DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA

By: Yi Chen · Yuying Ge · Hui Zhou · Mingyu Ding · Yixiao Ge · Xihui Liu

1 April 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.29844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

The Yin and Yang of tertiary lymphoid structures in primary liver cancer

Omics in Hepatocellular

By: Hui Liu · Shi Chen · Muzi Cao · Lizhuang Shu · Mufan Ji · Jian Zhou · Jia Fan · Pengxiang Wang · Yunfan Sun

29 March 2026 at 18:00

Cancer Lett. 2026 Mar 27;648:218461. doi: 10.1016/j.canlet.2026.218461. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) have emerged as key regulators of anti-tumor immunity and biomarkers for immunotherapy response in liver cancer, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA), and combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinoma (cHCC-iCCA). Advances in single-cell and spatial multi-omics technologies have revealed unprecedented complexity in TLSs, challenging the traditional binary classification of TLSs as simply "good" or "bad". Their functional diversity appears to be shaped by spatiotemporal context, cellular composition, and maturation status. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of TLSs in liver cancer, employing the Yin-Yang paradigm to navigate their functional dualism and prognostic contradictions through a detailed analysis of their identification, classification, and spatiotemporal interactions within the TME. Mechanistically, we elucidate how TLS functions are orchestrated by complex interactions between tumor cells, immune cell subsets, stromal components, and systemic factors. Within this framework, key metabolic drivers, notably ATP citrate lyase (ACLY), and signaling axes such as cGAS-STING/mTOR have emerged as pivotal regulators of TLS ontogeny. In addition, we evaluate current preclinical animal models and therapeutic strategies for clinical TLS induction. Furthermore, we have discussed the key unanswered questions in the field, including the three-dimensional architecture of TLSs and the mechanisms by which they establish durable immunological memory independent of the primary tumor. Clinically, TLSs exhibit great promise as prognostic and predictive biomarkers, particularly in the context of immune checkpoint blockade and locoregional therapies. Finally, we identify challenges in standardization, mechanistic understanding, and translational applications, providing directions for future research to harness TLSs for improving liver cancer outcomes.

PMID:41905709 | DOI:10.1016/j.canlet.2026.218461

PhySe-RPO: Physics and Semantics Guided Relative Policy Optimization for Diffusion-Based Surgical Smoke Removal

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

By: Zining Fang · Chunhui Liu · Bin Xu · Ming Chen · Xiaowei Hu · Cheng Xue

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.22844v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surgical smoke severely degrades intraoperative video quality, obscuring anatomical structures and limiting surgical perception. Existing learning-based desmoking approaches rely on scarce paired supervision and deterministic restoration pipelines, making it difficult to perform exploration or reinforcement-driven refinement under real surgical conditions. We propose PhySe-RPO, a diffusion restoration framework optimized through Physics- and Semantics-Guided Relative Policy Optimization. The core idea is to transform deterministic restoration into a stochastic policy, enabling trajectory-level exploration and critic-free updates via group-relative optimization. A physics-guided reward imposes illumination and color consistency, while a visual-concept semantic reward learned from CLIP-based surgical concepts promotes smoke-free and anatomically coherent restoration. Together with a reference-free perceptual constraint, PhySe-RPO produces results that are physically consistent, semantically faithful, and clinically interpretable across synthetic and real robotic surgical datasets, providing a principled route to robust diffusion-based restoration under limited paired supervision.

Three Creates All: You Only Sample 3 Steps

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

By: Yuren Cai · Guangyi Wang · Zongqing Li · Li Li · Zhihui Liu · Songzhi Su

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.22375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models deliver high-fidelity generation but remain slow at inference time due to many sequential network evaluations. We find that standard timestep conditioning becomes a key bottleneck for few-step sampling. Motivated by layer-dependent denoising dynamics, we propose Multi-layer Time Embedding Optimization (MTEO), which freeze the pretrained diffusion backbone and distill a small set of step-wise, layer-wise time embeddings from reference trajectories. MTEO is plug-and-play with existing ODE solvers, adds no inference-time overhead, and trains only a tiny fraction of parameters. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and backbones show state-of-the-art performance in the few-step sampling and substantially narrow the gap between distillation-based and lightweight methods. Code will be available.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Covariate Time Series

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

By: Kenny Ye Liang · Zhongyi Pei · Huan Zhang · Yuhui Liu · Shaoxu Song · Jianmin Wang

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.04951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While RAG has greatly enhanced LLMs, extending this paradigm to Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) remains a challenge. This is exemplified in the Predictive Maintenance of the Pressure Regulating and Shut-Off Valve (PRSOV), a high-stakes industrial scenario characterized by (1) data scarcity, (2) short transient sequences, and (3) covariate coupled dynamics. Unfortunately, existing time-series RAG approaches predominantly rely on generated static vector embeddings and learnable context augmenters, which may fail to distinguish similar regimes in such scarce, transient, and covariate coupled scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose RAG4CTS, a regime-aware, training-free RAG framework for Covariate Time-Series. Specifically, we construct a hierarchal time-series native knowledge base to enable lossless storage and physics-informed retrieval of raw historical regimes. We design a two-stage bi-weighted retrieval mechanism that aligns historical trends through point-wise and multivariate similarities. For context augmentation, we introduce an agent-driven strategy to dynamically optimize context in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on PRSOV demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in prediction accuracy. The proposed system is deployed in Apache IoTDB within China Southern Airlines. Since deployment, our method has successfully identified one PRSOV fault in two months with zero false alarm.

Facile induction of immune tolerance by an interleukin-2–TGFβ surrogate agonist

Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Qinli Sun · Alison K. Barrett · Masato Ogishi · Huiyun Lyu · Hua Jiang · Honghui Liu · Yang Zhao · Grayson E. Rodriguez · Pingdong Tao · Matthias Obenaus · Karsten D. Householder · Qizhi Tang · Tobias V. Lanz · K. Christopher Garcia

11 March 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 11 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10208-0

A fusion protein designed to comprise IL-2 and a helminth-derived TGFβ mimic activates IL-2 and TGFβ signalling pathways in IL-2 receptor-expressing T cells and induces stable antigen-specific regulatory T cells in peripheral lymphoid organs.

Agentic Critical Training

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

By: Weize Liu · Minghui Liu · Sy-Tuyen Ho · Souradip Chakraborty · Xiyao Wang · Furong Huang

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.08706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents often begins with imitation learning, but it only teaches agents what to do without understanding why: agents never contrast successful actions against suboptimal alternatives and thus lack awareness of action quality. Recent approaches attempt to address this by introducing self-reflection supervision derived from contrasts between expert and alternative actions. However, the training paradigm fundamentally remains imitation learning: the model imitates pre-constructed reflection text rather than learning to reason autonomously. We propose Agentic Critical Training (ACT), a reinforcement learning paradigm that trains agents to identify the better action among alternatives. By rewarding whether the model's judgment is correct, ACT drives the model to autonomously develop reasoning about action quality, producing genuine self-reflection rather than imitating it. Across three challenging agent benchmarks, ACT consistently improves agent performance when combined with different post-training methods. It achieves an average improvement of 5.07 points over imitation learning and 4.62 points over reinforcement learning. Compared to approaches that inject reflection capability through knowledge distillation, ACT also demonstrates clear advantages, yielding an average improvement of 2.42 points. Moreover, ACT enables strong out-of-distribution generalization on agentic benchmarks and improves performance on general reasoning benchmarks without any reasoning-specific training data, highlighting the value of our method. These results suggest that ACT is a promising path toward developing more reflective and capable LLM agents.

GraphSkill: Documentation-Guided Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Coding for Complex Graph Reasoning

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

By: Fali Wang · Chenglin Weng · Xianren Zhang · Siyuan Hong · Hui Liu · Suhang Wang

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.06620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing demand for automated graph algorithm reasoning has attracted increasing attention in the large language model (LLM) community. Recent LLM-based graph reasoning methods typically decouple task descriptions from graph data, generate executable code augmented by retrieval from technical documentation, and refine the code through debugging. However, we identify two key limitations in existing approaches: (i) they treat technical documentation as flat text collections and ignore its hierarchical structure, leading to noisy retrieval that degrades code generation quality; and (ii) their debugging mechanisms focus primarily on runtime errors, yet ignore more critical logical errors. To address them, we propose {\method}, an \textit{agentic hierarchical retrieval-augmented coding framework} that exploits the document hierarchy through top-down traversal and early pruning, together with a \textit{self-debugging coding agent} that iteratively refines code using automatically generated small-scale test cases. To enable comprehensive evaluation of complex graph reasoning, we introduce a new dataset, {\dataset}, covering small-scale, large-scale, and composite graph reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher task accuracy and lower inference cost compared to baselines\footnote{The code is available at \href{https://github.com/FairyFali/GraphSkill}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/FairyFali/GraphSkill}}.}.

MetaWorld-X: Hierarchical World Modeling via VLM-Orchestrated Experts for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

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

By: Yutong Shen · Hangxu Liu · Penghui Liu · Jiashuo Luo · Yongkang Zhang · Rex Morvley · Chen Jiang · Jianwei Zhang · Lei Zhang

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.08572v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning natural, stable, and compositionally generalizable whole-body control policies for humanoid robots performing simultaneous locomotion and manipulation (loco-manipulation) remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing reinforcement learning approaches typically rely on a single monolithic policy to acquire multiple skills, which often leads to cross-skill gradient interference and motion pattern conflicts in high-degree-of-freedom systems. As a result, generated behaviors frequently exhibit unnatural movements, limited stability, and poor generalization to complex task compositions. To address these limitations, we propose MetaWorld-X, a hierarchical world model framework for humanoid control. Guided by a divide-and-conquer principle, our method decomposes complex control problems into a set of specialized expert policies (Specialized Expert Policies, SEP). Each expert is trained under human motion priors through imitation-constrained reinforcement learning, introducing biomechanically consistent inductive biases that ensure natural and physically plausible motion generation. Building upon this foundation, we further develop an Intelligent Routing Mechanism (IRM) supervised by a Vision-Language Model (VLM), enabling semantic-driven expert composition. The VLM-guided router dynamically integrates expert policies according to high-level task semantics, facilitating compositional generalization and adaptive execution in multi-stage loco-manipulation tasks.

Unbiased Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Group-Based Policy Optimization

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

By: Haodong Zhu · Yangyang Ren · Yanjing Li · Mingbao Lin · Linlin Yang · Xuhui Liu · Xiantong Zhen · Haiguang Liu · Baochang Zhang

5 March 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2603.04135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) effectively scales LLM reasoning but incurs prohibitive computational costs due to its extensive group-based sampling requirement. While recent selective data utilization methods can mitigate this overhead, they could induce estimation bias by altering the underlying sampling distribution, compromising theoretical rigor and convergence behavior. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Pruning Policy Optimization (DPPO), a framework that enables dynamic pruning while preserving unbiased gradient estimation through importance sampling-based correction. By incorporating mathematically derived rescaling factors, DPPO significantly accelerates GRPO training without altering the optimization objective of the full-batch baseline. Furthermore, to mitigate the data sparsity induced by pruning, we introduce Dense Prompt Packing, a window-based greedy strategy that maximizes valid token density and hardware utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPPO consistently accelerates training across diverse models and benchmarks. For instance, on Qwen3-4B trained on MATH, DPPO achieves 2.37$\times$ training speedup and outperforms GRPO by 3.36% in average accuracy across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

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