Industry
Developing Fairness-Aware Task Decomposition to Improve Equity in Post-Spinal Fusion Complication Prediction
Yuan, Yining, Tamo, J. Ben, Shi, Wenqi, Zhong, Yishan, Nnamdi, Micky C., Brenn, B. Randall, Hwang, Steven W., Wang, May D.
Fairness in clinical prediction models remains a persistent challenge, particularly in high-stakes applications such as spinal fusion surgery for scoliosis, where patient outcomes exhibit substantial heterogeneity. Many existing fairness approaches rely on coarse demographic adjustments or post-hoc corrections, which fail to capture the latent structure of clinical populations and may unintentionally reinforce bias. We propose FAIR-MTL, a fairness-aware multitask learning framework designed to provide equitable and fine-grained prediction of postoperative complication severity. Instead of relying on explicit sensitive attributes during model training, FAIR-MTL employs a data-driven subgroup inference mechanism. We extract a compact demographic embedding, and apply k-means clustering to uncover latent patient subgroups that may be differentially affected by traditional models. These inferred subgroup labels determine task routing within a shared multitask architecture. During training, subgroup imbalance is mitigated through inverse-frequency weighting, and regularization prevents overfitting to smaller groups. Applied to postoperative complication prediction with four severity levels, FAIR-MTL achieves an AUC of 0.86 and an accuracy of 75%, outperforming single-task baselines while substantially reducing bias. For gender, the demographic parity difference decreases to 0.055 and equalized odds to 0.094; for age, these values reduce to 0.056 and 0.148, respectively. Model interpretability is ensured through SHAP and Gini importance analyses, which consistently highlight clinically meaningful predictors such as hemoglobin, hematocrit, and patient weight. Our findings show that incorporating unsupervised subgroup discovery into a multitask framework enables more equitable, interpretable, and clinically actionable predictions for surgical risk stratification.
Sleep Apnea Detection on a Wireless Multimodal Wearable Device Without Oxygen Flow Using a Mamba-based Deep Learning Approach
Luszczynski, Dominik, Yin, Richard Fei, Afonin, Nicholas, Lim, Andrew S. P.
Objectives: We present and evaluate a Mamba-based deep-learning model for diagnosis and event-level characterization of sleep disordered breathing based on signals from the ANNE One, a non-intrusive dual-module wireless wearable system measuring chest electrocardiography, triaxial accelerometry, chest and finger temperature, and finger phototplethysmography. Methods: We obtained concurrent PSG and wearable sensor recordings from 384 adults attending a tertiary care sleep laboratory. Respiratory events in the PSG were manually annotated in accordance with AASM guidelines. Wearable sensor and PSG recordings were automatically aligned based on the ECG signal, alignment confirmed by visual inspection, and PSG-derived respiratory event labels were used to train and evaluate a deep sequential neural network based on the Mamba architecture. Results: In 57 recordings in our test set (mean age 56, mean AHI 10.8, 43.86\% female) the model-predicted AHI was highly correlated with that derived form the PSG labels (R=0.95, p=8.3e-30, men absolute error 2.83). This performance did not vary with age or sex. At a threshold of AHI$>$5, the model had a sensitivity of 0.96, specificity of 0.87, and kappa of 0.82, and at a threshold of AHI$>$15, the model had a sensitivity of 0.86, specificity of 0.98, and kappa of 0.85. At the level of 30-sec epochs, the model had a sensitivity of 0.93 and specificity of 0.95, with a kappa of 0.68 regarding whether any given epoch contained a respiratory event. Conclusions: Applied to data from the ANNE One, a Mamba-based deep learning model can accurately predict AHI and identify SDB at clinically relevant thresholds, achieves good epoch- and event-level identification of individual respiratory events, and shows promise at physiological characterization of these events including event type (central vs. other) and event duration.
Subgroup Validity in Machine Learning for Echocardiogram Data
Feeney, Cynthia, Williams, Shane, Wessler, Benjamin S., Hughes, Michael C.
Echocardiogram datasets enable training deep learning models to automate interpretation of cardiac ultrasound, thereby expanding access to accurate readings of diagnostically-useful images. However, the gender, sex, race, and ethnicity of the patients in these datasets are underreported and subgroup-specific predictive performance is unevaluated. These reporting deficiencies raise concerns about subgroup validity that must be studied and addressed before model deployment. In this paper, we show that current open echocardiogram datasets are unable to assuage subgroup validity concerns. We improve sociodemographic reporting for two datasets: TMED-2 and MIMIC-IV-ECHO. Analysis of six open datasets reveals no consideration of gender-diverse patients and insufficient patient counts for many racial and ethnic groups. We further perform an exploratory subgroup analysis of two published aortic stenosis detection models on TMED-2. We find insufficient evidence for subgroup validity for sex, racial, and ethnic subgroups. Our findings highlight that more data for underrepresented subgroups, improved demographic reporting, and subgroup-focused analyses are needed to prove subgroup validity in future work.
Visual Sync: Multi-Camera Synchronization via Cross-View Object Motion
Liu, Shaowei, Yao, David Yifan, Gupta, Saurabh, Wang, Shenlong
Today, people can easily record memorable moments, ranging from concerts, sports events, lectures, family gatherings, and birthday parties with multiple consumer cameras. However, synchronizing these cross-camera streams remains challenging. Existing methods assume controlled settings, specific targets, manual correction, or costly hardware. We present VisualSync, an optimization framework based on multi-view dynamics that aligns unposed, unsynchronized videos at millisecond accuracy. Our key insight is that any moving 3D point, when co-visible in two cameras, obeys epipolar constraints once properly synchronized. To exploit this, VisualSync leverages off-the-shelf 3D reconstruction, feature matching, and dense tracking to extract tracklets, relative poses, and cross-view correspondences. It then jointly minimizes the epipolar error to estimate each camera's time offset. Experiments on four diverse, challenging datasets show that VisualSync outperforms baseline methods, achieving an median synchronization error below 50 ms.
Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Imperfect Simulations
Hsieh, Elvis, Hsieh, Wen-Han, Wang, Yen-Jen, Lin, Toru, Malik, Jitendra, Sreenath, Koushil, Qi, Haozhi
Figure 1: We propose DexScrew, a sim-to-real framework for learning dexterous manipulation skills when the environment cannot be accurately simulated. In simulation, we use simplified objects to learn transferable rotational skills, which are then used to collect data and train tactile policies in the real world. We demonstrate the framework on contact-rich screwdriving (top row) and nut-bolt fastening (middle row). We also show generalization across different objects (bottom row). More videos and code are available on https://dexscrew.github.io. Abstract-- Reinforcement learning and sim-to-real transfer have made significant progress in dexterous manipulation. However, progress remains limited by the difficulty of simulating complex contact dynamics and multisensory signals, especially tactile feedback. In this work, we propose DexScrew, a sim-to-real framework that addresses these limitations and demonstrates its effectiveness on nut-bolt fastening and screwdriving with multi-fingered hands. The framework has three stages. First, we train reinforcement learning policies in simulation using simplified object models that lead to the emergence of correct finger gaits. We then use the learned policy as a skill primitive within a teleoperation system to collect real-world demonstrations that contain tactile and proprioceptive information. Finally, we train a behavior cloning policy that incorporates tactile sensing and show that it generalizes to nuts and screwdrivers with diverse geometries. Experiments across both tasks show high task progress ratios compared to direct sim-to-real transfer and robust performance even on unseen object shapes and under external perturbations.
Learning Sim-to-Real Humanoid Locomotion in 15 Minutes
Seo, Younggyo, Sferrazza, Carmelo, Chen, Juyue, Shi, Guanya, Duan, Rocky, Abbeel, Pieter
Massively parallel simulation has reduced reinforcement learning (RL) training time for robots from days to minutes. However, achieving fast and reliable sim-to-real RL for humanoid control remains difficult due to the challenges introduced by factors such as high dimensionality and domain randomization. In this work, we introduce a simple and practical recipe based on off-policy RL algorithms, i.e., FastSAC and FastTD3, that enables rapid training of humanoid locomotion policies in just 15 minutes with a single RTX 4090 GPU. Our simple recipe stabilizes off-policy RL algorithms at massive scale with thousands of parallel environments through carefully tuned design choices and minimalist reward functions. We demonstrate rapid end-to-end learning of humanoid locomotion controllers on Unitree G1 and Booster T1 robots under strong domain randomization, e.g., randomized dynamics, rough terrain, and push perturbations, as well as fast training of whole-body human-motion tracking policies. We provide videos and open-source implementation at: https://younggyo.me/fastsac-humanoid.
RoaD: Rollouts as Demonstrations for Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Autonomous Driving Policies
Garcia-Cobo, Guillermo, Igl, Maximilian, Karkus, Peter, Zhang, Zhejun, Watson, Michael, Chen, Yuxiao, Ivanovic, Boris, Pavone, Marco
Autonomous driving policies are typically trained via open-loop behavior cloning of human demonstrations. However, such policies suffer from covariate shift when deployed in closed loop, leading to compounding errors. W e introduce Rollouts as Demonstrations (RoaD), a simple and efficient method to mitigate covariate shift by leveraging the policy's own closed-loop rollouts as additional training data. During rollout generation, RoaD incorporates expert guidance to bias trajectories toward high-quality behavior, producing informative yet realistic demonstrations for fine-tuning. This approach enables robust closed-loop adaptation with orders of magnitude less data than reinforcement learning, and avoids restrictive assumptions of prior closed-loop supervised fine-tuning (CL-SFT) methods, allowing broader applications domains including end-to-end driving. W e demonstrate the effectiveness of RoaD on WOSAC, a large-scale traffic simulation benchmark, where it performs similar or better than the prior CL-SFT method; and in AlpaSim, a high-fidelity neural reconstruction-based simulator for end-to-end driving, where it improves driving score by 41% and reduces collisions by 54%.
LLM CHESS: Benchmarking Reasoning and Instruction-Following in LLMs through Chess
Kolasani, Sai, Saplin, Maxim, Crispino, Nicholas, Montgomery, Kyle, Davis, Jared Quincy, Zaharia, Matei, Wang, Chi, Wang, Chenguang
We introduce LLM CHESS, an evaluation framework designed to probe the generalization of reasoning and instruction-following abilities in large language models (LLMs) through extended agentic interaction in the domain of chess. We rank over 50 open and closed source models by playing against a random opponent using a range of behavioral metrics, including win and loss rates, move quality, move legality, hallucinated actions, and game duration. For a subset of top reasoning models, we derive an Elo estimate by playing against a chess engine with variably configured skill, which allows for comparisons between models in an easily understandable way. Despite the simplicity of the instruction-following task and the weakness of the opponent, many state-of-the-art models struggle to complete games or achieve consistent wins. Similar to other benchmarks on complex reasoning tasks, our experiments reveal a clear separation between reasoning and non-reasoning models. However, unlike existing static benchmarks, the stochastic and dynamic nature of LLM CHESS uniquely reduces overfitting and memorization while preventing benchmark saturation, proving difficult even for top reasoning models. To support future work on evaluating reasoning and instruction-following in LLMs, we release our experimental framework, a public leaderboard, and a dataset of associated games.
A robust generalizable device-agnostic deep learning model for sleep-wake determination from triaxial wrist accelerometry
Montazeri, Nasim, Yang, Stone, Luszczynski, Dominik, Zhang, John, Gurve, Dharmendra, Centen, Andrew, Goubran, Maged, Lim, Andrew
Study Objectives: Wrist accelerometry is widely used for inferring sleep-wake state. Previous works demonstrated poor wake detection, without cross-device generalizability and validation in different age range and sleep disorders. We developed a robust deep learning model for to detect sleep-wakefulness from triaxial accelerometry and evaluated its validity across three devices and in a large adult population spanning a wide range of ages with and without sleep disorders. Methods: We collected wrist accelerometry simultaneous to polysomnography (PSG) in 453 adults undergoing clinical sleep testing at a tertiary care sleep laboratory, using three devices. We extracted features in 30-second epochs and trained a 3-class model to detect wake, sleep, and sleep with arousals, which was then collapsed into wake vs. sleep using a decision tree. To enhance wake detection, the model was specifically trained on randomly selected subjects with low sleep efficiency and/or high arousal index from one device recording and then tested on the remaining recordings. Results: The model showed high performance with F1 Score of 0.86, sensitivity (sleep) of 0.87, and specificity (wakefulness) of 0.78, and significant and moderate correlation to PSG in predicting total sleep time (R=0.69) and sleep efficiency (R=0.63). Model performance was robust to the presence of sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and periodic limb movements in sleep, and was consistent across all three models of accelerometer. Conclusions: We present a deep model to detect sleep-wakefulness from actigraphy in adults with relative robustness to the presence of sleep disorders and generalizability across diverse commonly used wrist accelerometers.
Feature-Based Semantics-Aware Scheduling for Energy-Harvesting Federated Learning
Jeong, Eunjeong, Perin, Giovanni, Yang, Howard H., Pappas, Nikolaos
Federated Learning (FL) on resource-constrained edge devices faces a critical challenge: The computational energy required for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often dominates communication costs. However, most existing Energy-Harvesting FL (EHFL) strategies fail to account for this reality, resulting in wasted energy due to redundant local computations. For efficient and proactive resource management, algorithms that predict local update contributions must be devised. We propose a lightweight client scheduling framework using the Version Age of Information (VAoI), a semantics-aware metric that quantifies update timeliness and significance. Crucially, we overcome VAoI's typical prohibitive computational cost, which requires statistical distance over the entire parameter space, by introducing a feature-based proxy. This proxy estimates model redundancy using intermediate-layer extraction from a single forward pass, dramatically reducing computational complexity. Experiments conducted under extreme non-IID data distributions and scarce energy availability demonstrate superior learning performance while achieving energy reduction compared to existing baseline selection policies. Our framework establishes semantics-aware scheduling as a practical and vital solution for EHFL in realistic scenarios where training costs dominate transmission costs.