NPCBench: A Clinical Apprenticeship Benchmark for Multimodal Care-Pathway Reasoning in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma
Pengkai Wang, Wei-Wei Zhang, Yan Li, Min Tang, Zhitian Hou, Zeyu Liu, Guanghao Zhu, Yuanyi Wang 等 16 位作者
AI 速览：作者提出 NPCBench，一个模拟专科培训进阶的鼻咽癌临床学徒制基准，用于评估模型能否在多模态证据下完成从知识到纵向诊疗路径的连贯推理。
Current medical benchmarks typically break down clinical competence into isolated factual questions, single-image tasks, or static case vignettes. These tests score individual answers, but reveal less about whether a model can integrate subspecialty knowledge with multimodal evidence and track a patient's condition throughout a course of care. To close this gap, we introduce NPCBench, a clinical apprenticeship benchmark for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). NPCBench mirrors specialist training, from guideline and foundational knowledge to case planning, longitudinal review, CarePath integration, and open-ended consultation. It contains 4,777 component and consultation items and a 100-patient CarePath cohort with 417 scored diagnostic and care tasks. The episode-level evaluation tests whether diagnostic and care answers are jointly correct within a care pathway. By linking stepwise tasks to patient-level care trajectories, NPCBench evaluates whether models ground decisions in visual evidence, interpret changes in patient state, and meet clinical requirements in consultation. Across 30 evaluated models, we observe a composition gap: strong performance on individual tasks does not ensure jointly correct diagnostic and care answers for the same patient. Among 21 multimodal models, strict CarePath success reaches at most 23%. Paired controls and physician calibration further examine evidence grounding, longitudinal revision, and consultation judging. Overall, NPCBench broadens the evaluation of medical artificial intelligence beyond static question-answering paradigms to an apprenticeship-oriented assessment of clinical workflows, thereby offering a testbed for evidence-based and temporally coherent reasoning in oncology care.
Weimin Wu, Xuefeng Song, Yibo Wen, Qinjie Lin, Zhihan Zhou, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Zhong Wang, Han Liu
We introduce Genome-Factory, the first integrated Python library for tuning, deploying, and interpreting genomic foundation models. Our core contribution is to simplify and unify the workflow for genomic model development: data collection, model tuning, inference, benchmarking, and interpretability. For data collection, Genome-Factory offers an automated pipeline to download genomic sequences and preprocess them. For model tuning, Genome-Factory supports both full and parameter-efficient fine-tuning across diverse genomic models. For inference, Genome-Factory enables both embedding extraction and DNA sequence generation. For benchmarking, we include two existing benchmarks and provide a flexible interface to incorporate additional benchmarks. For interpretability, Genome-Factory introduces an open-source biological interpreter based on a sparse auto-encoder. We validate the utility of Genome-Factory across three dimensions: (i) Compatibility with diverse models and fine-tuning methods; (ii) Benchmarking downstream performance using two open-source benchmarks; (iii) Biological interpretation of learned representations with DNABERT-2. These results highlight its practical value for real-world genomic analysis. GitHub: https://github.com/WeiminWu2000/Genome_Factory.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess depression in counseling conversations, where psychology evidence suggests that tracking change across sessions matters more than any single score. However, existing dialogue benchmarks score each session on its own, and an accurate score for every session does not guarantee that a method follows the changes between sessions. We introduce LongCounsel-8, a benchmark for tracking depression across counseling sessions. Its systematic pipeline takes client profiles from real counseling cases, depression scores from real longitudinal data, and turn length and form from real counseling dialogues, yielding 7,749 five-session trajectories from three LLMs. Every session is generated to express a preset score on the PHQ-8, a standard eight-symptom depression questionnaire. Validation shows that the labels are self-consistent and the dialogues close to real counseling. Following clinical research on treatment monitoring, we propose a trend-based evaluation protocol reflecting real-world tracking needs: changes between sessions, crossings of the screening cutoff, trajectory types, and symptom-level changes. Extensive experiments show all five existing methods tested fall short in tracking trends: none estimates changes better than a no-change baseline, at most 40% of cutoff crossings are detected, and adding earlier sessions lowers change error but causes more missed improvements.
Text-based counseling is widely adopted across online mental health platforms, where automatically estimating depressive symptom severity from transcripts is vital for client safety and clinical monitoring. We therefore study prediction of the standard eight-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8) total score directly from counseling sessions. Existing clinical-based methods obtain structured assessments through large language model inference but summarize away individual client turns. Training-based methods preserve turn semantics but must learn clinical structure from limited labels. Integrating these representations requires preserving clinical-feature identity and selecting evidence relevant to each symptom. We propose EmoTrack, which jointly encodes clinical-feature tokens and frozen client-turn embeddings, then uses PHQ-8 item queries to estimate total severity. Optional gated memory incorporates evidence from the preceding session. To support controlled evaluation in the multi-session setting, we introduce CounselArc, a synthetic counseling dataset with session-level PHQ-8 supervision for predicting current-session severity with optional prior-session context. Across real DAIC-WOZ interviews, transfer to E-DAIC, and three longitudinal datasets, EmoTrack achieves the lowest normalized aggregate error. It reduces DAIC-WOZ mean absolute error by 12.5% and aggregate error by approximately 8.6%, each relative to the strongest baseline for that measure.
Shibo Feng, Wei Li, Min Wu, Chunyan Miao, Peilin Zhao
Real-world time series exhibit complex dynamics across multiple temporal resolutions, yet effectively incorporating multi-scale information into generative modeling remains challenging without increasing generative complexity. We propose UniFlow, a unified framework that integrates multi-scale representation learning with efficient non-autoregressive generation through a shared-semantic discrete interface. Specifically, a multi-scale tokenizer employs shared-index voting to consolidate complementary temporal information into a single public-ID sequence, while scale-specific codebooks preserve the information required for reconstruction. Building on this unified representation, we develop geometry-aware categorical flow matching, which initializes transport from learned low-rank anchors and generates public identities non-autoregressively. This design captures multi-scale temporal structure without requiring multiple generative token streams or sequential token decoding. Experiments across four benchmarks and both short- and long-term settings demonstrate improved generative fidelity, strong cross-scale consistency, and substantial inference speedups over representative autoregressive and diffusion-based baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/William-Liwei/uniflow
Mingxin Li, Enge Song, Yueshang Zuo, Xiaodong Liu, Rong Wen, Qiang Fu, Gianni Antichi, Jian He 等 30 位作者
LLM agents increasingly rely on tool calling to complete tasks. Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes tool calling between LLM agents and tool providers. It reduces integration cost and drives rapid growth in tool scale. In production deployments, tool access becomes difficult to scale. On the tool provider side, legacy services are not directly callable through MCP; the rapid protocol development creates ongoing compatibility cost. On the agent side, the number of mounted tools is limited by the LLM context window and inference overhead; mounting a large tool set increases token usage and inference latency and can reduce task success rate. Moreover, for stateful MCP backends with multiple replicas, preserving session affinity increases client-side complexity. We present a cloud-scale MCP Gateway system. It breaks the direct-connect model on the data plane and offloads legacy service integration, consolidating incompatible MCP variants, access control, tool recommendation, and session-aware routing at the gateway. The conversion module supports 315 OpenAPI services in the cloud and integrates MCP transport variants. Session-aware routing decouples the scalability of the gateway layer and the MCP service layer. The hybrid retrieval engine sustains $\sim$98\% Top-15 recall; it scales agent tool access to 3{,}000+ tools with improved tool selection accuracy. We also share the lessons learned from deploying the gateway system in production.
The rapid growth of computer science (CS) papers increases the work needed to review research and find relevant studies. The growing use of AI tools in scientific writing makes it increasingly important to identify the authors behind this growth. Previous studies have tracked publication growth and followed researchers' careers, documenting the increasing number of authors and the many researchers who publish only briefly. However, annual averages of papers per author reflect different sets of researchers and may hide changes among the same authors. This study addresses this gap by linking individual changes to overall CS paper growth using arXiv, DBLP, and conference submission records for 2010-2025. With each paper divided equally among its authors, the total paper count equals the number of authors multiplied by their average papers per author. This relationship provides a decomposition of the two contributions of paper growth. This decomposition attributes nearly all growth in CS paper volume to an increase in the number of publishing authors. The analysis of author numbers further distinguishes expansion through new and returning arXiv authors from the replacement of authors no longer publishing there. Changes in who publishes also affect the average, motivating comparisons of the same authors over time within groups with similar past paper counts. This comparison identifies substantial replacement within the growing author group. New authors average fewer papers under this counting method, keeping the overall average nearly unchanged despite increases among authors who published in both years. Moreover, statistics show that these increases are uneven, with widening gaps even among authors who previously published similar numbers of papers. These findings provide insights into peer review, community participation, researcher evaluation, and equity within the CS community.
LLM-based agents are increasingly used to complete complex, long-horizon tasks without human intervention. To make progress toward the task goal, agents need to perform different duties, such as planning and verification, when needed. To understand how single agents manage these duties during long-horizon execution, we conduct a preliminary study. Our analysis shows that verification has the strongest association with task success, but often occurs late, leaving limited opportunities for correction. We also find that the proportion of duty-relevant information decreases as records from different duties accumulate in a shared context. These findings lead us to examine whether multi-agent systems (MAS) can address these problems by assigning duties to agents with separate contexts. Our analysis shows that this separation alone is insufficient. Agents can lose track of the overall goal and repeat prior investigations. They may also lack necessary background while receiving irrelevant information from others. To maintain goal awareness and coordinate collaboration as task needs change, we propose Goal-Aware Dynamic Multi-Agent Collaboration (GAD). It uses a growing execution graph to organize subtasks and their dependencies. To keep agents focused on their goals, each context retains the original instruction and the assigned task's goal and acceptance conditions. To adapt collaboration and information sharing during execution, agents can divide tasks into subtasks and specify dependencies based on execution evidence. These dependencies guide when agents work and which results they receive. Verification and recovery check subtask results and full task completion against their goals, providing feedback for repair when checks fail.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards provide limited guidance for assigning credit to individual steps within long interaction trajectories. Existing approaches often introduce dense intermediate supervision, such as process reward models or auxiliary self-supervised signals, which increases supervision and tuning complexity and may limit generalization across tasks and domains. We present AEM, a supervision-free credit assignment method that adaptively modulates entropy dynamics during RL training to improve the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Since in agentic RL the environment is typically affected by a complete response, rather than an individual token, our analysis lifts entropy dynamics from the token level to the response level, aligning uncertainty estimation with the effective action granularity of LLM agents and reducing sensitivity to token-level sampling noise. We further show that entropy drift under natural-gradient updates is governed by the interaction between the sampled-response advantage and its relative surprisal. Motivated by this result, AEM derives a practical response-level uncertainty proxy and uses it to rescale advantages, leveraging the evolving balance between positive and negative samples to naturally transition from exploration to exploitation. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SWE-bench-Verified with models ranging from 1.5B to 32B demonstrate that AEM consistently improves strong RL baselines, including a +1.4\% gain when integrated into a state-of-the-art software-engineering RL training framework.
Wei-Wei Zhang, Pengkai Wang, Yan Li, Zhijie Sang, Guan-Qun Zhou, Jun-Yan Li, Shu-Han Zhou, Pei-Wen Liu 等 16 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in specialty medicine, yet existing evaluations largely focus on isolated clinical encounters rather than tracking how clinical responsibilities evolve across a longitudinal care pathway. Here we introduce NPC-RubricBench, a phase-aware benchmark for evaluating multistage clinical reasoning across the cancer care continuum, using nasopharyngeal carcinoma as a defined disease context. Curated from longitudinal records of 405 patients across two cancer centers, the benchmark comprises 941 patient-phase units across six sequential care phases and 17,688 patient-specific atomic criteria spanning five evaluation dimensions, with each assessment strictly restricted to decision-time clinical evidence. Evaluating 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs revealed that strong diagnostic performance does not carry over to downstream care. We evaluated 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs, showing that high diagnostic performance did not translate into improved downstream care. Instead, the dominant failure modes reversed across phases. Explicit decision errors dominated anatomical staging at 48.2%, whereas decision omissions dominated initial work-up and post-treatment follow-up at 33.4% and 30.4%, respectively. In the evaluated model set, medically adapted models showed higher omission rates than general-purpose models. Moreover, varying query granularity exposes a critical specification trade-off: broad open-ended requests degrade Decision Quality across all 30 models, while more detailed, checklist-like prompts raise Decision Quality but reduce Evidence Faithfulness and Safety Adherence. Furthermore, NPC-RubricBench demonstrates that static diagnostic benchmarks are insufficient to ensure consistent clinical reliability over time, highlighting the importance of phase-adaptive safeguards in multistage medical AI.