Smart membrane: high content in situ monitoring barrier on chip with artificial neuronal network

Conventional transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) technique provides only a low-content analysis of cell-layer conditions, necessitating repeated microscopic assessments of morphology and cell-cell contacts outside the incubator for barrier-on-chip systems. This work presents a novel high-content TEER device in the form of a novel nanoporous membrane that facilitates continuous electrical measurement of cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS). The ultrathin (700 nm) membrane, composed of ultra-low-stress SixNy, is monolithically integrated into wafer-level fabricated chips sealed with glass lids. Coplanar ECIS electrodes were connected to custom electronics to record impedance under sinusoidal excitation. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were seeded and continuously recorded impedance spectra were compared with bright-field and fluorescence microscopy, revealing distinct phases of monolayer formation. With one-dimensional convolutional neural network (Conv1d) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) trained with a small amount of Nyquist-diagrams, phases of (I) adherence, (II) outspreading, (III) confluence and (IV) barrier maturity with tight junction formation could be recognized with 95% confidence. As further proof of concept, reversible and irreversible barrier weakening using modulators PN159 and BAC was identified in this way. Our studies have demonstrated that an immediate and automatable non-invasive detection of in-vitro barrier dynamics within barrier-on-chip systems, eliminating the need for microscopy and endpoint staining. We expect this ECIS technique will find broad applications in organ-on-chip systems for in situ monitoring physiological or pathological states of tissue barrier.

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

TableMoE: Neuro-Symbolic Routing for Structured Expert Reasoning in Multimodal Table Understanding

Multimodal understanding of tables in real-world contexts is challenging due to the complexity of structure, symbolic density, and visual degradation (blur, skew, watermarking, incomplete structures or fonts, multi-span or hierarchically nested layouts). Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with such WildStruct conditions, resulting in limited performance and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose TableMoE, a neuro-symbolic Mixture-of-Connector-Experts (MoCE) architecture specifically designed for robust, structured reasoning over multimodal table data. TableMoE features an innovative Neuro-Symbolic Routing mechanism, which predicts latent semantic token roles (e.g., header, data cell, axis, formula) and dynamically routes table elements to specialized experts (Table-to-HTML, Table-to-JSON, Table-to-Code) using a confidence-aware gating strategy informed by symbolic reasoning graphs. To facilitate effective alignment-driven pretraining, we introduce the large-scale TableMoE-Align dataset, consisting of 1.2M table-HTML-JSON-code quadruples across finance, science, biomedicine and industry, utilized exclusively for model pretraining. For evaluation, we curate and release four challenging WildStruct benchmarks: WMMFinQA, WMMTatQA, WMMTabDialog, and WMMFinanceMath, designed specifically to stress-test models under real-world multimodal degradation and structural complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that TableMoE significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art models. Extensive ablation studies validate each core component, emphasizing the critical role of Neuro-Symbolic Routing and structured expert alignment. Through qualitative analyses, we further showcase TableMoE's interpretability and enhanced robustness, underscoring the effectiveness of integrating neuro-symbolic reasoning for multimodal table understanding.