Intelligent analysis of medical imaging plays a crucial role in assisting clinical diagnosis, especially for identifying subtle pathological features. This paper introduces a novel multi-branch ConvNeXt architecture designed specifically for the nuanced challenges of medical image analysis. While applied here to the specific problem of COVID-19 diagnosis, the methodology offers a generalizable framework for classifying a wide range of pathologies from CT scans. The proposed model incorporates a rigorous end-to-end pipeline, from meticulous data preprocessing and augmentation to a disciplined two-phase training strategy that leverages transfer learning effectively. The architecture uniquely integrates features extracted from three parallel branches: Global Average Pooling, Global Max Pooling, and a new Attention-weighted Pooling mechanism. The model was trained and validated on a combined dataset of 2,609 CT slices derived from two distinct datasets. Experimental results demonstrate a superior performance on the validation set, achieving a final ROC-AUC of 0.9937, a validation accuracy of 0.9757, and an F1-score of 0.9825 for COVID-19 cases, outperforming all previously reported models on this dataset. These findings indicate that a modern, multi-branch architecture, coupled with careful data handling, can achieve performance comparable to or exceeding contemporary state-of-the-art models, thereby proving the efficacy of advanced deep learning techniques for robust medical diagnostics.

The increasing influence of unstructured external information, such as news articles, on stock prices has attracted growing attention in financial markets. Despite recent advances, most existing newsbased forecasting models represent all articles using sentiment scores or average embeddings that capture the general tone but fail to provide quantitative, context-aware explanations of the impacts of public sentiment on predictions. To address this limitation, we propose an interpretable keyword-guided network (IKNet), which is an explainable forecasting framework that models the semantic association between individual news keywords and stock price movements. The IKNet identifies salient keywords via FinBERTbased contextual analysis, processes each embedding through a separate nonlinear projection layer, and integrates their representations with the time-series data of technical indicators to forecast next-day closing prices. By applying Shapley Additive Explanations the model generates quantifiable and interpretable attributions for the contribution of each keyword to predictions. Empirical evaluations of S&P 500 data from 2015 to 2024 demonstrate that IKNet outperforms baselines, including recurrent neural networks and transformer models, reducing RMSE by up to 32.9% and improving cumulative returns by 18.5%. Moreover, IKNet enhances transparency by offering contextualized explanations of volatility events driven by public sentiment.

Measuring the ideational content of populism remains a challenge. Traditional strategies based on textual analysis have been critical for building the field's foundations and providing a valid, objective indicator of populist framing. Yet these approaches are costly, time consuming, and difficult to scale across languages, contexts, and large corpora. Here we present the results from a rubric and anchor guided chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach that mirrors human coder training. By leveraging the Global Populism Database (GPD), a comprehensive dataset of global leaders' speeches annotated for degrees of populism, we replicate the process used to train human coders by prompting the LLM with an adapted version of the same documentation to guide the model's reasoning. We then test multiple proprietary and open weight models by replicating scores in the GPD. Our findings reveal that this domain specific prompting strategy enables the LLM to achieve classification accuracy on par with expert human coders, demonstrating its ability to navigate the nuanced, context sensitive aspects of populism.

Graphon models provide a flexible nonparametric framework for estimating latent connectivity probabilities in networks, enabling a range of downstream applications such as link prediction and data augmentation. However, accurate graphon estimation typically requires a large graph, whereas in practice, one often only observes a small-sized network. One approach to addressing this issue is to adopt a transfer learning framework, which aims to improve estimation in a small target graph by leveraging structural information from a larger, related source graph. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely GTRANS, a transfer learning framework that integrates neighborhood smoothing and Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport to align and transfer structural patterns between graphs. To prevent negative transfer, GTRANS includes an adaptive debiasing mechanism that identifies and corrects for target-specific deviations via residual smoothing. We provide theoretical guarantees on the stability of the estimated alignment matrix and demonstrate the effectiveness of GTRANS in improving the accuracy of target graph estimation through extensive synthetic and real data experiments. These improvements translate directly to enhanced performance in downstream applications, such as the graph classification task and the link prediction task.

AI-based talking-head videoconferencing systems reduce bandwidth by sending a compact pose-expression latent and re-synthesizing RGB at the receiver, but this latent can be puppeteered, letting an attacker hijack a victim's likeness in real time. Because every frame is synthetic, deepfake and synthetic video detectors fail outright. To address this security problem, we exploit a key observation: the pose-expression latent inherently contains biometric information of the driving identity. Therefore, we introduce the first biometric leakage defense without ever looking at the reconstructed RGB video: a pose-conditioned, large-margin contrastive encoder that isolates persistent identity cues inside the transmitted latent while cancelling transient pose and expression. A simple cosine test on this disentangled embedding flags illicit identity swaps as the video is rendered. Our experiments on multiple talking-head generation models show that our method consistently outperforms existing puppeteering defenses, operates in real-time, and shows strong generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.

Spine disorders affect 619 million people globally and are a leading cause of disability, yet AI-assisted diagnosis remains limited by the lack of level-aware, multimodal datasets. Clinical decision-making for spine disorders requires sophisticated reasoning across X-ray, CT, and MRI at specific vertebral levels. However, progress has been constrained by the absence of traceable, clinically-grounded instruction data and standardized, spine-specific benchmarks. To address this, we introduce SpineMed, an ecosystem co-designed with practicing spine surgeons. It features SpineMed-450k, the first large-scale dataset explicitly designed for vertebral-level reasoning across imaging modalities with over 450,000 instruction instances, and SpineBench, a clinically-grounded evaluation framework. SpineMed-450k is curated from diverse sources, including textbooks, guidelines, open datasets, and ~1,000 de-identified hospital cases, using a clinician-in-the-loop pipeline with a two-stage LLM generation method (draft and revision) to ensure high-quality, traceable data for question-answering, multi-turn consultations, and report generation. SpineBench evaluates models on clinically salient axes, including level identification, pathology assessment, and surgical planning. Our comprehensive evaluation of several recently advanced large vision-language models (LVLMs) on SpineBench reveals systematic weaknesses in fine-grained, level-specific reasoning. In contrast, our model fine-tuned on SpineMed-450k demonstrates consistent and significant improvements across all tasks. Clinician assessments confirm the diagnostic clarity and practical utility of our model's outputs.

Recent progress in speech processing has highlighted that high-quality performance across languages requires substantial training data for each individual language. While existing multilingual datasets cover many languages, they often contain insufficient data for most languages. Thus, trained models perform poorly on the majority of the supported languages. Our work addresses this challenge by introducing a scalable pipeline for constructing speech datasets from parliamentary recordings. The proposed pipeline includes robust components for media retrieval and a two-stage alignment algorithm designed to handle non-verbatim transcripts and long-form audio. Applying this pipeline to recordings from 22 European parliaments, we extract over 61k hours of aligned speech segments, achieving substantial per-language coverage with 19 languages exceeding 1k hours and 22 languages exceeding 500 hours of high-quality speech data. We obtain an average 41.8\% reduction in word error rates over baselines when finetuning an existing ASR model on our dataset, demonstrating the usefulness of our approach.

Invasion team sports such as soccer produce a high-dimensional, strongly coupled state space as many players continuously interact on a shared field, challenging quantitative tactical analysis. Traditional rule-based analyses are intuitive, while modern predictive machine learning models often perform pattern-matching without explicit agent representations. The problem we address is how to build player-level agent models from data, whose learned values and policies are both tactically interpretable and robust across heterogeneous data sources. Here, we propose Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS), a semantically enriched state representation that augments raw positions and velocities with relational variables (e.g., scoring of space, pass, and score), combined with an action-masking scheme that gives on-ball and off-ball agents distinct decision sets. Compared to prior work, EDMS maps learned value functions and action policies to human-interpretable tactical concepts (e.g., marking pressure, passing lanes, ball accessibility) instead of raw coordinate features, and aligns agent choices with the rules of play. In the experiments, EDMS with action masking consistently reduced both action-prediction loss and temporal-difference (TD) error compared to the baseline. Qualitative case studies and Q-value visualizations further indicate that EDMS highlights high-risk, high-reward tactical patterns (e.g., fast counterattacks and defensive breakthroughs). We also integrated our approach into an open-source library and demonstrated compatibility with multiple commercial and open datasets, enabling cross-provider evaluation and reproducible experiments.

The social science of large language models (LLMs) examines how these systems evoke mind attributions, interact with one another, and transform human activity and institutions. We conducted a systematic review of 270 studies, combining text embeddings, unsupervised clustering and topic modeling to build a computational taxonomy. Three domains emerge organically across the reviewed literature. LLM as Social Minds examines whether and when models display behaviors that elicit attributions of cognition, morality and bias, while addressing challenges such as test leakage and surface cues. LLM Societies examines multi-agent settings where interaction protocols, architectures and mechanism design shape coordination, norms, institutions and collective epistemic processes. LLM-Human Interactions examines how LLMs reshape tasks, learning, trust, work and governance, and how risks arise at the human-AI interface. This taxonomy provides a reproducible map of a fragmented field, clarifies evidentiary standards across levels of analysis, and highlights opportunities for cumulative progress in the social science of artificial intelligence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with multimodal capabilities have revolutionized vision-language tasks, but their deployment often requires huge memory and computational resources. While post-training quantization (PTQ) has successfully compressed language models to as low as 1-bit precision without significant performance loss, its effectiveness for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present the first study on ultra-low bit (<4-bit) quantization for multimodal LLMs. Our analysis reveals that multimodal tokens and intermediate layer activations produced by them exhibit significantly higher statistical variance and entropy compared to text tokens, making them less tolerant to ultra-low bit quantization. However, the activation distributions of multimodal tokens varies significantly over different layers, with some layers having lower entropy activation distributions. We empirically show that such layers in these models can better tolerate ultra-low bit quantization. Building on these insights, we propose a novel strategy for MLLM quantization, LUQ: Layerwise Ultra-Low Bit Quantization, which selectively applies ultra-low bit quantization to layers that are more resilient to it. Additionally, we also show that using a mix of multimodal tokens (image and text) for PTQ boosts VQA performance in the ultra-low bit regime. We evaluate our method on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-2.5-VL across 9 popular VQA benchmarks. The resulting LUQ models use 40% and 31% less memory than their 4-bit counterparts, respectively, while exhibiting a performance degradation of less than 10% on the MME benchmark.