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The Boundaries of Fair AI in Medical Image Prognosis: ACausal Perspective

Neural Information Processing Systems

As machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly used in medical image analysis, concerns have emerged about their potential biases against certain social groups. Although many approaches have been proposed to ensure the fairness of ML models, most existing works focus only on medical image diagnosis tasks, such as image classification and segmentation, and overlooked prognosis scenarios, which involve predicting the likely outcome or progression of a medical condition over time. To address this gap, we introduce FairTTE, the first comprehensive framework for assessing fairness in time-to-event (TTE) prediction in medical imaging. FairTTE encompasses a diverse range of imaging modalities and TTE outcomes, integrating cutting-edge TTE prediction and fairness algorithms to enable systematic and fine-grained analysis of fairness in medical image prognosis. Leveraging causal analysis techniques, FairTTE uncovers and quantifies distinct sources of bias embedded within medical imaging datasets. Our large-scale evaluation reveals that bias is pervasive across different imaging modalities and that current fairness methods offer limited mitigation. We further demonstrate a strong association between underlying bias sources and model disparities, emphasizing the need for holistic approaches that target all forms of bias. Notably, we find that fairness becomes increasingly difficult to maintain under distribution shifts, underscoring the limitations of existing solutions and the pressing need for more robust, equitable prognostic models.


RiverMamba: AState Space Model for Global River Discharge and Flood Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent deep learning approaches for river discharge forecasting have improved the accuracy and efficiency in flood forecasting, enabling more reliable early warning systems for risk management. Nevertheless, existing deep learning approaches in hydrology remain largely confined to local-scale applications and do not leverage the inherent spatial connections of bodies of water. Thus, there is a strong need for new deep learning methodologies that are capable of modeling spatio-temporal relations to improve river discharge and flood forecasting for scientific and operational applications. To address this, we present RiverMamba, a novel deep learning model that is pretrained with long-term reanalysis data and that can forecast global river discharge and floods on a 0.05 grid up to 7 days lead time, which is of high relevance in early warning. To achieve this, RiverMamba leverages efficient Mamba blocks that enable the model to capture spatio-temporal relations in very large river networks and enhance its forecast capability for longer lead times. The forecast blocks integrate ECMWFHRES meteorological forecasts, while accounting for their inaccuracies through spatio-temporal modeling. Our analysis demonstrates that RiverMamba provides reliable predictions of river discharge across various flood return periods, including extreme floods, and lead times, surpassing both AIand physics-based models. The source code and datasets are publicly available at the project page https://hakamshams.github.io/RiverMamba.


Staggered Environment Resets Improve Massively Parallel On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Massively parallel GPU simulation environments have accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) research by enabling fast data collection for on-policy RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). To maximize throughput, it is common to use short rollouts per policy update, increasing the update-to-data (UTD) ratio. However, we find that, in this setting, standard synchronous resets introduce harmful nonstationarity, skewing the learning signal and destabilizing training. We introduce staggered resets, a simple yet effective technique where environments are initialized and reset at varied points within the task horizon. This yields training batches with greater temporal diversity, reducing the nonstationarity induced by synchronized rollouts. We characterize dimensions along which RL environments can benefit significantly from staggered resets through illustrative toy environments. We then apply this technique to challenging high-dimensional robotics environments, achieving significantly higher sample efficiency, faster wall-clock convergence, and stronger final performance. Finally, this technique scales better with more parallel environments compared to naive synchronized rollouts.


Distilling LLMPrior to Flow Model for Generalizable Agent's Imagination in Object Goal Navigation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) task challenges agents to locate a specified object in an unseen environment by imagining unobserved regions of the scene. Prior approaches rely on deterministic and discriminative models to complete semantic maps, overlooking the inherent uncertainty in indoor layouts and limiting their ability to generalize to unseen environments. In this work, we propose GOAL, a generative flow-based framework that models the semantic distribution of indoor environments by bridging observed regions with LLM-enriched fullscene semantic maps. During training, spatial priors inferred from large language models (LLMs) are encoded as two-dimensional Gaussian fields and injected into target maps, distilling rich contextual knowledge into the flow model and enabling more generalizable completions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GOAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on MP3D and Gibson, and shows strong generalization in transfer settings to HM3D. Codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Badi-Li/GOAL.


Breaking Down the Time-Slip Ending of My Royal Nemesis

TIME - Tech

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Principled Data Augmentation for Learning to Solve Quadratic Programming Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Linear and quadratic optimization are crucial in numerous real-world applications, ranging from training machine learning models to solving integer linear programs. Recently, learning-to-optimize methods (L2O) for linear (LPs) or quadratic programs (QPs) using message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) have gained traction, promising lightweight, data-driven proxies for solving such optimization problems. For example, they replace the costly computation of strong branching scores in branch-and-bound solvers, thereby reducing the need to solve many such optimization problems. However, robust L2OMPNNs remain challenging in data-scarce settings, especially when addressing complex optimization problems such as QPs. This work introduces a principled approach to data augmentation tailored for QPs via MPNNs. Our method leverages theoretically justified data augmentation techniques to generate diverse yet optimality-preserving instances. Furthermore, we integrate these augmentations into a self-supervised contrastive learning framework, thereby pretraining MPNNs for improved performance on L2O tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves generalization in supervised scenarios and facilitates effective transfer learning to related optimization problems.


c04744f625d59b571d8a72811ff7dd72-Paper-Position_Paper_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

The claim that the AI community, or society at large, should'democratize AI' has attracted considerable critical attention and controversy. Two core problems have arisen and remain unsolved: conceptual disagreement persists about what democratizing AI means; normative disagreement persists over whether democratizing AI is ethically and politically desirable. We identify eight common AI democratization traps: democratization-skeptical arguments that seem plausible at first glance, but turn out to be misconceptions. We develop arguments about how to resist each trap. We conclude that, while AI democratization may well have drawbacks, we should be cautious about dismissing AI democratization prematurely and for the wrong reasons. We offer a constructive roadmap for developing alternative conceptual and normative approaches to democratizing AI that successfully avoid the traps.


CHOICE: Benchmarking the Remote Sensing Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rapid advancement of Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), both generaldomain models and those specifically tailored for remote sensing, has demonstrated exceptional perception and reasoning capabilities in Earth observation tasks. However, a benchmark for systematically evaluating their capabilities in this domain is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we propose CHOICE, an extensive benchmark designed to objectively evaluate the hierarchical remote sensing capabilities of VLMs. Focusing on 2 primary capability dimensions essential to remote sensing: perception and reasoning, we further categorize 6 secondary dimensions and 23 leaf tasks to ensure a well-rounded assessment coverage. CHOICE guarantees the quality of all 10,507 problems through a rigorous process of data collection from 50 globally distributed cities, question construction, and quality control. The newly curated data and the format of multiple-choice questions with definitive answers allow for an objective and straightforward performance assessment. Our evaluation of 3 proprietary and 21 open-source VLMs highlights their critical limitations within this specialized context. We hope that CHOICE will serve as a valuable resource and offer deeper insights into the challenges and potential of VLMs in the field of remote sensing. Code and dataset are available at this https URL.


CARE-PD: AMulti-Site Anonymized Clinical Dataset for Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment

Neural Information Processing Systems

Objective gait assessment in Parkinson's Disease (PD) is limited by the absence of large, diverse, and clinically annotated motion datasets. We introduce CARE-PD, the largest publicly available archive of 3D mesh gait data for PD, and the first multi-site collection spanning 9 cohorts from 8 clinical centers. All recordings (RGB video or motion capture) are converted into anonymized SMPL meshes via a harmonized preprocessing pipeline. CARE-PD supports two key benchmarks: supervised clinical score prediction (estimating Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, UPDRS, gait scores) and unsupervised motion pretext tasks (2D-to-3D keypoint lifting and full-body 3D reconstruction). Clinical prediction is evaluated under four generalization protocols: within-dataset, cross-dataset, leave-one-dataset-out, and multi-dataset in-domain adaptation. To assess clinical relevance, we compare state-of-the-art motion encoders with a traditional gait-feature baseline, finding that encoders consistently outperform handcrafted features. Pretraining on CARE-PD reduces MPJPE (from 60.8 mm to 7.5 mm) and boosts PD severity macro-F1 by 17 percentage points, underscoring the value of clinically curated, diverse training data. CARE-PD and all benchmark code are released for non-commercial research at https://neurips2025.care-pd.ca.


Scientists predict how the world will end - and say Earth may NOT be swallowed by the sun after all

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Trump declares that Keir Starmer'failed badly' as UK's Prime Minister as he CRIES while resigning Boston's Scotland-loving residents claim England fans are'ruining the vibe' compared to the Tartan Army'Al Roker is an absolute ****': KENNEDY's Today show insider gives brutal behind-the-scenes verdict on beloved weatherman and names other two-faced NBC hosts Call me cynical, but the real reason Gruesome Twosome Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK is just so obvious... and highly humiliating: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Putin'prepares mass call-up' for the Ukraine meat-grinder - as video shows Russian veteran with no legs threatening recruiter with a knife in sign of growing resistance facing desperate Kremlin Secret life of John Travolta's daughter Ella Bleu: New details about'unusual' relationship with her dad revealed by insiders amid fears that aspiring actress is'stuck' Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard gives rare glimpse of daughter Oonagh, five, after finishing 10k race in Spain Rock band playing at Madison Square Garden when fan, 51, plunged to his death break silence... as investigators probe his final moments Colorado siblings VANISH from home in middle of the night... and police still can't find them a week later Revealed: Emotional handwritten letter Iran's'oppressed' World Cup stars left in SoFi Stadium locker room No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. New footage shows tourists fleeing with their bags as fire destroys Dominican Republic resort - and it's revealed Italian celebrity died from carbon monoxide fumes Unseen trove of intimate letters from Nicole Brown Simpson's passionate affair: Her lover reveals jealous OJ's peeping tom compulsion and relentless stalking Map reveals every state's favorite fast food cheeseburger Family-man facade of award-winning children's swim coach is shattered by disturbing teen babysitter claims: Read all the vile texts Fidel Castro's'secret' daughter speaks out to reveal truth about those Justin Trudeau'sibling' rumors: 'Sensitive subject' Kyle Busch's widow posts heartbreaking Father's Day tribute a month on from his shock death at 41: 'Cards were already made' US marks'encouraging progress' in peace talks with Iran after summit was nearly derailed by Trump's fiery threat I'm 52, and after ending my sexless marriage I slept with men in every decade from 30s to 60s. Here's EXACTLY what happened with each of them and the surprising truth about who was best - and worst! For years, it's been believed that the sun will start to expand in around five billion years, swallowing our planet in the process. However, a new study suggests that this might not be the case after all.