Seven genes have been linked to particularly fast ageing of the brain – but 13 drugs and supplements might reduce their effects. The activity of many genes contributes to the difference between our actual age and the biological age of our brains, defined by how old our cells indicate we are, which creates what is known as a brain age gap. Restoring the brain's mitochondria could slow ageing and end dementia To find genes that accelerate brain ageing and widen this gap, Zhengxing Huang at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues trained a deep-learning model called 3D-ViT on some medical records and used others to check it gave accurate responses. They then used it to analyse data from nearly 39,000 people who had health, genetic and lifestyle information, along with biological samples, stored in the UK Biobank. These participants were 64 years old, on average, and about half were women.

This paper presents a constraint-guided deep learning framework for developing physically consistent health indicators in bearing prognostics and health management. Conventional data-driven methods often lack physical plausibility, while physics-based models are limited by incomplete system knowledge. To address this, we integrate domain knowledge into deep learning using constraints to enforce monotonicity, bound output values between 1 and 0 (representing healthy to failed states), and ensure consistency between signal energy trends and health indicator estimates. This eliminates the need for complex loss term balancing. We implement constraint-guided gradient descent within an autoencoder architecture, creating a constrained autoencoder. However, the framework is adaptable to other architectures. Using time-frequency representations of accelerometer signals from the Pronostia dataset, our constrained model generates smoother, more reliable degradation profiles compared to conventional methods, aligning with expected physical behavior. Performance is assessed using three metrics: trendability, robustness, and consistency. Compared to a conventional baseline, the constrained model improves all three. Another baseline, incorporating monotonicity via a soft-ranking loss function, outperforms in trendability but falls short in robustness and consistency. An ablation study confirms that the monotonicity constraint enhances trendability, the boundary constraint ensures consistency, and the energy-health consistency constraint improves robustness. These findings highlight the effectiveness of constraint-guided deep learning in producing reliable, physically meaningful health indicators, offering a promising direction for future prognostic applications.

We propose a 3D U-Net model to predict the spatial distribution of electromagnetic fields inside a radio-frequency (RF) coil with a subject present, using the phase, amplitude, and position of the coils, along with the density, permittivity, and conductivity of the surrounding medium as inputs. To improve accuracy, we introduce a physics-augmented variant, U-Net Phys, which incorporates Gauss's law of magnetism into the loss function using finite differences. We train our models on electromagnetic field simulations from CST Studio Suite for an eight-channel dipole array RF coil at 7T MRI. Experimental results show that U-Net Phys significantly outperforms the standard U-Net, particularly in predicting fields within the subject, demonstrating the advantage of integrating physical constraints into deep learning-based field prediction.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly vulnerable to AI-generated extremist content, including photorealistic images and text, which can be used to bypass safety mechanisms and generate harmful outputs. However, existing datasets for evaluating LMM robustness offer limited exploration of extremist content, often lacking AI-generated images, diverse image generation models, and comprehensive coverage of historical events, which hinders a complete assessment of model vulnerabilities. To fill this gap, we introduce ExtremeAIGC, a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework designed to assess LMM vulnerabilities against such content. ExtremeAIGC simulates real-world events and malicious use cases by curating diverse text- and image-based examples crafted using state-of-the-art image generation techniques. Our study reveals alarming weaknesses in LMMs, demonstrating that even cutting-edge safety measures fail to prevent the generation of extremist material. We systematically quantify the success rates of various attack strategies, exposing critical gaps in current defenses and emphasizing the need for more robust mitigation strategies.

--We study the task of language-conditioned pick and place in clutter, where a robot should grasp a target object in open clutter and move it to a specified place. Some approaches learn end-to-end policies with features from vision foundation models, requiring large datasets. Others combine foundation models in a zero-shot setting, suffering from cascading errors. In this paper, we aim to develop an effective policy by integrating foundation priors from vision, language, and action. The alignment formulation enables our policy to train with less data and preserve zero-shot generalization capabilities. We show that a shared policy for both pick and place actions enhances the performance for each task, and introduce a policy adaptation scheme to accommodate the multi-modal nature of actions. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real-world show that our policy achieves higher task success rates with fewer steps for both pick and place tasks in clutter, effectively generalizing to unseen objects and language instructions. Videos and codes are available at the project page. HE ability to pick and place objects is essential for robotic manipulation [1]-[6]. Consider a scenario where a robot is commanded with language instructions to grasp a target object in open clutter, and move it to a specified place. The target object may be partially or fully occluded, posing challenges for object grounding and grasping. In such scenarios, multiple pick and place actions may be needed to clear obstacles for object rearrangement. A common way to construct a policy for such tasks is to predict 6-DoF actions directly from raw sensory information, as in classic end-to-end policies. Recently, these policies have achieved promising performances by incorporating features of pre-trained foundation models, e.g., vision-language models (VLM) and large language models (LLM) [7]-[12]. However, they require large amounts of demonstration data for policy learning, particularly for tasks involving cluttered environments. In addition, one has to deal with generalization issues to deploy these policies in real-world applications. Kechun Xu is with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, and Alibaba Cloud, Hangzhou, China. Xunlong Xia, and Bing Deng are with Alibaba Cloud, Hangzhou, China. Kaixuan Wang, Yifei Y ang, Y unxuan Mao, Rong Xiong, and Y ue Wang are with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Conversational recommendation frameworks have gained prominence as a dynamic paradigm for delivering personalized suggestions via interactive dialogues. The incorporation of advanced language understanding techniques has substantially improved the dialogue fluency of such systems. However, while modern language models demonstrate strong proficiency in interpreting user preferences articulated through natural conversation, they frequently encounter challenges in effectively utilizing collective behavioral patterns - a crucial element for generating relevant suggestions. To mitigate this limitation, this work presents a novel probabilistic framework that synergizes behavioral patterns with conversational interactions through latent preference modeling. The proposed method establishes a dual-channel alignment mechanism where implicit preference representations learned from collective user interactions serve as a connecting mechanism between behavioral data and linguistic expressions. Specifically, the framework first derives latent preference representations through established collaborative filtering techniques, then employs these representations to jointly refine both the linguistic preference expressions and behavioral patterns through an adaptive fusion process. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to various state-of-the-art baseline methods, particularly in aligning conversational interactions with collaborative behavioral signals.

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising approach for privacy-preserving collaborative learning. However, it faces significant challenges when dealing with domain shifts, especially when each client has access only to its source data and cannot share it during target domain adaptation. Moreover, FL methods often require high communication overhead due to multiple rounds of model updates between clients and the server. We propose a one-shot Federated Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (FUDA) method to address these limitations. Specifically, we introduce Scaled Entropy Attention (SEA) for model aggregation and Multi-Source Pseudo Labeling (MSPL) for target domain adaptation. SEA uses scaled prediction entropy on target domain to assign higher attention to reliable models. This improves the global model quality and ensures balanced weighting of contributions. MSPL distills knowledge from multiple source models to generate pseudo labels and manage noisy labels using smoothed soft-label cross-entropy (SSCE). Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods across four standard benchmarks while reducing communication and computation costs, making it highly suitable for real-world applications. The implementation code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL). However, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. To address this gap, we investigate the impact of demonstrations on token representations within the practical alignment tasks. We find that the transformer embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation, which plays an important role in the generation of prior response tokens. Once the prior response tokens are determined, the demonstrations become redundant.Motivated by this finding, we propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment (PICA) method consisting of two stages. In the first few-shot stage, the model generates several prior response tokens via standard ICL while concurrently extracting the ICL vector that stores the task function from the separator token representation. In the following zero-shot stage, this ICL vector guides the model to generate responses without further demonstrations.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PICA not only surpasses vanilla ICL but also achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. The proposed training-free method reduces the time cost (e.g., 5.45+) with improved alignment performance (e.g., 6.57+). Consequently, our work highlights the application of ICL for alignment and calls for a deeper understanding of ICL for complex generations. The code will be available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/PICA.

The biases exhibited by Text-to-Image (TTI) models are often treated as if they are independent, but in reality, they may be deeply interrelated. Addressing bias along one dimension, such as ethnicity or age, can inadvertently influence another dimension, like gender, either mitigating or exacerbating existing disparities. Understanding these interdependencies is crucial for designing fairer generative models, yet measuring such effects quantitatively remains a challenge. In this paper, we aim to address these questions by introducing BiasConnect, a novel tool designed to analyze and quantify bias interactions in TTI models. Our approach leverages a counterfactual-based framework to generate pairwise causal graphs that reveals the underlying structure of bias interactions for the given text prompt. Additionally, our method provides empirical estimates that indicate how other bias dimensions shift toward or away from an ideal distribution when a given bias is modified. Our estimates have a strong correlation (+0.69) with the interdependency observations post bias mitigation. We demonstrate the utility of BiasConnect for selecting optimal bias mitigation axes, comparing different TTI models on the dependencies they learn, and understanding the amplification of intersectional societal biases in TTI models.

Supervised learning relies on annotated data, which is expensive to obtain. A longstanding strategy to reduce annotation costs is active learning, an iterative process, in which a human annotates only data instances deemed informative by a model. Large language models (LLMs) have pushed the effectiveness of active learning, but have also improved methods such as few- or zero-shot learning, and text synthesis - thereby introducing potential alternatives. This raises the question: has active learning become obsolete? To answer this fully, we must look beyond literature to practical experiences. We conduct an online survey in the NLP community to collect previously intangible insights on the perceived relevance of data annotation, particularly focusing on active learning, including best practices, obstacles and expected future developments. Our findings show that annotated data remains a key factor, and active learning continues to be relevant. While the majority of active learning users find it effective, a comparison with a community survey from over a decade ago reveals persistent challenges: setup complexity, estimation of cost reduction, and tooling. We publish an anonymized version of the collected dataset