Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is widely used in medical imaging classification to reduce the labeling effort. While only bag labels are available for training, one typically seeks predictions at both bag and instance levels (classification and localization tasks, respectively). Early MIL methods treated the instances in a bag independently. Recent methods account for global and local dependencies among instances. Although they have yielded excellent results in classification, their performance in terms of localization is comparatively limited.

Recent research on online Gradient Balancing (GraB) has revealed that there exist permutation-based example orderings for SGD that are guaranteed to outperform random reshuffling (RR). Whereas RR arbitrarily permutes training examples, GraB leverages stale gradients from prior epochs to order examples -- achieving a provably faster convergence rate than RR. However, GraB is limited by design: while it demonstrates an impressive ability to scale-up training on centralized data, it does not naturally extend to modern distributed ML workloads. We therefore propose Coordinated Distributed GraB (CD-GraB), which uses insights from prior work on kernel thinning to translate the benefits of provably faster permutation-based example ordering to distributed settings. With negligible overhead, CD-GraB exhibits a linear speedup in convergence rate over centralized GraB and outperforms distributed RR on a variety of benchmark tasks.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for enhancing human productivity by assisting with computer tasks. Existing task formulations primarily focus on simple tasks that can be specified by a single, language-only instruction, such as "Insert a new slide." In this work, we introduce VideoGUI, a novel multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate GUI assistants on visual-centric GUI tasks. Sourced from high-quality web instructional videos, our benchmark focuses on tasks involving professional and novel software (e.g., Adobe Pho- toshop or Stable Diffusion WebUI) and complex activities (e.g., video editing). VideoGUI evaluates GUI assistants through a hierarchical process, allowing for identification of the specific levels at which they may fail: (i) high-level planning: reconstruct procedural subtasks from visual conditions without language descrip- tions; (ii) middle-level planning: generate sequences of precise action narrations based on visual state (i.e., screenshot) and goals; (iii) atomic action execution: perform specific actions such as accurately clicking designated elements.

Online continual learning (OCL) requires the models to learn from constant, endless streams of data. While significant efforts have been made in this field, most were focused on mitigating the \textit{catastrophic forgetting} issue to achieve better classification ability, at the cost of a much heavier training workload. They overlooked that in real-world scenarios, e.g., in high-speed data stream environments, data do not pause to accommodate slow models. In this paper, we emphasize that \textit{model throughput}-- defined as the maximum number of training samples that a model can process within a unit of time -- is equally important. It directly limits how much data a model can utilize and presents a challenging dilemma for current methods. With this understanding, we revisit key challenges in OCL from both empirical and theoretical perspectives, highlighting two critical issues beyond the well-documented catastrophic forgetting: (\romannumeral1) Model's ignorance: the single-pass nature of OCL challenges models to learn effective features within constrained training time and storage capacity, leading to a trade-off between effective learning and model throughput; (\romannumeral2) Model's myopia: the local learning nature of OCL on the current task leads the model to adopt overly simplified, task-specific features and \textit{excessively sparse classifier}, resulting in the gap between the optimal solution for the current task and the global objective.

Image generation has shown remarkable results in generating high-fidelity realistic images, in particular with the advancement of diffusion-based models. However, the prevalence of AI-generated images may have side effects for the machine learning community that are not clearly identified. Meanwhile, the success of deep learning in computer vision is driven by the massive dataset collected on the Internet. The extensive quantity of synthetic data being added to the Internet would become an obstacle for future researchers to collect "clean" datasets without AI-generated content. Prior research has shown that using datasets contaminated by synthetic images may result in performance degradation when used for training.

Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically generate a curriculum for a given reinforcement learning (RL) agent, avoiding manual design. In this paper, we propose an answer by interpreting the curriculum generation as an inference problem, where distributions over tasks are progressively learned to approach the target task. This approach leads to an automatic curriculum generation, whose pace is controlled by the agent, with solid theoretical motivation and easily integrated with deep RL algorithms. In the conducted experiments, the curricula generated with the proposed algorithm significantly improve learning performance across several environments and deep RL algorithms, matching or outperforming state-of-the-art existing CRL algorithms.

Online Class Incremental Learning (OCIL) aims to train models incrementally, where data arrive in mini-batches, and previous data are not accessible. A major challenge in OCIL is Catastrophic Forgetting, i.e., the loss of previously learned knowledge. Among existing baselines, replay-based methods show competitive results but requires extra memory for storing exemplars, while exemplar-free (i.e., data need not be stored for replay in production) methods are resource friendly but often lack accuracy. In this paper, we propose an exemplar-free approach--Forward-only Online Analytic Learning (F-OAL). Unlike traditional methods, F-OAL does not rely on back-propagation and is forward-only, significantly reducing memory usage and computational time.

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) treat neural network weights as random variables, which aim to provide posterior uncertainty estimates and avoid overfitting by performing inference on the posterior weights. However, the selection of appropriate prior distributions remains a challenging task, and BNNs may suffer from catastrophic inflated variance or poor predictive performance when poor choices are made for the priors. Existing BNN designs apply different priors to weights, while the behaviours of these priors make it difficult to sufficiently shrink noisy signals or they are prone to overshrinking important signals in the weights. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel R2D2-Net, which imposes the R^2-induced Dirichlet Decomposition (R2D2) prior to the BNN weights. The R2D2-Net can effectively shrink irrelevant coefficients towards zero, while preventing key features from over-shrinkage. To approximate the posterior distribution of weights more accurately, we further propose a variational Gibbs inference algorithm that combines the Gibbs updating procedure and gradient-based optimization. This strategy enhances stability and consistency in estimation when the variational objective involving the shrinkage parameters is non-convex. We also analyze the evidence lower bound (ELBO) and the posterior concentration rates from a theoretical perspective. Experiments on both natural and medical image classification and uncertainty estimation tasks demonstrate satisfactory performance of our method.

Although graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely investigated, it is still a challenge to generate effective and stable graph augmentations. Existing methods often apply heuristic augmentation like random edge dropping, which may disrupt important graph structures and result in unstable GCL performance. In this paper, we propose Positive-incentive Noise driven Graph Data Augmentation (PiNGDA), where positive-incentive noise (pi-noise) scientifically analyzes the beneficial effect of noise under the information theory. To bridge the standard GCL and pi-noise framework, we design a Gaussian auxiliary variable to convert the loss function to information entropy. We prove that the standard GCL with pre-defined augmentations is equivalent to estimate the beneficial noise via the point estimation. Following our analysis, PiNGDA is derived from learning the beneficial noise on both topology and attributes through a trainable noise generator for graph augmentations, instead of the simple estimation. Since the generator learns how to produce beneficial perturbations on graph topology and node attributes, PiNGDA is more reliable compared with the existing methods. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and stability of PiNGDA.

Using massive datasets, foundation models are large-scale, pre-trained models that perform a wide range of tasks. These models have shown consistently improved results with the introduction of new methods. It is crucial to analyze how these trends impact the medical field and determine whether these advancements can drive meaningful change. This study investigates the application of recent state-of-the-art foundation models, DINOv2, MAE, VMamba, CoCa, SAM2, and AIMv2, for medical image classification. We explore their effectiveness on datasets including CBIS-DDSM for mammography, ISIC2019 for skin lesions, APTOS2019 for diabetic retinopathy, and CHEXPERT for chest radiographs. By fine-tuning these models and evaluating their configurations, we aim to understand the potential of these advancements in medical image classification. The results indicate that these advanced models significantly enhance classification outcomes, demonstrating robust performance despite limited labeled data. Based on our results, AIMv2, DINOv2, and SAM2 models outperformed others, demonstrating that progress in natural domain training has positively impacted the medical domain and improved classification outcomes. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sajjad-sh33/Medical-Transfer-Learning.