Liuwang Kang

Liuwang Kang, Fan Wang, Yuzhang Huang et al.

Mission-critical healthcare applications including real-time intensive care monitoring, ambulance-to-hospital orchestration, and distributed medical imaging inference require workflow-level, time-bounded coordination across heterogeneous devices, edge servers, and network control entities. While current 3GPP and O-RAN standards excel at per-device control and quality-of-service enforcement, they do not natively expose abstractions for workflow-level coordination under strict clinical timing constraints, leaving this capability to fragile, application-specific overlays. This article outlines the Collective Adaptive Intelligence Plane (CAIP) as a standards-aligned coordination framework that addresses this abstraction gap without introducing new protocol layers. CAIP is realized through minimal, backward-compatible coordination profiles anchored to existing RRC, QoS/SDAP, and O-RAN E2 interfaces, enabling workflow-scoped coordination context binding, deadline-aware coordination pacing, semantic flow association, and privacy-preserving data locality across distributed clinical entities. We analyze the structural limitations of existing standards, present a concrete interface mapping to 3GPP and O-RAN mechanisms, illustrate deployment through a representative ICU coordination scenario, and outline a phased standardization roadmap from proof-of-concept xApp deployment to AI-native 6G specification evolution. The proposed framework is incrementally deployable on current 5G Advanced infrastructure and provides a principled migration path toward workflow-level coordination abstraction as a first-class capability in future 6G healthcare networks.

Liuwang Kang, Fan Wang, Shaoshan Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether it can achieve long-term retention and cross-task knowledge accumulation when multitasks arrive sequentially remains underexplored. Motivated by human memory studies, we investigate the retention characteristics of ICL in multitask settings and extend it to in-context continual learning (ICCL), where continual learning ability emerges through task scheduling and prompt rearrangement. Experiments on Markov-Chain benchmarks demonstrate that, for specific large-language models, ICCL benefits from distributed practice (DP) in a manner analogous to humans, consistently revealing a spacing "sweet spot" for retention. Beyond retention performance, we propose a human-retention similarity metric to quantify how closely a continual-learning (CL) method aligns with human retention dynamics. Using this metric, we show that linear-attention models such as MAMBA and RWKV exhibit particularly human-like retention patterns, despite their retention performance lagging behind that of Transformer-based LLMs. Overall, our results establish ICCL as both cognitively plausible and practically effective, providing an inference-only CL paradigm that mitigates catastrophic forgetting and addresses the stability-plasticity dilemma in conventional CL methods.