Jun S. Liu

Jian Zhang, Zhangqi Wang, Zhiyuan Wang et al.

Linguistic expressions of emotions such as depression, anxiety, and trauma-related states are pervasive in clinical notes, counseling dialogues, and online mental health communities, and accurate recognition of these emotions is essential for clinical triage, risk assessment, and timely intervention. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization ability in emotion analysis tasks, their diagnostic reliability in high-stakes, context-intensive medical settings remains highly sensitive to prompt design. Moreover, existing methods face two key challenges: emotional comorbidity, in which multiple intertwined emotional states complicate prediction, and inefficient exploration of clinically relevant cues. To address these challenges, we propose APOLO (Automated Prompt Optimization for Linguistic Emotion Diagnosis), a framework that systematically explores a broader and finer-grained prompt space to improve diagnostic efficiency and robustness. APOLO formulates instruction refinement as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and adopts a multi-agent collaboration mechanism involving Planner, Teacher, Critic, Student, and Target roles. Within this closed-loop framework, the Planner defines an optimization trajectory, while the Teacher-Critic-Student agents iteratively refine prompts to enhance reasoning stability and effectiveness, and the Target agent determines whether to continue optimization based on performance evaluation. Experimental results show that APOLO consistently improves diagnostic accuracy and robustness across domain-specific and stratified benchmarks, demonstrating a scalable and generalizable paradigm for trustworthy LLM applications in mental healthcare.

Jun Wan, Jun Liu, Zhihui lai et al.

Current region feature-based image captioning methods have progressed rapidly and achieved remarkable performance. However, they are still prone to generating irrelevant descriptions due to the lack of contextual information and the over-reliance on generated partial descriptions for predicting the remaining words. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Stream Collaborative Transformer (DSCT) to address this issue by introducing the segmentation feature. The proposed DSCT consolidates and then fuses the region and segmentation features to guide the generation of caption sentences. It contains multiple Pattern-Specific Mutual Attention Encoders (PSMAEs) and Dynamic Nomination Decoders (DNDs). The PSMAE effectively highlights and consolidates the private information of two representations by querying each other. The DND dynamically searches for the most relevant learning blocks to the input textual representations and exploits the homogeneous features between the consolidated region and segmentation features to generate more accurate and descriptive caption sentences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore how to fuse different pattern-specific features in a dynamic way to bypass their semantic inconsistencies and spatial misalignment issues for image captioning. The experimental results from popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DSCT outperforms the state-of-the-art image captioning models in the literature.