With the advent of wearable recorders, scientists are increasingly turning to automated methods of analysis of audio and video data in order to measure children's experience, behavior, and outcomes, with a sizable literature employing long-form audio-recordings to study language acquisition. While numerous articles report on the accuracy and reliability of the most popular automated classifiers, less has been written on the downstream effects of classification errors on measurements and statistical inferences (e.g., the estimate of correlations and effect sizes in regressions). This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to study the effects of algorithmic errors on key scientific questions, including the effect of siblings on children's language experience and the association between children's production and their input. In both the most commonly used \gls{lena}, and an open-source alternative (the Voice Type Classifier from the ACLEW system), we find that classification errors can significantly distort estimates. For instance, automated annotations underestimated the negative effect of siblings on adult input by 20--80\%, potentially placing it below statistical significance thresholds. We further show that a Bayesian calibration approach for recovering unbiased estimates of effect sizes can be effective and insightful, but does not provide a fool-proof solution. Both the issue reported and our solution may apply to any classifier involving event detection and classification with non-zero error rates.

The accurate extraction of clinical information from electronic medical records is particularly critical to clinical research but require much trained expertise and manual labor. In this study we developed a robust system for automated extraction of the specific cancer types for the purpose of supporting precision oncology research. from pathology reports using a fine-tuned RoBERTa model. This model significantly outperformed the baseline model and a Large Language Model, Mistral 7B, achieving F1_Bertscore 0.98 and overall exact match of 80.61%. This fine-tuning approach demonstrates the potential for scalability that can integrate seamlessly into the molecular tumour board process. Fine-tuning domain-specific models for precision tasks in oncology, may pave the way for more efficient and accurate clinical information extraction.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), have advanced the interpretability of black-box machine learning models by approximating their behavior locally using interpretable surrogate models. However, LIME's inherent randomness in perturbation and sampling can lead to locality and instability issues, especially in scenarios with limited training data. In such cases, data scarcity can result in the generation of unrealistic variations and samples that deviate from the true data manifold. Consequently, the surrogate model may fail to accurately approximate the complex decision boundary of the original model. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Instance-based Transfer Learning LIME framework (ITL-LIME) that enhances explanation fidelity and stability in data-constrained environments. ITL-LIME introduces instance transfer learning into the LIME framework by leveraging relevant real instances from a related source domain to aid the explanation process in the target domain. Specifically, we employ clustering to partition the source domain into clusters with representative prototypes. Instead of generating random perturbations, our method retrieves pertinent real source instances from the source cluster whose prototype is most similar to the target instance. These are then combined with the target instance's neighboring real instances. To define a compact locality, we further construct a contrastive learning-based encoder as a weighting mechanism to assign weights to the instances from the combined set based on their proximity to the target instance. Finally, these weighted source and target instances are used to train the surrogate model for explanation purposes.

Evaluating automatically generated radiology reports remains a fundamental challenge due to the lack of clinically grounded, interpretable, and fine-grained metrics. Existing methods either produce coarse overall scores or rely on opaque black-box models, limiting their usefulness in real-world clinical workflows. We introduce RadReason, a novel evaluation framework for radiology reports that not only outputs fine-grained sub-scores across six clinically defined error types, but also produces human-readable justifications that explain the rationale behind each score. Our method builds on Group Relative Policy Optimization and incorporates two key innovations: (1) Sub-score Dynamic Weighting, which adaptively prioritizes clinically challenging error types based on live F1 statistics; and (2) Majority-Guided Advantage Scaling, which adjusts policy gradient updates based on prompt difficulty derived from sub-score agreement. Together, these components enable more stable optimization and better alignment with expert clinical judgment. Experiments on the ReXVal benchmark show that RadReason surpasses all prior offline metrics and achieves parity with GPT-4-based evaluations, while remaining explainable, cost-efficient, and suitable for clinical deployment. Code will be released upon publication.

This paper studies an input-driven one-state differential equation model initially developed for an experimentally demonstrated dynamic molecular switch that switches like synapses in the brain do. The linear-in-the-state and nonlinear-in-the-input model is exactly solvable, and it is shown that it also possesses mathematical properties of convergence and fading memory that enable stable processing of time-varying inputs by nonlinear dynamical systems. Thus, the model exhibits the co-existence of biologically-inspired behavior and desirable mathematical properties for stable learning on sequential data. The results give theoretical support for the use of the dynamic molecular switches as computational units in deep cascaded/layered feedforward and recurrent architectures as well as other more general structures for neuromorphic computing. They could also inspire more general exactly solvable models that can be fitted to emulate arbitrary physical devices which can mimic brain-inspired behaviour and perform stable computation on input signals.

In the era of big data, data mining has become indispensable for uncovering hidden patterns and insights from vast and complex datasets. The integration of multimodal data sources further enhances its potential. Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) is a distributed approach that enhances the efficiency and quality of multimodal learning, ensuring collaborative work and privacy protection. However, missing modalities pose a significant challenge in MFL, often due to data quality issues or privacy policies across the clients. In this work, we present MMiC, a framework for Mitigating Modality incompleteness in MFL within the Clusters. MMiC replaces partial parameters within client models inside clusters to mitigate the impact of missing modalities. Furthermore, it leverages the Banzhaf Power Index to optimize client selection under these conditions. Finally, MMiC employs an innovative approach to dynamically control global aggregation by utilizing Markovitz Portfolio Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMiC consistently outperforms existing federated learning architectures in both global and personalized performance on multimodal datasets with missing modalities, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Our code is available at https://github.com/gotobcn8/MMiC.

Credit card fraud detection (CCFD) is a critical application of Machine Learning (ML) in the financial sector, where accurately identifying fraudulent transactions is essential for mitigating financial losses. ML models have demonstrated their effectiveness in fraud detection task, in particular with the tabular dataset. While adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in computer vision and deep learning, their impacts on the ML models, particularly those trained on CCFD tabular datasets, remains largely unexplored. These latent vulnerabilities pose significant threats to the security and stability of the financial industry, especially in high-value transactions where losses could be substantial. To address this gap, in this paper, we present a holistic framework that investigate the robustness of CCFD ML model against adversarial perturbations under different circumstances. Specifically, the gradient-based attack methods are incorporated into the tabular credit card transaction data in both black- and white-box adversarial attacks settings. Our findings confirm that tabular data is also susceptible to subtle perturbations, highlighting the need for heightened awareness among financial technology practitioners regarding ML model security and trustworthiness. Furthermore, the experiments by transferring adversarial samples from gradient-based attack method to non-gradient-based models also verify our findings. Our results demonstrate that such attacks remain effective, emphasizing the necessity of developing robust defenses for CCFD algorithms.

--While multiple emotional speech corpora exist for commonly spoken languages, there is a lack of functional datasets for smaller (spoken) languages, such as Danish. T o our knowledge, Danish Emotional Speech (DES), published in 1997, is the only other database of Danish emotional speech. We demonstrate the validity of the dataset by investigating and presenting its predictive power using speech emotion recognition (SER) models. We develop SER models for EmoT ale and the reference datasets using self-supervised speech model (SSLM) embeddings and the openSMILE feature extractor . We find the embeddings superior to the hand-crafted features. The best model achieves an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 64.1% on the EmoT ale corpus using leave-one-speaker-out cross-validation, comparable to the performance on DES. Speech signals are rich in information, both linguistic (in the form of sentences and words) and paralinguistic (denoting mood and affective state). Speech also carries information about multiple, potentially personal traits of the speaker, such as age, gender, and nationality. Multiple psychological and neuroscientific models of the mind hypothesize that language and emotion are certainly linked [1]. For example, some cultures express anger more vocally, while others might be more restrained.

Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the environment, captured by the reward mechanism, from what remains unknown and must be discovered through sampling. This separation supports techniques such as counterfactual experience generation and reward shaping, which reduce sample complexity and speed up learning. We introduce physics-informed reward machines (pRMs), a symbolic machine designed to express complex learning objectives and reward structures for RL agents, thereby enabling more programmable, expressive, and efficient learning. We present RL algorithms capable of exploiting pRMs via counterfactual experiences and reward shaping. Our experimental results show that these techniques accelerate reward acquisition during the training phases of RL. We demonstrate the expressiveness and effectiveness of pRMs through experiments in both finite and continuous physical environments, illustrating that incorporating pRMs significantly improves learning efficiency across several control tasks.