Content moderation filters are a critical safeguard against alignment failures in language models. Yet most existing filters focus narrowly on general safety and overlook cultural context. In this work, we introduce FanarGuard, a bilingual moderation filter that evaluates both safety and cultural alignment in Arabic and English. We construct a dataset of over 468K prompt and response pairs, drawn from synthetic and public datasets, scored by a panel of LLM judges on harmlessness and cultural awareness, and use it to train two filter variants. To rigorously evaluate cultural alignment, we further develop the first benchmark targeting Arabic cultural contexts, comprising over 1k norm-sensitive prompts with LLM-generated responses annotated by human raters. Results show that FanarGuard achieves stronger agreement with human annotations than inter-annotator reliability, while matching the performance of state-of-the-art filters on safety benchmarks. These findings highlight the importance of integrating cultural awareness into moderation and establish FanarGuard as a practical step toward more context-sensitive safeguards.

Discovering effective predictive signals, or ``alphas,'' from financial data with high dimensionality and extremely low signal-to-noise ratio remains a difficult open problem. Despite progress in deep learning, genetic programming, and, more recently, large language model (LLM)--based factor generation, existing approaches still explore only a narrow region of the vast alpha search space. Neural models tend to produce opaque and fragile patterns, while symbolic or formula-based methods often yield redundant or economically ungrounded expressions that generalize poorly. Although different in form, these paradigms share a key limitation: none can conduct broad, structured, and human-like exploration that balances logical consistency with creative leaps. To address this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Alpha Mining Framework (CogAlpha), which combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. Treating LLMs as adaptive cognitive agents, our framework iteratively refines, mutates, and recombines alpha candidates through multi-stage prompts and financial feedback. This synergistic design enables deeper thinking, richer structural diversity, and economically interpretable alpha discovery, while greatly expanding the effective search space. Experiments on A-share equities demonstrate that CogAlpha consistently discovers alphas with superior predictive accuracy, robustness, and generalization over existing methods. Our results highlight the promise of aligning evolutionary optimization with LLM-based reasoning for automated and explainable alpha discovery. All source code will be released.

Text summarization is the task of automatically condensing longer texts into shorter, coherent summaries while preserving the original meaning and key information. Although this task has been extensively studied in English and other high-resource languages, Czech summarization, particularly in the context of historical documents, remains underexplored. This is largely due to the inherent linguistic complexity of Czech and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets. In this work, we address this gap by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Mistral and mT5, which have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and multilingual settings. In addition, we also propose a translation-based approach that first translates Czech texts into English, summarizes them using an English-language model, and then translates the summaries back into Czech. Our study makes the following main contributions: We demonstrate that LLMs achieve new state-of-the-art results on the SumeCzech dataset, a benchmark for modern Czech text summarization, showing the effectiveness of multilingual LLMs even for morphologically rich, medium-resource languages like Czech. We introduce a new dataset, Posel od Čerchova, designed for the summarization of historical Czech texts. This dataset is derived from digitized 19th-century publications and annotated for abstractive summarization. We provide initial baselines using modern LLMs to facilitate further research in this underrepresented area. By combining cutting-edge models with both modern and historical Czech datasets, our work lays the foundation for further progress in Czech summarization and contributes valuable resources for future research in Czech historical document processing and low-resource summarization more broadly.

Personalized federated learning (PFL) possesses the unique capability of preserving data confidentiality among clients while tackling the data heterogeneity problem of non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data. Its advantages have led to widespread adoption in domains such as medical image segmentation. However, the existing approaches mostly overlook the potential benefits of leveraging shared features across clients, where each client contains segmentation data of different organs. In this work, we introduce a novel personalized federated approach for organ agnostic tumor segmentation (FedOAP), that utilizes cross-attention to model long-range dependencies among the shared features of different clients and a boundary-aware loss to improve segmentation consistency. FedOAP employs a decoupled cross-attention (DCA), which enables each client to retain local queries while attending to globally shared key-value pairs aggregated from all clients, thereby capturing long-range inter-organ feature dependencies. Additionally, we introduce perturbed boundary loss (PBL) which focuses on the inconsistencies of the predicted mask's boundary for each client, forcing the model to localize the margins more precisely. We evaluate FedOAP on diverse tumor segmentation tasks spanning different organs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedOAP consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art federated and personalized segmentation methods.

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) faces persistent challenges, including domain heterogeneity from diverse client data, data imbalance due to skewed participation, and strict communication constraints. Traditional federated learning often lacks personalization, as a single global model cannot capture client-specific characteristics, leading to biased predictions and poor generalization, especially for clients with highly divergent data distributions. To address these issues, we propose FedSTAR, a style-aware federated learning framework that disentangles client-specific style factors from shared content representations. FedSTAR aggregates class-wise prototypes using a Transformer-based attention mechanism, allowing the server to adaptively weight client contributions while preserving personalization. Furthermore, by exchanging compact prototypes and style vectors instead of full model parameters, FedSTAR significantly reduces communication overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that combining content-style disentanglement with attention-driven prototype aggregation improves personalization and robustness in heterogeneous environments without increasing communication cost.

The adaptation of teaching slides to instructors' situated teaching needs, including pedagogical styles and their students' context, is a critical yet time-consuming task for educators. Through a series of educator interviews, we first identify and systematically categorize the key friction points that impede this adaptation process. Grounded in these findings, we introduce a novel multi-agent framework designed to automate slide adaptation based on high-level instructor specifications. An evaluation involving 16 modification requests across 8 real-world courses validates our approach. The framework's output consistently achieved high scores in intent alignment, content coherence and factual accuracy, and performed on par with baseline methods regarding visual clarity, while also demonstrating appropriate timeliness and a high operational agreement with human experts, achieving an F1 score of 0.89. This work heralds a new paradigm where AI agents handle the logistical burdens of instructional design, liberating educators to focus on the creative and strategic aspects of teaching.

Abstract--The utility of deep learning models, such as CheXNet, in high stakes clinical settings is fundamentally constrained by their purely deterministic nature, failing to provide reliable measures of predictive confidence. Initial architectural development failed to stabilize performance and calibration using Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD), yielding an unacceptable Expected Calibration Error (ECE) of 0.7588. This technical failure necessitated a rigorous architectural pivot to a high diversity, 9-member Deep Ensemble (DE). This resulting DE successfully stabilized performance and delivered superior reliability, achieving a State-of-the-Art (SOT A) average Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) of 0.8559 and an average F1 Score of 0.3857. Crucially, the DE demonstrated superior calibration (Mean ECE of 0.0728 and Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) of 0.1916) and enabled the reliable decomposition of total uncertainty into its Aleatoric (irreducible data noise) and Epistemic (reducible model knowledge) components, with a mean Epistemic Uncertainty (EU) of 0.0240. These results establish the Deep Ensemble as a trustworthy and explainable platform, transforming the model from a probabilistic tool into a reliable clinical decision support system. Deep learning has achieved remarkable diagnostic accuracy in medical imaging, exemplified by the CheXNet model, which reached radiologist-level performance for pneumonia detection and classification across 14 thoracic pathologies.

With the success of flow matching in visual generation, sampling efficiency remains a critical bottleneck for its practical application. Among flow models' accelerating methods, ReFlow has been somehow overlooked although it has theoretical consistency with flow matching. This is primarily due to its suboptimal performance in practical scenarios compared to consistency distillation and score distillation. In this work, we investigate this issue within the ReFlow framework and propose FlowSteer, a method unlocks the potential of ReFlow-based distillation by guiding the student along teacher's authentic generation trajectories. We first identify that Piecewised ReFlow's performance is hampered by a critical distribution mismatch during the training and propose Online Trajectory Alignment(OTA) to resolve it. Then, we introduce a adversarial distillation objective applied directly on the ODE trajectory, improving the student's adherence to the teacher's generation trajectory. Furthermore, we find and fix a previously undiscovered flaw in the widely-used FlowMatchEulerDiscreteScheduler that largely degrades few-step inference quality. Our experiment result on SD3 demonstrates our method's efficacy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face information overload when handling long contexts, particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where extensive supporting documents often introduce redundant content. This issue not only weakens reasoning accuracy but also increases computational overhead. We propose an unsupervised context compression framework that exploits Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to preserve semantically essential information while filtering out irrelevant text. By quantifying node-level entropy within AMR graphs, our method estimates the conceptual importance of each node, enabling the retention of core semantics. Specifically, we construct AMR graphs from raw contexts, compute the conceptual entropy of each node, and screen significant informative nodes to form a condensed and semantically focused context than raw documents. Experiments on the PopQA and EntityQuestions datasets show that our method outperforms vanilla and other baselines, achieving higher accuracy while substantially reducing context length. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work introducing AMR-based conceptual entropy for context compression, demonstrating the potential of stable linguistic features in context engineering.

We propose a dual input neural network strategy that separates event and sequence attributes, using a duration-aware pseudo-embedding matrix to transform temporal importance into compact, learnable representations. This design is implemented across two baseline families: B-LSTM and B-GCN, and their duration-aware variants D-LSTM and D-GCN. All models incorporate self-tuned hypermodels for adaptive architecture selection. Experiments on balanced and imbalanced outcome prediction tasks show that duration pseudo-embedding inputs consistently improve generalization, reduce model complexity, and enhance interpretability. Our results demonstrate the benefits of explicit temporal encoding and provide a flexible design for robust, real-world PPM applications.