We introduce EXIT, an extractive context compression framework that enhances both the effectiveness and efficiency of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in question answering (QA). Current RAG systems often struggle when retrieval models fail to rank the most relevant documents, leading to the inclusion of more context at the expense of latency and accuracy. While abstractive compression methods can drastically reduce token counts, their token-by-token generation process significantly increases end-to-end latency. Conversely, existing extractive methods reduce latency but rely on independent, non-adaptive sentence selection, failing to fully utilize contextual information. EXIT addresses these limitations by classifying sentences from retrieved documents - while preserving their contextual dependencies - enabling parallelizable, context-aware extraction that adapts to query complexity and retrieval quality. Our evaluations on both single-hop and multi-hop QA tasks show that EXIT consistently surpasses existing compression methods and even uncompressed baselines in QA accuracy, while also delivering substantial reductions in inference time and token count. By improving both effectiveness and efficiency, EXIT provides a promising direction for developing scalable, high-quality QA solutions in RAG pipelines. Our code is available at https://github.com/ThisIsHwang/EXIT

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic inflammatory lung disease that causes obstructed airflow from the lungs. In the United States, more than 15.7 million Americans have been diagnosed with COPD, with 96% of individuals living with at least one other chronic health condition. It is the 4th leading cause of death in the country. Over 2.2 million patients are admitted to hospitals annually due to COPD exacerbations. Monitoring and predicting patient exacerbations on-time could save their life. This paper presents two different predictive models to predict COPD exacerbation using AI and natural language processing (NLP) approaches. These models use respiration summary notes, symptoms, and vital signs. To train and test these models, data records containing physiologic signals and vital signs time series were used. These records were captured from patient monitors and comprehensive clinical data obtained from hospital medical information systems for tens of thousands of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. We achieved an area under the Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.82 in detection and prediction of COPD exacerbation.

Respiratory diseases impose a significant burden on global health, with current diagnostic and management practices primarily reliant on specialist clinical testing. This work aims to develop machine learning-based algorithms to facilitate at-home respiratory disease monitoring and assessment for patients undergoing continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. Data were collected from 30 healthy adults, encompassing respiratory pressure, flow, and dynamic thoraco-abdominal circumferential measurements under three breathing conditions: normal, panting, and deep breathing. Various machine learning models, including the random forest classifier, logistic regression, and support vector machine (SVM), were trained to predict breathing types. The random forest classifier demonstrated the highest accuracy, particularly when incorporating breathing rate as a feature. These findings support the potential of AI-driven respiratory monitoring systems to transition respiratory assessments from clinical settings to home environments, enhancing accessibility and patient autonomy. Future work involves validating these models with larger, more diverse populations and exploring additional machine learning techniques.

Existing fake news detection methods aim to classify a piece of news as true or false and provide veracity explanations, achieving remarkable performances. However, they often tailor automated solutions on manual fact-checked reports, suffering from limited news coverage and debunking delays. When a piece of news has not yet been fact-checked or debunked, certain amounts of relevant raw reports are usually disseminated on various media outlets, containing the wisdom of crowds to verify the news claim and explain its verdict. In this paper, we propose a novel Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation (CofCED) neural network for explainable fake news detection based on such raw reports, alleviating the dependency on fact-checked ones. Specifically, we first utilize a hierarchical encoder for web text representation, and then develop two cascaded selectors to select the most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of the selected top-K reports in a coarse-to-fine manner. Besides, we construct two explainable fake news datasets, which are publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives.

Gone are the days when tossing a mattress in the back of a truck was the only way to get it home from the store. The booming'boxed bed' business has taken over the mattress industry, allowing consumers to purchase their bedding online and have it shipped to their doorstep compressed inside of a box. And a new video shows the monstrous Auto-Pac 1390HCA system using a 60-ton hydraulic press and highly consistent rolling to neatly fold your mattress to be bagged and sealed for delivery. A new video shows the monstrous Auto-Pac 1390HCA system using a 60-ton hydraulic press and highly consistent rolling to neatly fold a mattress to be bagged and sealed for delivery. The first step of preparing a mattress for shipping is to cover it in a protective plastic wrap.