Estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of mechanical systems is pivotal in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Rolling-element bearings are among the most frequent causes of machinery failure, highlighting the need for robust RUL estimation methods. Existing approaches often suffer from poor generalization, lack of robustness, high data demands, and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a novel multimodal-RUL framework that jointly leverages image representations (ImR) and time-frequency representations (TFR) of multichannel, nonstationary vibration signals. The architecture comprises three branches: (1) an ImR branch and (2) a TFR branch, both employing multiple dilated convolutional blocks with residual connections to extract spatial degradation features; and (3) a fusion branch that concatenates these features and feeds them into an LSTM to model temporal degradation patterns. A multi-head attention mechanism subsequently emphasizes salient features, followed by linear layers for final RUL regression. To enable effective multimodal learning, vibration signals are converted into ImR via the Bresenham line algorithm and into TFR using Continuous Wavelet Transform. We also introduce multimodal Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (multimodal-LRP), a tailored explainability technique that significantly enhances model transparency. The approach is validated on the XJTU-SY and PRONOSTIA benchmark datasets. Results show that our method matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines under both seen and unseen operating conditions, while requiring ~28 % less training data on XJTU-SY and ~48 % less on PRONOSTIA. The model exhibits strong noise resilience, and multimodal-LRP visualizations confirm the interpretability and trustworthiness of predictions, making the framework highly suitable for real-world industrial deployment.

Thinking LLMs solve complex tasks at the expense of increased compute and overthinking on simpler problems, while non-thinking LLMs are faster and cheaper but underthink on harder reasoning problems. This has led to the development of separate thinking and non-thinking LLM variants, leaving the onus of selecting the optimal model for each query on the end user. We introduce OptimalThinkingBench, a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates overthinking and underthinking in LLMs and also encourages the development of optimally-thinking models that balance performance and efficiency. Our benchmark comprises two sub-benchmarks: OverthinkingBench, featuring simple math and general queries in 72 domains, and UnderthinkingBench, containing 11 challenging reasoning tasks along with harder math problems. Using novel thinking-adjusted accuracy metrics, we extensively evaluate 33 different thinking and non-thinking models and show that no model is able to optimally think on our benchmark. Thinking models often overthink for hundreds of tokens on the simplest user queries without improving performance. In contrast, large non-thinking models underthink, often falling short of much smaller thinking models. We further explore several methods to encourage optimal thinking, but find that these approaches often improve on one sub-benchmark at the expense of the other, highlighting the need for better unified and optimal models in the future.

Fault detection in rotating machinery is a complex task, particularly in small and heterogeneous dataset scenarios. Variability in sensor placement, machinery configurations, and structural differences further increase the complexity of the problem. Conventional deep learning approaches often demand large, homogeneous datasets, limiting their applicability in data-scarce industrial environments. While transfer learning and few-shot learning have shown potential, however, they are often constrained by the need for extensive fault datasets. This research introduces a unified framework leveraging a novel progressive neural network (PNN) architecture designed to address these challenges. The PNN sequentially estimates the fixed-size refined features of the higher order with the help of all previously estimated features and appends them to the feature set. This fixed-size feature output at each layer controls the complexity of the PNN and makes it suitable for effective learning from small datasets. The framework's effectiveness is validated on eight datasets, including six open-source datasets, one in-house fault simulator, and one real-world industrial dataset. The PNN achieves state-of-the-art performance in fault detection across varying dataset sizes and machinery types, highlighting superior generalization and classification capabilities.

The advent of artificial intelligence has significantly enhanced credit scoring technologies. Despite the remarkable efficacy of advanced deep learning models, mainstream adoption continues to favor tree-structured models due to their robust predictive performance on tabular data. Although pretrained models have seen considerable development, their application within the financial realm predominantly revolves around question-answering tasks and the use of such models for tabular-structured credit scoring datasets remains largely unexplored. Tabular-oriented large models, such as TabPFN, has made the application of large models in credit scoring feasible, albeit can only processing with limited sample sizes. This paper provides a novel framework to combine tabular-tailored dataset distillation technique with the pretrained model, empowers the scalability for TabPFN. Furthermore, though class imbalance distribution is the common nature in financial datasets, its influence during dataset distillation has not been explored. We thus integrate the imbalance-aware techniques during dataset distillation, resulting in improved performance in financial datasets (e.g., a 2.5% enhancement in AUC). This study presents a novel framework for scaling up the application of large pretrained models on financial tabular datasets and offers a comparative analysis of the influence of class imbalance on the dataset distillation process. We believe this approach can broaden the applications and downstream tasks of large models in the financial domain.

Accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of rotating machinery, such as bearings, is crucial for equipment reliability and minimizing unexpected failures in industrial systems. Despite recent advancements, data-driven deep learning methods face challenges in practical industrial settings due to inconsistent data distributions between training and testing phases, and limited generalization capabilities for long-term RUL predictions. To address these issues, we propose LM4RUL, a framework for RUL prediction based on pre-trained Large language Model (LLM). LM4RUL leverages the generalization and reasoning capabilities of LLM to transfer predictive knowledge from pre-training, effectively overcoming data inconsistencies and enhancing prediction accuracy. This represents a meaningful advancement in the artificial intelligence field, being among the first efforts to successfully apply LLM to RUL prediction tasks without the need for additional manual instruction, thereby extending the boundaries of AI applications beyond natural language processing and into complex industrial scenarios. The framework includes the local scale perception representation component, which captures fine-grained bearing degradation trends by tokenizing vibration data, and hybrid embedding learning, which selectively freezes and fine-tunes parameters to model complex nonlinear degradation.

Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.

Accurately estimating a Health Index (HI) from condition monitoring data (CM) is essential for reliable and interpretable prognostics and health management (PHM) in complex systems. In most scenarios, complex systems operate under varying operating conditions and can exhibit different fault modes, making unsupervised inference of an HI from CM data a significant challenge. Hybrid models combining prior knowledge about degradation with deep learning models have been proposed to overcome this challenge. However, previously suggested hybrid models for HI estimation usually rely heavily on system-specific information, limiting their transferability to other systems. In this work, we propose an unsupervised hybrid method for HI estimation that integrates general knowledge about degradation into the convolutional autoencoder's model architecture and learning algorithm, enhancing its applicability across various systems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in two case studies from different domains: turbofan engines and lithium batteries. The results show that the proposed method outperforms other competitive alternatives, including residual-based methods, in terms of HI quality and their utility for Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions. The case studies also highlight the comparable performance of our proposed method with a supervised model trained with HI labels.

Prokaryotic viruses, which infect bacteria and archaea, are key players in microbial communities. Predicting the hosts of prokaryotic viruses helps decipher the dynamic relationship between microbes. Experimental methods for host prediction cannot keep pace with the fast accumulation of sequenced phages. Thus, there is a need for computational host prediction. Despite some promising results, computational host prediction remains a challenge because of the limited known interactions and the sheer amount of sequenced phages by high-throughput sequencing technologies. The state-of-the-art methods can only achieve 43\% accuracy at the species level. In this work, we formulate host prediction as link prediction in a knowledge graph that integrates multiple protein and DNA-based sequence features. Our implementation named CHERRY can be applied to predict hosts for newly discovered viruses and to identify viruses infecting targeted bacteria. We demonstrated the utility of CHERRY for both applications and compared its performance with 11 popular host prediction methods. To our best knowledge, CHERRY has the highest accuracy in identifying virus-prokaryote interactions. It outperforms all the existing methods at the species level with an accuracy increase of 37\%. In addition, CHERRY's performance on short contigs is more stable than other tools.