Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs). We introduce a benchmark designed to evaluate RAG pipelines as a whole, evaluating a pipeline's ability to ingest, retrieve, and reason about several modalities of information, differentiating it from existing benchmarks that focus on particular aspects such as retrieval. We present (1) a small, human-created dataset of 93 questions designed to evaluate a pipeline's ability to ingest textual data, tables, images, and data spread across these modalities in one or more documents; (2) a phrase-level recall metric for correctness; (3) a nearest-neighbor embedding classifier to identify potential pipeline hallucinations; (4) a comparative evaluation of 2 pipelines built with open-source retrieval mechanisms and 4 closed-source foundation models; and (5) a third-party human evaluation of the alignment of our correctness and hallucination metrics. We find that closed-source pipelines significantly outperform open-source pipelines in both correctness and hallucination metrics, with wider performance gaps in questions relying on multimodal and cross-document information. Human evaluation of our metrics showed average agreement of 4.62 for correctness and 4.53 for hallucination detection on a 1-5 Likert scale (5 indicating "strongly agree").

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy gradients and the complexity of backpropagation through time. This stable learning process is critically enabled by our second contribution: a robust distributional critic, which we design through a fusion of distributional RL and clipped double Q-learning. The resulting algorithm is highly effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark of eighteen hard RL tasks, including Humanoid, Dog, and Shadow Hand domains, spanning both dense-reward and goal-conditioned RL scenarios. Beyond standard benchmarks, we also evaluate a biologically motivated predator-prey task to examine the behavioral robustness and generalization capacity of our approach. Code: https://github.com/d2ac-actor-critic/d2ac-public

Real-world videos often extend over thousands of frames. Existing generative video super-resolution (VSR) approaches, however, face two persistent challenges when processing long sequences: (1) inefficiency due to the heavy cost of multi-step denoising for full-length sequences; and (2) poor consistency is hindered by temporal decomposition that causes artifacts and discontinuities. To break these limits, we propose InfVSR, which reformulates VSR as an autoregressive-one-step-diffusion paradigm, and enables streaming inference with video diffusion priors. First, we adapt the pretrained DiT into a causal structure, maintaining both local and global coherence via rolling KV-cache and joint visual guidance. Second, we distill the diffusion process into a single step efficiently, with patch-wise pixel supervision and cross-chunk distribution matching. To fill the gap in long-form video evaluation, we build a new benchmark tailored for extended sequences and further introduce semantic-level metrics to comprehensively assess temporal consistency. Our method pushes the frontier of long-form VSR, achieves state-of-the-art quality with enhanced semantic consistency, and delivers up to 58x speed-up over existing methods such as MGLD-VSR. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/InfVSR.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) replaces costly human labeling with automated verifiers. To reduce verifier hacking, many RLVR systems binarize rewards to $\{0,1\}$, but imperfect verifiers inevitably introduce \emph{false negatives} (rejecting correct answers) and \emph{false positives} (accepting incorrect ones). We formalize verifier unreliability as a stochastic reward channel with asymmetric noise rates $ρ_0$ and $ρ_1$ -- the FP rate and the FN rate, respectively. From this abstraction we derive two lightweight corrections: (i) a \emph{backward} correction that yields an unbiased surrogate reward and thus an unbiased policy-gradient estimator in expectation, and (ii) a \emph{forward} correction that reweights score-function terms so the expected update aligns with the clean gradient direction and requires only the FN rate. We implement both as lightweight hooks in a group relative policy optimization pipeline, both corrections improve RLVR for math reasoning under synthetic and real verifier noise, with the forward variant being more stable under heavier noise. Finally, an appeals mechanism with a lightweight LLM verifier estimates the FN rate online and further improves performance.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL). While NLL is classically optimal when training from scratch, post-training operates in a different paradigm and could violate its optimality assumptions, where models already encode task-relevant priors and supervision can be long and noisy. In this work, we systematically study various probability-based objectives and characterize when and why different objectives succeed or fail under varying conditions. Through comprehensive experiments and extensive ablation studies across 8 model backbones, 27 benchmarks, and 7 domains, we uncover a critical dimension that governs objective behavior: the model-capability continuum. Near the model-strong end, prior-leaning objectives that downweight low-probability tokens (e.g., $-p$, $-p^{10}$, thresholded variants) consistently outperform NLL; toward the model-weak end, NLL dominates; in between, no single objective prevails. Our theoretical analysis further elucidates how objectives trade places across the continuum, providing a principled foundation for adapting objectives to model capability. The code is available at https://github.com/GaotangLi/Beyond-Log-Likelihood.

Knowledge-graph retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) couples large language models (LLMs) with structured, verifiable knowledge graphs (KGs) to reduce hallucination and provide reasoning traces. However, current KG-RAG systems often rely on fixed pipelines of multiple LLM modules (e.g., planning, reasoning, and responding), which inflate inference costs and tie performance to specific graph schemas. To address this, we introduce KG-R1, an agentic framework that optimizes KG-RAG through reinforcement learning (RL). Unlike modular workflows, KG-R1 uses a single agent that interacts with KGs as its environment, learning to retrieve information at each step and incorporating it into its reasoning and generation in a unified process. Across Knowledge-Graph Question Answering (KGQA) benchmarks, KG-R1 demonstrates both efficiency and transferability-using Qwen 2.5-3B, KG-R1 improves answer accuracy with fewer generation tokens than prior multi-module workflow methods that use much larger foundation or fine-tuned models. Furthermore, KG-R1 exhibits strong plug-and-play capability: after training, maintaining accuracy on unseen KGs without retraining. These properties make KG-R1 a promising KG-RAG framework for real-world deployment. Our code is publicly available at github.com/junhongmit/KG-R1/.

We present a speaker-aware approach for simulating multi-speaker conversations that captures temporal consistency and realistic turn-taking dynamics. Prior work typically models aggregate conversational statistics under an independence assumption across speakers and turns. In contrast, our method uses speaker-specific deviation distributions enforcing intra-speaker temporal consistency, while a Markov chain governs turn-taking and a fixed room impulse response preserves spatial realism. We also unify pauses and overlaps into a single gap distribution, modeled with kernel density estimation for smooth continuity. Evaluation on Switchboard using intrinsic metrics - global gap statistics, correlations between consecutive gaps, copula-based higher-order dependencies, turn-taking entropy, and gap survival functions - shows that speaker-aware simulation better aligns with real conversational patterns than the baseline method, capturing fine-grained temporal dependencies and realistic speaker alternation, while revealing open challenges in modeling long-range conversational structure.

Time series forecasting (TSF) is critical in domains like energy, finance, healthcare, and logistics, requiring models that generalize across diverse datasets. Large pre-trained models such as Chronos and Time-MoE show strong zero-shot (ZS) performance but suffer from high computational costs. In this work, we introduce Super-Linear, a lightweight and scalable mixture-of-experts (MoE) model for general forecasting. It replaces deep architectures with simple frequency-specialized linear experts, trained on resampled data across multiple frequency regimes. A lightweight spectral gating mechanism dynamically selects relevant experts, enabling efficient, accurate forecasting. Despite its simplicity, Super-Linear demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks, while substantially improving efficiency, robustness to sampling rates, and interpretability. The implementation of Super-Linear is available at: \href{https://github.com/azencot-group/SuperLinear}{https://github.com/azencot-group/SuperLinear}.

Continual Learning (CL) models, while adept at sequential knowledge acquisition, face significant and often overlooked privacy challenges due to accumulating diverse information. Traditional privacy methods, like a uniform Differential Privacy (DP) budget, indiscriminately protect all data, leading to substantial model utility degradation and hindering CL deployment in privacy-sensitive areas. To overcome this, we propose a privacy-enhanced continual learning (PeCL) framework that forgets what's sensitive and remembers what matters. Our approach first introduces a token-level dynamic Differential Privacy strategy that adaptively allocates privacy budgets based on the semantic sensitivity of individual tokens. This ensures robust protection for private entities while minimizing noise injection for non-sensitive, general knowledge. Second, we integrate a privacy-guided memory sculpting module. This module leverages the sensitivity analysis from our dynamic DP mechanism to intelligently forget sensitive information from the model's memory and parameters, while explicitly preserving the task-invariant historical knowledge crucial for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments show that PeCL achieves a superior balance between privacy preserving and model utility, outperforming baseline models by maintaining high accuracy on previous tasks while ensuring robust privacy.

Obtaining pixel-level annotations over large spatial extents remains a major bottleneck for deploying machine learning in ecological applications. Here we present a multi-scale weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) framework that enables training high-resolution segmentation models from dense, classification-based outputs. Our method combines fine-scale, multi-label predictions from underwater imagery with broad-coverage aerial data. We convert these point-level classifications into coarse supervision masks that can be used to train a semantic segmentation model on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) orthophotos. A second training step using the model's own refined predictions is then used to further improve spatial accuracy without requiring additional annotations. We demonstrate the approach on coral reef imagery, enabling large-area segmentation of coral morphotypes and illustrating its flexibility in integrating new classes. The final model achieves 86.07% pixel accuracy and 52.23% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on manually annotated reef zones, demonstrating that accurate large-scale coral segmentation can be obtained without pixel-level annotations. By bridging image classification and segmentation across scales and modalities, this method provides an efficient solution for deploying segmentation models in settings where annotations are unavailable and opens opportunities for scalable, efficient monitoring in ecology and beyond.

There is an increasing need to enforce multiple, often competing, measures of fairness within automated decision systems. The appropriate weighting of these fairness objectives is typically unknown a priori, may change over time and, in our setting, must be learned adaptively through sequential interactions. In this work, we address this challenge in a bandit setting, where decisions are made with graph-structured feedback.

The ubiquity of missing data in urban intelligence systems, attributable to adverse environmental conditions and equipment failures, poses a significant challenge to the efficacy of downstream applications, notably in the realms of traffic forecasting and energy consumption prediction. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a robust spatio-temporal learning methodology capable of extracting meaningful insights from incomplete datasets. Despite the existence of methodologies for spatio-temporal graph forecasting in the presence of missing values, unresolved issues persist. Primarily, the majority of extant research is predicated on time-series analysis, thereby neglecting the dynamic spatial correlations inherent in sensor networks. Additionally, the complexity of missing data patterns compounds the intricacy of the problem. Furthermore, the variability in maintenance conditions results in a significant fluctuation in the ratio and pattern of missing values, thereby challenging the generalizability of predictive models. In response to these challenges, this study introduces GeoMAE, a self-supervised spatio-temporal representation learning model. The model is comprised of three principal components: an input preprocessing module, an attention-based spatio-temporal forecasting network (STAFN), and an auxiliary learning task, which draws inspiration from Masking AutoEncoders to enhance the robustness of spatio-temporal representation learning. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that GeoMAE significantly outperforms existing benchmarks, achieving up to 13.20\% relative improvement over the best baseline models.

We present a novel approach for graph classification based on tabularizing graph data via new variants of the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm and then applying methods for tabular data. The variants are obtained by modifying the underlying logical framework, and we establish a precise theoretical characterization of their expressive power using a novel generalization of the bisimulation game for generalized quantifiers. We then test our method on 14 datasets that span a range of application domains. The experiments demonstrate that on datasets with up to 40 000 samples, our approach generally matches the predictive performance of graph neural networks and graph transformers, without requiring a GPU or extensive hyperparameter tuning. Even when our method's tuning time is included and the baselines' is not, our method is 5-20 times faster. When tuning time is included for all methods, the gap is significantly greater in favour of our method.

Building interactive omni-modal assistants often relies on end-to-end multimodal alignment to fuse heterogeneous modalities, which incurs substantial data and compute costs and limits extensibility. We present Training-Free Large Language Model Orchestration (LLM Orchestration), a training-free orchestration framework that integrates off-the-shelf modality experts into a unified multimodal input--output system without additional gradient-based training for integration. LLM Orchestration comprises three components: (1) an LLM controller that infers user intent and emits explicit control tokens for expert selection and sequencing, enabling protocol-constrained and auditable routing; (2) a text-centric cross-modal memory that compresses multimodal evidence into structured records for lightweight retrieval and reuse, reducing redundant expert invocations across turns; and (3) a unified interaction layer that executes routing and memory decisions to support consistent modality transitions, full-duplex streaming, and interruption-aware dialogue. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, LLM Orchestration achieves strong performance under standard evaluation constraints while maintaining low orchestration overhead and modular upgradeability, providing a practical alternative to costly joint training for omni-modal systems.

Despite advances in legal NLP, no comprehensive evaluation of Transformer-based models customized for legal tasks (referred to as `legal-specific' models in this paper) exists for contract classification tasks. To address this gap, we present an evaluation of 13 legal-specific transformer-based models on 3 English-language contract classification tasks and compare them with 9 generalist models. The results show that legal-specific models consistently outperform generalist models, especially on tasks requiring nuanced legal understanding. They also help reduce misclassification of rare classes in imbalanced datasets. Legal-BERT and Contracts-BERT establish new SOTAs on two of the three tasks, despite having 69% fewer parameters than the best-performing generalist models. We also identify CaseLaw-BERT and LexLM as strong additional baselines for contract classification. Our results highlight the shortcomings of generalist models, emphasizing the need for domain-specific customization, particularly in the context of legal applications.

The performance of Bayesian optimization (BO), a highly sample-efficient method for expensive black-box problems, is critically governed by the selection of its hyperparameters, including the kernel and acquisition functions. This presents a significant practical challenge: an inappropriate combination of these can lead to poor performance and wasted evaluations. While individual improvements to kernel functions and acquisition functions have been actively explored, the joint and autonomous selection of the best pair of these fundamental hyperparameters has been largely overlooked. This forced practitioners to rely on heuristics or costly manual training. In this work, we propose a framework, BOOST (Bayesian Optimization with Optimal Kernel and Acquisition Function Selection Technique), that automates this selection. BOOST utilizes a simple offline evaluation stage to predict the performance of various kernel-acquisition function pairs and identify the most promising pair before committing to the expensive evaluation process. BOOST is a data-driven strategy selection procedure that evaluates kernel-acquisition pairs based on their empirical performance on the data-in-hand. At each iteration, previously observed points are partitioned into a reference set and a query set. These subsets play roles analogous to training and validation sets in machine learning: the reference set is used for model construction, while the query set represents unseen regions to retrospectively evaluate how effectively each candidate strategy progresses toward the target value. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and machine learning hyperparameter optimization tasks demonstrate that BOOST consistently improves over fixed-hyperparameter BO and remains competitive with state-of-the-art adaptive methods, highlighting its robustness across diverse landscapes.

Emotional understanding and generation are often treated as separate tasks, yet they are inherently complementary and can mutually enhance each other. In this paper, we propose the UniEmo, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates these two tasks. The key challenge lies in the abstract nature of emotions, necessitating the extraction of visual representations beneficial for both tasks. To address this, we propose a hierarchical emotional understanding chain with learnable expert queries that progressively extracts multi-scale emotional features, thereby serving as a foundational step for unification. Simultaneously, we fuse these expert queries and emotional representations to guide the diffusion model in generating emotion-evoking images. To enhance the diversity and fidelity of the generated emotional images, we further introduce the emotional correlation coefficient and emotional condition loss into the fusion process. This step facilitates fusion and alignment for emotional generation guided by the understanding. In turn, we demonstrate that joint training allows the generation component to provide implicit feedback to the understanding part. Furthermore, we propose a novel data filtering algorithm to select high-quality and diverse emotional images generated by the well-trained model, which explicitly feedback into the understanding part. Together, these generation-driven dual feedback processes enhance the model's understanding capacity. Extensive experiments show that UniEmo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both emotional understanding and generation tasks. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/UniEmo.

Wheel-legged robots integrate leg agility on rough terrain with wheel efficiency on flat ground. However, most existing designs do not fully capitalize on the benefits of both legged and wheeled structures, which limits overall system flexibility and efficiency. We present FLORES, a novel wheel-legged robot design featuring a distinctive front-leg configuration that sets it beyond standard design approaches. Specifically, FLORES replaces the conventional hip-roll degree of freedom (DoF) of the front leg with hip-yaw DoFs, and this allows for efficient movement on flat surfaces while ensuring adaptability when navigating complex terrains. This innovative design facilitates seamless transitions between different locomotion modes (i.e., legged locomotion and wheeled locomotion) and optimizes the performance across varied environments. To fully exploit \flores's mechanical capabilities, we develop a tailored reinforcement learning (RL) controller that adapts the Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) with a customized reward structure optimized for our unique mechanical configuration. This framework enables the generation of adaptive, multi-modal locomotion strategies that facilitate smooth transitions between wheeled and legged movements. Furthermore, our distinctive joint design enables the robot to exhibit novel and highly efficient locomotion gaits that capitalize on the synergistic advantages of both locomotion modes. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate FLORES's enhanced steering capabilities, improved navigation efficiency, and versatile locomotion across various terrains. The open-source project can be found at https://github.com/ZhichengSong6/FLORES.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have revolutionized cross-modal understanding but continue to struggle with hallucinations - fabricated content contradicting visual inputs. Existing hallucination mitigation methods either incur prohibitive computational costs or introduce distribution mismatches between training data and model outputs. We identify a critical insight: hallucinations predominantly emerge at the early stages of text generation and propagate through subsequent outputs. To address this, we propose SENTINEL (Sentence-level Early iNtervention Through IN-domain prEference Learning), a framework that eliminates dependency on human annotations. Specifically, we first bootstrap high-quality in-domain preference pairs by iteratively sampling model outputs, validating object existence through cross-checking with two open-vocabulary detectors, and classifying sentences into hallucinated/non-hallucinated categories. Subsequently, we use context-coherent positive samples and hallucinated negative samples to build context-aware preference data iteratively. Finally, we train models using a context-aware preference loss (C-DPO) that emphasizes discriminative learning at the sentence level where hallucinations initially manifest. Experimental results show that SENTINEL can reduce hallucinations by over 90% compared to the original model and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method on both hallucination benchmarks and general capabilities benchmarks, demonstrating its superiority and generalization ability. The models, datasets, and code are available at https://github.com/pspdada/SENTINEL.

End-to-end planning systems for autonomous driving are rapidly improving, especially in closed-loop simulation environments like CARLA. Many such driving systems either do not consider uncertainty as part of the plan itself or obtain it by using specialized representations that do not generalize. In this paper, we propose EnDfuser, an end-to-end driving system that uses a diffusion model as the trajectory planner. EnDfuser effectively leverages complex perception information like fused camera and LiDAR features, through combining attention pooling and trajectory planning into a single diffusion transformer module. Instead of committing to a single plan, EnDfuser produces a distribution of candidate trajectories (128 for our case) from a single perception frame through ensemble diffusion. By observing the full set of candidate trajectories, EnDfuser provides interpretability for uncertain, multimodal future trajectory spaces. Using this information we design a simplistic safety-rule that improves the system's driving score by 1.7% on the LAV benchmark. Our findings suggest that ensemble diffusion, used as a drop-in replacement for traditional point-estimate trajectory planning modules, can contribute to an uncertainty-aware decision making process in End-to-End driving policies by modeling the uncertainty of the posterior trajectory distribution.

Learning PDE dynamics from limited data with unknown physics is challenging. Existing neural PDE solvers either require large datasets or rely on known physics (e.g., PDE residuals or handcrafted stencils), leading to limited applicability. To address these challenges, we propose Spectral-Inspired Neural Operator (SINO), which can model complex systems from just 2-5 trajectories, without requiring explicit PDE terms. Specifically, SINO automatically captures both local and global spatial derivatives from frequency indices, enabling a compact representation of the underlying differential operators in physics-agnostic regimes. To model nonlinear effects, it employs a Pi-block that performs multiplicative operations on spectral features, complemented by a low-pass filter to suppress aliasing. Extensive experiments on both 2D and 3D PDE benchmarks demonstrate that SINO achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of 1-2 orders of magnitude in accuracy. Particularly, with only 5 training trajectories, SINO outperforms data-driven methods trained on 1000 trajectories and remains predictive on challenging out-of-distribution cases where other methods fail.

In many real-world settings--e.g., single-cell RNA sequencing, mobility sensing, and environmental monitoring--data are observed only as temporally aggregated snapshots collected over finite time windows, often with noisy or uncertain timestamps, and without access to continuous trajectories. We study the problem of estimating continuous-time dynamics from such snapshots. We present Continuous-Time Optimal Transport Flow (CT-OT Flow), a two-stage framework that (i) infers high-resolution time labels by aligning neighboring intervals via partial optimal transport (POT) and (ii) reconstructs a continuous-time data distribution through temporal kernel smoothing, from which we sample pairs of nearby times to train standard ODE/SDE models. Our formulation explicitly accounts for snapshot aggregation and time-label uncertainty and uses practical accelerations (screening and mini-batch POT), making it applicable to large datasets. Across synthetic benchmarks and two real datasets (scRNA-seq and typhoon tracks), CT-OT Flow reduces distributional and trajectory errors compared with OT-CFM, [SF]\(^{2}\)M, TrajectoryNet, MFM, and ENOT.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced in visual tasks, yet their spatial understanding remains limited to single images, leaving them ill-suited for physical-world applications that require multi-frame reasoning. In this paper, we propose a framework to equip MLLMs with multi-frame spatial understanding by integrating fundamental spatial skills, including depth perception, visual correspondence, and dynamic perception. We design a novel data pipeline and collect the MultiSPA dataset of more than 27 million samples spanning diverse 3D and 4D scenes to enable training. Alongside MultiSPA, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark that tests a wide spectrum of spatial tasks under uniform metrics. Our resulting model, Multi-SpatialMLLM, achieves significant gains over baselines and proprietary systems, demonstrating scalable and generalizable multi-frame perception. We further observe multi-task benefits and emergent spatial capabilities in challenging scenarios, and showcase how our model can serve as a multi-frame reward annotator for robotics.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified efforts to fuse heterogeneous open-source models into a unified system that inherits their complementary strengths. Existing logit-based fusion methods maintain inference efficiency but treat vocabulary dimensions independently, overlooking semantic dependencies encoded by cross-dimension interactions. These dependencies reflect how token types interact under a model's internal reasoning and are essential for aligning models with diverse generation behaviors. To explicitly model these dependencies, we propose \textbf{InfiGFusion}, the first structure-aware fusion framework with a novel \textit{Graph-on-Logits Distillation} (GLD) loss. Specifically, we retain the top-$k$ logits per output and aggregate their outer products across sequence positions to form a global co-activation graph, where nodes represent vocabulary channels and edges quantify their joint activations. To ensure scalability and efficiency, we design a sorting-based closed-form approximation that reduces the original $O(n^4)$ cost of Gromov-Wasserstein distance to $O(n \log n)$, with provable approximation guarantees. Experiments across multiple fusion settings show that GLD consistently improves fusion quality and stability. InfiGFusion outperforms SOTA models and fusion baselines across 11 benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It shows particular strength in complex reasoning tasks, with +35.6 improvement on Multistep Arithmetic and +37.06 on Causal Judgement over SFT, demonstrating superior multi-step and relational inference.

Insulin resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes, is characterized by impaired insulin action in tissues. Current methods for measuring insulin resistance, while effective, are expensive, inaccessible, not widely available and hinder opportunities for early intervention. In this study, we remotely recruited the largest dataset to date across the US to study insulin resistance (N=1,165 participants, with median BMI=28 kg/m2, age=45 years, HbA1c=5.4%), incorporating wearable device time series data and blood biomarkers, including the ground-truth measure of insulin resistance, homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). We developed deep neural network models to predict insulin resistance based on readily available digital and blood biomarkers. Our results show that our models can predict insulin resistance by combining both wearable data and readily available blood biomarkers better than either of the two data sources separately (R2=0.5, auROC=0.80, Sensitivity=76%, and specificity 84%). The model showed 93% sensitivity and 95% adjusted specificity in obese and sedentary participants, a subpopulation most vulnerable to developing type 2 diabetes and who could benefit most from early intervention. Rigorous evaluation of model performance, including interpretability, and robustness, facilitates generalizability across larger cohorts, which is demonstrated by reproducing the prediction performance on an independent validation cohort (N=72 participants). Additionally, we demonstrated how the predicted insulin resistance can be integrated into a large language model agent to help understand and contextualize HOMA-IR values, facilitating interpretation and safe personalized recommendations. This work offers the potential for early detection of people at risk of type 2 diabetes and thereby facilitate earlier implementation of preventative strategies.

Frequent and long-term exposure to hyperglycemia increases the risk of chronic complications, including neuropathy, nephropathy, and cardiovascular disease. Existing continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technologies model only specific aspects of glycemic regulation, such as predicting hypoglycemia and administering small insulin boluses. Similarly, current digital twin approaches in diabetes management primarily focus on predicting glucose responses to human behavior and insulin therapy. As a result, these technologies lack the ability to provide alternative treatment scenarios that could guide proactive behavioral interventions for optimal diabetes management. To address this gap, we propose GlyTwin, a novel computational framework that enhances digital twin technologies by integrating counterfactual explanations to simulate optimal behavioral treatments for glucose control. GlyTwin generates counterfactual treatments by recommending adjustments to behavioral choices, such as carbohydrate intake and insulin dosing, to significantly reduce the occurrence and duration of hyperglycemic events. In addition, GlyTwin incorporates stakeholder preferences into its intervention-generation process, ensuring that the tool is personalized and user-centric. We evaluate GlyTwin on AZT1D, a new dataset constructed by collecting longitudinal data from 50 individuals living with type 1 diabetes (T1D) on automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, each monitored for 26 days. Results show that GlyTwin outperforms state-of-the-art methods for generating counterfactual explanations, with 85.8\% valid explanations and 87.3\% effectiveness in preventing hyperglycemia compared with historical data.

Pretraining data curation is a cornerstone in Large Language Model (LLM) development, leading to growing research on quality filtering of large web corpora. From statistical quality flags to LLM-based labelling systems, datasets are divided into categories, frequently reducing to a binary: those passing the filters are deemed as valuable examples, others are discarded as useless or detrimental. However, a more detailed understanding of the contribution of different kinds of texts to model performance is still largely lacking. In this article, we present the first study utilising registers or genres - a widely used standard in corpus linguistics to model linguistic variation - to curate pretraining datasets and investigate the effect of register on the performance of LLMs. We train small generative models with register classified data and evaluate them using standard benchmarks, and show that the register of pretraining data substantially affects model performance. We uncover surprising relationships between the pretraining material and the resulting models: using the News register results in subpar performance, and on the contrary, including the Opinion class, covering texts such as reviews and opinion blogs, is highly beneficial. While a model trained on the entire unfiltered dataset outperforms those trained on datasets limited to a single register, combining well-performing registers like How-to-Instructions, Informational Description, and Opinion leads to major improvements. Furthermore, analysis of individual benchmark results reveals key differences in the strengths and drawbacks of specific register classes as pretraining data. These findings show that register is an important explainer of model variation and can facilitate more deliberate future data selection practices.

Learning-based medical image registration has matched the accuracy of conventional methods while offering superior computational efficiency. However, existing approaches suffer from poor generalization across diverse clinical scenarios, requiring the laborious development of multiple isolated networks for specific registration tasks, e.g., inter-/intra-subject registration or anatomical region-specific alignment, leading to cumbersome development pipelines. To overcome this limitation, we propose UniReg, the first conditional unified model for multi-scenario CT image registration, which combines the precision advantages of task-specific learning methods with the generalization of traditional optimization methods. Our key innovation is a unified registration framework that adaptively estimates deformation fields conditioned on: (1) anatomical structure priors, (2) registration type constraints (inter/intra-subject), and (3) instance-specific features, enabling optimal alignment across heterogeneous scenarios within a single model. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple CT/MR registration datasets, UniReg achieves superior average registration accuracy compared with current state-of-the-art learning-based methods while exhibiting strong cross-scenario generalization. Moreover, by replacing multiple isolated task-specific models with a compact unified model, UniReg substantially reduces the overall training burden in terms of total training cost and model redundancy.

Recent advances in diffusion-based text-to-image generation have demonstrated promising results through visual condition control. However, existing ControlNet-like methods struggle with compositional visual conditioning - simultaneously preserving semantic fidelity across multiple heterogeneous control signals while maintaining high visual quality, where they employ separate control branches that often introduce conflicting guidance during the denoising process, leading to structural distortions and artifacts in generated images. To address this issue, we present PixelPonder, a novel unified control framework, which allows for effective control of multiple visual conditions under a single control structure. Specifically, we design a patch-level adaptive condition selection mechanism that dynamically prioritizes spatially relevant control signals at the sub-region level, enabling precise local guidance without global interference. Additionally, a time-aware control injection scheme is deployed to modulate condition influence according to denoising timesteps, progressively transitioning from structural preservation to texture refinement and fully utilizing the control information from different categories to promote more harmonious image generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelPonder surpasses previous methods across different benchmark datasets, showing superior improvement in spatial alignment accuracy while maintaining high textual semantic consistency.

Purpose: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) promises to ease the annotation bottleneck in medical segmentation, but overlapping anatomy and blurred boundaries make its point prompts ambiguous, leading to cycles of manual refinement to achieve precise masks. Better prompting strategies are needed. Methods: We propose a structured prompting strategy using 4 points as a compact instance-level shape description. We study two 4-point variants: extreme points and the proposed major/minor axis endpoints, inspired by ultrasound measurement practice. SAM cannot fully exploit such structured prompts because it treats all points identically and lacks geometry-aware reasoning. To address this, we introduce S4M (4-points to Segment Anything), which augments SAM to interpret 4 points as relational cues rather than isolated clicks. S4M expands the prompt space with role-specific embeddings and adds an auxiliary "Canvas" pretext task that sketches coarse masks directly from prompts, fostering geometry-aware reasoning. Results: Across eight datasets in ultrasound and surgical endoscopy, S4M improves segmentation by +3.42 mIoU over a strong SAM baseline at equal prompt budget. An annotation study with three clinicians further shows that major/minor prompts enable faster annotation. Conclusion: S4M increases performance, reduces annotation effort, and aligns prompting with clinical practice, enabling more scalable dataset development in medical imaging. We release our code and pretrained models at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/S4M.