Anne Pham | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Cardinal Grid Slime Trail is PSPACE-Complete

Slime Trail is a two-player combinatorial game in which the players alternately move a shared token to an adjacent vertex, permanently removing each vertex the token leaves, while attempting to reach a goal node. Ferland and Burke (2017) proved that Slime Trail is PSPACE-complete on arbitrary planar graphs and asked whether the same holds for the grid version actually used in play. We resolve this open problem by proving that Cardinal Grid Slime Trail, that is, Slime Trail on a square grid with four-directional movement, is PSPACE-complete. We adapt their QBF reduction to the grid setting, designing grid-compatible gadgets that respect the degree-4 bound and the parity constraints of the integer lattice. We further show the construction extends, under a 45-degree rotation, to the eight-directional variant.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2025

CytoDINO: Risk-Aware and Biologically-Informed Adaptation of DINOv3 for Bone Marrow Cytomorphology

Bone marrow cell cytomorphology analysis is critical for the diagnosis of hematological malignancies but remains a labor-intensive process subject to significant inter-observer variability. While recent foundation models have shown promise in computational pathology, they often require extensive computational resources and fail to account for the asymmetric risks associated with clinical misdiagnosis. We introduce CytoDINO, a framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Munich Leukemia Laboratory (MLL) dataset by fine-tuning DINOv3 using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our primary contribution is a novel Hierarchical Focal Loss with Critical Penalties, which encodes biological relationships between cell lineages and explicitly penalizes clinically dangerous misclassifications (e.g., classifying blasts as normal cells). CytoDINO achieves an 88.2% weighted F1 score and 76.5% macro F1 on a held-out test set of 21 cell classes. By utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning with only 8% trainable parameters on a single NVIDIA RTX 5080, we demonstrate that consumer-grade hardware can match specialized infrastructure. Furthermore, confidence-based selective prediction yields 99.5% accuracy on 67% of samples, suggesting a viable pathway for clinical deployment where high-uncertainty cases are flagged for expert review

q-bio.OT↗