Yutong Song

Yutong Song, Shiva Shrestha, Chenhan Lyu et al.

Spoken question-answering (SQA) systems relying on automatic speech recognition (ASR) often struggle with accurately recognizing medical terminology. To this end, we propose MedSpeak, a novel knowledge graph-aided ASR error correction framework that refines noisy transcripts and improves downstream answer prediction by leveraging both semantic relationships and phonetic information encoded in a medical knowledge graph, together with the reasoning power of LLMs. Comprehensive experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that MedSpeak significantly improves the accuracy of medical term recognition and overall medical SQA performance, establishing MedSpeak as a state-of-the-art solution for medical SQA. The code is available at https://github.com/RainieLLM/MedSpeak.

Cheonkam Jeong, Jessica Liao, Audrey Lu et al.

We present DementiaBank-Emotion, the first multi-rater emotion annotation corpus for Alzheimer's disease (AD) speech. Annotating 1,492 utterances from 108 speakers for Ekman's six basic emotions and neutral, we find that AD patients express significantly more non-neutral emotions (16.9%) than healthy controls (5.7%; p < .001). Exploratory acoustic analysis suggests a possible dissociation: control speakers showed substantial F0 modulation for sadness (Delta = -3.45 semitones from baseline), whereas AD speakers showed minimal change (Delta = +0.11 semitones; interaction p = .023), though this finding is based on limited samples (sadness: n=5 control, n=15 AD) and requires replication. Within AD speech, loudness differentiates emotion categories, indicating partially preserved emotion-prosody mappings. We release the corpus, annotation guidelines, and calibration workshop materials to support research on emotion recognition in clinical populations.

Yutong Song, Jiang Wu, Weijia Zhang et al.

Adapting large language models to individual users remains challenging due to the tension between fine-grained personalization and scalable deployment. We present CARD, a hierarchical framework that achieves effective personalization through progressive refinement. CARD first clusters users according to shared stylistic patterns and learns cluster-specific LoRA adapters, enabling robust generalization and strong low-resource performance. To capture individual differences within each cluster, we propose an implicit preference learning mechanism that contrasts user-authored text with cluster-level generations, allowing the model to infer user-specific style preferences without manual annotation. At inference time, CARD injects personalization exclusively at decoding via lightweight user preference vectors and low-rank logit corrections, while keeping the base model frozen. Experiments on the LaMP and LongLaMP benchmarks show that CARD achieves competitive or superior generation quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while significantly improving efficiency and scalability for practical personalized text generation.

Yutong Song, Chenhan Lyu, Pengfei Zhang et al.

Mild-stage dementia patients primarily experience two critical symptoms: severe memory loss and emotional instability. To address these challenges, we propose DEMENTIA-PLAN, an innovative retrieval-augmented generation framework that leverages large language models to enhance conversational support. Our model employs a multiple knowledge graph architecture, integrating various dimensional knowledge representations including daily routine graphs and life memory graphs. Through this multi-graph architecture, DEMENTIA-PLAN comprehensively addresses both immediate care needs and facilitates deeper emotional resonance through personal memories, helping stabilize patient mood while providing reliable memory support. Our notable innovation is the self-reflection planning agent, which systematically coordinates knowledge retrieval and semantic integration across multiple knowledge graphs, while scoring retrieved content from daily routine and life memory graphs to dynamically adjust their retrieval weights for optimized response generation. DEMENTIA-PLAN represents a significant advancement in the clinical application of large language models for dementia care, bridging the gap between AI tools and caregivers interventions.

Chenhan Lyu, Yutong Song, Pengfei Zhang et al.

Mental health applications have emerged as a critical area in computational health, driven by rising global rates of mental illness, the integration of AI in psychological care, and the need for scalable solutions in underserved communities. These include therapy chatbots, crisis detection, and wellness platforms handling sensitive data, requiring specialized AI safety beyond general safeguards due to emotional vulnerability, risks like misdiagnosis or symptom exacerbation, and precise management of vulnerable states to avoid severe outcomes such as self-harm or loss of trust. Despite AI safety advances, general safeguards inadequately address mental health-specific challenges, including crisis intervention accuracy to avert escalations, therapeutic guideline adherence to prevent misinformation, scale limitations in resource-constrained settings, and adaptation to nuanced dialogues where generics may introduce biases or miss distress signals. We introduce an approach to apply Constitutional AI training with domain-specific mental health principles for safe, domain-adapted CAI systems in computational mental health applications.

Yuxuan Nie, Yutong Song, Jinjie Yang et al.

Drug combinations are essential in cancer therapy, leveraging synergistic drug-drug interactions (DDI) to enhance efficacy and combat resistance. However, the vast combinatorial space makes experimental screening impractical, and existing computational models struggle to capture the complex, bidirectional nature of DDIs, often relying on independent drug encoding or simplistic fusion strategies that miss fine-grained inter-molecular dynamics. Moreover, state-of-the-art graph-based approaches suffer from high computational costs, limiting scalability for real-world drug discovery. To address this, we propose DPASyn, a novel drug synergy prediction framework featuring a dual-attention mechanism and Precision-Aware Quantization (PAQ). The dual-attention architecture jointly models intra-drug structures and inter-drug interactions via shared projections and cross-drug attention, enabling fine-grained, biologically plausible synergy modeling. While this enhanced expressiveness brings increased computational resource consumption, our proposed PAQ strategy complements it by dynamically optimizing numerical precision during training based on feature sensitivity-reducing memory usage by 40% and accelerating training threefold without sacrificing accuracy. With LayerNorm-stabilized residual connections for training stability, DPASyn outperforms seven state-of-the-art methods on the O'Neil dataset (13,243 combinations) and supports full-batch processing of up to 256 graphs on a single GPU, setting a new standard for efficient and expressive drug synergy prediction.