Most post-training backdoor detection methods rely on attacked models exhibiting extreme outlier detection statistics for the target class of an attack, compared to non-target classes. However, these approaches may fail: (1) when some (non-target) classes are easily discriminable from all others, in which case they may naturally achieve extreme detection statistics (e.g., decision confidence); and (2) when the backdoor is subtle, i.e., with its features weak relative to intrinsic class-discriminative features. A key observation is that the backdoor target class has contributions to its detection statistic from both the backdoor trigger and from its intrinsic features, whereas non-target classes only have contributions from their intrinsic features. To achieve more sensitive detectors, we thus propose to suppress intrinsic features while optimizing the detection statistic for a given class. For non-target classes, such suppression will drastically reduce the achievable statistic, whereas for the target class the (significant) contribution from the backdoor trigger remains. In practice, we formulate a constrained optimization problem, leveraging a small set of clean examples from a given class, and optimizing the detection statistic while orthogonalizing with respect to the class's intrinsic features. We dub this plug-and-play approach Class Subspace Orthogonalization (CSO) and assess it against challenging mixed-label and adaptive attacks.

The goal of this work is to develop a universal approach for aligning subtitles (i.e., spoken language text with corresponding timestamps) to continuous sign language videos. Prior approaches typically rely on end-to-end training tied to a specific language or dataset, which limits their generality. In contrast, our method Segment, Embed, and Align (SEA) provides a single framework that works across multiple languages and domains. SEA leverages two pretrained models: the first to segment a video frame sequence into individual signs and the second to embed the video clip of each sign into a shared latent space with text. Alignment is subsequently performed with a lightweight dynamic programming procedure that runs efficiently on CPUs within a minute, even for hour-long episodes. SEA is flexible and can adapt to a wide range of scenarios, utilizing resources from small lexicons to large continuous corpora. Experiments on four sign language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art alignment performance, highlighting the potential of SEA to generate high-quality parallel data for advancing sign language processing. SEA's code and models are openly available.

Despite advances in generative large language models (LLMs), practical application of specialized conversational AI agents remains constrained by computation costs, latency requirements, and the need for precise domain-specific relevance measures. While existing embedding models address the first two constraints, they underperform on information retrieval in specialized domains like finance. This paper introduces a scalable pipeline that trains specialized models from an unlabeled corpus using a general purpose retrieval embedding model as foundation. Our method yields an average of 27.7% improvement in MRR$\texttt{@}$5, 44.6% improvement in mean DCG$\texttt{@}$5 across 14 financial filing types measured over 21,800 query-document pairs, and improved NDCG on 3 of 4 document classes in FinanceBench. We adapt retrieval embeddings (bi-encoder) for RAG, not LLM generators, using LLM-judged relevance to distill domain knowledge into a compact retriever. There are prior works which pair synthetically generated queries with real passages to directly fine-tune the retrieval model. Our pipeline differs from these by introducing interaction between student and teacher models that interleaves retrieval-based mining of hard positive/negative examples from the unlabeled corpus with iterative retraining of the student model's weights using these examples. Each retrieval iteration uses the refined student model to mine the corpus for progressively harder training examples for the subsequent training iteration. The methodology provides a cost-effective solution to bridging the gap between general-purpose models and specialized domains without requiring labor-intensive human annotation.

We investigate the short-context dominance hypothesis: that for most sequences, a small local prefix suffices to predict their next tokens. Using large language models as statistical oracles, we measure the minimum context length (MCL) needed to reproduce accurate full-context predictions across datasets with sequences of varying lengths. For sequences with 1-7k tokens from long-context documents, we consistently find that 75-80% require only the last 96 tokens at most. Given the dominance of short-context tokens, we then ask whether it is possible to detect challenging long-context sequences for which a short local prefix does not suffice for prediction. We introduce a practical proxy to MCL, called Distributionally Aware MCL (DaMCL), that does not require knowledge of the actual next-token and is compatible with sampling strategies beyond greedy decoding. Our experiments validate that simple thresholding of the metric defining DaMCL achieves high performance in detecting long vs. short context sequences. Finally, to counter the bias that short-context dominance induces in LLM output distributions, we develop an intuitive decoding algorithm that leverages our detector to identify and boost tokens that are long-range-relevant. Across Q&A tasks and model architectures, we confirm that mitigating the bias improves performance.

Crisis classification in social media aims to extract actionable disaster-related information from multimodal posts, which is a crucial task for enhancing situational awareness and facilitating timely emergency responses. However, the wide variation in crisis types makes achieving generalizable performance across unseen disasters a persistent challenge. Existing approaches primarily leverage deep learning to fuse textual and visual cues for crisis classification, achieving numerically plausible results under in-domain settings. However, they exhibit poor generalization across unseen crisis types because they 1. do not disentangle spurious and causal features, resulting in performance degradation under domain shift, and 2. fail to align heterogeneous modality representations within a shared space, which hinders the direct adaptation of established single-modality domain generalization (DG) techniques to the multimodal setting. To address these issues, we introduce a causality-guided multimodal domain generalization (MMDG) framework that combines adversarial disentanglement with unified representation learning for crisis classification. The adversarial objective encourages the model to disentangle and focus on domain-invariant causal features, leading to more generalizable classifications grounded in stable causal mechanisms. The unified representation aligns features from different modalities within a shared latent space, enabling single-modality DG strategies to be seamlessly extended to multimodal learning. Experiments on the different datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves the best performance in unseen disaster scenarios.

We propose an interpretable deep competing risks model called the Deep Kernel Aalen-Johansen (DKAJ) estimator, which generalizes the classical Aalen-Johansen nonparametric estimate of cumulative incidence functions (CIFs). Each data point (e.g., patient) is represented as a weighted combination of clusters. If a data point has nonzero weight only for one cluster, then its predicted CIFs correspond to those of the classical Aalen-Johansen estimator restricted to data points from that cluster. These weights come from an automatically learned kernel function that measures how similar any two data points are. On four standard competing risks datasets, we show that DKAJ is competitive with state-of-the-art baselines while being able to provide visualizations to assist model interpretation.

Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, with education and research emerging as particularly impactful areas. Among current state-of-the-art LLMs, ChatGPT and DeepSeek exhibit strong capabilities in mathematics, science, medicine, literature, and programming. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation of these two LLMs through background technology analysis, empirical experiments, and a real-world user survey. The evaluation explores trade-offs among model accuracy, computational efficiency, and user experience in educational and research affairs. We benchmarked these LLMs performance in text generation, programming, and specialized problem-solving. Experimental results show that ChatGPT excels in general language understanding and text generation, while DeepSeek demonstrates superior performance in programming tasks due to its efficiency-focused design. Moreover, both models deliver medically accurate diagnostic outputs and effectively solve complex mathematical problems. Complementing these quantitative findings, a survey of students, educators, and researchers highlights the practical benefits and limitations of these models, offering deeper insights into their role in advancing education and research.

-- Joint activity describes when more than one agent (human or machine) contributes to the completion of a task or activity. Designing for joint activity focuses on explicitly supporting the interdependencies between agents necessary for effective coordination amon g agents engaged in the joint activity. This builds and expands upon designing for usability to further address how technologies can be designed to act as effective team players. Effective joint activity requires supporting, at minimum, five primary macroc ognitive functions within teams: Event Detection, Sensemaking, Adaptability, Perspective - Shifting, and Coordination. Supporting these functions is equally as important as making technologies usable. We synthesized fourteen heuristics from relevant literatu re including display design, human factors, cognitive systems engineering, cognitive psychology, and computer science to aid the design, development, and evaluation of technologies that support joint human - machine activity . Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies have accelerated human - machine interactions progress ing from simple tool - based engagements to complex cognitive collaborations [1] . Machines are being designed to perform an increasing set of functions and are being expected to engage more deeply in the collaborative joint activit ies related to these functions. This shift in machine capabilities and expectations demands a corresponding re - evaluation and broadening of design and evaluation principles to support joint human - machine activity in ways that lie outside the boundaries of trad itional usability methods and models [2] . Traditional usability heuristics, such as those proposed by [3], provide a strong foundation focusing primarily on surface - level interactions such as enhancing the ease of use, efficiency, and satisfaction in human - machine interaction . These heuristics are primarily oriented towards actions and responses but offer limited support for the essential macrocognitive functions associated with effective teamwork including event detection, sensemaking, adaptability, perspective shifting, and co ordination, all of which are vital in the close collaboration of humans and machine s with joint activities [2], [4], [5], [6] . These heuristics are primarily oriented towards actions and responses but offer limited support for the essential macrocognitive functions associated with effective teamwork including event detection, sensemaking, adaptability, perspective shifting, and co ordination . A ll of these macrocognitive functions are vital in the close collaboration of humans and machines with joint activities in high - stakes and dynamic environments with little room for error [2], [5] . This reliance on macrocognitive functions is evident in domains where the ability to process complex information and adapt to changing conditions is crucial.

Clinical decision-making in oncology requires predicting dynamic disease evolution, a task current static AI predictors cannot perform. While world models (WMs) offer a paradigm for generative prediction, existing medical applications remain limited. Existing methods often rely on stochastic diffusion models, focusing on visual reconstruction rather than causal, physiological transitions. Furthermore, in medical domain, models like MeWM typically ignore patient-specific temporal and clinical contexts and lack a feedback mechanism to link predictions to treatment decisions. To address these gaps, we introduce CLARITY, a medical world model that forecasts disease evolution directly within a structured latent space. It explicitly integrates time intervals (temporal context) and patient-specific data (clinical context) to model treatment-conditioned progression as a smooth, interpretable trajectory, and thus generate physiologically faithful, individualized treatment plans. Finally, CLARITY introduces a novel prediction-to-decision framework, translating latent rollouts into transparent, actionable recommendations. CLARITY demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in treatment planning. On the MU-Glioma-Post dataset, our approach outperforms recent MeWM by 12\%, and significantly surpasses all other medical-specific large language models.

Abstract-- This paper presents a UA V swarm system designed to assist first responders in disaster scenarios like wildfires. By distributing sensors across multiple agents, the system extends flight duration and enhances data availability, reducing the risk of mission failure due to collisions. T o mitigate this risk further, we introduce an autonomous navigation framework that utilizes a local Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) map for obstacle avoidance while maintaining swarm formation with minimal path deviation. Additionally, we incorporate a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) variant to optimize area coverage, prioritizing Points of Interest (POIs) based on preas-signed values derived from environmental behavior and critical infrastructure. The proposed system is validated through simulations with varying swarm sizes, demonstrating its ability to maximize coverage while ensuring collision avoidance between UA Vs and obstacles.