Active Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning

By: Jing Guan · Yachao Yang · Zhaoliang Liu · Yuyao Zhang · Fanyu Meng · Junlan Feng

10 September 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2609.10142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models remain fragile against malicious fine-tuning, motivating training-time defenses against harmful persona drift. Preventative Steering injects undesirable-trait persona vectors during fine-tuning and removes them at evaluation time, yet the mechanism behind its lasting protection remains unclear. Analyzing its temporal optimization dynamics, we find that the defense emerges from an early compensatory adaptation phase followed by a steady-state phase where the corrective signal decays; in parameter space, attention output projections emerge as the dominant residual-write route for defensive updates. Through Intervention Delta Preservation (IDP) and IDP Continuation experiments, we further show that preserving or reinjecting the weight offset fails to maintain protection, indicating that preventative steering relies on active adaptation rather than a static defense. Motivated by this finding, we propose Progressive Intensity Scheduling (PIS), which starts with a moderate injection strength and increases it after static-strength alignment begins to decay. Across the evaluated Qwen2.5 and Gemma-3 models, PIS improves safety robustness over static-strength steering while reducing harmful trait expression.

Pulmonary nodule prediction in the multi-omics era: Integrating radiomics, AI, liquid biopsy, and airway classifiers

Pulmonary nodule

By: Yan Li · Guanyu Lu · Xiangliang Liu · Jin Lu · Wei Song · Jiuwei Cui

10 July 2026 at 18:00

Crit Rev Oncol Hematol. 2026 Sep;225:105483. doi: 10.1016/j.critrevonc.2026.105483. Epub 2026 Jul 10.

ABSTRACT

Low-dose CT (LDCT) lung cancer screening significantly reduces mortality but has dramatically increased the detection of pulmonary nodules. Most of these nodules are benign, leading to a high false-positive rate that triggers unnecessary invasive procedures and patient anxiety, underscoring the need for more precise noninvasive diagnostic tools. Critically, single-modality liquid biopsy biomarkers, including circulating tumor cells, cell-free DNA mutations, or individual microRNAs, have demonstrated insufficient sensitivity or specificity for independent clinical deployment when used in isolation. This necessitates a paradigm shift toward multimodal molecular integration, wherein complementary biomarker classes are combined to overcome the inherent limitations of any single analyte. Traditional clinical prediction models (Mayo, VA, Brock, Herder) assist in estimating malignancy risk, yet their accuracy remains modest. Emerging approaches harness radiomics and artificial intelligence (AI) to extract high-dimensional imaging features from chest CT scans, improving risk stratification beyond human assessment alone. In parallel, minimally invasive liquid biopsy biomarkers offer complementary avenues to detect occult malignancy signals. Additionally, bronchial airway gene expression classifiers leverage the "field-of-injury" effect in normal respiratory epithelium to help identify lung cancer even when the nodule itself cannot be directly sampled via biopsy. Integrating these radiologic and molecular data streams into a multi-omics framework has the potential to enhance diagnostic precision for indeterminate pulmonary nodules, enabling more confident discrimination between benign and malignant lesions. However, most of these emerging tools have not yet been validated in large prospective trials and face technological barriers as well as challenges in real-world implementation. This review focuses primarily on LDCT screening detected pulmonary nodules, while incorporating evidence from incidentally detected and other indeterminate nodule cohorts when relevant to broader CT based management. By synthesizing advances in radiomics, AI, liquid biopsy, airway classifiers, and multi-omics integration, we highlight the need for prospective validation and multidisciplinary collaboration to translate these approaches into clinically useful pathways that improve early lung cancer detection, reduce unnecessary interventions, and enhance patient outcomes.

PMID:42431477 | DOI:10.1016/j.critrevonc.2026.105483

NeurIPS: Neuro-anatomical Inductive Priors for Sphere-based Brain Decoding

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

By: Sijin Yu · Zijiao Chen · Zhenyu Yang · Zihao Tan · Jiakun Xu · Zhongliang Liu · Shengxian Chen · Wenxuan Wu · Xiangmin Xu · Xin Zhang

26 May 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2605.24993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current fMRI decoders face a performance-fidelity trade-off where efficient ID encoders outperform geometrically faithful surface-based models. We argue this is partly driven by inefficient surface tokenization and the failure to use anatomy as a predictive signal. We present NeurIPS, a framework that improves surface-based decoding by reframing anatomical variation from a nuisance to a powerful inductive prior. NeurIPS unites two innovations: a Selective ROI Spherical Tokenizer (SRST) for efficient geometric encoding, and a Structure-Guided Mixture of Experts (SG-MoE) that explicitly models individual anatomy using cortical features. On the Natural Scenes Dataset, NeurIPS establishes a new state-of-the-art for surface decoders and achieves performance comparable to strong 1D baselines. This is achieved with unprecedented efficiency, as the model converges dramatically faster (10 vs. 600 epochs). This efficiency enables rapid adaptation to new subjects using only 20% of data and ensures robust scalability as the training cohort is expanded. Ablations provide causal evidence that these gains are driven by the model's use of cortical features, not by memorizing subject IDs. By leveraging anatomical priors, NeurIPS provides a principled and scalable path toward robust, generalizable brain decoding.

AgentHijack: Benchmarking Computer Use Agent Robustness to Common Environment Corruptions

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

By: Jingwei Sun · Jianing Zhu · Yuanyi Li · Tongliang Liu · Xia HU · Bo Han

26 May 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2605.25707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous computer use agents that powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are emerging as capable assistants for completing complex digital workflows. However, real-world execution environments are far from ideal: pop-ups, resolution changes, and competing applications frequently interfere with agent perception and control. We introduce AgentHijack, a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of computer-use agents under common corruptions, where the uncertainties in dynamic environment disrupt the execution flow without direct adversarial intent. Specifically, AgentHijack introduces 9 configurable common corruptions to replicate realistic imperfect scenarios. We evaluate a variety of desktop tasks that utilize MLLM-based agents and discover that even minor instances of corruption can result in substantial performance degradation, which emphasizes the fragility of agents and underscores the necessity of robustness evaluation. Afterward, we propose AgentHijack-Agent, a framework that integrates an action generator with enhanced grounding capabilities and an onlooker responsible for behavior summarization and environment checking. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness. Our code, environment, baseline models and data are publicly available at: https://AgentHijack.github.io.

Correction: Steroid receptor coactivator-1 facilitates METTL3-mediated m6A modification by coactivating NF-κB and promotes the malignant progression of glioblastoma

Oncogene - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Liang Liu · Rui Wang · Ke Cheng · Chunmei Bai · Yuke Ji · Yifei Zhang · Haoran Yang · Miaomiao Gong · Fang Xie · Yongshun Zhao · Jinjin Pan · Yuhui Yuan

15 April 2026 at 08:00

Oncogene, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03788-8

Correction: Steroid receptor coactivator-1 facilitates METTL3-mediated m6A modification by coactivating NF-κB and promotes the malignant progression of glioblastoma

Effect of the Maxing Huoqiao granule on nonsevere community-acquired pneumonia: A multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial

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

By: Qingming Ke · Caiping Zhao · Shengda Luo · Yuntao Liu · Ye Ye · Xingdong Lin · Jing Zeng · Xinghua Liu · Yang Liao · Hongtao Li · Shu Chen · Hong Ren · Liang Liu · Hudan Pan

12 April 2026 at 18:00

Pharmacol Res. 2026 Apr 9:108186. doi: 10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108186. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) remains a major global public health challenge with substantial morbidity and mortality. Although preclinical studies suggest that Maxing Huoqiao (MXHQ) granule may have therapeutic potential for pneumonia, high-quality clinical evidence is still limited. We conducted a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial at two tertiary hospitals in China to evaluate the clinical efficacy of MXHQ as adjunctive therapy and to explore its potential mechanisms in adults with nonsevere CAP receiving standard moxifloxacin treatment. A total of 96 patients were enrolled and randomized (1:1:1) to receive standard-dose MXHQ, low-dose MXHQ, or placebo in addition to moxifloxacin for 7 days, with a 14-day follow-up. The primary endpoint was clinical cure, defined as composite recovery of major respiratory symptoms, lung rales, and fever; secondary endpoints included symptom relief, radiographic improvement, and safety. Compared with placebo, standard-dose MXHQ was associated with a higher day-14 clinical cure rate (30.78% vs. 68.97%; RR = 0.45, 95% CI = 0.24-0.83; P < 0.01). Furthermore, the standard-dose intervention was correlated with a shorter time to relief and recovery of cough and sputum (P < 0.05), as well as improvements in symptom scores (P < 0.05) and promoting lesion absorption on chest CT (P < 0.05). Low-dose MXHQ showed no significant clinical benefit, whereas safety profiles were comparable across all groups. Transcriptomic analyses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells, complemented by a Streptococcus pneumonia animal model, indicated that the clinical benefits of MXHQ are linked to the modulation of inflammation and innate immunity. These omics and in vivo observations suggest a potential mechanism underlying the protective effects of MXHQ against inflammatory injury and promotion of tissue repair, involving the regulation of anti-inflammatory mediators and tissue repair-related factors. (Chictr.org.cn, ID Number: ChiCTR2400082095).

PMID:41966499 | DOI:10.1016/j.phrs.2026.108186

TSPO: Breaking the Double Homogenization Dilemma in Multi-turn Search Policy Optimization

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

By: Shichao Ma · Zhiyuan Ma · Ming Yang · Xiaofan Li · Xing Wu · Jintao Du · Yu Cheng · Weiqiang Wang · Qiliang Liu · Zhengyang Zhou · Yang Wang

7 April 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2601.22776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn tool-integrated reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks through iterative information retrieval. However, current reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks for search-augmented reasoning predominantly rely on sparse outcome-level rewards, leading to a "Double Homogenization Dilemma." This manifests as (1) Process homogenization, where the thinking, reasoning, and tooling involved in generation are ignored. (2) Intra-group homogenization, coarse-grained outcome rewards often lead to inefficiencies in intra-group advantage estimation with methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) during sampling. To address this, we propose Turn-level Stage-aware Policy Optimization (TSPO). TSPO introduces the First-Occurrence Latent Reward (FOLR) mechanism, allocating partial rewards to the step where the ground-truth answer first appears, thereby preserving process-level signals and increasing reward variance within groups without requiring external reward models or any annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSPO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving average performance gains of 24% and 13.6% on Qwen2.5-3B and 7B models, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Flipped-May/TSPO.

Mirror-enhanced 4Pi-SMLM with one objective enables isotropic nanoscale imaging

Nature Biotechnology - Issue - nature.com science feeds

By: Zijing Yu · Bei Zheng · Yajing Zhan · Shuxin Li · Xulong Wang · Qiuyang Dai · Yanqin Chen · Zongfang Wei · Wenxuan Zhao · Linlin Chen · Jiaxin Tang · Tianchang Xia · Lingjuan He · Changliang Liu · Xudong Wu · Xiaochun Yu · Yongdeng Zhang

31 March 2026 at 08:00

Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 31 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03083-7

Single-molecule 4Pi microscopy is simplified and made accessible by using a single objective.

Grounding Sim-to-Real Generalization in Dexterous Manipulation: An Empirical Study with Vision-Language-Action Models

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

By: Ruixing Jin · Zicheng Zhu · Ruixiang Ouyang · Sheng Xu · Bo Yue · Zhizheng Wu · Guiliang Liu

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.22876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning a generalist control policy for dexterous manipulation typically relies on large-scale datasets. Given the high cost of real-world data collection, a practical alternative is to generate synthetic data through simulation. However, the resulting synthetic data often exhibits a significant gap from real-world distributions. While many prior studies have proposed algorithms to bridge the Sim-to-Real discrepancy, there remains a lack of principled research that grounds these methods in real-world manipulation tasks, particularly their performance on generalist policies such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. In this study, we empirically examine the primary determinants of Sim-to-Real generalization across four dimensions: multi-level domain randomization, photorealistic rendering, physics-realistic modeling, and reinforcement learning updates. To support this study, we design a comprehensive evaluation protocol to quantify the real-world performance of manipulation tasks. The protocol accounts for key variations in background, lighting, distractors, object types, and spatial features. Through experiments involving over 10k real-world trials, we derive critical insights into Sim-to-Real transfer. To inform and advance future studies, we release both the robotic platforms and the evaluation protocol for public access to facilitate independent verification, thereby establishing a realistic and standardized benchmark for dexterous manipulation policies.

EVA: Aligning Video World Models with Executable Robot Actions via Inverse Dynamics Rewards

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

By: Ruixiang Wang · Qingming Liu · Yueci Deng · Guiliang Liu · Zhen Liu · Kui Jia

25 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.17808v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Video generative models are increasingly used as world models for robotics, where a model generates a future visual rollout conditioned on the current observation and task instruction, and an inverse dynamics model (IDM) converts the generated frames into executable robot actions. However, current video world models lack explicit executability constraints. As a result, visually coherent rollouts may still violate rigid-body and kinematic consistency, producing unstable or infeasible control commands when decoded by an IDM. We refer to this mismatch between visual generation and physically executable control as the executability gap. While this gap can be mitigated at inference time using techniques such as rejection sampling, such approaches are inefficient due to the high cost of video generation. In this paper, we leverage the executability gap as a training signal and introduce Executable Video Alignment (EVA), a reinforcement-learning post-training framework for aligning video world models. EVA trains an inverse dynamics model on real robot trajectories and repurposes it as a reward model that evaluates generated videos through the action sequences they induce, encouraging smooth motions measured by velocity, acceleration, and jerk while penalizing actions that violate embodiment constraints. Importantly, the reward remains informative even when generated videos contain severe visual artifacts, since such artifacts typically translate into unstable or out-of-bound actions. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and a real bimanual robot show that EVA reduces embodiment-specific artifacts in generated rollouts and improves downstream task execution success.

Thinking with Gaze: Sequential Eye-Tracking as Visual Reasoning Supervision for Medical VLMs

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

By: Yiwei Li · Zihao Wu · Yanjun Lv · Hanqi Jiang · Weihang You · Zhengliang Liu · Dajiang Zhu · Xiang Li · Quanzheng Li · Tianming Liu · Lin Zhao

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2603.06697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) process images as visual tokens, yet their intermediate reasoning is often carried out in text, which can be suboptimal for visually grounded radiology tasks. Radiologists instead diagnose via sequential visual search; eye-tracking captures this process as time-ordered gaze trajectories that reveal how evidence is acquired over time. We use eye-gaze as supervision to guide VLM reasoning by introducing a small set of dedicated gaze tokens. These tokens are trained to predict gaze-selected image patch indices in temporal order, encouraging the model to follow human-like evidence acquisition and integration. Experiments on MIMIC-EYE and multiple external zero-shot benchmarks show consistent gains over baselines, achieving state-of-the-art in-domain performance and improved out-of-domain robustness. These results highlight temporally ordered gaze as an effective supervision signal for learning visually grounded medical reasoning.

From 2D Alignment to 3D Plausibility: Unifying Heterogeneous 2D Priors and Penetration-Free Diffusion for Occlusion-Robust Two-Hand Reconstruction

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

By: Gaoge Han · Yongkang Cheng · Zhe Chen · Shaoli Huang · Tongliang Liu

10 March 2026 at 12:00

arXiv:2503.17788v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-hand reconstruction from monocular images is hampered by complex poses and severe occlusions, which often cause interaction misalignment and two-hand penetration. We address this by decoupling the problem into 2D structural alignment and 3D spatial interaction alignment, each handled by a tailored component. For 2D alignment, we pioneer the attempt to unify heterogeneous structural priors (keypoints, segmentation, and depth) from vision foundation models as complementary structured guidance for two-hand recovery. Instead of extracting priors prediction as explicit inputs, we propose a fusion-alignment encoder that absorbs their structural knowledge implicitly, achieving foundation-level guidance without foundation-level cost. For 3D spatial alignment, we propose a two-hand penetration-free diffusion model that learns a generative mapping from interpenetrated poses to realistic, collision-free configurations. Guided by collision gradients during denoising, the model converges toward the manifold of valid two-hand interactions, preserving geometric and kinematic coherence. This generative formulation approach enables physically credible reconstructions even under occlusion or ambiguous visual input. Extensive experiments on InterHand2.6M and HIC show state-of-the-art or leading performance in interaction alignment and penetration suppression. Project: https://gaogehan.github.io/A2P/

Benchmarking MLLM-based Web Understanding: Reasoning, Robustness and Safety

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

By: Junliang Liu · Jingyu Xiao · Wenxin Tang · Zhixian Wang · Zipeng Xie · Wenxuan Wang · Minrui Zhang · Shuanghe Yu

5 March 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2509.21782v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as the core reasoning engine for web-facing systems, powering GUI agents and front-end automation that must interpret page structure, select actionable widgets, and execute multi-step interactions reliably. However, existing benchmarks largely emphasize visual perception or UI code generation, showing insufficient evaluation on the reasoning, robustness and safety capability required for end-to-end web applications. To bridge the gap, we introduce a comprehensive web understanding benchmark, named WebRRSBench, that jointly evaluates Reasoning, Robustness, and Safety across eight tasks, such as position relationship reasoning, color robustness, and safety critical detection, etc. The benchmark is constructed from 729 websites and contains 3799 QA pairs that probe multi-step inference over page structure, text, widgets, and safety-critical interactions. To ensure reliable measurement, we adopt standardized prompts, a protocolized and deterministic evaluation pipeline, and multi-stage quality control combining automatic checks with targeted human verification. We evaluate 11 MLLMs on WebRRSBench. The results reveal significant gaps: models still struggle with compositional and cross-element reasoning over realistic layouts, show limited robustness when facing perturbations in user interfaces and content such as layout rearrangements or visual style shifts, and are rather conservative in recognizing and avoiding safety critical or irreversible actions. Our code and appendix are available at https: //github.com/annoy-worker/WebRSSBench.

Shuffle-R1: Efficient RL framework for Multimodal Large Language Models via Data-centric Dynamic Shuffle

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

By: Linghao Zhu · Yiran Guan · Dingkang Liang · Jianzhong Ju · Zhenbo Luo · Bin Qin · Jian Luan · Yuliang Liu · Xiang Bai

24 February 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2508.05612v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies caused by two underexplored issues: Advantage Collapsing, where most advantages in a batch concentrate near zero, and Rollout Silencing, where the proportion of rollouts contributing non-zero gradients diminishes over time. These issues lead to suboptimal gradient updates and hinder long-term learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Shuffle-R1, a simple yet principled framework that improves RL fine-tuning efficiency by dynamically restructuring trajectory sampling and batch composition. It introduces (1) Pairwise Trajectory Sampling, which selects high-contrast trajectories with large advantages to improve gradient signal quality, and (2) Advantage-based Trajectory Shuffle, which increases exposure of valuable rollouts through informed batch reshuffling. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong RL baselines with minimal overhead. These results highlight the importance of data-centric adaptations for more efficient RL training in MLLM.

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