Industry
Learning to Route: Per-Sample Adaptive Routing for Multimodal Multitask Prediction
We propose a unified framework for adaptive routing in multitask, multimodal prediction settings where data heterogeneity and task interactions vary across samples. We introduce a routing-based architecture that dynamically selects modality processing pathways and task-sharing strategies on a per-sample basis. Our model defines multiple modality paths, including raw and fused representations of text and numeric features, and learns to route each input through the most informative modality-task expert combination. Task-specific predictions are produced by shared or independent heads depending on the routing decision, and the entire system is trained end-to-end. We evaluate the model on both synthetic data and real-world psychotherapy notes, predicting depression and anxiety outcomes. Our experiments show that our method consistently outperforms fixed multitask or single-task baselines, and that the learned routing policy provides interpretable insights into modality relevance and task structure. This addresses critical challenges in personalized healthcare by providing per-subject adaptive information processing that accounts for data and task correlation heterogeneity.
Want to beat Wordle? Try a 1940s mathematical theory.
Technology Want to beat Wordle? Try a 1940s mathematical theory. A new strategy found the correct word 99 percent of the time. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Wordle is currently celebrating its fifth anniversary and a team from Binghamton University has a new way to solve the fun word game.
Beyond the Average: Distributional Causal Inference under Imperfect Compliance
We study the estimation of distributional treatment effects in randomized experiments with imperfect compliance. When participants do not adhere to their assigned treatments, we leverage treatment assignment as an instrumental variable to identify the local distributional treatment effect--the difference in outcome distributions between treatment and control groups for the subpopulation of compliers. We propose a regression-adjusted estimator based on a distribution regression framework with Neyman-orthogonal moment conditions, enabling robustness and flexibility with high-dimensional covariates. Our approach accommodates continuous, discrete, and mixed discrete-continuous outcomes, and applies under a broad class of covariate-adaptive randomization schemes, including stratified block designs and simple random sampling. We derive the estimator's asymptotic distribution and show that it achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound. Simulation results demonstrate favorable finite-sample performance, and we demonstrate the method's practical relevance in an application to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.
Informed Initialization for Bayesian Optimization and Active Learning
Bayesian Optimization is a widely used method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, relying on probabilistic surrogate models such as Gaussian Processes. The quality of the surrogate model is crucial for good optimization performance, especially in the few-shot setting where only a small number of batches of points can be evaluated. In this setting, the initialization plays a critical role in shaping the surrogate's predictive quality and guiding subsequent optimization. Despite this, practitioners typically rely on (quasi-)random designs to cover the input space. However, such approaches neglect two key factors: (a) space-filling designs may not be desirable to reduce predictive uncertainty, and (b) efficient hyperparameter learning during initialization is essential for high-quality prediction, which may conflict with space-filling designs. To address these limitations, we propose Hyperparameter-Informed Predictive Exploration (HIPE), a novel acquisition strategy that balances predictive uncertainty reduction with hyperparameter learning using information-theoretic principles. We derive a closed-form expression for HIPE in the Gaussian Process setting and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments in active learning and few-shot BO. Our results show that HIPE outperforms standard initialization strategies in terms of predictive accuracy, hyperparameter identification, and subsequent optimization performance, particularly in large-batch, few-shot settings relevant to many real-world Bayesian Optimization applications.
Epic Games details how it's embracing generative AI in Unreal Engine
Just over half of game developers think gen AI is bad for the industry, according to a report published earlier this year. During The State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest on Wednesday, Epic Games revealed just how it's embracing generative AI in Unreal Engine (UE). Along with offering the first details on Unreal Engine 6 (UE6), the company discussed new features for Unreal Engine 5.8, which it also released on Wednesday. As part of the latest update, Epic is offering an experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin that will allow developers to hook gen AI models such as Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine. It's looking to make the MCP an integral part of UE6.
Best Prime Day deals on robot vacuums, lawn mowers, and pool cleaners
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Amazon Prime Day is almost here, but many of the best discounts have already arrived. These are the top home robotics deals I've found so far. I've been spending the past few months digging into home robotics, and one thing is incredibly obvious: Robot vacuums, lawn mowers, and pool cleaners are becoming more accessible. Homeowners can realistically afford them now -- especially with the juicy deals on offer during Amazon Prime Day.
Graph KV Breaking Sequence via Injecting Structural Biases into Large Language Models
Modern large language models (LLMs) are inherently auto-regressive, requiring input to be serialized into flat sequences regardless of their structural dependencies. This serialization hinders the model's ability to leverage structural inductive biases, especially in tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning on data with native graph structures, where inter-segment dependencies are crucial. We introduce Graph-KV with the potential to overcome this limitation.
ArchPower: Dataset for Architecture-Level Power Modeling of Modern CPUDesign
Power is the primary design objective of large-scale integrated circuits (ICs), especially for complex modern processors (i.e., CPUs). Accurate CPU power evaluation requires designers to go through the whole time-consuming IC implementation process, easily taking months. At the early design stage (e.g., architecture-level), classical power models are notoriously inaccurate. Recently, ML-based architecture-level power models have been proposed to boost accuracy, but the data availability is a severe challenge. Currently, there is no open-source dataset for this important ML application.
Parameter Dynamics of Online Machine Learning and Test-time Adaptation
Pre-trained models based on deep neural networks hold strong potential for crossdomain adaptability. However, this potential is often impeded in online machine learning (OML) settings, where the breakdown of the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption leads to unstable adaptation. While recent advances in test-time adaptation (TTA) have addressed aspects of this challenge under unsupervised learning, most existing methods focus exclusively on unsupervised objectives and overlook the risks posed by non-i.i.d.
6294a235c0b80f0a2b224375c546c750-Paper-Conference.pdf
Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models [11, 41, 38, 43, 8, 7, 25], trained on large-scale datasets, have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality, semantically aligned images from natural language prompts. While language-based control offers intuitive and flexible guidance, it often lacks the precision needed for fine-grained visual control, such as specific object positions, shapes, or scene layouts. To overcome this, recent works [19, 35, 28, 58, 27, 39, 59, 53] incorporate explicit spatial signals--like edge maps, depth maps, and segmentation masks to control diffusion models. To enable spatial control while preserving the generative quality of pre-trained diffusion models, existing methods typically employ control adapters [58, 35, 28] that inject spatial signals into a frozen T2I model. However, these adapters are usually trained independently for each spatial control task, requiring substantial computational resources and extensive labeled data for a new task. Alternatively, reusing pre-trained multi-task adapters - either directly [39, 53] or with minimal updates [59]- struggle to generalize to tasks that differ from their training distribution, and often show poor adaptability.