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Embracing Trustworthy Brain-Agent Collaboration as Paradigm Extension for Intelligent Assistive Technologies
However, their widespread adoption is hindered by critical limitations, such as low information transfer rates and extensive user-specific calibration. To overcome these challenges, recent research has explored the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), extending the focus from simple command decoding to understanding complex cognitive states.Despite these advancements, deploying agentic AI faces technical hurdles and ethical concerns.Due to the lack of comprehensive discussion on this emerging direction, this position paper argues that the field is poised for a paradigm extension from BCI to Brain-Agent Collaboration (BAC).We emphasize reframing agents as active and collaborative partners for intelligent assistance rather than passive brain signal data processors, demanding a focus on ethical data handling, model reliability, and a robust human-agent collaboration framework to ensure these systems are safe, trustworthy, and effective.
MedAgentBoard: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Collaboration with Conventional Methods for Diverse Medical Tasks
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has stimulated interest in multi-agent collaboration for addressing complex medical tasks. However, the practical advantages of multi-agent collaboration approaches remain insufficiently understood. Existing evaluations often lack generalizability, failing to cover diverse tasks reflective of real-world clinical practice, and frequently omit rigorous comparisons against both single-LLM-based and established conventional methods. To address this critical gap, we introduce MedAgentBoard, a comprehensive benchmark for the systematic evaluation of multi-agent collaboration, single-LLM, and conventional approaches. MedAgentBoard encompasses four diverse medical task categories: (1) medical (visual) question answering, (2) lay summary generation, (3) structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) predictive modeling, and (4) clinical workflow automation, across text, medical images, and structured EHR data. Our extensive experiments reveal a nuanced landscape: while multi-agent collaboration demonstrates benefits in specific scenarios, such as enhancing task completeness in clinical workflow automation, it does not consistently outperform advanced single LLMs (e.g., in textual medical QA) or, critically, specialized conventional methods that generally maintain better performance in tasks like medical VQA and EHR-based prediction. MedAgentBoard offers a vital resource and actionable insights, emphasizing the necessity of a task-specific, evidence-based approach to selecting and developing AI solutions in medicine. It underscores that the inherent complexity and overhead of multi-agent collaboration must be carefully weighed against tangible performance gains. All code, datasets, detailed prompts, and experimental results are open-sourced at this link .
Self-Supervised Discovery of Neural Circuits in Spatially Patterned Neural Responses with Graph Neural Networks
Inferring synaptic connectivity from neural population activity is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience, complicated by partial observability and mismatches between inference models and true circuit dynamics. In this study, we propose a graph-based neural inference model that simultaneously predicts neural activity and infers latent connectivity by modeling neurons as interacting nodes in a graph.
EvoBrain: Dynamic Multi-Channel EEG Graph Modeling for Time-Evolving Brain Networks
Dynamic GNNs, which integrate temporal and spatial features in Electroencephalography (EEG) data, have shown great potential in automating seizure detection. However, fully capturing the underlying dynamics necessary to represent brain states, such as seizure and non-seizure, remains a non-trivial task and presents two fundamental challenges. First, most existing dynamic GNN methods are built on temporally fixed static graphs, which fail to reflect the evolving nature of brain connectivity during seizure progression. Second, current efforts to jointly model temporal signals and graph structures and, more importantly, their interactions remain nascent, often resulting in inconsistent performance. To address these challenges, we present the first theoretical analysis of these two problems, demonstrating the effectiveness and necessity of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph dynamic GNN method. Building on these insights, we propose EvoBrain, a novel seizure detection model that integrates a two-stream Mamba architecture with a GCN enhanced by Laplacian Positional Encoding, following neurological insights. Moreover, EvoBrain incorporates explicitly dynamic graph structures, allowing both nodes and edges to evolve over time. Our contributions include (a) a theoretical analysis proving the expressivity advantage of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph over other approaches, (b) a novel and efficient model that significantly improves AUROC by 23\% and F1 score by 30\%, compared with the dynamic GNN baseline, and (c) broad evaluation of our method on the challenging early seizure prediction task.
Manipulating 3D Molecules in a Fixed-Dimensional E(3)-Equivariant Latent Space
Medicinal chemists often optimize drugs considering their 3D structures and designing structurally distinct molecules that retain key features, such as shapes, pharmacophores, or chemical properties. Previous deep learning approaches address this through supervised tasks like molecule inpainting or property-guided optimization. In this work, we propose a flexible zero-shot molecule manipulation method by navigating in a shared latent space of 3D molecules. We introduce a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) for 3D molecules, named MolFLAE, which learns a fixed-dimensional, E(3)-equivariant latent space independent of atom counts. MolFLAE encodes 3D molecules using an E(3)-equivariant neural network into fixed number of latent nodes, distinguished by learned embeddings. The latent space is regularized, and molecular structures are reconstructed via a Bayesian Flow Network (BFN) conditioned on the encoder's latent output. MolFLAE achieves competitive performance on standard unconditional 3D molecule generation benchmarks. Moreover, the latent space of MolFLAE enables zero-shot molecule manipulation, including atom number editing, structure reconstruction, and coordinated latent interpolation for both structure and properties. We further demonstrate our approach on a drug optimization task for the human glucocorticoid receptor, generating molecules with improved hydrophilicity while preserving key interactions, under computational evaluations.
EDBench: Large-Scale Electron Density Data for Molecular Modeling
Existing molecular machine learning force fields (MLFFs) generally focus on the learning of atoms, molecules, and simple quantum chemical properties (such as energy and force), but ignore the importance of electron density (ED) $\rho(r)$ in accurately understanding molecular force fields (MFFs). ED describes the probability of finding electrons at specific locations around atoms or molecules, which uniquely determines all ground state properties (such as energy, molecular structure, etc.) of interactive multi-particle systems according to the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem. However, the calculation of ED relies on the time-consuming first-principles density functional theory (DFT), which leads to the lack of large-scale ED data and limits its application in MLFFs. In this paper, we introduce EDBench, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of ED designed to advance learning-based research at the electronic scale. Built upon the PCQM4Mv2, EDBench provides accurate ED data, covering 3.3 million molecules. To comprehensively evaluate the ability of models to understand and utilize electronic information, we design a suite of ED-centric benchmark tasks spanning prediction, retrieval, and generation. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that learning from EDBench is not only feasible but also achieves high accuracy. Moreover, we show that learning-based methods can efficiently calculate ED with comparable precision while significantly reducing the computational cost relative to traditional DFT calculations. All data and benchmarks from EDBench will be freely available, laying a robust foundation for ED-driven drug discovery and materials science.
Setting \varepsilon is not the Issue in Differential Privacy
This position paper argues that setting the privacy budget in differential privacy should not be viewed as an important limitation of differential privacy compared to alternative methods for privacy-preserving machine learning. The so-called problem of interpreting the privacy budget is often presented as a major hindrance to the wider adoption of differential privacy in real-world deployments and is sometimes used to promote alternative mitigation techniques for data protection. We believe this misleads decision-makers into choosing unsafe methods. We argue that the difficulty in interpreting privacy budgets does not stem from the definition of differential privacy itself, but from the intrinsic difficulty of estimating privacy risks in context, a challenge that any rigorous method for privacy risk assessment face. Moreover, we claim that any sound method for estimating privacy risks should, given the current state of research, be expressible within the differential privacy framework or justify why it cannot.
Enhancing Privacy in Multimodal Federated Learning with Information Theory
Multimodal federated learning (MMFL) has gained increasing popularity due to its ability to leverage the correlation between various modalities, meanwhile preserving data privacy for different clients. However, recent studies show that correlation between modalities increase the vulnerability of federated learning against Gradient Inversion Attack (GIA). The complicated situation of MMFL privacy preserving can be summarized as follows: 1) different modality transmits different amounts of information, thus requires various protection strength; 2) correlation between modalities should be taken into account. This paper introduces an information theory perspective to analyze the leaked privacy in process of MMFL, and tries to propose a more reasonable protection method \textbf{Sec-MMFL} based on assessing different information leakage possibilities of each modality by conditional mutual information and adjust the corresponding protection strength. Moreover, we use mutual information to reduce the cross-modality information leakage in MMFL. Experiments have proven that our method can bring more balanced and comprehensive protection at an acceptable cost.
PF : A Benchmark Dataset for Power Flow under Load, Generation, and Topology Variations
Power flow (PF) calculations are the backbone of real-time grid operations, across workflows such as contingency analysis (where repeated PF evaluations assess grid security under outages) and topology optimization (which involves PF-based searches over combinatorially large action spaces). Running these calculations at operational timescales or across large evaluation spaces remains a major computational bottleneck. Additionally, growing uncertainty in power system operations from the integration of renewables and climate-induced extreme weather also calls for tools that can accurately and efficiently simulate a wide range of scenarios and operating conditions. Machine learning methods offer a potential speedup over traditional solvers, but their performance has not been systematically assessed on benchmarks that capture real-world variability. This paper introduces PF, a benchmark dataset for power flow that captures diverse variations in load, generation, and topology. PF contains 859,800 solved power flow instances spanning six different bus system sizes, capturing three types of contingency scenarios (N, N -1, and N -2), and including close-to-infeasible cases near steady-state voltage stability limits. We evaluate traditional solvers and GNN-based methods, highlighting key areas where existing approaches struggle, and identifying open problems for future research.
Towards Robust Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Federated Learning
Federated Learning enables collaborative training across decentralized edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models in federated learning is hampered by substantial communication overhead and client resource limitations. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduce resource demands but suffer from aggregation discrepancies and heightened vulnerability to label noise, particularly in heterogeneous federated settings. In this paper, we introduce RFedLR, a robust federated PEFT framework designed to overcome these challenges. RFedLR integrates two key components: (1) Sensitivity-aware robust tuning, which identifies and selectively updates noise-sensitive parameters to bolster local robustness against label noise, and (2) Adaptive federated LoRA aggregation, which dynamically weights and aggregates LoRA updates based on their importance and stability to minimize bias and noise propagation. Comprehensive experimental validation shows RFedLR outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and robustness in noisy federated scenarios.