On the Robustness of Temporal Vision-Language Models for Surgical Endoscopy Videos

Temporal vision-language models (TVLMs) offer a reusable, prompt-based interface for surgical video understanding, yet, their robustness under clinically realistic acquisition artifacts in endoscopy remains insufficiently characterized. In practice, degradations such as defocus, haze, motion blur, noise, cautery smoke, and packet loss introduce structured distribution shifts which may compromise video-text alignment. We study the robustness of temporal VLMs under such shifts caused by corruptions in clip frames. We introduce Endo-C6, a compact corruption benchmark of six endoscopy-realistic perturbations evaluated at a fixed high severity, and apply it to public Gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy and laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos. Under a standardized prompt protocol, we benchmark 3 recent surgical TVLM baselines and analyze robustness in both mean and worst-case settings, spanning 294 dataset-level evaluations. Finally, we present RobustEndoCLIP, obtained by few-shot parameter-efficient tuning with VeRA, outperforming existing TVLM baselines. Our findings show that off-the-shelf TVLMs can exhibit severe worst-case collapse under endoscopy-specific corruptions, whereas lightweight few-shot adaptation can substantially improve corrupted performance and robustness without changing the prompt-based interface. We expect Endo-C6 to support standardized robustness reporting and promote more reliable clinical vision-language systems.

Nova3D: Code-Native Generation of Programmable 3D Assets

Current 3D generative models mostly produce a final surface: a visually strong but largely opaque mesh. Interactive 3D worlds need more than a surface. They need named parts, an assembly hierarchy, measurable constraints, local edit handles, and joints for articulation. We present Nova3D, a system that generates 3D assets as executable Blender source code; the compiled mesh, a binary glTF (GLB), is treated as the artifact, not the asset. Because the output is a program, semantic handles exist at generation time rather than being recovered afterward by segmentation or rigging. We evaluate on Nova3D-Bench, a frozen, spec-grounded benchmark of 54 items across six domains and three difficulty levels with text and image inputs, against eleven baselines in four families (mesh-native, part-structured, code-native, and CAD) plus a same-LLM ablation. Nova3D produces an executable program and a valid artifact for 54/54 items. Every asset exposes named parts organized in a parent-child assembly tree; no mesh-native, CAD, or segmentation baseline exposes either. It satisfies 51/52 prompt-stated numeric and count constraints (best baseline: 11/52), passes 14/18 blinded local edits with locality preserved in 18/18, and articulates 59 joints across 12 assets at 98.3% geometric validity, where every baseline exposes zero native joints. Its geometry is competitive: it wins the structured domains in a pairwise shape-quality tournament and is second only to the strongest mesh-native model, while conceding texture realism to baked-PBR systems. The central result is representational: code-native generation turns a generated 3D object from an opaque surface into a programmable asset that downstream systems can inspect, measure, edit, and animate.

LLM-Based Test Oracles: Source-of-Authority Taxonomy -- A Systematic Literature Review

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to produce test oracles, the part of a test that decides whether observed behavior is correct. Yet a clear account of where these oracles draw their authority is missing. Prior secondary studies organize the area by oracle form or by LLM technique. None organizes it by the source of the verdict's authority, the property that governs how far a verdict can be trusted. This article presents a systematic literature review, conducted and reported under the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. From 2,436 records, an LLM pre-filter followed by independent dual human screening (reviewer agreement, a Cohen's kappa of 0.79) and full-text assessment yielded 54 included studies. We analyze these along three axes: the source of an oracle's authority, the form it takes, and the mechanism that adjudicates it. We characterize the landscape of domains, languages, models, and adaptation strategies. Specification-derived authority, though the most common single source, covers about half of the studies (28 of 54). The remaining 26 reach a verdict with no specification at all. The source of authority and the adjudication mechanism cross-cut: the same source is checked by several mechanisms and one mechanism serves several sources, so a label such as LLM-as-a-judge names a mechanism rather than a basis for trust. We further report how these oracles are evaluated and how they fail, and read the sparse and empty regions of the taxonomy as a research agenda. The protocol, search query, and per-study coding sheet are released as supplementary material.

All Green, Still Broken: Real-Flow Verification Lessons from an LLM-Integrated, Multi-Market Web Application

Modern web applications increasingly combine three ingredients that are hard to test: output from large language models, multi-market internationalization, and browser-driven front-ends over external data sources. We report on a production rental-search assistant whose automated suite grew to 1,553 test cases in six weeks. The suite passed continuously, yet user-facing defects continued to reach production. We studied all 252 bug-fix commits in the project and classified each by the boundary, or seam, it escaped through. About 44 percent of the fixes fall in four seams that component-level unit tests cannot observe: the live browser runtime, the non-default market, the end-to-end flow, and the whole-system level. A fix without a guard at the seam let one defect ship twice. We present the four-seam framework, the measured defect distribution, and the practices we adopted, including a simple way for a team to find the seam that carries the most fixes.

AI-Native Closed-Loop Security for 6G-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems: From Edge Detection to Network-Wide Mitigation

In sixth-generation (6G) networks, billions of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) - autonomous vehicles, smart grids, industrial robots, and remote-surgical equipment - will run over ultra-reliable low-latency slices, collapsing the gap between a remote breach and physical harm to milliseconds, a budget perimeter firewalls and centralised security operations centres cannot meet. This survey reframes 6G CPS security as a closed-loop, AI-native pipeline that senses at the multi-access edge computing (MEC) tier, using minute-scale call-detail records (CDRs) for baseline learning and sub-millisecond RAN/Open-RAN (O-RAN) telemetry for the latency-critical path. It decides locally with compressed deep models, mitigates network-wide via SDN, NFV, and O-RAN controllers, and retrains through federated learning (FL) and digital-twin (DT) replay. We formalise a per-slice, tail-bounded latency contract on the sense, detect, and mitigate stages, enforced at a slice-dependent tail percentile (p99 for safety-critical URLLC slices). Organising 128 peer-reviewed studies (2017-2026) under a PRISMA 2020 protocol, we (i) map the 6G/CPS threat surface to MITRE ATT&CK and a CDR-observable feature space; (ii) unify edge anomaly detection and DDoS classification across twelve datasets and statistical, graph, and transformer models; (iii) synthesise SDN/NFV/O-RAN primitives into one closed-loop reference architecture; (iv) treat FL, large language models (LLMs), DT, post-quantum cryptography (PQC), zero-trust architecture (ZTA), and explainable AI as cross-cutting enablers, not parallel pillars; and (v) consolidate open problems into five directions spanning data, latency, trust, standardisation, and evaluation.

Same Patient, Different Words, Different Diagnosis? Evaluating Semantic Stability in Clinical LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical applications. However, their behavior remains highly sensitive to subtle linguistic variations, such as rephrasing or syntactic variation. This sensitivity poses risks in safety-critical healthcare settings, where semantically equivalent inputs should produce consistent predictions. However, a key challenge is to ensure that prompt variations truly preserve clinical meaning, as embedding-based similarity metrics often fail to capture distinctions involving negation, temporality, or severity. To address this limitation, we propose a semantic verification framework based on Natural Language Inference (NLI) to filter meaning-preserving prompt variations, which are further refined using an LLM-as-a-judge and audited by a clinical expert. In addition, we introduce three metrics to quantify model sensitivity: MeaningPreserving Variation Sensitivity (MVS), confidence variation (ΔC), and Worst-Case Instability (WCI). We evaluate 16 open-source general-purpose (GP) and medical LLMs within the same model families and parameter scales, using reformulated prompts derived from the DiagnosisQA and MedQA datasets. Our results demonstrate that robustness differences between domain-specific (DS) models are mixed and highly model-dependent, i.e., domain specialization does not consistently improve or reduce robustness to meaning-preserving prompt reformulations. Several DS models rank among the most robust (when compared with GP counterparts), and strong GP baselines remain competitive as well.

RAPTOR+: A Visually Grounded Vision-Language Framework to Improve Clinical Trust and Auditability in Automated Cancer Referral Processing

Urgent suspected colorectal cancer (CRC) referrals create operational bottlenecks because semi-structured clinical documents often require manual review and transcription. The original RAPTOR system used Large Language Models for structured extraction but relied on a separate OCR stage, making it vulnerable to handwriting, layout variation, and loss of visual evidence linkage. We present RAPTOR+, a multimodal extension that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for end-to-end referral understanding. We evaluate fine-tuned VLMs, commercial and open-source zero-shot VLMs, and the original OCR-based pipeline on 223 clinically curated CRC urgent referral forms. We also introduce a grounding-aware evaluation framework that measures both extraction accuracy and evidence localisation. Results show a clear grounding gap in zero-shot models. Gemini 2.5 Flash achieved 92.6% Reading Accuracy but only 1.2% Strict Safety. In contrast, fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B achieved 96.1% Reading Accuracy and 60.6% Strict Safety, substantially improving verifiable evidence grounding. These findings show that task-specific fine-tuning is essential for reliable, auditable clinical document understanding. RAPTOR+ enables extracted referral decisions to be linked to visual evidence, supporting safer and more efficient cancer referral triage.

PathWISE: Multi-Agent Cancer Pathway Triaging Ontology Learning from Clinical Flowcharts

Clinical pathways are disseminated as visual flowcharts where spatial topology, arrow direction, colour coding, and font weight encode critical triage logic that remains inaccessible to computational systems. We present PathWISE, a five-phase pipeline combining four LLM-based agents with a deterministic depth-first search auditor and a Java compiler critic, transforming these non-computable artefacts into validated, executable HL7 Clinical Quality Language (CQL) libraries deployable as FHIR CDS Hooks services. Purpose-built agents extract flowchart structure into a typed directed graph, perform deterministic path enumeration, conduct a structured semantic audit of every node's computability, generate terminology-constrained CQL definitions verified by the official Java CQL-to-ELM compiler, and produce routing logic covering 100% of enumerated patient journeys. Demonstrated across five UK NHS cancer pathways (colorectal, lung, skin, upper GI, and breast), PathWISE audits up to 183 nodes (182 under the Hybrid configuration), identifies 544 structured governance findings across four issue categories, achieves 100% syntactic compilation success, with UNCOMPUTABLE nodes receiving false placeholders that preserve compilability while surfacing governance gaps for clinical review, and produces zero hallucinated terminology codes for dictionary-covered concepts. Critically, PathWISE confines non-deterministic LLM inference to knowledge extraction while deterministic graph mathematics and a standard compiler underpin every verification step.

Mining Subscenario Refactoring Opportunities in Behaviour-Driven Software Test Suites: ML Classifiers and LLM-Judge Baselines

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) software test suites accumulate duplicated step subsequences. Three published refactoring patterns are available (within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario invocation, cross-organisational shared higher-level step), but no prior work automates which recurring subsequences are worth extracting or which mechanism applies. Objective. Rank recurring step subsequences ("slices") by refactoring suitability (extraction-worthy), pre-map each to one of the three patterns, and quantify prevalence across the public BDD ecosystem. Method. Every contiguous L-step window (L in [2, 18]) in a 339-repository / 276-upstream-owner Gherkin corpus is keyed by paraphrase-robust cluster identifiers and counted under three scopes. Sentence-BERT (SBERT) / Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) / Hierarchical Density-Based Clustering (HDBSCAN) recovers paraphrase-equivalent slices. Three authors label a stratified 200-slice pool against a written rubric. An eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) extraction-worthy classifier trained under 5-fold cross-validation is compared with a tuned rule baseline and two open-weight Large Language Model (LLM) judges. Results. The miner produces 5,382,249 slices collapsing to 692,020 recurring patterns. Three-author Fleiss' kappa = 0.56 (extraction-worthy) and 0.79 (mechanism). The classifier reaches out-of-fold F1 = 0.891 (95% CI [0.852, 0.927]), outperforming both the rule baseline (F1 = 0.836, p = 0.017) and the better LLM judge (F1 = 0.728, p < 1e-4). 75.0%, 59.5%, and 11.7% of scenarios carry a within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario, or cross-organisational shared-step candidate. Conclusion. Paraphrase-robust subscenario discovery yields a corpus-wide census of BDD refactoring opportunities; pipeline, classifier predictions, labelled pool, and rubric are released under Apache-2.0.

Large Language Models for Agentic NetOps and AIOps: Architectures, Evaluation, and Safety

Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, and limited self-healing. In both NetOps and AIOps, this shift is changing how tasks are managed. Agent-based operations work as workflows, from gathering evidence to taking action, following permissions, policies, and checks, and providing rollback options when necessary. This is crucial because operational decisions can have instant impacts. To make the argument concrete, we organise the relevant literature around the hierarchy of autonomy, tool scope, evidence traces, and assurance contracts. These contracts define what an agent may observe, propose, and execute. They also define the checks that must pass before any action is allowed. A consistent pattern appears across work on telemetry query recommendation, diagnosis, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, change planning, and limited self-healing. Operational reliability does not come chiefly from the model itself. It depends on the machinery around the model. We also argue that evaluation should go beyond static question answering. Agentic NetOps and AIOps systems require workflow-centred evaluation, including trace quality, bounded tool use, safe proposal generation, replay in sandboxed environments, and canary trials with rollback-aware scoring. Without these measures, a system may appear robust yet remain too fragile. Finally, we examine security, privacy, and governance risks that become acute when agents sit close to operational control surfaces. Taken together, the survey concludes that progress in intelligent NetOps and AIOps will depend on treating autonomy as a constrained operational control problem, whose outputs must be reliable, auditable, and securely deployable.