Integrating clinical reasoning into large language model-based diagnosis through etiology-aware attention steering

Objective: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant capabilities in medical text understanding and generation. However, their diagnostic reliability in complex clinical scenarios remains limited. This study aims to enhance LLMs' diagnostic accuracy and clinical reasoning ability. Method: We propose an Etiology-Aware Attention Steering Framework to integrate structured clinical reasoning into LLM-based diagnosis. Specifically, we first construct Clinical Reasoning Scaffolding (CRS) based on authoritative clinical guidelines for three representative acute abdominal emergencies: acute appendicitis, acute pancreatitis, and acute cholecystitis. Next, we develop the Etiology-Aware Head Identification algorithm to pinpoint attention heads crucial for the model's etiology reasoning. To ensure reliable clinical reasoning alignment, we introduce the Reasoning-Guided Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning that embeds etiological reasoning cues into input representations and steers the selected Etiology-Aware Heads toward critical information through a Reasoning-Guided Loss function. Result: On the Consistent Diagnosis Cohort, our framework improves average diagnostic accuracy by 15.65% and boosts the average Reasoning Focus Score by 31.6% over baselines. External validation on the Discrepant Diagnosis Cohort further confirms its effectiveness in enhancing diagnostic accuracy. Further assessments via Reasoning Attention Frequency indicate that our models exhibit enhanced reliability when faced with real-world complex scenarios. Conclusion: This study presents a practical and effective approach to enhance clinical reasoning in LLM-based diagnosis. By aligning model attention with structured CRS, the proposed framework offers a promising paradigm for building more interpretable and reliable AI diagnostic systems in complex clinical settings.

ApexNav: An Adaptive Exploration Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Target-centric Semantic Fusion

Navigating unknown environments to find a target object is a significant challenge. While semantic information is crucial for navigation, relying solely on it for decision-making may not always be efficient, especially in environments with weak semantic cues. Additionally, many methods are susceptible to misdetections, especially in environments with visually similar objects. To address these limitations, we propose ApexNav, a zero-shot object navigation framework that is both more efficient and reliable. For efficiency, ApexNav adaptively utilizes semantic information by analyzing its distribution in the environment, guiding exploration through semantic reasoning when cues are strong, and switching to geometry-based exploration when they are weak. For reliability, we propose a target-centric semantic fusion method that preserves long-term memory of the target object and similar objects, reducing false detections and minimizing task failures. We evaluate ApexNav on the HM3Dv1, HM3Dv2, and MP3D datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both SR and SPL metrics. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of each module. Furthermore, real-world experiments validate the practicality of ApexNav in physical environments. Project page is available at https://robotics-star.com/ApexNav.

FERMI: Flexible Radio Mapping with a Hybrid Propagation Model and Scalable Autonomous Data Collection

Communication is fundamental for multi-robot collaboration, with accurate radio mapping playing a crucial role in predicting signal strength between robots. However, modeling radio signal propagation in large and occluded environments is challenging due to complex interactions between signals and obstacles. Existing methods face two key limitations: they struggle to predict signal strength for transmitter-receiver pairs not present in the training set, while also requiring extensive manual data collection for modeling, making them impractical for large, obstacle-rich scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose FERMI, a flexible radio mapping framework. FERMI combines physics-based modeling of direct signal paths with a neural network to capture environmental interactions with radio signals. This hybrid model learns radio signal propagation more efficiently, requiring only sparse training data. Additionally, FERMI introduces a scalable planning method for autonomous data collection using a multi-robot team. By increasing parallelism in data collection and minimizing robot travel costs between regions, overall data collection efficiency is significantly improved. Experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios demonstrate that FERMI enables accurate signal prediction and generalizes well to unseen positions in complex environments. It also supports fully autonomous data collection and scales to different team sizes, offering a flexible solution for creating radio maps. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/ymLuo1214/Flexible-Radio-Mapping.