Semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds is important for many applications, such as autonomous driving. To train semantic segmentation models, labeled point cloud segmentation datasets are essential. Meanwhile, point cloud labeling is time-consuming for annotators, which typically involves tuning the camera viewpoint and selecting points by lasso. To reduce the time cost of point cloud labeling, we propose a viewpoint recommendation approach to reduce annotators' labeling time costs. We adapt Fitts' law to model the time cost of lasso selection in point clouds. Using the modeled time cost, the viewpoint that minimizes the lasso selection time cost is recommended to the annotator. We build a data labeling system for semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds that integrates our viewpoint recommendation approach. The system enables users to navigate to recommended viewpoints for efficient annotation. Through an ablation study, we observed that our approach effectively reduced the data labeling time cost. We also qualitatively compare our approach with previous viewpoint selection approaches on different datasets.

Why depth yields a genuine computational advantage over shallow methods remains a central open question in learning theory. We study this question in a controlled high-dimensional Gaussian setting, focusing on compositional target functions. We analyze their learnability using an explicit three-layer fitting model trained via layer-wise spectral estimators. Although the target is globally a high-degree polynomial, its compositional structure allows learning to proceed in stages: an intermediate representation reveals structure that is inaccessible at the input level. This reduces learning to simpler spectral estimation problems, well studied in the context of multi-index models, whereas any shallow estimator must resolve all components simultaneously. Our analysis relies on Gaussian universality, leading to sharp separations in sample complexity between two and three-layer learning strategies.

Deep learning models trained in a supervised setting have revolutionized audio and speech processing. However, their performance inherently depends on the quantity of human-annotated data, making them costly to scale and prone to poor generalization under unseen conditions. To address these challenges, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, leveraging vast amounts of unlabeled data to learn relevant representations. The application of SSL for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been extensively studied, but research on other downstream tasks, notably Speaker Recognition (SR), remains in its early stages. This work describes major SSL instance-invariance frameworks (e.g., SimCLR, MoCo, and DINO), initially developed for computer vision, along with their adaptation to SR. Various SSL methods for SR, proposed in the literature and built upon these frameworks, are also presented. An extensive review of these approaches is then conducted: (1) the effect of the main hyperparameters of SSL frameworks is investigated; (2) the role of SSL components is studied (e.g., data-augmentation, projector, positive sampling); and (3) SSL frameworks are evaluated on SR with in-domain and out-of-domain data, using a consistent experimental setup, and a comprehensive comparison of SSL methods from the literature is provided. Specifically, DINO achieves the best downstream performance and effectively models intra-speaker variability, although it is highly sensitive to hyperparameters and training conditions, while SimCLR and MoCo provide robust alternatives that effectively capture inter-speaker variability and are less prone to collapse. This work aims to highlight recent trends and advancements, identifying current challenges in the field.

Recent studies have revealed that when LLMs are appropriately prompted and configured, they demonstrate mixed results. Such results often meet or exceed the baseline performance. However, these comparisons have two primary issues. First, they mostly considered only reliability as a comparison metric and selected a few LLMs (such as Codex and ChatGPT) for comparision. This paper proposes a comprehensive code quality assessment framework called Programmatic Excellence via LLM Iteration (PELLI). PELLI is an iterative analysis-based process that upholds high-quality code changes. We extended the state-of-the-art by performing a comprehensive evaluation that generates quantitative metrics for analyzing three primary nonfunctional requirements (such as maintainability, performance, and reliability) while selecting five popular LLMs. For PELLI's applicability, we selected three application domains while following Python coding standards. Following this framework, practitioners can ensure harmonious integration between LLMs and human developers, ensuring that their potential is fully realized. PELLI can serve as a practical guide for developers aiming to leverage LLMs while adhering to recognized quality standards. This study's outcomes are crucial for advancing LLM technologies in real-world applications, providing stakeholders with a clear understanding of where these LLMs excel and where they require further refinement. Overall, based on three nonfunctional requirements, we have found that GPT-4T and Gemini performed slightly better. We also found that prompt design can influence the overall code quality. In addition, each application domain demonstrated high and low scores across various metrics, and even within the same metrics across different prompts.

Dynamic models, particularly rate-dependent models, have proven effective in capturing the key phenomenological features of frictional processes, whilst also possessing important mathematical properties that facilitate the design of control and estimation algorithms. However, many rate-dependent formulations are built on empirical considerations, whereas physical derivations may offer greater interpretability. In this context, starting from fundamental physical principles, this paper introduces a novel class of first-order dynamic friction models that approximate the dynamics of a bristle element by inverting the friction characteristic. Amongst the developed models, a specific formulation closely resembling the LuGre model is derived using a simple rheological equation for the bristle element. This model is rigorously analyzed in terms of stability and passivity -- important properties that support the synthesis of observers and controllers. Furthermore, a distributed version, formulated as a hyperbolic partial differential equation (PDE), is presented, which enables the modeling of frictional processes commonly encountered in rolling contact phenomena. The tribological behavior of the proposed description is evaluated through classical experiments and validated against the response predicted by the LuGre model, revealing both notable similarities and key differences.

The accurate characterization of tire dynamics is critical for advancing control strategies in autonomous road vehicles, as tire behavior significantly influences handling and stability through the generation of forces and moments at the tire-road interface. Smart tire technologies have emerged as a promising tool for sensing key variables such as road friction, tire pressure, and wear states, and for estimating kinematic and dynamic states like vehicle speed and tire forces. However, most existing estimation and control algorithms rely on empirical correlations or machine learning approaches, which require extensive calibration and can be sensitive to variations in operating conditions. In contrast, model-based techniques, which leverage infinite-dimensional representations of tire dynamics using partial differential equations (PDEs), offer a more robust approach. This paper proposes a novel model-based, output-feedback lateral tracking control strategy for all-wheel steering vehicles that integrates distributed tire dynamics with smart tire technologies. The primary contributions include the suppression of micro-shimmy phenomena at low speeds and path-following via force control, achieved through the estimation of tire slip angles, vehicle kinematics, and lateral tire forces. The proposed controller and observer are based on formulations using ODE-PDE systems, representing rigid body dynamics and distributed tire behavior. This work marks the first rigorous control strategy for vehicular systems equipped with distributed tire representations in conjunction with smart tire technologies.

Phishing attacks represents one of the primary attack methods which is used by cyber attackers. In many cases, attackers use deceptive emails along with malicious attachments to trick users into giving away sensitive information or installing malware while compromising entire systems. The flexibility of malicious email attachments makes them stand out as a preferred vector for attackers as they can embed harmful content such as malware or malicious URLs inside standard document formats. Although phishing email defenses have improved a lot, attackers continue to abuse attachments, enabling malicious content to bypass security measures. Moreover, another challenge that researches face in training advance models, is lack of an unified and comprehensive dataset that covers the most prevalent data types. To address this gap, we generated CIC-Trap4Phish, a multi-format dataset containing both malicious and benign samples across five categories commonly used in phishing campaigns: Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, HTML pages, and QR code images. For the first four file types, a set of execution-free static feature pipeline was proposed, designed to capture structural, lexical, and metadata-based indicators without the need to open or execute files. Feature selection was performed using a combination of SHAP analysis and feature importance, yielding compact, discriminative feature subsets for each file type. The selected features were evaluated by using lightweight machine learning models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, and Decision Tree. All models demonstrate high detection accuracy across formats. For QR code-based phishing (quishing), two complementary methods were implemented: image-based detection by employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and lexical analysis of decoded URLs using recent lightweight language models.

The inability to communicate poses a major challenge to coordination in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Prior work has explored correlating local policies via shared randomness, sometimes in the form of a correlation device, as a mechanism to assist in decentralized decision-making. In contrast, this work introduces the first framework for training MARL agents to exploit shared quantum entanglement as a coordination resource, which permits a larger class of communication-free correlated policies than shared randomness alone. This is motivated by well-known results in quantum physics which posit that, for certain single-round cooperative games with no communication, shared quantum entanglement enables strategies that outperform those that only use shared randomness. In such cases, we say that there is quantum advantage. Our framework is based on a novel differentiable policy parameterization that enables optimization over quantum measurements, together with a novel policy architecture that decomposes joint policies into a quantum coordinator and decentralized local actors. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we first show that we can learn, purely from experience, strategies that attain quantum advantage in single-round games that are treated as black box oracles. We then demonstrate how our machinery can learn policies with quantum advantage in an illustrative multi-agent sequential decision-making problem formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP).

As Generative AI (GenAI), particularly inference, rapidly emerges as a dominant workload category, the Kubernetes ecosystem is proactively evolving to natively support its unique demands. This industry paper demonstrates how emerging Kubernetes-native projects can be combined to deliver the benefits of container orchestration, such as scalability and resource efficiency, to complex AI workflows. We implement and evaluate an illustrative, multi-stage use case consisting of automatic speech recognition and summarization. First, we address batch inference by using Kueue to manage jobs that transcribe audio files with Whisper models and Dynamic Accelerator Slicer (DAS) to increase parallel job execution. Second, we address a discrete online inference scenario by feeding the transcripts to a Large Language Model for summarization hosted using llm-d, a novel solution utilizing the recent developments around the Kubernetes Gateway API Inference Extension (GAIE) for optimized routing of inference requests. Our findings illustrate that these complementary components (Kueue, DAS, and GAIE) form a cohesive, high-performance platform, proving Kubernetes' capability to serve as a unified foundation for demanding GenAI workloads: Kueue reduced total makespan by up to 15%; DAS shortened mean job completion time by 36\%; and GAIE working in conjunction with llm-d improved tail Time to First Token latency by up to 90% even under high loads.

Transforming scientific papers into multimodal presentation content is essential for research dissemination but remains labor intensive. Existing automated solutions typically treat each format as an isolated downstream task, leading to redundant processing and semantic inconsistency. We introduce PaperX, a unified framework that models academic presentation generation as a structural transformation and rendering process. Central to our approach is the Scholar DAG, an intermediate representation that decouples the paper's logical structure from its final presentation syntax. By applying adaptive graph traversal strategies, PaperX generates diverse, high quality outputs from a single source. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves the state of the art performance in content fidelity and aesthetic quality while significantly improving cost efficiency compared to specialized single task agents.

Transition states (TSs) are central to understanding and quantitatively predicting chemical reactivity and reaction mechanisms. Although traditional TS generation methods are computationally expensive, recent generative modeling approaches have enabled chemically meaningful TS prediction for relatively small molecules. However, these methods fail to generalize to practically relevant reaction substrates because of distribution shifts induced by increasing molecular sizes. Furthermore, TS geometries for larger molecules are not available at scale, making it infeasible to train generative models from scratch on such molecules. To address these challenges, we introduce FragmentFlow: a divide-and-conquer approach that trains a generative model to predict TS geometries for the reactive core atoms, which define the reaction mechanism. The full TS structure is then reconstructed by re-attaching substituent fragments to the predicted core. By operating on reactive cores, whose size and composition remain relatively invariant across molecular contexts, FragmentFlow mitigates distribution shifts in generative modeling. Evaluated on a new curated dataset of reactions involving reactants with up to 33 heavy atoms, FragmentFlow correctly identifies 90% of TSs while requiring 30% fewer saddle-point optimization steps than classical initialization schemes. These results point toward scalable TS generation for high-throughput reactivity studies.

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained solely on massive text data, have achieved high performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), a benchmark proposed to measure commonsense knowledge and reasoning abilities about the real world. This suggests that the language produced by humanity describes a significant portion of the world with considerable nuance. In this study, we attempt to harness the high expressive power of language within cellular automata. Specifically, we express cell states and rules in natural language and delegate their updates to an LLM. Through this approach, cellular automata can transcend the constraints of merely numerical states and fixed rules, providing us with a richer platform for simulation. Here, we propose LOGOS-CA (Language Oriented Grid Of Statements - Cellular Automaton) as a natural framework to achieve this and examine its capabilities. We confirmed that LOGOS-CA successfully performs simple forest fire simulations and also serves as an intriguing subject for investigation from an Artificial Life (ALife) perspective. In this paper, we report the results of these experiments and discuss directions for future research using LOGOS-CA.

Generative AI and misinformation research has evolved since our 2024 survey. This paper presents an updated perspective, transitioning from literature review to practical countermeasures. We report on changes in the threat landscape, including improved AI-generated content through Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Central to this work are our practical contributions: JudgeGPT, a platform for evaluating human perception of AI-generated news, and RogueGPT, a controlled stimulus generation engine for research. Together, these tools form an experimental pipeline for studying how humans perceive and detect AI-generated misinformation. Our findings show that detection capabilities have improved, but the competition between generation and detection continues. We discuss mitigation strategies including LLM-based detection, inoculation approaches, and the dual-use nature of generative AI. This work contributes to research addressing the adverse impacts of AI on information quality.

The use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to increase spacecraft autonomy for orbit determination has gained renewed momentum following the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which demonstrated feasible onboard GPS and Galileo signal reception and tracking at lunar distances. This work processes in-phase and quadrature (IQ) snapshots collected by the LuGRE receiver in cis-lunar space and on the lunar surface to assess multi-frequency, multi-constellation signal availability. Signals from additional systems beyond GPS and Galileo, including RNSS and SBAS constellations, are observable and successfully acquired exclusively in the recorded IQ snapshots. These observations provide the first experimental evidence that signals from multiple constellations, including systems not supported by LuGRE realtime operations, are detectable at unprecedented distances from Earth. Useful observables can be extracted from the IQ snapshots, despite minimal sampling rates, 4-bit quantization, and short durations (200 ms-2 s), through a hybrid coherent/non-coherent acquisition stage compensating for code Doppler. These observations are exploited to tune simulation tools and to perform extended simulation campaigns, showing that the inclusion of additional constellations significantly improves availability; for a 26 dB-Hz acquisition threshold, the fraction of epochs with at least four visible satellites increases from 11% to 46% of the total epoch count. These findings indicate that BeiDou, RNSS, and SBAS signals can substantially enhance GNSS-based autonomy for lunar and cislunar missions.

Dirichlet regression models are suitable for compositional data, in which the response variable represents proportions that sum to one. However, there are still no well-established methods for constructing valid prediction sets in this context, especially considering the geometry of the compositional space. In this work, we investigate conformal prediction-based strategies for constructing valid predictive regions in Dirichlet regression models. We evaluate three distinct approaches: a method based on quantile residuals, an approximate construction of highest density regions (HDR), and an adaptation of the approximate HDR using grid-based discretization over the simplex. The performance of the methods was analyzed through simulation studies under different scenarios, varying the model complexity, response dimensionality, and covariate structure. The results indicated that the HDR approximation approach exhibits good robustness in terms of coverage, while the grid discretization proved effective in reducing overcoverage and the area of the prediction region compared to the original method. The quantile method provided larger prediction regions compared to the grid method, while maintaining adequate coverage. The methodologies were also applied to two real datasets: one concerning sleep stages and another on biomass allocation in plants. In both cases, the proposed methods demonstrated practical feasibility and produced coherent interpretations within the compositional space. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of this work

The next-generation radio-interferometric (RI) telescopes require imaging algorithms capable of forming high-resolution high-dynamic-range images from large data volumes spanning wide frequency bands. Recently, AIRI, a plug-and-play (PnP) approach taking the forward-backward algorithmic structure (FB), has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in monochromatic RI imaging by alternating a data-fidelity step with a regularization step via learned denoisers. In this work, we introduce HyperAIRI, its hyperspectral extension, underpinned by learned hyperspectral denoisers enforcing a power-law spectral model. For each spectral channel, the HyperAIRI denoiser takes as input its current image estimate, alongside estimates of its two immediate neighboring channels and the spectral index map, and provides as output its associated denoised image. To ensure convergence of HyperAIRI, the denoisers are trained with a Jacobian regularization enforcing non-expansiveness. To accommodate varying dynamic ranges, we assemble a shelf of pre-trained denoisers, each tailored to a specific dynamic range. At each HyperAIRI iteration, the spectral channels of the target image cube are updated in parallel using dynamic-range-matched denoisers from the pre-trained shelf. The denoisers are also endowed with a spatial image faceting functionality, enabling scalability to varied image sizes. Additionally, we formally introduce Hyper-uSARA, a variant of the optimization-based algorithm HyperSARA, promoting joint sparsity across spectral channels via the $\ell_{2,1}$-norm, also adopting FB. We evaluate HyperAIRI's performance on simulated and real observations. We showcase its superior performance compared to its optimization-based counterpart Hyper-uSARA, CLEAN's hyperspectral variant in WSClean, and the monochromatic imaging algorithms AIRI and uSARA.

We introduce MaskVCT, a zero-shot voice conversion (VC) model that offers multi-factor controllability through multiple classifier-free guidances (CFGs). While previous VC models rely on a fixed conditioning scheme, MaskVCT integrates diverse conditions in a single model. To further enhance robustness and control, the model can leverage continuous or quantized linguistic features to enhance intelligibility and speaker similarity, and can use or omit pitch contour to control prosody. These choices allow users to seamlessly balance speaker identity, linguistic content, and prosodic factors in a zero-shot VC setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MaskVCT achieves the best target speaker and accent similarities while obtaining competitive word and character error rates compared to existing baselines. Audio samples are available at https://maskvct.github.io/.

Interactive Narrative Systems (INS) have revolutionized digital experiences by empowering users to actively shape their stories, diverging from traditional passive storytelling. However, the field faces challenges due to fragmented research efforts and diverse system representations. This paper introduces a formal representation framework for INS, inspired by diverse approaches from the state of the art. By providing a consistent vocabulary and modeling structure, the framework facilitates the analysis, the description and comparison of INS properties. Experimental validations on the "Little Red Riding Hood" scenario highlight the usefulness of the proposed formalism and its impact on improving the evaluation of INS. This work aims to foster collaboration and coherence within the INS research community by proposing a methodology for formally representing these systems.

We introduce LighthouseGS, a practical novel view synthesis framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that utilizes simple panorama-style captures from a single mobile device. While convenient, this rotation-dominant motion and narrow baseline make accurate camera pose and 3D point estimation challenging, especially in textureless indoor scenes. To address these challenges, LighthouseGS leverages rough geometric priors, such as mobile device camera poses and monocular depth estimation, and utilizes indoor planar structures. Specifically, we propose a new initialization method called plane scaffold assembly to generate consistent 3D points on these structures, followed by a stable pruning strategy to enhance geometry and optimization stability. Additionally, we present geometric and photometric corrections to resolve inconsistencies from motion drift and auto-exposure in mobile devices. Tested on real and synthetic indoor scenes, LighthouseGS delivers photorealistic rendering, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and enabling applications like panoramic view synthesis and object placement. Project page: https://vision3d-lab.github.io/lighthousegs/

Accurate and efficient modeling of soft-tissue interactions is fundamental for advancing surgical simulation, surgical robotics, and model-based surgical automation. To achieve real-time latency, classical Finite Element Method (FEM) solvers are often replaced with neural approximations; however, naively training such models in a fully data-driven manner without incorporating physical priors frequently leads to poor generalization and physically implausible predictions. We present a novel physics-informed neural simulation framework that enables real-time prediction of soft-tissue deformations under complex single- and multi-grasper interactions. Our approach integrates Kelvinlet-based analytical priors with large-scale FEM data, capturing both linear and nonlinear tissue responses. This hybrid design improves predictive accuracy and physical plausibility across diverse neural architectures while maintaining the low-latency performance required for interactive applications. We validate our method on challenging surgical manipulation tasks involving standard laparoscopic grasping tools, demonstrating substantial improvements in deformation fidelity and temporal stability over existing baselines. These results establish Kelvinlet-augmented learning as a principled and computationally efficient paradigm for real-time, physics-aware soft-tissue simulation in surgical AI.

An evaluator, such as an LLM-as-a-judge, is trustworthy when there exists some agreed-upon way to measure its performance as a labeller. Traditional approaches either rely on testing the evaluator against references or assume that it `knows' somehow the correct labelling. Both approaches fail when references are unavailable: the former requires data, and the latter is an assumption, not evidence. To address this, we introduce the `No-Data Algorithm', which provably establishes trust in an evaluator without requiring any labelled data. Our algorithm works by successively posing challenges to said evaluator. We prove that after $r$ challenge rounds, it accepts an evaluator which knows the correct labels with probability $ \geq 1 - (1/4)^r$, and reliably flags untrustworthy ones. We present formal proofs of correctness, empirical tests, and applications to assessing trust in LLMs-as-judges for low-resource language labelling. Our work enables scientifically-grounded evaluator trust in low-data domains, addressing a critical bottleneck for scalable, trustworthy LLM deployment.

Learning on large graphs presents significant challenges, with traditional Message Passing Neural Networks suffering from computational and memory costs scaling linearly with the number of edges. We introduce the Intersecting Block Graph (IBG), a low-rank factorization of large directed graphs based on combinations of intersecting bipartite components, each consisting of a pair of communities, for source and target nodes. By giving less weight to non-edges, we show how to efficiently approximate any graph, sparse or dense, by a dense IBG. Specifically, we prove a constructive version of the weak regularity lemma, showing that for any chosen accuracy, every graph, regardless of its size or sparsity, can be approximated by a dense IBG whose rank depends only on the accuracy. This dependence of the rank solely on the accuracy, and not on the sparsity level, is in contrast to previous forms of the weak regularity lemma. We present a graph neural network architecture operating on the IBG representation of the graph and demonstrating competitive performance on node classification, spatio-temporal graph analysis, and knowledge graph completion, while having memory and computational complexity linear in the number of nodes rather than edges.

In complex multi-agent environments, achieving efficient learning and desirable behaviours is a significant challenge for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) systems. This work explores the potential of combining MARL with Large Language Model (LLM)-mediated interventions to guide agents toward more desirable behaviours. Specifically, we investigate how LLMs can be used to interpret and facilitate interventions that shape the learning trajectories of multiple agents. We experimented with two types of interventions, referred to as controllers: a Natural Language (NL) Controller and a Rule-Based (RB) Controller. The RB Controller showed a stronger impact than the NL Controller, which uses a small (7B/8B) LLM to simulate human-like interventions. Our findings indicate that agents particularly benefit from early interventions, leading to more efficient training and higher performance. Both intervention types outperform the baseline without interventions, highlighting the potential of LLM-mediated guidance to accelerate training and enhance MARL performance in challenging environments.

The success of AI is based on the availability of data to train models. While in some cases a single data custodian may have sufficient data to enable AI, often multiple custodians need to collaborate to reach a cumulative size required for meaningful AI research. The latter is, for example, often the case for rare diseases, with each clinical site having data for only a small number of patients. Recent algorithms for federated synthetic data generation are an important step towards collaborative, privacy-preserving data sharing. Existing techniques, however, focus exclusively on synthesizer training, assuming that the training data is already preprocessed and that the desired synthetic data can be delivered in one shot, without any hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end collaborative framework for publishing of synthetic data that accounts for privacy-preserving preprocessing as well as evaluation. We instantiate this framework with Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols and evaluate it in a use case for privacy-preserving publishing of synthetic genomic data for leukemia.

In medical imaging, the diffusion models have shown great potential for synthetic image generation tasks. However, these approaches often lack the interpretable connections between the generated and real images and can create anatomically implausible structures or illusions. To address these limitations, we propose the Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM), a novel diffusion-based generative model that emphasises morphological transformation through deformation fields rather than direct image synthesis. DRDM introduces a topology-preserving deformation field generation strategy, which randomly samples and integrates multi-scale Deformation Velocity Fields (DVFs). DRDM is trained to learn to recover unrealistic deformation components, thus restoring randomly deformed images to a realistic distribution. This formulation enables the generation of diverse yet anatomically plausible deformations that preserve structural integrity, thereby improving data augmentation and synthesis for downstream tasks such as few-shot learning and image registration. Experiments on cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging and pulmonary Computed Tomography show that DRDM is capable of creating diverse, large-scale deformations, while maintaining anatomical plausibility of deformation fields. Additional evaluations on 2D image segmentation and 3D image registration tasks indicate notable performance gains, underscoring DRDM's potential to enhance both image manipulation and generative modelling in medical imaging applications. Project page: https://jianqingzheng.github.io/def_diff_rec/

Over the last three to five years, it has become possible to generate machine learning synthetic data for healthcare-related uses. However, concerns have been raised about potential negative factors associated with the possibilities of artificial dataset generation. These include the potential misuse of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in fields such as cybercrime, the use of deepfakes and fake news to deceive or manipulate, and displacement of human jobs across various market sectors. Here, we consider both current and future positive advances and possibilities with synthetic datasets. Synthetic data offers significant benefits, particularly in data privacy, research, in balancing datasets and reducing bias in machine learning models. Generative AI is an artificial intelligence genre capable of creating text, images, video or other data using generative models. The recent explosion of interest in GenAI was heralded by the invention and speedy move to use of large language models (LLM). These computational models are able to achieve general-purpose language generation and other natural language processing tasks and are based on transformer architectures, which made an evolutionary leap from previous neural network architectures. Fuelled by the advent of improved GenAI techniques and wide scale usage, this is surely the time to consider how synthetic data can be used to advance infectious disease research. In this commentary we aim to create an overview of the current and future position of synthetic data in infectious disease research.

Recent advances in large-scale code generation models have led to remarkable progress in producing high-quality code. These models are trained in a self-supervised manner on extensive unlabeled code corpora using a decoder-only architecture. However, despite their generative strength, decoder-only models often exhibit limited performance on code understanding tasks such as code search and clone detection, primarily due to their generation-oriented training objectives. While training large encoder-only models from scratch on massive code datasets can improve understanding ability but remains computationally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore a more efficient alternative by transferring knowledge from pre-trained decoder-only code generation models to code understanding tasks. We investigate how decoder-only architectures can be effectively adapted to learn discriminative and semantically meaningful code representations. To this end, we propose CL4D, a contrastive learning framework tailored to strengthen the representation capabilities of decoder-only models. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CL4D achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods on representative code understanding tasks, including code search and clone detection. Further analysis reveals that CL4D substantially improves the semantic alignment of code representations by reducing the distance between semantically similar code snippets. These findings highlight the feasibility of leveraging decoder-only models as a unified backbone for both code generation and understanding.

In repeated games, such as auctions, players rely on autonomous learning agents to choose their actions. We study settings in which players have their agents make monetary transfers to other agents during play at their own expense, in order to influence learning dynamics in their favor. Our goal is to understand when players have incentives to use such payments, how payments between agents affect learning outcomes, and what the resulting implications are for welfare and its distribution. We propose a simple game-theoretic model to capture the incentive structure of such scenarios. We find that, quite generally, abstaining from payments is not robust to strategic deviations by users of learning agents: self-interested players benefit from having their agents make payments to other learners. In a broad class of games, such endogenous payments between learning agents lead to higher welfare for all players. In first- and second-price auctions, equilibria of the induced "payment-policy game" lead to highly collusive learning outcomes, with low or vanishing revenue for the auctioneer. These results highlight a fundamental challenge for mechanism design, as well as for regulatory policies, in environments where learning agents may interact in the digital ecosystem beyond a mechanism's boundaries.

Traditional methods for matching in causal inference are impractical for high-dimensional datasets. They suffer from the curse of dimensionality: exact matching and coarsened exact matching find exponentially fewer matches as the input dimension grows, and propensity score matching may match highly unrelated units together. To overcome this problem, we develop theoretical results which motivate the use of neural networks to obtain non-trivial, multivariate balancing scores of a chosen level of coarseness, in contrast to the classical, scalar propensity score. We leverage these balancing scores to perform matching for high-dimensional causal inference and call this procedure neural score matching. We show that our method is competitive against other matching approaches on semi-synthetic high-dimensional datasets, both in terms of treatment effect estimation and reducing imbalance.

We propose a new benchmark for evaluating stereoscopic visual-inertial computer vision algorithms (SLAM/ SfM/ 3D Reconstruction/ Visual-Inertial Odometry) for minimally invasive surgical (MIS) interventions in the abdomen. Our MITI Dataset available at [https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/1621941] provides all the necessary data by a complete recording of a handheld surgical intervention at Research Hospital Rechts der Isar of TUM. It contains multimodal sensor information from IMU, stereoscopic video, and infrared (IR) tracking as ground truth for evaluation. Furthermore, calibration for the stereoscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, the rigid transformations in the sensor setup, and time-offsets are available. We wisely chose a suitable intervention that contains very few cutting and tissue deformation and shows a full scan of the abdomen with a handheld camera such that it is ideal for testing SLAM algorithms. Intending to promote the progress of visual-inertial algorithms designed for MIS application, we hope that our clinical training dataset helps and enables researchers to enhance algorithms.