Effective communication is central to achieving positive healthcare outcomes in mental health contexts, yet international students often face linguistic and cultural barriers that hinder their communication of mental distress. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of AI-generated images in supporting self-expression of mental distress. To achieve this, twenty Chinese international students studying at UK universities were invited to describe their personal experiences of mental distress. These descriptions were elaborated using GPT-4o with four persona-based prompt templates rooted in contemporary counselling practice to generate corresponding images. Participants then evaluated the helpfulness of generated images in facilitating the expression of their feelings based on their original descriptions. The resulting dataset comprises 100 textual descriptions of mental distress, 400 generated images, and corresponding human evaluation scores. Findings indicate that prompt design substantially affects perceived helpfulness, with the illustrator persona achieving the highest ratings. This work introduces the first publicly available text-to-image evaluation dataset with human judgment scores in the mental health domain, offering valuable resources for image evaluation, reinforcement learning with human feedback, and multi-modal research on mental health communication.

In large-scale AI training, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (s-MoE) layers enable scaling by activating only a small subset of experts per token. An operational challenge in this design is load balancing: routing tokens to minimize the number of idle experts, which is important for the efficient utilization of (costly) GPUs. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing (ALF-LB) procedure -- proposed by DeepSeek's Wang et al. (2024) -- by casting it as a one-step-per-iteration primal-dual method for an assignment problem. First, in a stylized deterministic setting, our framework yields several insightful structural properties: (i) a monotonic improvement of a Lagrangian objective, (ii) a preference rule that moves tokens from overloaded to underloaded experts, and (iii) an approximate-balancing guarantee. Then, we incorporate the stochastic and dynamic nature of AI training using a generalized online optimization formulation. In the online setting, we derive a strong convexity property of the objective that leads to a logarithmic expected regret bound under certain step-size choices. Additionally, we present real experiments on 1B-parameter DeepSeekMoE models to complement our theoretical findings. Together, these results build a principled framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing of s-MoE in AI models.

The advancement in Large Language Models has driven the creation of complex agentic systems, such as Deep Research Agents (DRAs), to overcome the limitations of static Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines in handling complex, multi-turn research tasks. This paper introduces the Static Deep Research Agent (Static-DRA), a novel solution built upon a configurable and hierarchical Tree-based static workflow. The core contribution is the integration of two user-tunable parameters, Depth and Breadth, which provide granular control over the research intensity. This design allows end-users to consciously balance the desired quality and comprehensiveness of the research report against the associated computational cost of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions. The agent's architecture, comprising Supervisor, Independent, and Worker agents, facilitates effective multi-hop information retrieval and parallel sub-topic investigation. We evaluate the Static-DRA against the established DeepResearch Bench using the RACE (Reference-based Adaptive Criteria-driven Evaluation) framework. Configured with a depth of 2 and a breadth of 5, and powered by the gemini-2.5-pro model, the agent achieved an overall score of 34.72. Our experiments validate that increasing the configured Depth and Breadth parameters results in a more in-depth research process and a correspondingly higher evaluation score. The Static-DRA offers a pragmatic and resource-aware solution, empowering users with transparent control over the deep research process. The entire source code, outputs and benchmark results are open-sourced at https://github.com/SauravP97/Static-Deep-Research/

We introduce $\textbf{Doublespeak}$, a simple in-context representation hijacking attack against large language models (LLMs). The attack works by systematically replacing a harmful keyword (e.g., bomb) with a benign token (e.g., carrot) across multiple in-context examples, provided a prefix to a harmful request. We demonstrate that this substitution leads to the internal representation of the benign token converging toward that of the harmful one, effectively embedding the harmful semantics under a euphemism. As a result, superficially innocuous prompts (e.g., "How to build a carrot?") are internally interpreted as disallowed instructions (e.g., "How to build a bomb?"), thereby bypassing the model's safety alignment. We use interpretability tools to show that this semantic overwrite emerges layer by layer, with benign meanings in early layers converging into harmful semantics in later ones. Doublespeak is optimization-free, broadly transferable across model families, and achieves strong success rates on closed-source and open-source systems, reaching 74% ASR on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct with a single-sentence context override. Our findings highlight a new attack surface in the latent space of LLMs, revealing that current alignment strategies are insufficient and should instead operate at the representation level.

The 'Doughnut' of social and planetary boundaries has emerged as a popular framework for assessing environmental and social sustainability. Here, we provide a proof-of-concept analysis that shows how machine learning (ML) methods can be applied to a simple macroeconomic model of the Doughnut. First, we show how ML methods can be used to find policy parameters that are consistent with 'living within the Doughnut'. Second, we show how a reinforcement learning agent can identify the optimal trajectory towards desired policies in the parameter space. The approaches we test, which include a Random Forest Classifier and $Q$-learning, are frugal ML methods that are able to find policy parameter combinations that achieve both environmental and social sustainability. The next step is the application of these methods to a more complex ecological macroeconomic model.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In this work, we introduce memory-efficient, reversible architectures for LLMs, inspired by symmetric and symplectic differential equations, and investigate their theoretical properties. Different from standard, baseline architectures that store all intermediate activations, the proposed models use time-reversible dynamics to retrieve hidden states during backpropagation, relieving the need to store activations. This property allows for a drastic reduction in memory consumption, allowing for the processing of larger batch sizes for the same available memory, thereby offering improved throughput. In addition, we propose an efficient method for converting existing, non-reversible LLMs into reversible architectures through fine-tuning, rendering our approach practical for exploiting existing pre-trained models. Our results show comparable or improved performance on several datasets and benchmarks, on several LLMs, building a scalable and efficient path towards reducing the memory and computational costs associated with both training from scratch and fine-tuning of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating coherent text within a single prompt but fall short in sustaining relevance, personalization, and continuity across extended interactions. Human communication, however, relies on multiple forms of memory, from recalling past conversations to adapting to personal traits and situational context. This paper introduces the Mixed Memory-Augmented Generation (MMAG) pattern, a framework that organizes memory for LLM-based agents into five interacting layers: conversational, long-term user, episodic and event-linked, sensory and context-aware, and short-term working memory. Drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology, we map these layers to technical components and outline strategies for coordination, prioritization, and conflict resolution. We demonstrate the approach through its implementation in the Heero conversational agent, where encrypted long-term bios and conversational history already improve engagement and retention. We further discuss implementation concerns around storage, retrieval, privacy, and latency, and highlight open challenges. MMAG provides a foundation for building memory-rich language agents that are more coherent, proactive, and aligned with human needs.

As we deploy machine learning systems in the real world, a core challenge is to maintain a model that is performant even as the data shifts. Such shifts can take many forms: new classes may emerge that were absent during training, a problem known as open-set recognition, and the distribution of known categories may change. Guarantees on open-set recognition are mostly derived under the assumption that the distribution of known classes, which we call the background distribution, is fixed. In this paper we develop CoLOR, a method that is guaranteed to solve open-set recognition even in the challenging case where the background distribution shifts. We prove that the method works under benign assumptions that the novel class is separable from the non-novel classes, and provide theoretical guarantees that it outperforms a representative baseline in a simplified overparameterized setting. We develop techniques to make CoLOR scalable and robust, and perform comprehensive empirical evaluations on image and text data. The results show that CoLOR significantly outperforms existing open-set recognition methods under background shift. Moreover, we provide new insights into how factors such as the size of the novel class influences performance, an aspect that has not been extensively explored in prior work.

Accurate and timely diagnosis of multi-class skin lesions is hampered by subjective methods, inherent data imbalance in datasets like HAM10000, and the "black box" nature of Deep Learning (DL) models. This study proposes a trustworthy and highly accurate Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system to overcome these limitations. The approach utilizes Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs) for per class data augmentation to resolve the critical class imbalance problem. A fine-tuned ResNet-50 classifier is then trained on the augmented dataset to classify seven skin disease categories. Crucially, LIME and SHAP Explainable AI (XAI) techniques are integrated to provide transparency by confirming that predictions are based on clinically relevant features like irregular morphology. The system achieved a high overall Accuracy of 92.50 % and a Macro-AUC of 98.82 %, successfully outperforming various prior benchmarked architectures. This work successfully validates a verifiable framework that combines high performance with the essential clinical interpretability required for safe diagnostic deployment. Future research should prioritize enhancing discrimination for critical categories, such as Melanoma NOS (F1-Score is 0.8602).

Yoga is a popular form of exercise worldwide due to its spiritual and physical health benefits, but incorrect postures can lead to injuries. Automated yoga pose classification has therefore gained importance to reduce reliance on expert practitioners. While human pose keypoint extraction models have shown high potential in action recognition, systematic benchmarking for yoga pose recognition remains limited, as prior works often focus solely on raw images or a single pose extraction model. In this study, we introduce a curated dataset, 'Yoga-16', which addresses limitations of existing datasets, and systematically evaluate three deep learning architectures (VGG16, ResNet50, and Xception), using three input modalities (direct images, MediaPipe Pose skeleton images, and YOLOv8 Pose skeleton images). Our experiments demonstrate that skeleton-based representations outperform raw image inputs, with the highest accuracy of 96.09% achieved by VGG16 with MediaPipe Pose skeleton input. Additionally, we provide interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM, offering insights into model decision-making for yoga pose classification with cross-validation analysis.