Jinhan Zhang

Ziqi Pan, Ziqi Liu, Jinhan Zhang et al.

In today's in-person group discussions, smartphones are integrated as intelligent workstations; yet given their co-presence in such face-to-face interactions, whether and how they may enhance people's behavioral engagement with others remains underexplored. This work investigates how animating personal smartphones to move expressively, without compromising regular functions, can transform them into active embodied facilitators for co-located group interaction. In the four-stranger small-group discussion setting, guided by Tuckman's group-development theory, we conducted a design workshop (n=12) to identify problematic group-work circumstances and design expressive, attention-efficient animated phone facilitations. Subsequently, we developed AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that animates phones to deliver group facilitation cues according to conversation dynamics. In a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz study (n=56) with four-stranger group discussions, where everyone's phone was on an AnimaStand, the facilitations re-engaged inactive members, enhancing group dynamics, task operation performance, and relationships. We finally discuss prospects for more adaptive and generalizable animated device personal facilitation.

Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le et al.

Medical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically operate on text chunks extracted from biomedical literature, discarding the rich visual content (tables, figures, structured layouts) of original document pages. We propose MED-VRAG, an iterative multimodal RAG framework that retrieves and reasons over PMC document page images instead of OCR'd text. The system pairs ColQwen2.5 patch-level page embeddings with a sharded MapReduce LLM filter, scaling to ~350K pages while keeping Stage-1 retrieval under 30 ms via an offline coarse-to-fine index (C=8 centroids per page, ANN over centroids, exact two-way scoring on the top-R shortlist). A vision-language model (VLM) then iteratively refines its query and accumulates evidence in a memory bank across up to 3 reasoning rounds, with a single iteration costing ~15.9 s and the full three-round pipeline ~47.8 s on 4xA100. Across four medical QA benchmarks (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU-Med), MEDVRAG reaches 78.6% average accuracy. Under controlled comparison with the same Qwen2.5-VL-32B backbone, retrieval contributes a +5.8 point gain over the no-retrieval baseline; we also note a +1.8 point edge over MedRAG + GPT-4 (76.8%), with the caveat that this is a cross-paper rather than head-to-head comparison. Ablations isolate +1.0 from page-image vs text-chunk retrieval, +1.5 from iteration, and +1.0 from the memory bank.

Hsiang-Yun Sherry Chien, Jinhan Zhang, Christopher. J. Honey

In the human brain, sequences of language input are processed within a distributed and hierarchical architecture, in which higher stages of processing encode contextual information over longer timescales. In contrast, in recurrent neural networks which perform natural language processing, we know little about how the multiple timescales of contextual information are functionally organized. Therefore, we applied tools developed in neuroscience to map the "processing timescales" of individual units within a word-level LSTM language model. This timescale-mapping method assigned long timescales to units previously found to track long-range syntactic dependencies. Additionally, the mapping revealed a small subset of the network (less than 15% of units) with long timescales and whose function had not previously been explored. We next probed the functional organization of the network by examining the relationship between the processing timescale of units and their network connectivity. We identified two classes of long-timescale units: "controller" units composed a densely interconnected subnetwork and strongly projected to the rest of the network, while "integrator" units showed the longest timescales in the network, and expressed projection profiles closer to the mean projection profile. Ablating integrator and controller units affected model performance at different positions within a sentence, suggesting distinctive functions of these two sets of units. Finally, we tested the generalization of these results to a character-level LSTM model and models with different architectures. In summary, we demonstrated a model-free technique for mapping the timescale organization in recurrent neural networks, and we applied this method to reveal the timescale and functional organization of neural language models.