qing-Sui Li · Chen-Hong Li · Xu Su · Dan Yang · Ning Wang · Jun-Nan Guo

14 March 2026 at 18:00

Cancers (Basel). 2026 Feb 25;18(5):735. doi: 10.3390/cancers18050735.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Lactate accumulation is increasingly recognized as a feature of tumor metabolic reprogramming that can coincide with immune dysregulation and aggressive phenotypes. The prognostic and immunologic relevance of lactate-associated heterogeneity in lung cancer remains to be clarified.

METHODS: We curated lactate-related genes and identified prognostic candidates in lung cancer cohorts. Consensus clustering was applied to define lactate-associated molecular subtypes, followed by characterization of survival and tumor microenvironment features. A LASSO-based gene signature was developed to generate an individual-level risk score and an integrated nomogram. Multi-omics analyses were used to evaluate concordance between transcriptomic and proteomic alterations. Single-cell transcriptomic data were analyzed to explore cellular heterogeneity in lactate-related programs. In vitro assays evaluated the response of candidate genes to lactate exposure and assessed cell migration and invasion under proliferation-inhibited conditions after genetic perturbation.

RESULTS: Two lactate-associated molecular subtypes were identified with distinct overall survival and divergent immune microenvironment features. Subtype 1 was associated with better outcomes and a more immune-inflamed profile, whereas Subtype 2 was associated with poorer outcomes and a myeloid-enriched, immunosuppressive contexture. Pathway analyses indicated subtype-associated differences in extracellular matrix-related processes and apoptosis-associated signaling. We developed an 11-gene prognostic signature and nomogram that stratified patients by risk across TCGA and GEO cohorts. Multi-omics integration highlighted ANLN, FGA, and DKK1 as consistently dysregulated at both transcript and protein levels. Among these candidates, DKK1 showed lactate-responsive induction in vitro. DKK1 perturbation altered lactate-enhanced migratory and invasive phenotypes and was accompanied by changes in intracellular lactate levels and global protein lactylation, supporting a potential feedforward relationship between lactate exposure, DKK1 expression, and lactylation.

CONCLUSIONS: This study characterizes lactate-associated molecular heterogeneity in lung cancer and provides a lactate-related subtype framework and prognostic risk model for patient stratification. The findings nominate DKK1 as a lactate-responsive candidate linked to migration/invasion phenotypes and lactate/lactylation changes in vitro.

PMID:41827671 | PMC:PMC12985219 | DOI:10.3390/cancers18050735

Inhibition of ZBTB7B-mediated ADPGK transcription by NEDD4 impedes glycolysis and progression of lung adenocarcinoma

Oncogenesis - nature.com science feeds

By: Fang-Peng Liu · Ting Huang · Hai-Yan Yang · Jian-Hua Zha · Chuan Xu · Cheng-Peng Qiu · Xing Wang · Zhuo Lu · Tao Wang

11 March 2026 at 08:00

Oncogenesis, Published online: 11 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41389-026-00605-5

Inhibition of ZBTB7B-mediated ADPGK transcription by NEDD4 impedes glycolysis and progression of lung adenocarcinoma

Better Eyes, Better Thoughts: Why Vision Chain-of-Thought Fails in Medicine

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Yuan Wu · Zongxian Yang · Jiayu Qian · Songpan Gao · Guanxing Chen · Qiankun Li · Yu-An Huang · Zhi-An Huang

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.06665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting in general domains, yet its efficacy in medical vision-language tasks remains underexplored. We report a counter-intuitive trend: on medical visual question answering, CoT frequently underperforms direct answering (DirA) across general-purpose and medical-specific models. We attribute this to a \emph{medical perception bottleneck}: subtle, domain-specific cues can weaken visual grounding, and CoT may compound early perceptual uncertainty rather than correct it. To probe this hypothesis, we introduce two training-free, inference-time grounding interventions: (i) \emph{perception anchoring} via region-of-interest cues and (ii) \emph{description grounding} via high-quality textual guidance. Across multiple benchmarks and model families, these interventions improve accuracy, mitigate CoT degradation, and in several settings reverse the CoT--DirA inversion. Our findings suggest that reliable clinical VLMs require robust visual grounding and cross-modal alignment, beyond extending text-driven reasoning chains. Code is available \href{https://github.com/TianYin123/Better_Eyes_Better_Thoughts}{here}.

Revealing Behavioral Plasticity in Large Language Models: A Token-Conditional Perspective

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Liyuan Mao · Le Yu · Jing Zhou · Chujie Zheng · Bowen Yu · Chang Gao · Shixuan Liu · An Yang · Weinan Zhang · JunYang Lin

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.08398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we reveal that Large Language Models (LLMs) possess intrinsic behavioral plasticity-akin to chameleons adapting their coloration to environmental cues-that can be exposed through token-conditional generation and stabilized via reinforcement learning. Specifically, by conditioning generation on carefully selected token prefixes sampled from responses exhibiting desired behaviors, LLMs seamlessly adapt their behavioral modes at inference time (e.g., switching from step-by-step reasoning to direct answering) without retraining. Based on this insight, we propose Token-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (ToCoRL), a principled framework that leverages RL to internalize this chameleon-like plasticity, transforming transient inference-time adaptations into stable and learnable behavioral patterns. ToCoRL guides exploration with token-conditional generation and keep enhancing exploitation, enabling emergence of appropriate behaviors. Extensive experiments show that ToCoRL enables precise behavioral control without capability degradation. Notably, we show that large reasoning models, while performing strongly on complex mathematics, can be effectively adapted to excel at factual question answering, which was a capability previously hindered by their step-by-step reasoning patterns.

Batch-of-Thought: Cross-Instance Learning for Enhanced LLM Reasoning

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Xuan Yang · Furong Jia · Roy Xie · Xiong Xi · Hengwei Bian · Jian Li · Monica Agrawal

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2601.02950v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current Large Language Model reasoning systems process queries independently, discarding valuable cross-instance signals such as shared reasoning patterns and consistency constraints. We introduce Batch-of-Thought (BoT), a training-free method that processes related queries jointly to enable cross-instance learning. By performing comparative analysis across batches, BoT identifies high-quality reasoning templates, detects errors through consistency checks, and amortizes computational costs. We instantiate BoT within a multi-agent reflection architecture (BoT-R), where a Reflector performs joint evaluation to unlock mutual information gain unavailable in isolated processing. Experiments across three model families and six benchmarks demonstrate that BoT-R consistently improves accuracy and confidence calibration while reducing inference costs by up to 61%. Our theoretical and experimental analysis reveals when and why batch-aware reasoning benefits LLM systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanyang19/BoT

Multimodal Laryngoscopic Video Analysis for Assisted Diagnosis of Vocal Fold Paralysis

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Yucong Zhang · Xin Zou · Jinshan Yang · Wenjun Chen · Juan Liu · Faya Liang · Ming Li

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2409.03597v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents the Multimodal Laryngoscopic Video Analyzing System (MLVAS), a novel system that leverages both audio and video data to automatically extract key video segments and metrics from raw laryngeal videostroboscopic videos for assisted clinical assessment. The system integrates video-based glottis detection with an audio keyword spotting method to analyze both video and audio data, identifying patient vocalizations and refining video highlights to ensure optimal inspection of vocal fold movements. Beyond key video segment extraction from the raw laryngeal videos, MLVAS is able to generate effective audio and visual features for Vocal Fold Paralysis (VFP) detection. Pre-trained audio encoders are utilized to encode the patient voice to get the audio features. Visual features are generated by measuring the angle deviation of both the left and right vocal folds to the estimated glottal midline on the segmented glottis masks. To get better masks, we introduce a diffusion-based refinement that follows traditional U-Net segmentation to reduce false positives. We conducted several ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of each module and modalities in the proposed MLVAS. The experimental results on a public segmentation dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed segmentation module. In addition, unilateral VFP classification results on a real-world clinic dataset demonstrate MLVAS's ability of providing reliable and objective metrics as well as visualization for assisted clinical diagnosis.

OTESGN: Optimal Transport-Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Xinfeng Liao · Xuanqi Chen · Lianxi Wang · Jiahuan Yang · Zhuowei Chen · Ziying Rong

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2509.08612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify aspect terms and determine their sentiment polarity. While dependency trees combined with contextual semantics provide structural cues, existing approaches often rely on dot-product similarity and fixed graphs, which limit their ability to capture nonlinear associations and adapt to noisy contexts. To address these limitations, we propose the Optimal Transport-Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Network (OTESGN), a model that jointly integrates structural and distributional signals. Specifically, a Syntactic Graph-Aware Attention module models global dependencies with syntax-guided masking, while a Semantic Optimal Transport Attention module formulates aspect-opinion association as a distribution matching problem solved via the Sinkhorn algorithm. An Adaptive Attention Fusion mechanism balances heterogeneous features, and contrastive regularization enhances robustness. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (Rest14, Laptop14, and Twitter) demonstrate that OTESGN delivers state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it surpasses competitive baselines by up to +1.30 Macro-F1 on Laptop14 and +1.01 on Twitter. Ablation studies and visualization analyses further highlight OTESGN's ability to capture fine-grained sentiment associations and suppress noise from irrelevant context.

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