Industry
Flows, straight but not so fast: Exploring the design space of Rectified Flows in Protein Design
Chen, Junhua, Mathis, Simon, Harris, Charles, Didi, Kieran, Lio, Pietro
Generative modeling techniques such as Diffusion and Flow Matching have achieved significant successes in generating designable and diverse protein backbones. However, many current models are computationally expensive, requiring hundreds or even thousands of function evaluations (NFEs) to yield samples of acceptable quality, which can become a bottleneck in practical design campaigns that often generate $10^4\ -\ 10^6$ designs per target. In image generation, Rectified Flows (ReFlow) can significantly reduce the required NFEs for a given target quality, but their application in protein backbone generation has been less studied. We apply ReFlow to improve the low NFE performance of pretrained SE(3) flow matching models for protein backbone generation and systematically study ReFlow design choices in the context of protein generation in data curation, training and inference time settings. In particular, we (1) show that ReFlow in the protein domain is particularly sensitive to the choice of coupling generation and annealing, (2) demonstrate how useful design choices for ReFlow in the image domain do not directly translate to better performance on proteins, and (3) make improvements to ReFlow methodology for proteins.
Beyond Models: A Framework for Contextual and Cultural Intelligence in African AI Deployment
While global AI development prioritizes model performance and computational scale, meaningful deployment in African markets requires fundamentally different architectural decisions. This paper introduces Contextual and Cultural Intelligence (CCI) -- a systematic framework enabling AI systems to process cultural meaning, not just data patterns, through locally relevant, emotionally intelligent, and economically inclusive design. Using design science methodology, we validate CCI through a production AI-native cross-border shopping platform serving diaspora communities. Key empirical findings: 89% of users prefer WhatsApp-based AI interaction over traditional web interfaces (n=602, chi-square=365.8, p<0.001), achieving 536 WhatsApp users and 3,938 total conversations across 602 unique users in just 6 weeks, and culturally informed prompt engineering demonstrates sophisticated understanding of culturally contextualized queries, with 89% family-focused commerce patterns and natural code-switching acceptance. The CCI framework operationalizes three technical pillars: Infrastructure Intelligence (mobile-first, resilient architectures), Cultural Intelligence (multilingual NLP with social context awareness), and Commercial Intelligence (trust-based conversational commerce). This work contributes both theoretical innovation and reproducible implementation patterns, challenging Silicon Valley design orthodoxies while providing actionable frameworks for equitable AI deployment across resource-constrained markets.
AmarDoctor: An AI-Driven, Multilingual, Voice-Interactive Digital Health Application for Primary Care Triage and Patient Management to Bridge the Digital Health Divide for Bengali Speakers
Nahar, Nazmun, Ruparel, Ritesh Harshad, Kabir, Shariar, Khan, Sumaiya Tasnia, Saha, Shyamasree, Rashid, Mamunur
This study presents AmarDoctor, a multilingual voice-interactive digital health app designed to provide comprehensive patient triage and AI-driven clinical decision support for Bengali speakers, a population largely underserved in access to digital healthcare. AmarDoctor adopts a data-driven approach to strengthen primary care delivery and enable personalized health management. While platforms such as AdaHealth, WebMD, Symptomate, and K-Health have become popular in recent years, they mainly serve European demographics and languages. AmarDoctor addresses this gap with a dual-interface system for both patients and healthcare providers, supporting three major Bengali dialects. At its core, the patient module uses an adaptive questioning algorithm to assess symptoms and guide users toward the appropriate specialist. To overcome digital literacy barriers, it integrates a voice-interactive AI assistant that navigates users through the app services. Complementing this, the clinician-facing interface incorporates AI-powered decision support that enhances workflow efficiency by generating structured provisional diagnoses and treatment recommendations. These outputs inform key services such as e-prescriptions, video consultations, and medical record management. To validate clinical accuracy, the system was evaluated against a gold-standard set of 185 clinical vignettes developed by experienced physicians. Effectiveness was further assessed by comparing AmarDoctor performance with five independent physicians using the same vignette set. Results showed AmarDoctor achieved a top-1 diagnostic precision of 81.08 percent (versus physicians average of 50.27 percent) and a top specialty recommendation precision of 91.35 percent (versus physicians average of 62.6 percent).
The Epistemic Suite: A Post-Foundational Diagnostic Methodology for Assessing AI Knowledge Claims
Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent, plausible text that can mislead users into mistaking simulated coherence for genuine understanding. This paper introduces the Epistemic Suite, a post-foundational diagnostic methodology for surfacing the epistemic conditions under which AI outputs are produced and received. Rather than determining truth or falsity, the Suite operates through twenty diagnostic lenses, applied by practitioners as context warrants, to reveal patterns such as confidence laundering, narrative compression, displaced authority, and temporal drift. It is grounded in three design principles: diagnosing production before evaluating claims, preferring diagnostic traction over foundational settlement, and embedding reflexivity as a structural requirement rather than an ethical ornament. When enacted, the Suite shifts language models into a diagnostic stance, producing inspectable artifacts-flags, annotations, contradiction maps, and suspension logs (the FACS bundle)-that create an intermediary layer between AI output and human judgment. A key innovation is epistemic suspension, a practitioner-enacted circuit breaker that halts continuation when warrant is exceeded, with resumption based on judgment rather than rule. The methodology also includes an Epistemic Triage Protocol and a Meta-Governance Layer to manage proportionality and link activation to relational accountability, consent, historical context, and pluralism safeguards. Unlike internalist approaches that embed alignment into model architectures (e.g., RLHF or epistemic-integrity proposals), the Suite operates externally as scaffolding, preserving expendability and refusal as safeguards rather than failures. It preserves the distinction between performance and understanding, enabling accountable deliberation while maintaining epistemic modesty.
Modelling the Interplay of Eye-Tracking Temporal Dynamics and Personality for Emotion Detection in Face-to-Face Settings
Seikavandi, Meisam J., Fimland, Jostein, Narcizo, Fabricio Batista, Barrett, Maria, Vucurevich, Ted, Boldt, Jesper Bรผnsow, Dittberner, Andrew Burke, Burelli, Paolo
Accurate recognition of human emotions is critical for adaptive human-computer interaction, yet remains challenging in dynamic, conversation-like settings. This work presents a personality-aware multimodal framework that integrates eye-tracking sequences, Big Five personality traits, and contextual stimulus cues to predict both perceived and felt emotions. Seventy-three participants viewed speech-containing clips from the CREMA-D dataset while providing eye-tracking signals, personality assessments, and emotion ratings. Our neural models captured temporal gaze dynamics and fused them with trait and stimulus information, yielding consistent gains over SVM and literature baselines. Results show that (i) stimulus cues strongly enhance perceived-emotion predictions (macro F1 up to 0.77), while (ii) personality traits provide the largest improvements for felt emotion recognition (macro F1 up to 0.58). These findings highlight the benefit of combining physiological, trait-level, and contextual information to address the inherent subjectivity of emotion. By distinguishing between perceived and felt responses, our approach advances multimodal affective computing and points toward more personalized and ecologically valid emotion-aware systems.
Pearl: A Foundation Model for Placing Every Atom in the Right Location
Genesis Research Team, null, Dobles, Alejandro, Jovic, Nina, Leidal, Kenneth, Murugan, Pranav, Williams, David C., Wulsin, Drausin, Gruver, Nate, Ji, Christina X., Pruegsanusak, Korrawat, Scarpellini, Gianluca, Sharma, Ansh, Swiderski, Wojciech, Bootsma, Andrea, Bowen, Richard Strong, Chen, Charlotte, Chen, Jamin, Dรคmgen, Marc Andrรฉ, DiFrancesco, Benjamin, Fishman, J. D., Ivanova, Alla, Kagin, Zach, Li-Bland, David, Liu, Zuli, Morozov, Igor, Ouyang-Zhang, Jeffrey, Pickard, Frank C. IV, Shah, Kushal S., Shor, Ben, da Silva, Gabriel Monteiro, Tal, Roy, Tessmer, Maxx, Tilbury, Carl, Vetcher, Cyr, Zeng, Daniel, Al-Shedivat, Maruan, Faust, Aleksandra, Feinberg, Evan N., LeVine, Michael V., Pan, Matteus
Accurately predicting the three-dimensional structures of protein-ligand complexes remains a fundamental challenge in computational drug discovery that limits the pace and success of therapeutic design. Deep learning methods have recently shown strong potential as structural prediction tools, achieving promising accuracy across diverse biomolecular systems. However, their performance and utility are constrained by scarce experimental data, inefficient architectures, physically invalid poses, and the limited ability to exploit auxiliary information available at inference. To address these issues, we introduce Pearl (Placing Every Atom in the Right Location), a foundation model for protein-ligand cofolding at scale. Pearl addresses these challenges with three key innovations: (1) training recipes that include large-scale synthetic data to overcome data scarcity; (2) architectures that incorporate an SO(3)-equivariant diffusion module to inherently respect 3D rotational symmetries, improving generalization and sample efficiency, and (3) controllable inference, including a generalized multi-chain templating system supporting both protein and non-polymeric components as well as dual unconditional/conditional modes. Pearl establishes a new state-of-the-art performance in protein-ligand cofolding. On the key metric of generating accurate (RMSD < 2 ร ) and physically valid poses, Pearl surpasses AlphaFold 3 and other open source baselines on the public Runs N' Poses and PoseBusters benchmarks, delivering 14.5% and 14.2% improvements, respectively, over the next best model. In the pocket-conditional cofolding regime, Pearl delivers $3.6\times$ improvement on a proprietary set of challenging, real-world drug targets at the more rigorous RMSD < 1 ร threshold. Finally, we demonstrate that model performance correlates directly with synthetic dataset size used in training.
VDSAgents: A PCS-Guided Multi-Agent System for Veridical Data Science Automation
Jiang, Yunxuan, Hu, Silan, Wang, Xiaoning, Zhang, Yuanyuan, Chang, Xiangyu
Large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into data science workflows for automated system design. However, these LLM-driven data science systems rely solely on the internal reasoning of LLMs, lacking guidance from scientific and theoretical principles. This limits their trustworthiness and robustness, especially when dealing with noisy and complex real-world datasets. This paper provides VDSAgents, a multi-agent system grounded in the Predictability-Computability-Stability (PCS) principles proposed in the Veridical Data Science (VDS) framework. Guided by PCS principles, the system implements a modular workflow for data cleaning, feature engineering, modeling, and evaluation. Each phase is handled by an elegant agent, incorporating perturbation analysis, unit testing, and model validation to ensure both functionality and scientific auditability. We evaluate VDSAgents on nine datasets with diverse characteristics, comparing it with state-of-the-art end-to-end data science systems, such as AutoKaggle and DataInterpreter, using DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o as backends. VDSAgents consistently outperforms the results of AutoKaggle and DataInterpreter, which validates the feasibility of embedding PCS principles into LLM-driven data science automation.
NeuroPathNet: Dynamic Path Trajectory Learning for Brain Functional Connectivity Analysis
Guo, Tianqi, Chen, Liping, Peng, Ciyuan, Zhou, Jingjing, Ren, Jing
Understanding the evolution of brain functional networks over time is of great significance for the analysis of cognitive mechanisms and the diagnosis of neurological diseases. Existing methods often have difficulty in capturing the temporal evolution characteristics of connections between specific functional communities. To this end, this paper proposes a new path-level trajectory modeling framework (NeuroPathNet) to characterize the dynamic behavior of connection pathways between brain functional partitions. Based on medically supported static partitioning schemes (such as Yeo and Smith ICA), we extract the time series of connection strengths between each pair of functional partitions and model them using a temporal neural network. We validate the model performance on three public functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets, and the results show that it outperforms existing mainstream methods in multiple indicators. This study can promote the development of dynamic graph learning methods for brain network analysis, and provide possible clinical applications for the diagnosis of neurological diseases.
Group Interventions on Deep Networks for Causal Discovery in Subsystems
Ahmad, Wasim, Denzler, Joachim, Shadaydeh, Maha
Causal discovery uncovers complex relationships between variables, enhancing predictions, decision-making, and insights into real-world systems, especially in nonlinear multivariate time series. However, most existing methods primarily focus on pairwise cause-effect relationships, overlooking interactions among groups of variables, i.e., subsystems and their collective causal influence. In this study, we introduce gCDMI, a novel multi-group causal discovery method that leverages group-level interventions on trained deep neural networks and employs model invariance testing to infer causal relationships. Our approach involves three key steps. First, we use deep learning to jointly model the structural relationships among groups of all time series. Second, we apply group-wise interventions to the trained model. Finally, we conduct model invariance testing to determine the presence of causal links among variable groups. We evaluate our method on simulated datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in identifying group-level causal relationships compared to existing methods. Additionally, we validate our approach on real-world datasets, including brain networks and climate ecosystems. Our results highlight that applying group-level interventions to deep learning models, combined with invariance testing, can effectively reveal complex causal structures, offering valuable insights for domains such as neuroscience and climate science.
What Work is AI Actually Doing? Uncovering the Drivers of Generative AI Adoption
Agarwal, Peeyush, Agarwal, Harsh, Rana, Akshat
Purpose: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT, Claude AI, etc., has a deep impact on how work is done. Predicting how AI will reshape work requires understanding not just its capabilities, but how it is actually being adopted. This study investigates which intrinsic task characteristics drive users' decisions to delegate work to AI systems. Methodology: This study utilizes the Anthropic Economic Index dataset of four million Claude AI interactions mapped to O*NET tasks. We systematically scored each task across seven key dimensions: Routine, Cognitive, Social Intelligence, Creativity, Domain Knowledge, Complexity, and Decision Making using 35 parameters. We then employed multivariate techniques to identify latent task archetypes and analyzed their relationship with AI usage. Findings: Tasks requiring high creativity, complexity, and cognitive demand, but low routineness, attracted the most AI engagement. Furthermore, we identified three task archetypes: Dynamic Problem Solving, Procedural & Analytical Work, and Standardized Operational Tasks, demonstrating that AI applicability is best predicted by a combination of task characteristics, over individual factors. Our analysis revealed highly concentrated AI usage patterns, with just 5% of tasks accounting for 59% of all interactions. Originality: This research provides the first systematic evidence linking real-world generative AI usage to a comprehensive, multi-dimensional framework of intrinsic task characteristics. It introduces a data-driven classification of work archetypes that offers a new framework for analyzing the emerging human-AI division of labor.