Yifan Gao

Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) empowered agents have recently emerged as advanced paradigms that exhibit impressive capabilities in a wide range of domains and tasks. Despite their potential, current LLM agents often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, lacking the flexibility to respond to users' varying needs and preferences. This limitation motivates us to develop PersonaAgent, the first personalized LLM agent framework designed to address versatile personalization tasks. Specifically, PersonaAgent integrates two complementary components - a personalized memory module that includes episodic and semantic memory mechanisms; a personalized action module that enables the agent to perform tool actions tailored to the user. At the core, the persona (defined as unique system prompt for each user) functions as an intermediary: it leverages insights from personalized memory to control agent actions, while the outcomes of these actions in turn refine the memory. Based on the framework, we propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that simulate the latest n interactions to optimize the persona prompt, ensuring real-time user preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that PersonaAgent significantly outperforms other baseline methods by not only personalizing the action space effectively but also scaling during test-time real-world applications. These results underscore the feasibility and potential of our approach in delivering tailored, dynamic user experiences.

Wanjun Zhong, Yifan Gao, Ning Ding et al. · amazon-science, tsinghua

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for wider applications. To address this issue, we present ProQA, a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. ProQA takes a unified structural prompt as the bridge and improves the QA-centric ability by structural prompt-based pre-training. Through a structurally designed prompt-based input schema, ProQA concurrently models the knowledge generalization for all QA tasks while keeping the knowledge customization for every specific QA task. Furthermore, ProQA is pre-trained with structural prompt-formatted large-scale synthesized corpus, which empowers the model with the commonly-required QA ability. Experimental results on 11 QA benchmarks demonstrate that ProQA consistently boosts performance on both full data fine-tuning, few-shot learning, and zero-shot testing scenarios. Furthermore, ProQA exhibits strong ability in both continual learning and transfer learning by taking the advantages of the structural prompt.

Yifan Gao, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li et al. · amazon-science

Keyphrase generation is the task of automatically predicting keyphrases given a piece of long text. Despite its recent flourishing, keyphrase generation on non-English languages haven't been vastly investigated. In this paper, we call attention to a new setting named multilingual keyphrase generation and we contribute two new datasets, EcommerceMKP and AcademicMKP, covering six languages. Technically, we propose a retrieval-augmented method for multilingual keyphrase generation to mitigate the data shortage problem in non-English languages. The retrieval-augmented model leverages keyphrase annotations in English datasets to facilitate generating keyphrases in low-resource languages. Given a non-English passage, a cross-lingual dense passage retrieval module finds relevant English passages. Then the associated English keyphrases serve as external knowledge for keyphrase generation in the current language. Moreover, we develop a retriever-generator iterative training algorithm to mine pseudo parallel passage pairs to strengthen the cross-lingual passage retriever. Comprehensive experiments and ablations show that the proposed approach outperforms all baselines.

Yifan Gao, Wei Xia, Dingdu Hu et al.

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation models often suffer from domain shift, where the models trained on a source domain do not generalize well to other unseen domains. As a prompt-driven foundation model with powerful generalization capabilities, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) shows potential for improving the cross-domain robustness of medical image segmentation. However, SAM performs significantly worse in automatic segmentation scenarios than when manually prompted, hindering its direct application to domain generalization. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the degradation in performance was related to the coupling effect of inevitable poor prompts and mask generation. To address the coupling effect, we propose the Decoupled SAM (DeSAM). DeSAM modifies SAM's mask decoder by introducing two new modules: a prompt-relevant IoU module (PRIM) and a prompt-decoupled mask module (PDMM). PRIM predicts the IoU score and generates mask embeddings, while PDMM extracts multi-scale features from the intermediate layers of the image encoder and fuses them with the mask embeddings from PRIM to generate the final segmentation mask. This decoupled design allows DeSAM to leverage the pre-trained weights while minimizing the performance degradation caused by poor prompts. We conducted experiments on publicly available cross-site prostate and cross-modality abdominal image segmentation datasets. The results show that our DeSAM leads to a substantial performance improvement over previous state-of-theart domain generalization methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yifangao112/DeSAM.

Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu et al. · amazon-science

Understanding users' intentions in e-commerce platforms requires commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we present FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph construction framework to reveal the structure of humans' minds about purchasing items. As commonsense knowledge is usually ineffable and not expressed explicitly, it is challenging to perform information extraction. Thus, we propose a new approach that leverages the generation power of large language models~(LLMs) and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the knowledge graph. LLMs first generate intention assertions via e-commerce-specific prompts to explain shopping behaviors, where the intention can be an open reason or a predicate falling into one of 18 categories aligning with ConceptNet, e.g., IsA, MadeOf, UsedFor, etc. Then we annotate plausibility and typicality labels of sampled intentions as training data in order to populate human judgments to all automatic generations. Last, to structurize the assertions, we propose pattern mining and conceptualization to form more condensed and abstract knowledge. Extensive evaluations and studies demonstrate that our constructed knowledge graph can well model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.

Wanjun Zhong, Yifan Gao, Ning Ding et al. · amazon-science, tsinghua

Task generalization has been a long standing challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent research attempts to improve the task generalization ability of pre-trained language models by mapping NLP tasks into human-readable prompted forms. However, these approaches require laborious and inflexible manual collection of prompts, and different prompts on the same downstream task may receive unstable performance. We propose Unified Schema Prompt, a flexible and extensible prompting method, which automatically customizes the learnable prompts for each task according to the task input schema. It models the shared knowledge between tasks, while keeping the characteristics of different task schema, and thus enhances task generalization ability. The schema prompt takes the explicit data structure of each task to formulate prompts so that little human effort is involved. To test the task generalization ability of schema prompt at scale, we conduct schema prompt-based multitask pre-training on a wide variety of general NLP tasks. The framework achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization performance on 16 unseen downstream tasks from 8 task types (e.g., QA, NLI, etc). Furthermore, comprehensive analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the schema prompt, its flexibility in task compositionality, and its ability to improve performance under a full-data fine-tuning setting.

Yifan Gao, Jinpeng Lin, Min Zhou et al. · amazon-science

Text design is one of the most critical procedures in poster design, as it relies heavily on the creativity and expertise of humans to design text images considering the visual harmony and text-semantic. This study introduces TextPainter, a novel multimodal approach that leverages contextual visual information and corresponding text semantics to generate text images. Specifically, TextPainter takes the global-local background image as a hint of style and guides the text image generation with visual harmony. Furthermore, we leverage the language model and introduce a text comprehension module to achieve both sentence-level and word-level style variations. Besides, we construct the PosterT80K dataset, consisting of about 80K posters annotated with sentence-level bounding boxes and text contents. We hope this dataset will pave the way for further research on multimodal text image generation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TextPainter can generate visually-and-semantically-harmonious text images for posters.

Jinpeng Lin, Min Zhou, Ye Ma et al. · amazon-science

Advertising posters, a form of information presentation, combine visual and linguistic modalities. Creating a poster involves multiple steps and necessitates design experience and creativity. This paper introduces AutoPoster, a highly automatic and content-aware system for generating advertising posters. With only product images and titles as inputs, AutoPoster can automatically produce posters of varying sizes through four key stages: image cleaning and retargeting, layout generation, tagline generation, and style attribute prediction. To ensure visual harmony of posters, two content-aware models are incorporated for layout and tagline generation. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-task Style Attribute Predictor (SAP) to jointly predict visual style attributes. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, we propose the first poster generation dataset that includes visual attribute annotations for over 76k posters. Qualitative and quantitative outcomes from user studies and experiments substantiate the efficacy of our system and the aesthetic superiority of the generated posters compared to other poster generation methods.

Zining Zhu, Haoming Jiang, Jingfeng Yang et al. · amazon-science, utoronto

Natural language is among the most accessible tools for explaining decisions to humans, and large pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities to generate coherent natural language explanations (NLE). The existing NLE research perspectives do not take the audience into account. An NLE can have high textual quality, but it might not accommodate audiences' needs and preference. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative perspective, \textit{situated} NLE. On the evaluation side, we set up automated evaluation scores. These scores describe the properties of NLEs in lexical, semantic, and pragmatic categories. On the generation side, we identify three prompt engineering techniques and assess their applicability on the situations. Situated NLE provides a perspective and facilitates further research on the generation and evaluation of explanations.

Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Binxuan Huang et al.

RLVR is now a standard way to train LLMs on reasoning tasks with verifiable outcomes, but when rollout generation dominates the cost, efficiency depends heavily on which prompts you sample and when. In practice, prompt pools are often static or only loosely tied to the model's learning progress, so uniform sampling can't keep up with the shifting capability frontier and ends up wasting rollouts on prompts that are already solved or still out of reach. Existing approaches improve efficiency through filtering, curricula, adaptive rollout allocation, or teacher guidance, but they typically assume a fixed pool-which makes it hard to support stable on-policy pool growth-or they add extra teacher cost and latency. We introduce HeaPA (Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation), which maintains a bounded, evolving pool, tracks the frontier using heap-based boundary sampling, expands the pool via on-policy augmentation with lightweight asynchronous validation, and stabilizes correlated queries through topology-aware re-estimation of pool statistics and controlled reinsertion. Across two training corpora, two training recipes, and seven benchmarks, HeaPA consistently improves accuracy and reaches target performance with fewer computations while keeping wall-clock time comparable. Our analyses suggest these gains come from frontier-focused sampling and on-policy pool growth, with the benefits becoming larger as model scale increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/HeaPA.

Yifan Gao · amazon-science

Lee Sedol is on a winning streak--does this legend rise again after the competition with AlphaGo? Ke Jie is invincible in the world championship--can he still win the title this time? Go is one of the most popular board games in East Asia, with a stable professional sports system that has lasted for decades in China, Japan, and Korea. There are mature data-driven analysis technologies for many sports, such as soccer, basketball, and esports. However, developing such technology for Go remains nontrivial and challenging due to the lack of datasets, meta-information, and in-game statistics. This paper creates the Professional Go Dataset (PGD), containing 98,043 games played by 2,148 professional players from 1950 to 2021. After manual cleaning and labeling, we provide detailed meta-information for each player, game, and tournament. Moreover, the dataset includes analysis results for each move in the match evaluated by advanced AlphaZero-based AI. To establish a benchmark for PGD, we further analyze the data and extract meaningful in-game features based on prior knowledge related to Go that can indicate the game status. With the help of complete meta-information and constructed in-game features, our results prediction system achieves an accuracy of 75.30%, much higher than several state-of-the-art approaches (64%-65%). As far as we know, PGD is the first dataset for data-driven analytics in Go and even in board games. Beyond this promising result, we provide more examples of tasks that benefit from our dataset. The ultimate goal of this paper is to bridge this ancient game and the modern data science community. It will advance research on Go-related analytics to enhance the fan experience, help players improve their ability, and facilitate other promising aspects. The dataset will be made publicly available.

Yifan Gao, Danni Zhang, Haoyue Li · amazon-science

The game of Go has been highly under-researched due to the lack of game records and analysis tools. In recent years, the increasing number of professional competitions and the advent of AlphaZero-based algorithms provide an excellent opportunity for analyzing human Go games on a large scale. In this paper, we present the ProfessionAl Go annotation datasEt (PAGE), containing 98,525 games played by 2,007 professional players and spans over 70 years. The dataset includes rich AI analysis results for each move. Moreover, PAGE provides detailed metadata for every player and game after manual cleaning and labeling. Beyond the preliminary analysis of the dataset, we provide sample tasks that benefit from our dataset to demonstrate the potential application of PAGE in multiple research directions. To the best of our knowledge, PAGE is the first dataset with extensive annotation in the game of Go. This work is an extended version of [1] where we perform a more detailed description, analysis, and application.

Kewei Cheng, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang et al.

Reasoning encompasses two typical types: deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Despite extensive research into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), most studies have failed to rigorously differentiate between inductive and deductive reasoning, leading to a blending of the two. This raises an essential question: In LLM reasoning, which poses a greater challenge - deductive or inductive reasoning? While the deductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, (i.e. their capacity to follow instructions in reasoning tasks), have received considerable attention, their abilities in true inductive reasoning remain largely unexplored. To investigate into the true inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, we propose a novel framework, SolverLearner. This framework enables LLMs to learn the underlying function (i.e., $y = f_w(x)$), that maps input data points $(x)$ to their corresponding output values $(y)$, using only in-context examples. By focusing on inductive reasoning and separating it from LLM-based deductive reasoning, we can isolate and investigate inductive reasoning of LLMs in its pure form via SolverLearner. Our observations reveal that LLMs demonstrate remarkable inductive reasoning capabilities through SolverLearner, achieving near-perfect performance with ACC of 1 in most cases. Surprisingly, despite their strong inductive reasoning abilities, LLMs tend to relatively lack deductive reasoning capabilities, particularly in tasks involving ``counterfactual'' reasoning.

Yu Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiusi Chen et al.

Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) usually remain static after deployment, which might make it hard to inject new knowledge into the model. We aim to build models containing a considerable portion of self-updatable parameters, enabling the model to integrate new knowledge effectively and efficiently. To this end, we introduce MEMORYLLM, a model that comprises a transformer and a fixed-size memory pool within the latent space of the transformer. MEMORYLLM can self-update with text knowledge and memorize the knowledge injected earlier. Our evaluations demonstrate the ability of MEMORYLLM to effectively incorporate new knowledge, as evidenced by its performance on model editing benchmarks. Meanwhile, the model exhibits long-term information retention capacity, which is validated through our custom-designed evaluations and long-context benchmarks. MEMORYLLM also shows operational integrity without any sign of performance degradation even after nearly a million memory updates. Our code and model are open-sourced at https://github.com/wangyu-ustc/MemoryLLM.

Yu Wang, Dmitry Krotov, Yuanzhe Hu et al.

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with latent-space memory has attracted increasing attention as they can extend the context window of existing language models. However, retaining information from the distant past remains a challenge. For example, MemoryLLM (Wang et al., 2024a), as a representative work with latent-space memory, compresses past information into hidden states across all layers, forming a memory pool of 1B parameters. While effective for sequence lengths up to 16k tokens, it struggles to retain knowledge beyond 20k tokens. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing M+, a memory-augmented model based on MemoryLLM that significantly enhances long-term information retention. M+ integrates a long-term memory mechanism with a co-trained retriever, dynamically retrieving relevant information during text generation. We evaluate M+ on diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding and knowledge retention tasks. Experimental results show that M+ significantly outperforms MemoryLLM and recent strong baselines, extending knowledge retention from under 20k to over 160k tokens with similar GPU memory overhead. We open-source our code at https://github.com/wangyu-ustc/MemoryLLM

Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou et al.

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs. The benchmark data is available at https://github.com/AI-in-Health/ClinicBench.

Yilun Jin, Zheng Li, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Online shopping is a complex multi-task, few-shot learning problem with a wide and evolving range of entities, relations, and tasks. However, existing models and benchmarks are commonly tailored to specific tasks, falling short of capturing the full complexity of online shopping. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their multi-task and few-shot learning abilities, have the potential to profoundly transform online shopping by alleviating task-specific engineering efforts and by providing users with interactive conversations. Despite the potential, LLMs face unique challenges in online shopping, such as domain-specific concepts, implicit knowledge, and heterogeneous user behaviors. Motivated by the potential and challenges, we propose Shopping MMLU, a diverse multi-task online shopping benchmark derived from real-world Amazon data. Shopping MMLU consists of 57 tasks covering 4 major shopping skills: concept understanding, knowledge reasoning, user behavior alignment, and multi-linguality, and can thus comprehensively evaluate the abilities of LLMs as general shop assistants. With Shopping MMLU, we benchmark over 20 existing LLMs and uncover valuable insights about practices and prospects of building versatile LLM-based shop assistants. Shopping MMLU can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/KL4805/ShoppingMMLU. In addition, with Shopping MMLU, we host a competition in KDD Cup 2024 with over 500 participating teams. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website https://amazon-kddcup24.github.io/.

Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang et al.

The instruction hierarchy, which establishes a priority order from system messages to user messages, conversation history, and tool outputs, is essential for ensuring consistent and safe behavior in language models (LMs). Despite its importance, this topic receives limited attention, and there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy. We bridge this gap by introducing IHEval, a novel benchmark comprising 3,538 examples across nine tasks, covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. Our evaluation of popular LMs highlights their struggle to recognize instruction priorities. All evaluated models experience a sharp performance decline when facing conflicting instructions, compared to their original instruction-following performance. Moreover, the most competitive open-source model only achieves 48% accuracy in resolving such conflicts. Our results underscore the need for targeted optimization in the future development of LMs.

Muyi Sun, Yifan Gao, Ziang Jia et al.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, intelligent dentistry for clinical diagnosis and treatment has become increasingly promising. As the primary clinical dentistry task, tooth structure segmentation for Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) has made significant progress in recent years. However, challenges arise from the obtainment difficulty of full-annotated data, and the acquisition variability of multi-source data across different institutions, which have caused low-quality utilization, voxel-level inconsistency, and domain-specific disparity in CBCT slices. Thus, the rational and efficient utilization of multi-source and unlabeled data represents a pivotal problem. In this paper, we propose SemiTooth, a generalizable semi-supervised framework for multi-source tooth segmentation. Specifically, we first compile MS3Toothset, Multi-Source Semi-Supervised Tooth DataSet for clinical dental CBCT, which contains data from three sources with different-level annotations. Then, we design a multi-teacher and multi-student framework, i.e., SemiTooth, which promotes semi-supervised learning for multi-source data. SemiTooth employs distinct student networks that learn from unlabeled data with different sources, supervised by its respective teachers. Furthermore, a Stricter Weighted-Confidence Constraint is introduced for multiple teachers to improve the multi-source accuracy.Extensive experiments are conducted on MS3Toothset to verify the feasibility and superiority of the SemiTooth framework, which achieves SOTA performance on the semi-supervised and multi-source tooth segmentation scenario.

Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu et al.

Learning from preference feedback is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and improving the quality of generated responses. However, existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. In this work, we present PUGC, a novel framework that leverages implicit human Preferences in unlabeled User-Generated Content (UGC) to generate preference data. Although UGC is not explicitly created to guide LLMs in generating human-preferred responses, it often reflects valuable insights and implicit preferences from its creators that has the potential to address readers' questions. PUGC transforms UGC into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. The UGC is then leveraged as a reference text for response scoring, aligning the model with these implicit preferences. This approach improves the quality of preference data while enabling scalable, domain-specific alignment. Experimental results on Alpaca Eval 2 show that models trained with DPO and PUGC achieve a 9.37% performance improvement over traditional methods, setting a 35.93% state-of-the-art length-controlled win rate using Mistral-7B-Instruct. Further studies highlight gains in reward quality, domain-specific alignment effectiveness, robustness against UGC quality, and theory of mind capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://zhaoxuan.info/PUGC.github.io/

Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang et al.

Despite significant achievements in improving the instruction-following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. Real-world scenarios often require consistency across multiple instructions over time, such as secret privacy, personal preferences, and prioritization, which demand sophisticated abilities to integrate multiple turns and carefully balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. This work presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' capabilities in handling multiple turns of instructions, covering three levels of difficulty: (1) retrieving information from instructions, (2) tracking and reasoning across turns, and (3) resolving conflicts among instructions. We construct MultiTurnInstruct~with $\sim$1.1K high-quality multi-turn conversations through the human-in-the-loop approach and result in nine capability categories, including statics and dynamics, reasoning, and multitasking. Our finding reveals an intriguing trade-off between different capabilities. While GPT models demonstrate superior memorization, they show reduced effectiveness in privacy-protection tasks requiring selective information withholding. Larger models exhibit stronger reasoning capabilities but still struggle with resolving conflicting instructions. Importantly, these performance gaps cannot be attributed solely to information loss, as models demonstrate strong BLEU scores on memorization tasks. Still, their attention mechanisms fail to integrate multiple related instructions effectively. These findings highlight critical areas for improvement in complex real-world tasks involving multi-turn instructions. Data and codes are released at https://github.com/Glaciohound/Multi-Turn-Instruct.

Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang et al.

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.

Yifan Gao, Tao Zhou, Yi Zhou et al.

Medical Visual Grounding (MVG) aims to identify diagnostically relevant phrases from free-text radiology reports and localize their corresponding regions in medical images, providing interpretable visual evidence to support clinical decision-making. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising multimodal reasoning ability, their grounding remains insufficient spatial precision, largely due to a lack of explicit localization priors when relying solely on latent embeddings. In this work, we analyze this limitation from an attention perspective and propose KnowMVG, a Knowledge-prior and global-local attention enhancement framework for MVG in VLMs that explicitly strengthens spatial awareness during decoding. Specifically, we present a knowledge-enhanced prompting strategy that encodes phrase related medical knowledge into compact embeddings, together with a global-local attention that jointly leverages coarse global information and refined local cues to guide precise region localization. localization. This design bridges high-level semantic understanding and fine-grained visual perception without introducing extra textual reasoning overhead. Extensive experiments on four MVG benchmarks demonstrate that our KnowMVG consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving gains of 3.0% in AP50 and 2.6% in mIoU over prior state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component.

Yifan Gao, Lu Zou, Zhangjin Huang et al.

Category-level 6D object pose estimation is typically formulated as a multi-category joint learning problem with fully shared model parameters. However, pronounced geometric heterogeneity across categories entangles incompatible optimization signals in shared modules, resulting in gradient conflicts and negative transfer during training. To address this challenge, we first introduce gradient-based diagnostics to quantify module-level cross-category contention. Building on results of diagnostics, we propose DecomPose, a difficulty-aware decomposition framework that mitigates optimization contention via: (1) difficulty-aware gradient decoupling, which groups categories using a data-driven difficulty proxy and routes each instance to a group-specific correspondence branch to isolate incompatible updates; and (2) stability-driven asymmetric branching, which assigns higher-capacity branches to structurally simple categories as stable optimization anchors while constraining complex categories with lightweight branches to suppress noisy updates and alleviate negative transfer. Extensive experiments on REAL275, CAMERA25, and HouseCat6D demonstrate that DecomPose effectively reduces cross-category optimization contention and delivers superior pose estimation performance across multiple benchmarks.

Yifan Gao, Haoyue Li, Feng Yuan et al.

Foundation models pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets offer a powerful paradigm for medical image segmentation. However, effectively transferring their learned representations for precise clinical applications remains a challenge. In this work, we propose Dino U-Net, a novel encoder-decoder architecture designed to exploit the high-fidelity dense features of the DINOv3 vision foundation model. Our architecture introduces an encoder built upon a frozen DINOv3 backbone, which employs a specialized adapter to fuse the model's rich semantic features with low-level spatial details. To preserve the quality of these representations during dimensionality reduction, we design a new fidelity-aware projection module (FAPM) that effectively refines and projects the features for the decoder. We conducted extensive experiments on seven diverse public medical image segmentation datasets. Our results show that Dino U-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming previous methods across various imaging modalities. Our framework proves to be highly scalable, with segmentation accuracy consistently improving as the backbone model size increases up to the 7-billion-parameter variant. The findings demonstrate that leveraging the superior, dense-pretrained features from a general-purpose foundation model provides a highly effective and parameter-efficient approach to advance the accuracy of medical image segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/yifangao112/DinoUNet.

Feng Yuan, Yifan Gao, Wenbin Wu et al.

Accurate multi-modal medical image translation requires ha-rmonizing global anatomical semantics and local structural fidelity, a challenge complicated by intermodality information loss and structural distortion. We propose ABS-Mamba, a novel architecture integrating the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for organ-aware semantic representation, specialized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for preserving modality-specific edge and texture details, and Mamba's selective state-space modeling for efficient long- and short-range feature dependencies. Structurally, our dual-resolution framework leverages SAM2's image encoder to capture organ-scale semantics from high-resolution inputs, while a parallel CNNs branch extracts fine-grained local features. The Robust Feature Fusion Network (RFFN) integrates these epresentations, and the Bidirectional Mamba Residual Network (BMRN) models spatial dependencies using spiral scanning and bidirectional state-space dynamics. A three-stage skip fusion decoder enhances edge and texture fidelity. We employ Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA+) fine-tuning to enable precise domain specialization while maintaining the foundational capabilities of the pre-trained components. Extensive experimental validation on the SynthRAD2023 and BraTS2019 datasets demonstrates that ABS-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering high-fidelity cross-modal synthesis that preserves anatomical semantics and structural details to enhance diagnostic accuracy in clinical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/gatina-yone/ABS-Mamba

Hansi Zeng, Zoey Li, Yifan Gao et al.

Research Agents enable models to gather information from the web using tools to answer user queries, requiring them to dynamically interleave internal reasoning with tool use. While such capabilities can in principle be learned via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), we observe that agents often exhibit poor exploration behaviors, including premature termination and biased tool usage. As a result, RLVR alone yields limited improvements. We propose SynPlanResearch-R1, a framework that synthesizes tool-use trajectories that encourage deeper exploration to shape exploration during cold-start supervised fine-tuning, providing a strong initialization for subsequent RL. Across seven multi-hop and open-web benchmarks, \framework improves performance by up to 6.0% on Qwen3-8B and 5.8% on Qwen3-4B backbones respectively compared to SOTA baselines. Further analyses of tool-use patterns and training dynamics compared to baselines shed light on the factors underlying these gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HansiZeng/syn-plan-research.

Kailin Jiang, Ning Jiang, Yuntao Du et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encode rich factual knowledge via cross-modal pre-training, yet their static representations struggle to maintain an accurate understanding of time-sensitive factual knowledge. Existing benchmarks remain constrained by static designs, inadequately evaluating LMMs' ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. To address this gap, we propose MINED, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks: cognition, awareness, trustworthiness, understanding, reasoning, and robustness. MINED is constructed from Wikipedia by two professional annotators, containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types. Evaluating 15 widely used LMMs on MINED shows that Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves the highest average CEM score of 63.07, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. Meanwhile, LMMs perform best on organization knowledge, whereas their performance is weakest on sport. To address these challenges, we investigate the feasibility of updating time-sensitive knowledge in LMMs through knowledge editing methods and observe that LMMs can effectively update knowledge via knowledge editing methods in single editing scenarios.

Yifan Gao, Haoyue Li, Feng Yuan et al.

We present Camyla, a system for fully autonomous research within the scientific domain of medical image segmentation. Camyla transforms raw datasets into literature-grounded research proposals, executable experiments, and complete manuscripts without human intervention. Autonomous experimentation over long horizons poses three interrelated challenges: search effort drifts toward unpromising directions, knowledge from earlier trials degrades as context accumulates, and recovery from failures collapses into repetitive incremental fixes. To address these challenges, the system combines three coupled mechanisms: Quality-Weighted Branch Exploration for allocating effort across competing proposals, Layered Reflective Memory for retaining and compressing cross-trial knowledge at multiple granularities, and Divergent Diagnostic Feedback for diversifying recovery after underperforming trials. The system is evaluated on CamylaBench, a contamination-free benchmark of 31 datasets constructed exclusively from 2025 publications, under a strict zero-intervention protocol across two independent runs within a total of 28 days on an 8-GPU cluster. Across the two runs, Camyla generates more than 2,700 novel model implementations and 40 complete manuscripts, and surpasses the strongest per-dataset baseline selected from 14 established architectures, including nnU-Net, on 22 and 18 of 31 datasets under identical training budgets, respectively (union: 24/31). Senior human reviewers score the generated manuscripts at the T1/T2 boundary of contemporary medical imaging journals. Relative to automated baselines, Camyla outperforms AutoML and NAS systems on aggregate segmentation performance and exceeds six open-ended research agents on both task completion and baseline-surpassing frequency. These results suggest that domain-scale autonomous research is achievable in medical image segmentation.

Feng Yuan, Yifan Gao, Yuehua Ye et al.

Cross-modal medical image synthesis research focuses on reconstructing missing imaging modalities from available ones to support clinical diagnosis. Driven by clinical necessities for flexible modality reconstruction, we explore K to N medical generation, where three critical challenges emerge: How can we model the heterogeneous contributions of different modalities to various target tasks? How can we ensure fusion quality control to prevent degradation from noisy information? How can we maintain modality identity consistency in multi-output generation? Driven by these clinical necessities, and drawing inspiration from SAM2's sequential frame paradigm and clinicians' progressive workflow of incrementally adding and selectively integrating multi-modal information, we treat multi-modal medical data as sequential frames with quality-driven selection mechanisms. Our key idea is to "learn" adaptive weights for each modality-task pair and "memorize" beneficial fusion patterns through progressive enhancement. To achieve this, we design three collaborative modules: PreWeightNet for global contribution assessment, ThresholdNet for adaptive filtering, and EffiWeightNet for effective weight computation. Meanwhile, to maintain modality identity consistency, we propose the Causal Modality Identity Module (CMIM) that establishes causal constraints between generated images and target modality descriptions using vision-language modeling. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Med-K2N outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on multiple benchmarks. Source code is available.

Yifan Gao, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng et al.

In open-domain question answering, questions are highly likely to be ambiguous because users may not know the scope of relevant topics when formulating them. Therefore, a system needs to find possible interpretations of the question, and predict one or multiple plausible answers. When multiple plausible answers are found, the system should rewrite the question for each answer to resolve the ambiguity. In this paper, we present a model that aggregates and combines evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions. In addition, we propose a novel round-trip prediction approach to iteratively generate additional interpretations that our model fails to find in the first pass, and then verify and filter out the incorrect question-answer pairs to arrive at the final disambiguated output. Our model, named Refuel, achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the AmbigQA dataset, and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA. The proposed round-trip prediction is a model-agnostic general approach for answering ambiguous open-domain questions, which improves our Refuel as well as several baseline models. We release source code for our models and experiments at https://github.com/amzn/refuel-open-domain-qa.

Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Jingjing Li et al.

Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading. In this work, we propose Discern, a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding for both document and dialog. Specifically, we split the document into clause-like elementary discourse units (EDU) using a pre-trained discourse segmentation model, and we train our model in a weakly-supervised manner to predict whether each EDU is entailed by the user feedback in a conversation. Based on the learned EDU and entailment representations, we either reply to the user our final decision "yes/no/irrelevant" of the initial question, or generate a follow-up question to inquiry more information. Our experiments on the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out test set) show that Discern achieves state-of-the-art results of 78.3% macro-averaged accuracy on decision making and 64.0 BLEU1 on follow-up question generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/Discern.

Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Shafiq Joty et al.

The goal of conversational machine reading is to answer user questions given a knowledge base text which may require asking clarification questions. Existing approaches are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them. In this paper, we present a new framework of conversational machine reading that comprises a novel Explicit Memory Tracker (EMT) to track whether conditions listed in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision. Moreover, our framework generates clarification questions by adopting a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, utilizing sentence-level entailment scores to weight token-level distributions. On the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out) testset, EMT achieves new state-of-the-art results of 74.6% micro-averaged decision accuracy and 49.5 BLEU4. We also show that EMT is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/explicit_memory_tracker.

Yifan Gao, Piji Li, Irwin King et al.

We study the problem of generating interconnected questions in question-answering style conversations. Compared with previous works which generate questions based on a single sentence (or paragraph), this setting is different in two major aspects: (1) Questions are highly conversational. Almost half of them refer back to conversation history using coreferences. (2) In a coherent conversation, questions have smooth transitions between turns. We propose an end-to-end neural model with coreference alignment and conversation flow modeling. The coreference alignment modeling explicitly aligns coreferent mentions in conversation history with corresponding pronominal references in generated questions, which makes generated questions interconnected to conversation history. The conversation flow modeling builds a coherent conversation by starting questioning on the first few sentences in a text passage and smoothly shifting the focus to later parts. Extensive experiments show that our system outperforms several baselines and can generate highly conversational questions. The code implementation is released at https://github.com/Evan-Gao/conversational-QG.

Yangyi Chen, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Gao et al.

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach FLP consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of fully-converged sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance using the intermediate models with emerged performance. In our experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. Further, we present FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng et al.

The rapid advancement of conversational search systems revolutionizes how information is accessed by enabling the multi-turn interaction between the user and the system. Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models. This separation restricts the system from leveraging the intrinsic knowledge of the models simultaneously, which cannot ensure the effectiveness of retrieval benefiting the generation. The existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. In this paper, we explore how to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation. We conduct joint fine-tuning with different objectives and design two mechanisms to reduce the inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. The evaluations on five conversational search datasets demonstrate that our unified model can mutually improve both tasks and outperform the existing baselines.

Yifan Gao, Zihang Lin, Chuanbin Liu et al.

Product posters, which integrate subject, scene, and text, are crucial promotional tools for attracting customers. Creating such posters using modern image generation methods is valuable, while the main challenge lies in accurately rendering text, especially for complex writing systems like Chinese, which contains over 10,000 individual characters. In this work, we identify the key to precise text rendering as constructing a character-discriminative visual feature as a control signal. Based on this insight, we propose a robust character-wise representation as control and we develop TextRenderNet, which achieves a high text rendering accuracy of over 90%. Another challenge in poster generation is maintaining the fidelity of user-specific products. We address this by introducing SceneGenNet, an inpainting-based model, and propose subject fidelity feedback learning to further enhance fidelity. Based on TextRenderNet and SceneGenNet, we present PosterMaker, an end-to-end generation framework. To optimize PosterMaker efficiently, we implement a two-stage training strategy that decouples text rendering and background generation learning. Experimental results show that PosterMaker outperforms existing baselines by a remarkable margin, which demonstrates its effectiveness.

Yunbo Liu, Xukui Qin, Yifan Gao et al.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable sensor data has become a central task in mobile computing, healthcare, and human-computer interaction. Despite the success of traditional deep learning models such as CNNs and RNNs, they often struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies and contextual relevance across multiple sensor channels. To address these limitations, we propose SETransformer, a hybrid deep neural architecture that combines Transformer-based temporal modeling with channel-wise squeeze-and-excitation (SE) attention and a learnable temporal attention pooling mechanism. The model takes raw triaxial accelerometer data as input and leverages global self-attention to capture activity-specific motion dynamics over extended time windows, while adaptively emphasizing informative sensor channels and critical time steps. We evaluate SETransformer on the WISDM dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms conventional models including LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, and CNN baselines. The proposed model achieves a validation accuracy of 84.68\% and a macro F1-score of 84.64\%, surpassing all baseline architectures by a notable margin. Our results show that SETransformer is a competitive and interpretable solution for real-world HAR tasks, with strong potential for deployment in mobile and ubiquitous sensing applications.

Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu et al.

Goal-oriented script planning, or the ability to devise coherent sequences of actions toward specific goals, is commonly employed by humans to plan for typical activities. In e-commerce, customers increasingly seek LLM-based assistants to generate scripts and recommend products at each step, thereby facilitating convenient and efficient shopping experiences. However, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges, including the inability of LLMs to simultaneously conduct script planning and product retrieval, difficulties in matching products caused by semantic discrepancies between planned actions and search queries, and a lack of methods and benchmark data for evaluation. In this paper, we step forward by formally defining the task of E-commerce Script Planning (EcomScript) as three sequential subtasks. We propose a novel framework that enables the scalable generation of product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. By applying our framework to real-world e-commerce data, we construct the very first large-scale EcomScript dataset, EcomScriptBench, which includes 605,229 scripts sourced from 2.4 million products. Human annotations are then conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset, forming an evaluation benchmark. Extensive experiments reveal that current (L)LMs face significant challenges with EcomScript tasks, even after fine-tuning, while injecting product purchase intentions improves their performance.

Chang Yu, Fang Liu, Jie Zhu et al. · amazon-science

This paper proposes a hybrid framework combining LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks with LightGBM and CatBoost for stock price prediction. The framework processes time-series financial data and evaluates performance using seven models: Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), vanilla LSTM, XGBoost, LightGBM, and standard Neural Networks (NNs). Key metrics, including MAE, R-squared, MSE, and RMSE, are used to establish benchmarks across different time scales. Building on these benchmarks, we develop an ensemble model that combines the strengths of sequential and tree-based approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves accuracy by 10 to 15 percent compared to individual models and reduces error during market changes. This study highlights the potential of ensemble methods for financial forecasting and provides a flexible design for integrating new machine learning techniques.

Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu et al.

Session history is a common way of recording user interacting behaviors throughout a browsing activity with multiple products. For example, if an user clicks a product webpage and then leaves, it might because there are certain features that don't satisfy the user, which serve as an important indicator of on-the-spot user preferences. However, all prior works fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. There is also a lack of data and corresponding benchmark for explicitly modeling intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of an intention tree and propose a dataset curation pipeline. Together, we construct a sibling multimodal benchmark, SessionIntentBench, that evaluates L(V)LMs' capability on understanding inter-session intention shift with four subtasks. With 1,952,177 intention entries, 1,132,145 session intention trajectories, and 13,003,664 available tasks mined using 10,905 sessions, we provide a scalable way to exploit the existing session data for customer intention understanding. We conduct human annotations to collect ground-truth label for a subset of collected data to form an evaluation gold set. Extensive experiments on the annotated data further confirm that current L(V)LMs fail to capture and utilize the intention across the complex session setting. Further analysis show injecting intention enhances LLMs' performances.

Hongye Jin, Pei Chen, Jingfeng Yang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, they are often distracted by irrelevant or noisy context in input sequences that degrades output quality. This problem affects both long- and short-context scenarios, such as retrieval-augmented generation, table question-answering, and in-context learning. We reveal that LLMs can implicitly identify whether input sequences contain useful information at early layers, prior to token generation. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Early Noise Dropping (\textsc{END}), a novel approach to mitigate this issue without requiring fine-tuning the LLMs. \textsc{END} segments input sequences into chunks and employs a linear prober on the early layers of LLMs to differentiate between informative and noisy chunks. By discarding noisy chunks early in the process, \textsc{END} preserves critical information, reduces distraction, and lowers computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{END} significantly improves both performance and efficiency across different LLMs on multiple evaluation datasets. Furthermore, by investigating LLMs' implicit understanding to the input with the prober, this work also deepens understanding of how LLMs do reasoning with contexts internally.

Dawei Fan, Yifan Gao, Jiaming Yu et al.

Deep learning models have shown promising performance for cell nucleus segmentation in the field of pathology image analysis. However, training a robust model from multiple domains remains a great challenge for cell nucleus segmentation. Additionally, the shortcomings of background noise, highly overlapping between cell nucleus, and blurred edges often lead to poor performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed CausalCellSegmenter, which combines Causal Inference Module (CIM) with Diversified Aggregation Convolution (DAC) techniques. The DAC module is designed which incorporates diverse downsampling features through a simple, parameter-free attention module (SimAM), aiming to overcome the problems of false-positive identification and edge blurring. Furthermore, we introduce CIM to leverage sample weighting by directly removing the spurious correlations between features for every input sample and concentrating more on the correlation between features and labels. Extensive experiments on the MoNuSeg-2018 dataset achieves promising results, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods, where the mIoU and DSC scores growing by 3.6% and 2.65%.

Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular interface for human-AI interaction, supporting information seeking and task assistance through natural, multi-turn dialogue. To respond to users within multi-turn dialogues, the context-dependent user intent evolves across interactions, requiring contextual interpretation, query reformulation, and dynamic coordination between retrieval and generation. Existing studies usually follow static rewrite, retrieve, and generate pipelines, which optimize different procedures separately and overlook the mixed-initiative action optimization simultaneously. Although the recent developments in deep search agents demonstrate the effectiveness in jointly optimizing retrieval and generation via reasoning, these approaches focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. We introduce a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. The experimental results across four widely used conversational benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods by surpassing several existing strong baselines.

Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Runfeng Bao et al.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), especially Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), has emerged as a promising approach to fine-tuning large language models(LLMs) while reducing computational and memory overhead. However, LoRA assumes a uniform rank \textit{r} for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across different modules and layers. AdaLoRA leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to parameterize updates and employs pruning of singular values to introduce dynamic rank allocation, thereby enhancing adaptability. However, during the training process, it often encounters issues of slow convergence speed and high computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose HyperAdaLoRA, a novel framework that accelerates the convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. Instead of directly optimizing the components of Singular Value Decomposition $(P, Λ, Q)$, HyperAdaLoRA employs a hypernetwork based on attention mechanisms to dynamically generate these parameters. By pruning the outputs of the hypernetwork that generates the singular values, dynamic rank allocation is achieved. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets and models demonstrate that our method achieves faster convergence without sacrificing performance. Additionally, further extension experiments on other LoRA-based approaches validate the broad applicability of our method.

Mengchen Zhao, Yifan Gao, Yaqing Hou et al.

Recommendation models are predominantly trained using implicit user feedback, since explicit feedback is often costly to obtain. However, implicit feedback, such as clicks, does not always reflect users' real preferences. For example, a user might click on a news article because of its attractive headline, but end up feeling uncomfortable after reading the content. In the absence of explicit feedback, such erroneous implicit signals may severely mislead recommender systems. In this paper, we propose MTRec, a novel sequential recommendation framework designed to align with real user preferences by uncovering their internal satisfaction on recommended items. Specifically, we introduce a mental reward model to quantify user satisfaction and propose a distributional inverse reinforcement learning approach to learn it. The learned mental reward model is then used to guide recommendation models to better align with users' real preferences. Our experiments show that MTRec brings significant improvements to a variety of recommendation models. We also deploy MTRec on an industrial short video platform and observe a 7 percent increase in average user viewing time.

Haoyang Su, Jin-Yi Xiang, Shaohao Rui et al.

Accurate prediction of major adverse cardiac events (MACE) remains a central challenge in cardiovascular prognosis. We present PRISM (Prompt-guided Representation Integration for Survival Modeling), a self-supervised framework that integrates visual representations from non-contrast cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging with structured electronic health records (EHRs) for survival analysis. PRISM extracts temporally synchronized imaging features through motion-aware multi-view distillation and modulates them using medically informed textual prompts to enable fine-grained risk prediction. Across four independent clinical cohorts, PRISM consistently surpasses classical survival prediction models and state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning baselines under internal and external validation. Further clinical findings demonstrate that the combined imaging and EHR representations derived from PRISM provide valuable insights into cardiac risk across diverse cohorts. Three distinct imaging signatures associated with elevated MACE risk are uncovered, including lateral wall dyssynchrony, inferior wall hypersensitivity, and anterior elevated focus during diastole. Prompt-guided attribution further identifies hypertension, diabetes, and smoking as dominant contributors among clinical and physiological EHR factors.

Yaoxian Dong, Yifan Gao, Haoyue Li et al.

Accurate preoperative assessment of lymph node (LN) metastasis in rectal cancer guides treatment decisions, yet conventional MRI evaluation based on morphological criteria shows limited diagnostic performance. While some artificial intelligence models have been developed, they often operate as black boxes, lacking the interpretability needed for clinical trust. Moreover, these models typically evaluate nodes in isolation, overlooking the patient-level context. To address these limitations, we introduce LRMR, an LLM-Driven Relational Multi-node Ranking framework. This approach reframes the diagnostic task from a direct classification problem into a structured reasoning and ranking process. The LRMR framework operates in two stages. First, a multimodal large language model (LLM) analyzes a composite montage image of all LNs from a patient, generating a structured report that details ten distinct radiological features. Second, a text-based LLM performs pairwise comparisons of these reports between different patients, establishing a relative risk ranking based on the severity and number of adverse features. We evaluated our method on a retrospective cohort of 117 rectal cancer patients. LRMR achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7917 and an F1-score of 0.7200, outperforming a range of deep learning baselines, including ResNet50 (AUC 0.7708). Ablation studies confirmed the value of our two main contributions: removing the relational ranking stage or the structured prompting stage led to a significant performance drop, with AUCs falling to 0.6875 and 0.6458, respectively. Our work demonstrates that decoupling visual perception from cognitive reasoning through a two-stage LLM framework offers a powerful, interpretable, and effective new paradigm for assessing lymph node metastasis in rectal cancer.

Yifan Gao, Jiao Fu, Long Guo et al.

Early identification of suicide risk is crucial for preventing suicidal behaviors. As a result, the identification and study of patterns and markers related to suicide risk have become a key focus of current research. In this paper, we present the results of our work in the 1st SpeechWellness Challenge (SW1), which aims to explore speech as a non-invasive and easily accessible mental health indicator for identifying adolescents at risk of suicide.Our approach leverages large language model (LLM) as the primary tool for feature extraction, alongside conventional acoustic and semantic features. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 74\% on the test set, ranking first in the SW1 challenge. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-based methods for analyzing speech in the context of suicide risk assessment.

Xin Liu, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao et al.

The goal of session-based recommendation in E-commerce is to predict the next item that an anonymous user will purchase based on the browsing and purchase history. However, constructing global or local transition graphs to supplement session data can lead to noisy correlations and user intent vanishing. In this work, we propose the Frequent Attribute Pattern Augmented Transformer (FAPAT) that characterizes user intents by building attribute transition graphs and matching attribute patterns. Specifically, the frequent and compact attribute patterns are served as memory to augment session representations, followed by a gate and a transformer block to fuse the whole session information. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and 100 million industrial data in three domains, we demonstrate that FAPAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 4.5% across various evaluation metrics (Hits, NDCG, MRR). Besides evaluating the next-item prediction, we estimate the models' capabilities to capture user intents via predicting items' attributes and period-item recommendations.