Abstract--Recently, large models have shown significant potential for smart healthcare. However, the deployment of Large Vision-Language Models (L VLMs) for clinical services is currently hindered by three critical challenges: a tendency to hallucinate answers not grounded in visual evidence, the inefficiency of fixed-depth reasoning, and the difficulty of multi-institutional collaboration. T o address these challenges, in this paper, we develop MedAlign, a novel framework to ensure visually accurate L VLM responses for Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA). Specifically, we first propose a mul-timodal Direct Preference Optimization (mDPO) objective to explicitly align preference learning with visual context. T o achieve adaptive reasoning and facilitate multi-institutional collaboration, we propose a federated governance mechanism, where the selected expert, fine-tuned on clinical datasets based on mDPO, locally performs iterative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning via the local meta-cognitive uncertainty estimator . Extensive experiments on three representative Med-VQA datasets demonstrate that MedAlign achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong retrieval-augmented baselines by up to 11.85% in F1-score, and simultaneously reducing the average reasoning length by 51.60% compared with fixed-depth CoT approaches. Su, and S. Xie are with the School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China (e-mails: 3122000875@mail2.gdut.edu.cn, J. Wen is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China (e-mail: jinbo1608@nuaa.edu.cn). H. Pan and Z. Zhong are with State Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine Syndrome, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine, Guangdong Provincial Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Guangzhou, China, and Chinese Medicine Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, China (e-mails: hdpan@gzucm.edu.cn,

Molecular property prediction (MPP) is a cornerstone of drug discovery and materials science, yet conventional deep learning approaches depend on large labeled datasets that are often unavailable. Few-shot Molecular property prediction (FSMPP) addresses this scarcity by incorporating relational inductive bias through a context graph that links molecule nodes to property nodes, but such molecule-property graphs offer limited structural guidance. We propose a comprehensive solution: Motif Driven Global-Local Context Graph for few-shot molecular property prediction, which enriches contextual information at both the global and local levels. At the global level, chemically meaningful motif nodes representing shared substructures, such as rings or functional groups, are introduced to form a global tri-partite heterogeneous graph, yielding motif-molecule-property connections that capture long-range compositional patterns and enable knowledge transfer among molecules with common motifs. At the local level, we build a subgraph for each node in the molecule-property pair and encode them separately to concentrate the model's attention on the most informative neighboring molecules and motifs. Experiments on five standard FSMPP benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of integrating global motif knowledge with fine-grained local context to advance robust few-shot molecular property prediction.

Large language models are influencing the education landscape, with students relying on them in their learning process. Often implemented using general-purpose models, these systems are likely to give away the answers, which could hinder conceptual understanding and critical thinking. We study the role of automatic hint generation as a pedagogical strategy to promote active engagement with the learning content, while guiding learners toward the answers. Focusing on scientific topics at the secondary education level, we explore the potential of large language models to generate chains of hints that scaffold learners without revealing answers. We compare two distinct hinting strategies: static hints, pre-generated for each problem, and dynamic hints, adapted to learners' progress. Through a quantitative study with 41 participants, we uncover different preferences among learners with respect to hinting strategies, and identify the limitations of automatic evaluation metrics to capture them. Our findings highlight key design considerations for future research on hint generation and intelligent tutoring systems that seek to develop learner-centered educational technologies.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw data. However, gradient sharing still risks privacy leakage, such as gradient inversion attacks. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) can secure aggregation but often incurs prohibitive computational and communication overhead. Existing HE-based FL methods sit at two extremes: encrypting all gradients for full privacy at high cost, or partially encrypting gradients to save resources while exposing vulnerabilities. We present DictPFL, a practical framework that achieves full gradient protection with minimal overhead. DictPFL encrypts every transmitted gradient while keeping non-transmitted parameters local, preserving privacy without heavy computation. It introduces two key modules: Decompose-for-Partial-Encrypt (DePE), which decomposes model weights into a static dictionary and an updatable lookup table, only the latter is encrypted and aggregated, while the static dictionary remains local and requires neither sharing nor encryption; and Prune-for-Minimum-Encrypt (PrME), which applies encryption-aware pruning to minimize encrypted parameters via consistent, history-guided masks. Experiments show that DictPFL reduces communication cost by 402-748$\times$ and accelerates training by 28-65$\times$ compared to fully encrypted FL, while outperforming state-of-the-art selective encryption methods by 51-155$\times$ in overhead and 4-19$\times$ in speed. Remarkably, DictPFL's runtime is within 2$\times$ of plaintext FL, demonstrating for the first time, that HE-based private federated learning is practical for real-world deployment. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/DictPFL.

Applying complex legal rules characterized by multiple, heterogeneously weighted criteria presents a fundamental challenge in judicial decision-making, often hindering the consistent realization of legislative intent. This challenge is particularly evident in the quantification of non-pecuniary damages in personal injury cases. This paper introduces Soppia, a structured prompting framework designed to assist legal professionals in navigating this complexity. By leveraging advanced AI, the system ensures a comprehensive and balanced analysis of all stipulated criteria, fulfilling the legislator's intent that compensation be determined through a holistic assessment of each case. Using the twelve criteria for non-pecuniary damages established in the Brazilian CLT (Art. 223-G) as a case study, we demonstrate how Soppia (System for Ordered Proportional and Pondered Intelligent Assessment) operationalizes nuanced legal commands into a practical, replicable, and transparent methodology. The framework enhances consistency and predictability while providing a versatile and explainable tool adaptable across multi-criteria legal contexts, bridging normative interpretation and computational reasoning toward auditable legal AI.

Among many mysteries behind the success of deep networks lies the exceptional discriminative power of their learned representations as manifested by the intriguing Neural Collapse (NC) phenomenon, where simple feature structures emerge at the last layer of a trained neural network. Prior works on the theoretical understandings of NC have focused on analyzing the optimization landscape of matrix-factorization-like problems by considering the last-layer features as unconstrained free optimization variables and showing that their global minima exhibit NC. In this paper, we show that gradient flow on a two-layer ReLU network for classifying orthogonally separable data provably exhibits NC, thereby advancing prior results in two ways: First, we relax the assumption of unconstrained features, showing the effect of data structure and nonlinear activations on NC characterizations. Second, we reveal the role of the implicit bias of the training dynamics in facilitating the emergence of NC.

Abstract--Question Answering (QA) has seen significant improvements with the advancement of machine learning models, further studies enhanced this question answering system by retrieving external information, called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to produce more accurate and informative answers. However, these state-of-the-art-performance is predominantly in English language. T o address this gap we made an effort of bridging language gaps by incorporating Adaptive RAG system to Indonesian language. Adaptive RAG system integrates a classifier whose task is to distinguish the question complexity, which in turn determines the strategy for answering the question. T o overcome the limited availability of Indonesian language dataset, our study employs machine translation as data augmentation approach. Experiments show reliable question complexity classifier; however, we observed significant inconsistencies in multi-retrieval answering strategy which negatively impacted the overall evaluation when this strategy was applied. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown incredible performance for a lot of Natural Language tasks. However, despite the advancement of LLMs in all tasks in natural language processing, they still have problems answering questions that require a knowledge-intensive background, often resulting in hallucination answers [7]. LLMs often provide accurate answers when entities mentioned in the question are present in their training data. Furthermore, the performance of the models has a significant correlation with the entity popularity; less popular entities are often not answered accurately by LLMs [8]. Updating the LLM's knowledge frequently is not a good solution since the training of LLM with billions or even trillions of data from all over the internet takes too much time. In contrast, recent studies have demonstrated that augmenting non-parametric knowledge (information not contained in the model's training data) to the question-answering method commonly referred to as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) [9], even smaller models outperform larger models in terms of parameters [10].

We present a scalable machine learning framework for analyzing Parker Solar Probe (PSP) solar wind data using distributed processing and the quantum-inspired Kernel Density Matrices (KDM) method. The PSP dataset (2018--2024) exceeds 150 GB, challenging conventional analysis approaches. Our framework leverages Dask for large-scale statistical computations and KDM to estimate univariate and bivariate distributions of key solar wind parameters, including solar wind speed, proton density, and proton thermal speed, as well as anomaly thresholds for each parameter. We reveal characteristic trends in the inner heliosphere, including increasing solar wind speed with distance from the Sun, decreasing proton density, and the inverse relationship between speed and density. Solar wind structures play a critical role in enhancing and mediating extreme space weather phenomena and can trigger geomagnetic storms; our analyses provide quantitative insights into these processes. This approach offers a tractable, interpretable, and distributed methodology for exploring complex physical datasets and facilitates reproducible analysis of large-scale in situ measurements. Processed data products and analysis tools are made publicly available to advance future studies of solar wind dynamics and space weather forecasting. The code and configuration files used in this study are publicly available to support reproducibility.

Timely assessment of integrity of structures after seismic events is crucial for public safety and emergency response. This study focuses on assessing the structural damage conditions using deep learning methods to detect exposed steel reinforcement in concrete buildings and bridges after large earthquakes. Steel bars are typically exposed after concrete spalling or large flexural or shear cracks. The amount and distribution of exposed steel reinforcement is an indication of structural damage and degradation. To automatically detect exposed steel bars, new datasets of images collected after the 2023 Turkey Earthquakes were labeled to represent a wide variety of damaged concrete structures. The proposed method builds upon a deep learning framework, enhanced with fine-tuning, data augmentation, and testing on public datasets. An automated classification framework is developed that can be used to identify inside/outside buildings and structural components. Then, a YOLOv11 (You Only Look Once) model is trained to detect cracking and spalling damage and exposed bars. Another YOLO model is finetuned to distinguish different categories of structural damage levels. All these trained models are used to create a hybrid framework to automatically and reliably determine the damage levels from input images. This research demonstrates that rapid and automated damage detection following disasters is achievable across diverse damage contexts by utilizing image data collection, annotation, and deep learning approaches.

We study the online multi-class selection problem with group fairness guarantees, where limited resources must be allocated to sequentially arriving agents. Our work addresses two key limitations in the existing literature. First, we introduce a novel lossless rounding scheme that ensures the integral algorithm achieves the same expected performance as any fractional solution. Second, we explicitly address the challenges introduced by agents who belong to multiple classes. To this end, we develop a randomized algorithm based on a relax-and-round framework. The algorithm first computes a fractional solution using a resource reservation approach -- referred to as the set-aside mechanism -- to enforce fairness across classes. The subsequent rounding step preserves these fairness guarantees without degrading performance. Additionally, we propose a learning-augmented variant that incorporates untrusted machine-learned predictions to better balance fairness and efficiency in practical settings.