Bin Liu

Bin Liu, Lele Kang, Jiannan Yang

Open-source large language models have made platforms such as Hugging Face central hubs for decentralized AI innovation. Yet these ecosystems are shaped not only by collaboration, but also by competition for priority and community attention. Drawing on Hill and Stein's Race-to-the-Bottom framework, this study extends the logic of project potential, maturation, competition, and quality from scientific production to open-source LLM ecosystems, where prominent base models attract concentrated derivative entry under rapid and highly visible platform feedback. Using a large-scale sample of derivative models on Hugging Face, we find that later releases and more crowded competitive environments are both associated with weaker community recognition, even after accounting for differences in model and ecosystem prominence. These findings suggest that competition for priority remains an important organizing force in open-source LLM ecosystems, shaping which derivative innovations receive community recognition.

Yuedi Zhang, Zhixiang Xia, Guosheng Yin et al.

Multi-Instance Learning (MIL) is pivotal for analyzing complex, weakly labeled datasets, such as whole-slide images (WSIs) in computational pathology, where bags comprise unordered collections of instances with sparse diagnostic relevance. Traditional MIL approaches, including early statistical methods and recent attention-based frameworks, struggle with instance redundancy and lack explicit mechanisms for discarding non-informative instances, limiting their robustness and interpretability. We propose Cluster-level Sparse MIL (csMIL), a novel framework that integrates global-local instance clustering, within-cluster attention, and cluster-level sparsity induction to address these challenges. Our csMIL first performs global clustering across all bags to establish $K$ cluster centers, followed by local clustering within each bag to assign cluster labels. Attention scores are computed within each cluster, and sparse regularization is applied to cluster weights, enabling the selective retention of diagnostically relevant clusters while discarding irrelevant ones. This approach enhances robustness to noisy instances, improves interpretability by identifying critical regions, and reduces computational complexity. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that csMIL requires $O(s log K)$ bags to recover $s$ relevant clusters, aligning with compressed sensing principles. Empirically, csMIL achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public histopathology benchmarks (CAMELYON16, TCGA-NSCLC).