Industry
Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning for Privacy-Preserving Robotic-Assisted Surgery
Hafeez, Sana, Mulkana, Sundas Rafat, Imran, Muhammad Ali, Sevegnani, Michele
The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) into robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) holds significant promise for advancing surgical precision, adaptability, and autonomous decision-making. However, the development of robust RL models in clinical settings is hindered by key challenges, including stringent patient data privacy regulations, limited access to diverse surgical datasets, and high procedural variability. To address these limitations, this paper presents a Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL) framework that enables decentralized training of RL models across multiple healthcare institutions without exposing sensitive patient information. A central innovation of the proposed framework is its dynamic policy adaptation mechanism, which allows surgical robots to select and tailor patient-specific policies in real-time, thereby ensuring personalized and Optimised interventions. To uphold rigorous privacy standards while facilitating collaborative learning, the FDRL framework incorporates secure aggregation, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption techniques. Experimental results demonstrate a 60\% reduction in privacy leakage compared to conventional methods, with surgical precision maintained within a 1.5\% margin of a centralized baseline. This work establishes a foundational approach for adaptive, secure, and patient-centric AI-driven surgical robotics, offering a pathway toward clinical translation and scalable deployment across diverse healthcare environments.
Fault Diagnosis across Heterogeneous Domains via Self-Adaptive Temporal-Spatial Attention and Sample Generation
Li, Guangqiang, Atoui, M. Amine, Li, Xiangshun
Deep learning methods have shown promising performance in fault diagnosis for multimode process. Most existing studies assume that the collected health state categories from different operating modes are identical. However, in real industrial scenarios, these categories typically exhibit only partial overlap. The incompleteness of the available data and the large distributional differences between the operating modes pose a significant challenge to existing fault diagnosis methods. To address this problem, a novel fault diagnosis model named self-adaptive temporal-spatial attention network (TSA-SAN) is proposed. First, inter-mode mappings are constructed using healthy category data to generate multimode samples. To enrich the diversity of the fault data, interpolation is performed between healthy and fault samples. Subsequently, the fault diagnosis model is trained using real and generated data. The self-adaptive instance normalization is established to suppress irrelevant information while retaining essential statistical features for diagnosis. In addition, a temporal-spatial attention mechanism is constructed to focus on the key features, thus enhancing the generalization ability of the model. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available on Github at https://github.com/GuangqiangLi/TSA-SAN.
Who You Are Matters: Bridging Topics and Social Roles via LLM-Enhanced Logical Recommendation
Yu, Qing, Wang, Xiaobei, Liu, Shuchang, Bai, Yandong, Yang, Xiaoyu, Wang, Xueliang, Meng, Chang, Wu, Shanshan, Yang, Hailan, Xiao, Huihui, Li, Xiang, Yang, Fan, Feng, Xiaoqiang, Hu, Lantao, Li, Han, Gai, Kun, Zou, Lixin
Recommender systems filter contents/items valuable to users by inferring preferences from user features and historical behaviors. Mainstream approaches follow the learning-to-rank paradigm, which focus on discovering and modeling item topics (e.g., categories), and capturing user preferences on these topics based on historical interactions. However, this paradigm often neglects the modeling of user characteristics and their social roles, which are logical confounders influencing the correlated interest and user preference transition. To bridge this gap, we introduce the user role identification task and the behavioral logic modeling task that aim to explicitly model user roles and learn the logical relations between item topics and user social roles. We show that it is possible to explicitly solve these tasks through an efficient integration framework of Large Language Model (LLM) and recommendation systems, for which we propose TagCF. On the one hand, TagCF exploits the (Multi-modal) LLM's world knowledge and logic inference ability to extract realistic tag-based virtual logic graphs that reveal dynamic and expressive knowledge of users, refining our understanding of user behaviors. On the other hand, TagCF presents empirically effective integration modules that take advantage of the extracted tag-logic information, augmenting the recommendation performance. We conduct both online experiments and offline experiments with industrial and public datasets as verification of TagCF's effectiveness, and we empirically show that the user role modeling strategy is potentially a better choice than the modeling of item topics. Additionally, we provide evidence that the extracted logic graphs are empirically a general and transferable knowledge that can benefit a wide range of recommendation tasks. Our code is available in https://github.com/Code2Q/TagCF.
Creativity or Brute Force? Using Brainteasers as a Window into the Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models
Han, Simeng, Dai, Howard, Xia, Stephen, Zhang, Grant, Liu, Chen, Chen, Lichang, Nguyen, Hoang Huy, Mei, Hongyuan, Mao, Jiayuan, McCoy, R. Thomas
Accuracy remains a standard metric for evaluating AI systems, but it offers limited insight into how models arrive at their solutions. In this work, we introduce a benchmark based on brainteasers written in long narrative form to probe more deeply into the types of reasoning strategies that models use. Brainteasers are well-suited for this goal because they can be solved with multiple approaches, such as a few-step solution that uses a creative insight or a longer solution that uses more brute force. We investigate large language models (LLMs) across multiple layers of reasoning, focusing not only on correctness but also on the quality and creativity of their solutions. We investigate many aspects of the reasoning process: (1) semantic parsing of the brainteasers into precise mathematical competition style formats; (2) generating solutions from these mathematical forms; (3) self-correcting solutions based on gold solutions; (4) producing step-by-step sketches of solutions; and (5) making use of hints. We find that LLMs are in many cases able to find creative, insightful solutions to brainteasers, suggesting that they capture some of the capacities needed to solve novel problems in creative ways. Nonetheless, there also remain situations where they rely on brute force despite the availability of more efficient, creative solutions, highlighting a potential direction for improvement in the reasoning abilities of LLMs.
Which Demographic Features Are Relevant for Individual Fairness Evaluation of U.S. Recidivism Risk Assessment Tools?
Nguyen, Tin Trung, Xu, Jiannan, Nguyen-Le, Phuong-Anh, Lazar, Jonathan, Braman, Donald, Daumé, Hal III, Jelveh, Zubin
Despite its constitutional relevance, the technical ``individual fairness'' criterion has not been operationalized in U.S. state or federal statutes/regulations. We conduct a human subjects experiment to address this gap, evaluating which demographic features are relevant for individual fairness evaluation of recidivism risk assessment (RRA) tools. Our analyses conclude that the individual similarity function should consider age and sex, but it should ignore race.
Plexus: Taming Billion-edge Graphs with 3D Parallel Full-graph GNN Training
Ranjan, Aditya K., Singh, Siddharth, Wei, Cunyang, Bhatele, Abhinav
Graph neural networks (GNNs) leverage the connectivity and structure of real-world graphs to learn intricate properties and relationships between nodes. Many real-world graphs exceed the memory capacity of a GPU due to their sheer size, and training GNNs on such graphs requires techniques such as mini-batch sampling to scale. The alternative approach of distributed full-graph training suffers from high communication overheads and load imbalance due to the irregular structure of graphs. We propose a three-dimensional (3D) parallel approach for full-graph training that tackles these issues and scales to billion-edge graphs. In addition, we introduce optimizations such as a double permutation scheme for load balancing, and a performance model to predict the optimal 3D configuration of our parallel implementation -- Plexus. We evaluate Plexus on six different graph datasets and show scaling results on up to 2048 GPUs of Perlmutter, and 1024 GPUs of Frontier. Plexus achieves unprecedented speedups of 2.3-12.5x over prior state of the art, and a reduction in time-to-solution by 5.2-8.7x on Perlmutter and 7.0-54.2x on Frontier.
MDPs with a State Sensing Cost
Kapoor, Vansh, Nair, Jayakrishnan
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component of deciding when to sense the state, in a manner that balances the value associated with optimal (state-specific) actions and the cost of sensing. We formulate this as an expected discounted cost Markov Decision Process (MDP), wherein the agent incurs an additional cost for sensing its next state, but has the option to take actions while remaining `blind' to the system state. We pose this problem as a classical discounted cost MDP with an expanded (countably infinite) state space. While computing the optimal policy for this MDP is intractable in general, we derive lower bounds on the optimal value function, which allow us to bound the suboptimality gap of any policy. We also propose a computationally efficient algorithm SPI, based on policy improvement, which in practice performs close to the optimal policy. Finally, we benchmark against the state-of-the-art via a numerical case study.
OmegAMP: Targeted AMP Discovery through Biologically Informed Generation
Soares, Diogo, Hetzel, Leon, Szymczak, Paulina, Torres, Marcelo Der Torossian, Sommer, Johanna, de la Fuente-Nunez, Cesar, Theis, Fabian, Günnemann, Stephan, Szczurek, Ewa
Deep learning-based antimicrobial peptide (AMP) discovery faces critical challenges such as limited controllability, lack of representations that efficiently model antimicrobial properties, and low experimental hit rates. To address these challenges, we introduce OmegAMP, a framework designed for reliable AMP generation with increased controllability. Its diffusion-based generative model leverages a novel conditioning mechanism to achieve fine-grained control over desired physicochemical properties and to direct generation towards specific activity profiles, including species-specific effectiveness. This is further enhanced by a biologically informed encoding space that significantly improves overall generative performance. Complementing these generative capabilities, OmegAMP leverages a novel synthetic data augmentation strategy to train classifiers for AMP filtering, drastically reducing false positive rates and thereby increasing the likelihood of experimental success. Our in silico experiments demonstrate that OmegAMP delivers state-of-the-art performance across key stages of the AMP discovery pipeline, enabling us to achieve an unprecedented success rate in wet lab experiments. We tested 25 candidate peptides, 24 of them (96%) demonstrated antimicrobial activity, proving effective even against multi-drug resistant strains. Our findings underscore OmegAMP's potential to significantly advance computational frameworks in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.
Re-evaluating sample efficiency in de novo molecule generation
Thomas, Morgan, O'Boyle, Noel M., Bender, Andreas, De Graaf, Chris
De novo molecule generation can suffer from data inefficiency; requiring large amounts of training data or many sampled data points to conduct objective optimization. The latter is a particular disadvantage when combining deep generative models with computationally expensive molecule scoring functions (a.k.a. oracles) commonly used in computer-aided drug design. Recent works have therefore focused on methods to improve sample efficiency in the context of de novo molecule drug design, or to benchmark it. In this work, we discuss and adapt a recent sample efficiency benchmark to better reflect realistic goals also with respect to the quality of chemistry generated, which must always be considered in the context of small-molecule drug design; we then re-evaluate all benchmarked generative models. We find that accounting for molecular weight and LogP with respect to the training data, and the diversity of chemistry proposed, re-orders the ranking of generative models. In addition, we benchmark a recently proposed method to improve sample efficiency (Augmented Hill-Climb) and found it ranked top when considering both the sample efficiency and chemistry of molecules generated. Continual improvements in sample efficiency and chemical desirability enable more routine integration of computationally expensive scoring functions on a more realistic timescale.
Gaperon: A Peppered English-French Generative Language Model Suite
Godey, Nathan, Antoun, Wissam, Touchent, Rian, Bawden, Rachel, de la Clergerie, Éric, Sagot, Benoît, Seddah, Djamé
We release Gaperon, a fully open suite of French-English-coding language models designed to advance transparency and reproducibility in large-scale model training. The Gaperon family includes 1.5B, 8B, and 24B parameter models trained on 2-4 trillion tokens, released with all elements of the training pipeline: French and English datasets filtered with a neural quality classifier, an efficient data curation and training framework, and hundreds of intermediate checkpoints. Through this work, we study how data filtering and contamination interact to shape both benchmark and generative performance. We find that filtering for linguistic quality enhances text fluency and coherence but yields subpar benchmark results, and that late deliberate contamination -- continuing training on data mixes that include test sets -- recovers competitive scores while only reasonably harming generation quality. We discuss how usual neural filtering can unintentionally amplify benchmark leakage. To support further research, we also introduce harmless data poisoning during pretraining, providing a realistic testbed for safety studies. By openly releasing all models, datasets, code, and checkpoints, Gaperon establishes a reproducible foundation for exploring the trade-offs between data curation, evaluation, safety, and openness in multilingual language model development.