Accurate electric vehicle (EV) charging demand forecasting is essential for stable grid operation and proactive EV participation in electricity market. Existing forecasting methods, particularly those based on graph neural networks, are often limited to modeling pairwise relationships between stations, failing to capture the complex, group-wise dynamics inherent in urban charging networks. To address this gap, we develop a novel forecasting framework namely HyperCast, leveraging the expressive power of hypergraphs to model the higher-order spatiotemporal dependencies hidden in EV charging patterns. HyperCast integrates multi-view hypergraphs, which capture both static geographical proximity and dynamic demand-based functional similarities, along with multi-timescale inputs to differentiate between recent trends and weekly periodicities. The framework employs specialized hyper-spatiotemporal blocks and tailored cross-attention mechanisms to effectively fuse information from these diverse sources: views and timescales. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that HyperCast significantly outperforms a wide array of state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicitly modeling collective charging behaviors for more accurate forecasting.

Score matching has become a central training objective in modern generative modeling, particularly in diffusion models, where it is used to learn high-dimensional data distributions through the estimation of score functions. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of the optimization behavior of score matching, particularly in over-parameterized regimes, remains limited. In this work, we study gradient descent for training over-parameterized models to learn a single Gaussian distribution. Specifically, we use a student model with $n$ learnable parameters and train it on data generated from a single ground-truth Gaussian using the population score matching objective. We analyze the optimization dynamics under multiple regimes. When the noise scale is sufficiently large, we prove a global convergence result for gradient descent. In the low-noise regime, we identify the existence of a stationary point, highlighting the difficulty of proving global convergence in this case. Nevertheless, we show convergence under certain initialization conditions: when the parameters are initialized to be exponentially small, gradient descent ensures convergence of all parameters to the ground truth. We further prove that without the exponentially small initialization, the parameters may not converge to the ground truth. Finally, we consider the case where parameters are randomly initialized from a Gaussian distribution far from the ground truth. We prove that, with high probability, only one parameter converges while the others diverge, yet the loss still converges to zero with a $1/τ$ rate, where $τ$ is the number of iterations. We also establish a nearly matching lower bound on the convergence rate in this regime. This is the first work to establish global convergence guarantees for Gaussian mixtures with at least three components under the score matching framework.

In the realm of black-box jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs), the feasibility of constructing a narrow safety proxy, a lightweight model designed to predict the attack success rate (ASR) of adversarial prompts, remains underexplored. This work investigates the distillability of an LLM's core security logic. We propose a novel framework that incorporates an improved outline filling attack to achieve dense sampling of the model's security boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce a ranking regression paradigm that replaces standard regression and trains the proxy model to predict which prompt yields a higher ASR. Experimental results show that our proxy model achieves an accuracy of 91.1 percent in predicting the relative ranking of average long response (ALR), and 69.2 percent in predicting ASR. These findings confirm the predictability and distillability of jailbreak behaviors, and demonstrate the potential of leveraging such distillability to optimize black-box attacks.

Clinical notes in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) capture rich temporal information on events, clinician reasoning, and lifestyle factors often missing from structured data. Leveraging them for predictive modeling can be impactful for timely identification of chronic diseases. However, they present core natural language processing (NLP) challenges: long text, irregular event distribution, complex temporal dependencies, privacy constraints, and resource limitations. We present two complementary methods for temporally and contextually grounded risk prediction from longitudinal notes. First, we introduce HiTGNN, a hierarchical temporal graph neural network that integrates intra-note temporal event structures, inter-visit dynamics, and medical knowledge to model patient trajectories with fine-grained temporal granularity. Second, we propose ReVeAL, a lightweight, test-time framework that distills the reasoning of large language models into smaller verifier models. Applied to opportunistic screening for Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) using temporally realistic cohorts curated from private and public hospital corpora, HiTGNN achieves the highest predictive accuracy, especially for near-term risk, while preserving privacy and limiting reliance on large proprietary models. ReVeAL enhances sensitivity to true T2D cases and retains explanatory reasoning. Our ablations confirm the value of temporal structure and knowledge augmentation, and fairness analysis shows HiTGNN performs more equitably across subgroups.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading plays a critical role in early clinical intervention and vision preservation. Recent explorations predominantly focus on visual lesion feature extraction through data processing and domain decoupling strategies. However, they generally overlook domain-invariant pathological patterns and underutilize the rich contextual knowledge of foundation models, relying solely on visual information, which is insufficient for distinguishing subtle pathological variations. Therefore, we propose integrating fine-grained pathological descriptions to complement prototypes with additional context, thereby resolving ambiguities in borderline cases. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Anchor Prototype Modulation (HAPM) framework to facilitate DR grading. First, we introduce a variance spectrum-driven anchor prototype library that preserves domain-invariant pathological patterns. We further employ a hierarchical differential prompt gating mechanism, dynamically selecting discriminative semantic prompts from both LVLM and LLM sources to address semantic confusion between adjacent DR grades. Finally, we utilize a two-stage prototype modulation strategy that progressively integrates clinical knowledge into visual prototypes through a Pathological Semantic Injector (PSI) and a Discriminative Prototype Enhancer (DPE). Extensive experiments across eight public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves pathology-guided prototype evolution while outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/HAPM.

The electric power sector is a leading source of air pollutant emissions, impacting the public health of nearly every community. Although regulatory measures have reduced air pollutants, fossil fuels remain a significant component of the energy supply, highlighting the need for more advanced demand-side approaches to reduce the public health impacts. To enable health-informed demand-side management, we introduce HealthPredictor, a domain-specific AI model that provides an end-to-end pipeline linking electricity use to public health outcomes. The model comprises three components: a fuel mix predictor that estimates the contribution of different generation sources, an air quality converter that models pollutant emissions and atmospheric dispersion, and a health impact assessor that translates resulting pollutant changes into monetized health damages. Across multiple regions in the United States, our health-driven optimization framework yields substantially lower prediction errors in terms of public health impacts than fuel mix-driven baselines. A case study on electric vehicle charging schedules illustrates the public health gains enabled by our method and the actionable guidance it can offer for health-informed energy management. Overall, this work shows how AI models can be explicitly designed to enable health-informed energy management for advancing public health and broader societal well-being. Our datasets and code are released at: https://github.com/Ren-Research/Health-Impact-Predictor.

Drowsy driving is a growing cause of traffic accidents, prompting recent exploration of electroencephalography (EEG)-based drowsiness detection systems. However, the inherent variability of EEG signals due to psychological and physical factors necessitates a cumbersome calibration process. In particular, the inter-subject variability of EEG signals leads to a domain shift problem, which makes it challenging to generalize drowsiness detection models to unseen target subjects. To address these issues, we propose a novel driver drowsiness detection framework that leverages online test-time adaptation (TTA) methods to dynamically adjust to target subject distributions. Our proposed method updates the learnable parameters in batch normalization (BN) layers, while preserving pretrained normalization statistics, resulting in a modified configuration that ensures effective adaptation during test time. We incorporate a memory bank that dynamically manages streaming EEG segments, selecting samples based on their reliability determined by negative energy scores and persistence time. In addition, we introduce prototype learning to ensure robust predictions against distribution shifts over time. We validated our method on the sustained-attention driving dataset collected in a simulated environment, where drowsiness was estimated from delayed reaction times during monotonous lane-keeping tasks. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all baselines, achieving an average F1-score of 81.73\%, an improvement of 11.73\% over the best TTA baseline. This demonstrates that our proposed method significantly enhances the adaptability of EEG-based drowsiness detection systems in non-i.i.d. scenarios.

Accurate medical diagnosis often involves progressive visual focusing and iterative reasoning, characteristics commonly observed in clinical workflows. While recent vision-language models demonstrate promising chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), their purely on-policy learning paradigm tends to reinforce superficially coherent but clinically inaccurate reasoning paths. We propose MedEyes, a novel reinforcement learning framework that dynamically models clinician-style diagnostic reasoning by progressively attending to and interpreting relevant medical image regions. By incorporating off-policy expert guidance, MedEyes converts expert visual search trajectories into structured external behavioral signals, guiding the model toward clinically aligned visual reasoning. We design the Gaze-guided Reasoning Navigator (GRN) to emulate the diagnostic process through a dual-mode exploration strategy, scanning for systematic abnormality localization and drilling for detailed regional analysis. To balance expert imitation and autonomous discovery, we introduce the Confidence Value Sampler (CVS), which employs nucleus sampling and adaptive termination to create diverse yet credible exploration paths. Finally, the dual-stream GRPO optimization framework decouples on-policy and off-policy learning signals, mitigating reward assimilation and entropy collapse. Experiments demonstrate that MedEyes achieves an average performance improvement of +8.5\% across multiple medical VQA benchmarks, validating MedEyes's potential in building interpretable medical AI systems.

Existing AI bias evaluation benchmarks largely reflect Western perspectives, leaving African contexts underrepresented and enabling harmful stereotypes in applications across various domains. To address this gap, we introduce AfriStereo, the first open-source African stereotype dataset and evaluation framework grounded in local socio-cultural contexts. Through community engaged efforts across Senegal, Kenya, and Nigeria, we collected 1,163 stereotypes spanning gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and profession. Using few-shot prompting with human-in-the-loop validation, we augmented the dataset to over 5,000 stereotype-antistereotype pairs. Entries were validated through semantic clustering and manual annotation by culturally informed reviewers. Preliminary evaluation of language models reveals that nine of eleven models exhibit statistically significant bias, with Bias Preference Ratios (BPR) ranging from 0.63 to 0.78 (p <= 0.05), indicating systematic preferences for stereotypes over antistereotypes, particularly across age, profession, and gender dimensions. Domain-specific models appeared to show weaker bias in our setup, suggesting task-specific training may mitigate some associations. Looking ahead, AfriStereo opens pathways for future research on culturally grounded bias evaluation and mitigation, offering key methodologies for the AI community on building more equitable, context-aware, and globally inclusive NLP technologies.

Large vision foundation models have been widely adopted for retinal disease classification without systematic evidence justifying their parameter requirements. In the present work we address two critical questions: First, are large domain-specific foundation models essential, or do compact general-purpose architectures suffice? Second, does specialized retinal pretraining justify its computational cost? To answer this, we benchmark initialization strategies across four retinal imaging classification tasks spanning Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Color Fundus Photography (CFP) modalities: 8-class OCT classification, 3-class diabetic macular edema (DME), 5-class diabetic retinopathy (DR), and 3-class glaucoma (GL) detection. We evaluate 12-13 model configurations per task, including vision transformers (22.8M-86.6M parameters), Swin Transformers (27.6M-28.3M), ConvNeXt (28.6M), and the domain-specific RETFound models (303M), under identical training conditions. Our results challenge prevailing assumptions: First, we demonstrate that pretraining provides universal benefits (5.18-18.41% improvement), scaling with task difficulty. Second, compact architectures (27-29M) dominate Pareto frontiers; SwinV2-tiny achieves top-1 performance on three datasets. Third, RETFound (303M) justifies its computational cost only for challenging DR grading (accuracy of 71.15%), while ImageNet pretraining proves to be sufficient with all other tasks (DME accuracy: 99.24%, OCT accuracy: 97.96%). CFP tasks show larger pretraining accuracy gains (9.13-18.41%) than OCT (5.18%). Thus, the evidence suggests that compact general-purpose models deliver near-optimal performance for most retinal classification tasks; specialized foundation models warranted only for fine-grained discrimination under extreme class imbalance.