Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without retraining, improving robustness in real-world deployment.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in embodied control loops1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  High computational and time costs limit real-time applicability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Agents must reliably detect and correct errors in physical interactions to avoid irreversible failures in real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Long-horizon task preservation in embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Maintaining progress over extended sequences is critical for complex, multi-step tasks in robotics and navigation.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Open-source stacks for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Closed systems hinder reproducibility and systematic study of agent design for real-world computer tasks.

  • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Training & fine-tuning63+6200.0%
• Code models23+2200.0%
• AI safety45+2150.0%
• Evals103+1960.0%
• Robotics30+1400.0%
• Image & video generation36+1100.0%
• Computer vision47+1075.0%
• Small LLMs11+1000.0%

• arXiv cs.ITOct 18

  Pre-Query Retention with Bounded Bit and Word Retrieval

  Pranav Singh, Prashant Singh

  An agent can retain information before receiving a future question and later retrieve evidence from an archive. Evaluating this arrangement requires accounting for both retained information and the width of each retrieval response. Decision-tree capacity bounds describe individual sets of distinguishable records, but a memory writer must encode every possible record before the query is known. We study fixed-length retention beside an immutable binary archive, with a worst-case limit on raw bit or word reads. We characterize feasible one-bit-read memory cells and construct encoders that partition the complete record space. Supporting pairwise exclusive disjunction and conjunction with one bit read is equivalent to supporting every Boolean query. For multiple reads, we combine explicit encoders with decision-tree counting and an entropy converse. The word-read bounds differ by at most two retained bits when the read budget is at most half the archive length. Under an explicit condition on word width and archive length, raw-word caching attains the exact optimum among all writers. A related condition preserves this optimum under positive average error. Exhaustive checks validate the…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  Toward Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enterprise Retail Workflows over Heterogeneous Data Sources

  Jeonghwan Choi, Jibin Hwang, Hayoon Park, Hyeonjae Cheon, Hwanjun Song

  Enterprise retail workflows require agents to chain evidence across heterogeneous sources, from structured product and order records to unstructured inquiries and reviews, yet existing agentic RAG benchmarks rarely capture this challenge. To enable controlled evaluation of such workflows, we introduce RetailBridge, a compositional retail benchmark built from persona-driven simulations. Its questions are constructed by linking entities and intermediate answers across heterogeneous sources, requiring agents to identify the relevant sources, carry evidence between them, and produce a grounded answer. To systematically evaluate LLMs on these retail workflows, we develop RetailRAG, a retail-aware framework equipped with auto-schema briefing, source-routed plan chaining, and diagnostic plan revision. RetailRAG consistently outperforms existing agentic RAG baselines across all evaluation axes, serving as a strong reference system for assessing LLM agents on retail workflows. On RetailBridge, evaluating ten LLM backbones with RetailRAG reveals multi-source chaining as the dominant bottleneck across providers and model scales, suggesting that reliable retail agents require explicit…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Conformal Prediction-Enabled Sequence-level Policy Optimization for Reasoning Language Models

  Hui Yang, Wan Tian, Tao Ren, Zhongyi Li, Yijie Peng

  Reinforcement learning improves the reasoning capability of large language models through verifiable rewards for mathematical and coding tasks. In token-level methods such as GRPO, clipping acts on individual token ratios while the reward and advantage apply to a complete response. Recent sequence-level methods align these units but still use fixed clipping bands, whose tail probabilities change as the score distribution evolves. We propose Conformal Prediction-Enabled Sequence-level Policy Optimization (CSPO), which adaptively calibrates sequence-level clipping bounds using recent training statistics. The resulting band targets a specified marginal tail budget and adapts to policy drift; calibration conditional on response length requires additional assumptions. We bound the probability that a fresh score falls outside the band by the target miscoverage level plus explicit CDF discrepancy and drift terms. Under additional moment conditions, this bound also controls the objective and gradient error relative to the unclipped GSPO power surrogate. Experiments with the Qwen3-1.7B series show improvements over GSPO on difficult mathematical reasoning benchmarks and ALFWorld, with…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18▲ 19

  Think Visually Across Space and Time: Grounded Reasoning for Video Segmentation

  Junwei Wen, Deshui Miao, Guangming Lu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Xin Li +1

  Video Reasoning Segmentation (VRS) requires a model to identify an implicitly described target and predict its pixel-level mask trajectory, while resolving the spatial relations and temporal events that determine the answer. Text-only Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can explain a target choice without making the underlying visual references explicit, leaving a \emph{video reference gap} between linguistic inference and the evidence distributed across frames. We introduce \textbf{Temporal Chain of Video Primitives (TCoVP)}, a spatiotemporally grounded form of Video CoT that organizes query-relevant observations into a chronological reasoning chain. Each primitive associates an entity reference with temporal support and timestamped spatial evidence, and the chain interleaves these references with language to guide reasoning about which entity is relevant, when the queried event holds, and where its evidence appears. The selected target primitives then provide box prompts and temporal support for video mask prediction. We construct TCoVP-SFT-15k and TCoVP-RL-13k to learn this representation through supervised fine-tuning and chain-aligned reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  DAGLoop: Aligning Method Design with Experimental Feedback in Automated AI Research

  Dengyuxing Wang, Yonggang Zhang, Qianshu Cai, Huajiang Zheng, Jun Song +2

  Automated AI research agents aim to improve machine learning methods by iteratively proposing, implementing, and evaluating candidate methods. Existing work uses the outcome of each evaluation to determine how the next candidate should be revised for performance improvement. However, a candidate often combines multiple design decisions, and its overall outcome alone does not reveal which decisions produced their expected effects, whether their required conditions were satisfied, or which decisions should be retained or revised. Inspired by ablation studies in the machine learning community, we propose DAGLoop to test the expected effect of a design decision by comparing implementations with and without that decision while preserving the other decisions it requires. Specifically, DAGLoop translates each design decision's rationale into a testable expectation and pairs it with a targeted experiment, forming an experimental specification for assessing the expected effect under its required conditions. Using these specifications, we formulate ablation planning as the construction of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from the candidate method's design: nodes associate decisions with…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  Beyond Factual Accuracy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Perspective Alignment in LLMs

  Sunghoon Kim, Sangyeop Kim

  Large Language Models often generate factually correct responses that fail to maintain user-requested perspectives, blending multiple perspectives and forcing users to filter through unwanted information---a perspective control failure that factual accuracy metrics cannot detect. We introduce PerspectiveBench, a benchmark quantifying perspective alignment by constructing scenarios where multiple valid reasoning paths coexist, and propose the Perspective Alignment Score (PAS) to measure adherence to specified perspectives. Experiments reveal that state-of-the-art models successfully include target content but fail to exclude non-requested perspectives. Providing documents through RAG improves factual grounding but does not resolve perspective drift, as models prioritize comprehensive coverage over strict user constraints. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sunghoon014/PerspectiveBench.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  Dual-Slot: From Serial Loops to Parallel Slots in Language Models

  Yiqin Hao, Zitong Wang, Boyi Zeng, He Li, Shixiang Song +3

  Looped language models increase computational depth by repeatedly applying shared layers, offering a way to improve model quality without adding parameters. However, sequential dependencies between loop iterations increase autoregressive decoding latency. We introduce Dual-Slot, an architecture that reorganizes serial looped computation into parallel latent and prediction slots. Rather than waiting for the current token's latent computation to finish, the prediction slot combines the previous token's deep latent state with the current representation, while the latent slot produces a state for the next decoding step. This shifts the latent dependency across adjacent tokens, replacing two sequential module invocations with a single paired invocation while preserving standard autoregressive generation. To preserve token-level parallelism during training, we use a small number of Jacobi iterations to refine latent states across the sequence in parallel. Experiments on Qwen-style dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models show consistent improvements in language modeling and average downstream accuracy. On the 1B dense model, Dual-Slot reduces Pile validation perplexity from 7.25 to…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  Sufficient Frame Subsets for Video Understanding

  Lahiru Wijayasingha

  Understanding when during a video a model makes its critical observations is essential for interpreting video-understanding systems. However, existing attribution methods often spread evidence diffusely across near-duplicate frames. We introduce Sufficient Frame Subsets: compact sets of frames in which all other frames are masked, yet each subset independently preserves the model's prediction. We evaluate our method on two complementary benchmarks, UCF101 and Something-Something v2, using both CNN- and transformer-based architectures. Our results show that the proposed algorithm identifies highly compact and effective frame subsets for explaining model decisions. We also find that models capable of relying on a greater number of sufficient frame subsets tend to perform better, possibly because they are more robust, consistent with prior research. Finally, the extracted frame subsets help us analyze model failure cases, reveal which aspects of a video the model has learned to emphasize, and identify opportunities for improving future training procedures.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18▲ 57

  CoEvo-RSI: When Harnesses Evolve, Which Models Should Follow?

  Jiaqi Su, Guibin Zhang, Jie-Jing Shao, Cong Pang, Tiankuo Yao +3

  Model--harness co-evolution has emerged as a prominent paradigm for recursive self-improving (RSI) agents, jointly evolving their execution scaffolds and intrinsic capabilities. We study the persistent yet often overlooked brain--body mismatch problem in this paradigm, where an evolving harness (body) demands behaviors its model (brain) has not learned or restricts capabilities it already possesses. We introduce CoEvo-RSI, a RSI framework that advances model--harness co-evolution through agent-driven, bidirectional historical inheritance. Drawing on a shared evolutionary archive and execution feedback, a meta-agent coordinates harness development from historical designs with model checkpoint selection or merging and subsequent adaptation under the selected harness, aligning inherited capabilities with evolving execution requirements to reduce brain--body mismatch. Using only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on its own rejection-sampled trajectories, CoEvo-RSI makes Qwen3.5-9B competitive with larger models across diverse vertical applications, including multi-agent failure attribution, role-aware text-to-SQL, and smart-home instruction following. It surpasses DeepSeek-V4-Pro on…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  P2N: Reusing Deep Representations for Greater Effective Depth

  Yiqin Hao, Boyi Zeng, Zitong Wang, He Li, Shixiang Song +3

  Mathematical problem solving and autonomous agents are increasingly important applications of language models, demanding stronger reasoning capabilities. Computational depth is a key resource for such reasoning, but adding model layers increases both training and inference costs, while test-time scaling incurs substantial additional inference computation. We introduce P2N (Previous to Next), which reuses the previous token's deep representations, already available during generation, to increase effective computational depth with negligible decoding overhead. Specifically, P2N adds the previous token's deep hidden state to the current token's shallow representation, allowing subsequent layers to build on previously completed deep computation. This recurrence extends effective computational depth across tokens, while introducing only a single vector addition per decoding step. We train the recurrence using parallel Jacobi updates restricted to a middle-layer core. Experiments with Qwen-style models show that, at 1.5B parameters, P2N improves GSM8K accuracy by over 10 percentage points under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting, with nearly unchanged decoding latency. The benefits…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  MoCKEFA: Model-Conditioned Keyframe Extraction and Fair Attribution for Video Model Explanation

  Lahiru Wijayasingha

  We show that a video can be represented with just a few keyframes without sacrificing a given model's belief about the video. Our method is the first of its kind that extracts these keyframes conditioned on the model's prediction, which is massively helpful for building explainable video models. We then fairly distribute the importance of the video to the model among the keyframes with game theoretically fair Shapley values. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we show that keyframe attribution is superior to the traditional frame attribution. Further, we conduct preliminary exploration on highlighting the important changes among the frames by looking at the differences between adjacent keyframes.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  MoWE: Spatially Adaptive Mixture-of-Wavelet-Experts Pooling for Ultrasound Lesion Segmentation

  Reaz Hassan Joarder, Sidratul Tanzila Tasmi, Alif Arshad Bakshi, Md. Bakhtiar Hasan, Md Hasanul Kabir

  We present Mixture-of-Wavelet-Experts (MoWE), a spatially adaptive routing mechanism that replaces max-pooling and strided convolutions in U-Net architectures for ultrasound lesion segmentation. Standard pooling operations suppress high-frequency spatial details, including potential boundary cues in speckled regions. Recent frequency-domain methods preserve some of these details, but a single wavelet family applies the same spectral bias across the image. MoWE instead uses a context-aware router to assign local regions to fixed wavelet families according to local texture and global feature context. The decoder reuses the encoder's spatial routing maps during the inverse transform. Learnable channel-wise gates rescale the high-frequency subbands before reconstruction. We evaluate MoWE with U-Net on four ultrasound lesion benchmarks (BUSI, TN3K, UDIAT, BUS-UCLM) and one cardiac dataset (CAMUS), and with nnU-Net on BUSI. On BUSI, MoWE improves U-Net Dice from 72.59\% to 74.55\% and reduces HD95 from 47.01 to 43.49\,px. With nnU-Net, MoWE improves Dice from 80.18\% to 81.97\% and reduces ASSD from 20.07 to 17.25\,px. On U-Net, MoWE reduces trainable parameters by 6.4\%.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Auto-MD-bench: Evaluating Autoresearch Agents for Real-World Medical Tasks

  Shenqi Zhou, Qiran Zou, Wenhao Zhao, Zhenyu Liao, Dianbo Liu

  Autonomous agents are increasingly capable of developing machine learning (ML) models end to end. In medical practice, however, strong performance on the target metric does not fully characterize how good the models are in real-world use cases. For example, medical ML models should also provide well-calibrated risk estimates and remain robust across patient populations. Yet autonomous model development is typically guided by task objectives that emphasize simple predictive discrimination (e.g. AUROC). This raises a key question: are these objectives sufficient to guide agents toward models that meet the broader requirements of real-world medical use? In this study, we introduce Auto-MD-bench, a benchmark of 15 real-world medical tasks from 10 clinical datasets, spanning survival analysis, classification and sequential prediction, with external validation across cohorts, hospitals and time periods. We evaluate four agents: AIDE, AI Scientist v2, Codex, and Autoresearch. The strongest agents achieve competitive primary scores, yet their predicted risks are less calibrated than those of the simple baseline models, which could lead to severe medical accidents. Moreover, models with…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 18

  Localization and Neural Splatting on the Edge: An FPGA Scene Memory for Robots

  Que Haohua, Mingkai Liu, Handong Yao

  Resource-constrained robots and autonomous vehicles need scene memories that localize a camera and render nearby views without a desktop GPU. Scene-coordinate regression (SCR) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) fit because they avoid an SfM stage, but ACEsplat-style pipelines are GPU-centered, and moving them to an edge FPGA is hard because SCR is pose-sensitive and 3DGS rendering is irregular and capacity-sensitive. We present LENS, an edge scene-memory acceleration system on the AMD KR260 that brings an ACEsplat-style workload to a low-power FPGA/ARM platform. Rather than proposing a new scene model, LENS co-designs the two dominant kernels with the board data path: an INT16 SCR accelerator that preserves pose accuracy, and a bit-exact fixed-point ordered 3DGS renderer that rewrites alpha transmittance as a log-sum-exp recurrence and removes provably useless streamed Gaussians. All LENS latency, power, and quality results are board-measured. The SCR engine preserves DSAC* localization accuracy at 25.42 ms, the on-board renderer reaches 34.11 dB on Cambridge against ACEsplat's 33.20, novel-view synthesis on RealEstate10K reaches 27.84 dB against 26.11, and all ten Wayspots scenes…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  One Skill Takes Over: Clashing Agent Skills and a One-File Fix

  Parsa Razmara, Seyedarmin Azizi, Ardalan Aryashad

  Agent Skills are instruction files that tell a coding agent how to do one job. Users install skills from many authors, so two skills for the same job can be active at the same time. We ask what a model does when both skill files are in its context: does it combine their compatible rules, or follow one skill and drop the other? We build SkillClash, 16 pairs of same-job skills in which code checks every rule and a reference output shows the best result that can be reached. On seven models from five families, from 4B open models to Qwen3-235B and GPT-4.1, a skill's rules are followed 93 to 99% of the time when it is loaded alone and 61 to 62% when a same-job skill is loaded next to it. Most outputs show takeover: every rule that only one skill asks for is followed, and every rule that only the other skill asks for is dropped. The worked examples inside the skills drive this. When each skill file instead ends with one example that follows both skills, takeover falls to 1 to 15% on the six models we tested. Telling the model which skill has priority does not bring the dropped skill back, and telling it to apply both skills brings the dropped skill back only on the two strong models…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  LightCRS: Lightweight Multi-Domain Conversational Recommendation System

  He Ma, Lan You, Qiyang Wu, Chen Liu

  Conversational recommender systems have recently adopted vision-language models to match user dialogue intents with multimodal product information. However, extending these methods to many product domains faces a dilemma: deploying a separately adapted VLM per domain scales cost linearly with the number of domains and requires routing each dialogue to the right model, while naively merging all domains into a single VLM degrades accuracy because product characteristics vary widely across categories. We propose LightCRS, a lightweight, query-conditioned framework for unified multi-domain multimodal conversational recommendation. LightCRS precomputes multimodal product representations once offline with frozen encoders. Online, a compact 5.3M-parameter module fuses this evidence for each dialogue via query-conditioned cross-attention, whose parameters are shared across all domains, and compares candidates jointly with an inter-candidate Transformer. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct MM-R2A-25, a 25-domain benchmark pairing natural Reddit recommendation-seeking conversations with Amazon product listings. LightCRS achieves state-of-the-art average HR@1, NDCG@5, and MRR,…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  The Optimal Sample Complexity of Pointwise Replicable Agnostic Learning

  Guangjian Zhang

  Pointwise replicability asks that two independently trained predictors, using the same random seed, agree at each fixed query with high probability. We determine its optimal agnostic sample complexity on finite and countable domains. For every nonempty binary class of finite VC dimension $d\ge1$, the required number of independent examples is $Θ\!\left(\frac{d}{ρ^2α^2}+\frac{\log(1/β)}{α^2}\right)$, uniformly over independent accuracy, failure, and disagreement parameters $α,β,ρ\in(0,1/10)$. The learner returns one binary function, may be improper, and uses unrestricted shared randomness. Its sample budget is fixed before observing data, and the replicability guarantee includes queries of zero marginal mass. The main construction combines an ensemble of empirical-risk minimizers with a smooth, signal-dependent risk decomposition. A single shared phase selects the final binary predictor. Record times certify its weak-signal risk, while a uniform bound protects the strong-signal risk at that same selected time. A phase-comparison theorem controls the actual shared-seed execution under simultaneous changes in the marginals and risk coefficients. A rare repair step then makes the…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18▲ 9

  Policy Is Not Capability: Some Safety Benchmarks Measure Which Definition of "Unsafe" You Trained On

  Vahid Jebraeeli, Jonathon Romero, Yijin Wang, Adrian Chan, Jianbang Zhang

  A guardrail classifier is reported as if unsafe were a property of text. It is not: it is a property of a policy, and the policy enters the model through its labels. We exploit an accident of an industrial deployment in which the same ~53k prompts were labelled twice, under two operational definitions ("is this a request for harmful content?" and "would a moderator block this?"), and used to train ten guardrail arms sharing architecture, codebase and optimiser family, at two model scales. First, the guardrail's own training corpus already contained the benchmarks: JailbreakBench-benign is 88% and OR-Bench-hard 82% present in the training pools, two over-refusal benchmarks, the kind a guardrail reports to argue it does not over-block. Everything below is decontaminated. Second, safety benchmarks stratify sharply by how much of their score is decided by the label definition rather than by the model: with architecture and optimiser fixed, the range across the ten arms is 0.99 on HarmBench-copyright and 0.043 on WildGuard-benign, a 23x spread. Third, a benchmark score can be moved across its entire range by 0.03% of the parameters. Across these arms HarmBench-copyright spans 0-100…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  HCFM: Helmholtz Component Flow Matching for Time Series Anomaly Detection

  Shyam Sundar Saravanan, Tie Luo, Sanjay Madria

  Flow Matching (FM) is an efficient simulation-free approach for training flow-based generative models, making it a promising foundation for scalable time-series anomaly detection (TSAD). However, standard FM learns a monolithic vector field in which nominal transport and local density-changing behavior are entangled. This creates a central challenge for TSAD; local expansion and contraction carry crucial anomaly-sensitive information, yet isolating this signal requires expensive Jacobian-trace estimation over the entire field. We propose \emph{Helmholtz Component Flow Matching} (HCFM), an unsupervised TSAD framework that parameterizes the vector field prediction network with separate transport, compression, and residual heads. The transport head is constrained to be divergence-free, so divergence estimation is restricted to the compression head, while a lightweight residual head absorbs the remaining mismatch. This structured parameterization improves scalability and detection performance by separating volume-preserving nominal transport from density-changing compression, yielding cleaner anomaly signals from distinct deviations of nominal behavior. Experiments on large-scale…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  PRET is a few-shot system for pan-cancer recognition without example training

  Yi Li, Ziyu Ning, Tianqi Xiang, Qixiang Zhang, Zhihao Lin +15

  Pathological examination stands as the cornerstone in cancer diagnosis, impacting millions worldwide annually. With the shortage of pathologists globally, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged rapidly to automate the diagnostics process. However, conventional AI models require substantial labeled data for each disease, posing huge challenges in scalability and practicality. Therefore, we introduce PRET (pan-cancer recognition without examples training), a few-shot system to achieve flexible, scalable, and effective cancer recognition across diverse organs, hospitals and tasks without training. Evaluated on 23 international benchmarks comprising 4,484 whole-slide images, our method outperforms existing approaches across 20 tasks, achieving over 97% area under the curve on 15 benchmarks with a maximum improvement of 36.76%. Notably, PRET delivers clinical-grade diagnostic performance in lymph node metastasis detection using only eight slide examples, outperforming 11 pathologists. By offering a flexible and cost-effective solution for pan-cancer recognition, PRET paves the way for accessible and equitable AI-based pathology systems, particularly benefiting minority populations…

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