Auxiliary Learning (AL) is a form of multi-task learning in which a model trains on auxiliary tasks to boost performance on a primary objective. While AL has improved generalization across domains such as navigation, image classification, and NLP, it often depends on human-labeled auxiliary tasks that are costly to design and require domain expertise. Meta-learning approaches mitigate this by learning to generate auxiliary tasks, but typically rely on gradient based bi-level optimization, adding substantial computational and implementation overhead. We propose RL-AUX, a reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that dynamically creates auxiliary tasks by assigning auxiliary labels to each training example, rewarding the agent whenever its selections improve the performance on the primary task. We also explore learning per-example weights for the auxiliary loss. On CIFAR-100 grouped into 20 superclasses, our RL method outperforms human-labeled auxiliary tasks and matches the performance of a prominent bi-level optimization baseline. We present similarly strong results on other classification datasets. These results suggest RL is a viable path to generating effective auxiliary tasks.

Abstract--Recent advancements in large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) are driving significant innovations in mobile edge computing within next-generation wireless networks. However, the substantial demands for computational resources and large-scale training data required to train LAMs conflict with the limited storage and computational capacity of edge devices, posing significant challenges to training and deploying LAMs at the edge. In this work, we introduce the Networked Mixture-of-Experts (NMoE) system, in which clients infer collaboratively by distributing tasks to suitable neighbors based on their expertise and aggregate the returned results. For training the NMoE, we propose a federated learning framework that integrates both supervised and self-supervised learning to balance per-sonalization and generalization, while preserving communication efficiency and data privacy. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed NMoE system, providing insights and benchmarks for the NMoE training algorithms. The recent wave of progress in large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) has triggered a variety of novel technologies, such as large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and artificial intelligence (AI) agents [1], which present exciting opportunities for next-generation wireless communications.

Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in medical image analysis, offering the potential to provide generalizable, task-agnostic solutions across a wide range of clinical tasks and imaging modalities. Their capacity to learn transferable representations from large-scale data has the potential to address the limitations of conventional task-specific models. However, adaptation of FMs to real-world clinical practice remains constrained by key challenges, including domain shifts, limited availability of high-quality annotated data, substantial computational demands, and strict privacy requirements. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of strategies for adapting FMs to the specific demands of medical imaging. We examine approaches such as supervised fine-tuning, domain-specific pretraining, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, self-supervised learning, hybrid methods, and multimodal or cross-modal frameworks. For each, we evaluate reported performance gains, clinical applicability, and limitations, while identifying trade-offs and unresolved challenges that prior reviews have often overlooked. Beyond these established techniques, we also highlight emerging directions aimed at addressing current gaps. These include continual learning to enable dynamic deployment, federated and privacy-preserving approaches to safeguard sensitive data, hybrid self-supervised learning to enhance data efficiency, data-centric pipelines that combine synthetic generation with human-in-the-loop validation, and systematic benchmarking to assess robust generalization under real-world clinical variability. By outlining these strategies and associated research gaps, this review provides a roadmap for developing adaptive, trustworthy, and clinically integrated FMs capable of meeting the demands of real-world medical imaging.

3D instance segmentation is an important task for real-world applications. To avoid costly manual annotations, existing methods have explored generating pseudo labels by transferring 2D masks from foundation models to 3D. However, this approach is often suboptimal since the video frames are processed independently. This causes inconsistent segmentation granularity and conflicting 3D pseudo labels, which degrades the accuracy of final segmentation. To address this, we introduce a Granularity-Consistent automatic 2D Mask Tracking approach that maintains temporal correspondences across frames, eliminating conflicting pseudo labels. Combined with a three-stage curriculum learning framework, our approach progressively trains from fragmented single-view data to unified multi-view annotations, ultimately globally coherent full-scene supervision. This structured learning pipeline enables the model to progressively expose to pseudo-labels of increasing consistency. Thus, we can robustly distill a consistent 3D representation from initially fragmented and contradictory 2D priors. Experimental results demonstrated that our method effectively generated consistent and accurate 3D segmentations. Furthermore, the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks and open-vocabulary ability.

User behavior on online platforms is evolving, reflecting real-world changes in how people post, whether it's helpful messages or hate speech. Models that learn to capture this content can experience a decrease in performance over time due to data drift, which can lead to ineffective behavioral analytics systems. However, fine-tuning such a model over time with new data can be detrimental due to catastrophic forgetting. Replay-based approaches in continual learning offer a simple yet efficient method to update such models, minimizing forgetting by maintaining a buffer of important training instances from past learned tasks. However, the main limitation of this approach is the fixed size of the buffer. External knowledge bases can be utilized to overcome this limitation through data augmentation. We propose a novel augmentation-based approach to incorporate external knowledge in the replay-based continual learning framework. We evaluate several strategies with three datasets from prior studies related to deviant behavior classification to assess the integration of external knowledge in continual learning and demonstrate that augmentation helps outperform baseline replay-based approaches.

Privacy policies are statements that notify users of the services' data practices. However, few users are willing to read through policy texts due to the length and complexity. While automated tools based on machine learning exist for privacy policy analysis, to achieve high classification accuracy, classifiers need to be trained on a large labeled dataset. Most existing policy corpora are labeled by skilled human annotators, requiring significant amount of labor hours and effort. In this paper, we leverage active learning and crowdsourcing techniques to develop an automated classification tool named Calpric (Crowdsourcing Active Learning PRIvacy Policy Classifier), which is able to perform annotation equivalent to those done by skilled human annotators with high accuracy while minimizing the labeling cost. Specifically, active learning allows classifiers to proactively select the most informative segments to be labeled. On average, our model is able to achieve the same F1 score using only 62% of the original labeling effort. Calpric's use of active learning also addresses naturally occurring class imbalance in unlabeled privacy policy datasets as there are many more statements stating the collection of private information than stating the absence of collection. By selecting samples from the minority class for labeling, Calpric automatically creates a more balanced training set.

Supervised learning is classically formulated as training a model to minimize a fixed loss function over a fixed distribution, or task. However, an emerging paradigm instead views model training as extracting enough information from data so that the model can be used to minimize many losses on many downstream tasks. We formalize a mathematical framework for this paradigm, which we call panprediction, and study its statistical complexity. Formally, panprediction generalizes omniprediction and sits upstream from multi-group learning, which respectively focus on predictions that generalize to many downstream losses or many downstream tasks, but not both. Concretely, we design algorithms that learn deterministic and randomized panpredictors with $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^3)$ and $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples, respectively. Our results demonstrate that under mild assumptions, simultaneously minimizing infinitely many losses on infinitely many tasks can be as statistically easy as minimizing one loss on one task. Along the way, we improve the best known sample complexity guarantee of deterministic omniprediction by a factor of $1/\varepsilon$, and match all other known sample complexity guarantees of omniprediction and multi-group learning. Our key technical ingredient is a nearly lossless reduction from panprediction to a statistically efficient notion of calibration, called step calibration.

We propose a novel continual self-supervised learning (CSSL) framework for simultaneously learning diverse features from multi-window-obtained chest computed tomography (CT) images and ensuring data privacy. Achieving a robust and highly generalizable model in medical image diagnosis is challenging, mainly because of issues, such as the scarcity of large-scale, accurately annotated datasets and domain shifts inherent to dynamic healthcare environments. Specifically, in chest CT, these domain shifts often arise from differences in window settings, which are optimized for distinct clinical purposes. Previous CSSL frameworks often mitigated domain shift by reusing past data, a typically impractical approach owing to privacy constraints. Our approach addresses these challenges by effectively capturing the relationship between previously learned knowledge and new information across different training stages through continual pretraining on unlabeled images. Specifically, by incorporating a latent replay-based mechanism into CSSL, our method mitigates catastrophic forgetting due to domain shifts during continual pretraining while ensuring data privacy. Additionally, we introduce a feature distillation technique that integrates Wasserstein distance-based knowledge distillation (WKD) and batch-knowledge ensemble (BKE), enhancing the ability of the model to learn meaningful, domain-shift-robust representations. Finally, we validate our approach using chest CT images obtained across two different window settings, demonstrating superior performance compared with other approaches.

Learning to defer uncertain predictions to costly experts offers a powerful strategy for improving the accuracy and efficiency of machine learning systems. However, standard training procedures for deferral algorithms typically require querying all experts for every training instance, an approach that becomes prohibitively expensive when expert queries incur significant computational or resource costs. This undermines the core goal of deferral: to limit unnecessary expert usage. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the budgeted deferral framework, which aims to train effective deferral algorithms while minimizing expert query costs during training. We propose new algorithms for both two-stage and single-stage multiple-expert deferral settings that selectively query only a subset of experts per training example. While inspired by active learning, our setting is fundamentally different: labels are already known, and the core challenge is to decide which experts to query in order to balance cost and predictive performance. We establish theoretical guarantees for both of our algorithms, including generalization bounds and label complexity analyses. Empirical results across several domains show that our algorithms substantially reduce training costs without sacrificing prediction accuracy, demonstrating the practical value of our budget-aware deferral algorithms.

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a powerful solution to extract rich representations from unlabeled data. Yet, SSL research is mostly focused on clean, curated and high-quality datasets. As a result, applying SSL on noisy data remains a challenge, despite being crucial to applications such as astrophysics, medical imaging, geophysics or finance. In this work, we present a fully self-supervised framework that enables noise-robust representation learning without requiring a denoiser at inference or downstream fine-tuning. Our method first trains an SSL denoiser on noisy data, then uses it to construct a denoised-to-noisy data curriculum (i.e., training first on denoised, then noisy samples) for pretraining a SSL backbone (e.g., DINOv2), combined with a teacher-guided regularization that anchors noisy embeddings to their denoised counterparts. This process encourages the model to internalize noise robustness. Notably, the denoiser can be discarded after pretraining, simplifying deployment. On ImageNet-1k with ViT-B under extreme Gaussian noise ($σ=255$, SNR = 0.72 dB), our method improves linear probing accuracy by 4.8% over DINOv2, demonstrating that denoiser-free robustness can emerge from noise-aware pretraining. The code is available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/noisy_dinov2.