Understanding consumer choice is fundamental to marketing and management research, as firms increasingly seek to personalize offerings and optimize customer engagement. Traditional choice modeling frameworks, such as multinomial logit (MNL) and mixed logit models, impose rigid parametric assumptions that limit their ability to capture the complexity of consumer decision-making. This study introduces the Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework as a machine learning-driven alternative that dynamically segments consumers based on latent behavioral patterns. By leveraging probabilistic gating functions and specialized expert networks, MoE provides a flexible, nonparametric approach to modeling heterogeneous preferences. Empirical validation using large-scale retail data demonstrates that MoE significantly enhances predictive accuracy over traditional econometric models, capturing nonlinear consumer responses to price variations, brand preferences, and product attributes. The findings underscore MoEs potential to improve demand forecasting, optimize targeted marketing strategies, and refine segmentation practices. By offering a more granular and adaptive framework, this study bridges the gap between data-driven machine learning approaches and marketing theory, advocating for the integration of AI techniques in managerial decision-making and strategic consumer insights.

Its noninvasive nature and sensitivity to absorption related to tissue biomolecular content and scattering change, associated with subcellular morphology, make it an extremely powerful tool to analyse tissue composition, microstructure or oxygenation status, offering promising performance in applications such as cancer diagnostics and surgical guidance [1, 30, 85, 121]. DRS signals are measured by delivering a typically white light source into the tissue and detecting diffusely reflected signals at a certain distance from the source, where the distance between the emitting and receiving fibres determines the tissue depth probed. Depending on the application and clinical objective, multiple illumination or detection fibres can be used to obtain more quantitative information and probe different depths. The light delivery and collection from tissue are often handled using optical fibres or fibre bundles. When incident on the tissue, the light undergoes scattering and absorption processes, which alter the light intensity across the measured spectrum [75, 121].

This study uses various models to address network traffic classification, categorizing traffic into web, browsing, IPSec, backup, and email . We collected a comprehensive dataset from Arbor Edge Defender (AED) devices, comprising of 30,959 observations and 19 features. Multiple models were evaluated, including Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Transformer, and two Large Language Models (LLMs) including GPT - 4o and Gemini with zero - and few - shot learning. Transformer and XGBoost showed the best performance, achieving the highest accuracy of 98.95 and 97.56%, respectively . GPT - 4o and Gemini showed promising results with few - shot learning, improving accuracy significantly from initial zero - shot performance. While Gemini Few - Shot and GPT - 4 o Few - Shot performed well in categories like Web and Email, misclassifications occurred in more complex categories like IPSec and Backup. The study highlights the importance of model selection, fine - tuning, and the balance between training data siz e and model complexity for achieving reliable classification results.

Uncertainty in LiDAR sensor-based object detection arises from environmental variability and sensor performance limitations. Representing these uncertainties is essential for ensuring the Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF), which focuses on preventing hazards in automated driving scenarios. This paper presents a systematic approach to identifying, classifying, and representing uncertainties in LiDAR-based object detection within a SOTIF-related scenario. Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) is employed to construct a Frame of Discernment (FoD) to represent detection outcomes. Conditional Basic Probability Assignments (BPAs) are applied based on dependencies among identified uncertainty sources. Yager's Rule of Combination is used to resolve conflicting evidence from multiple sources, providing a structured framework to evaluate uncertainties' effects on detection accuracy. The study applies variance-based sensitivity analysis (VBSA) to quantify and prioritize uncertainties, detailing their specific impact on detection performance.

Designing proper experiments and selecting optimal intervention targets is a longstanding problem in scientific or causal discovery. Identifying the underlying causal structure from observational data alone is inherently difficult. Obtaining interventional data, on the other hand, is crucial to causal discovery, yet it is usually expensive and time-consuming to gather sufficient interventional data to facilitate causal discovery. Previous approaches commonly utilize uncertainty or gradient signals to determine the intervention targets. However, numerical-based approaches may yield suboptimal results due to the inaccurate estimation of the guiding signals at the beginning when with limited interventional data. In this work, we investigate a different approach, whether we can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist with the intervention targeting in causal discovery by making use of the rich world knowledge about the experimental design in LLMs. Specifically, we present Large Language Model Guided Intervention Targeting (LeGIT) -- a robust framework that effectively incorporates LLMs to augment existing numerical approaches for the intervention targeting in causal discovery. Across 4 realistic benchmark scales, LeGIT demonstrates significant improvements and robustness over existing methods and even surpasses humans, which demonstrates the usefulness of LLMs in assisting with experimental design for scientific discovery.

--Independent microgrids are crucial for supplying electricity by combining distributed energy resources and loads in scenarios like isolated islands and field combat. Fast and accurate assessments of microgrid vulnerability against intentional attacks or natural disasters are essential for effective risk prevention and design optimization. However, conventional Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) methods are computationally expensive and time-consuming, while existing machine learning-based approaches often lack accuracy and explainability. T o address these challenges, this study proposes a fast and explainable vulnerability assessment framework that integrates MCS with a graph attention network enhanced by self-attention pooling (GA T -S). MCS generates training data, while the GA T - S model learns the structural and electrical characteristics of the microgrid and further assesses its vulnerability intelligently. The GA T -S improves explainability and computational efficiency by dynamically assigning attention weights to critical nodes. Comprehensive experimental evaluations across various micro-grid configurations demonstrate that the proposed framework provides accurate vulnerability assessments, achieving a mean squared error as low as 0.001, real-time responsiveness within 1 second, and delivering explainable results. An independent microgrid, like a battlefield or island mi-crogrid, operates separately from the main grid, supplying electricity to a localized area by integrating distributed energy resources and loads via interconnected buses, transformers, and lines. Assessing the vulnerability of independent micro-grids is essential to ensure its normal power supply capacity against disruptions, particularly in scenarios like deliberate attacks and natural disasters. Chenhui Lin is with the State Key Laboratory of Power Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks across diverse domains. In healthcare, accurate and cost-efficient text classification is crucial, whether for clinical notes analysis, diagnosis coding, or any other task, and LLMs present promising potential. Text classification has always faced multiple challenges, including manual annotation for training, handling imbalanced data, and developing scalable approaches. With healthcare, additional challenges are added, particularly the critical need to preserve patients' data privacy and the complexity of the medical terminology. Numerous studies have been conducted to leverage LLMs for automated healthcare text classification and contrast the results with existing machine learning-based methods where embedding, annotation, and training are traditionally required. Existing systematic reviews about LLMs either do not specialize in text classification or do not focus on the healthcare domain. This research synthesizes and critically evaluates the current evidence found in the literature regarding the use of LLMs for text classification in a healthcare setting. Major databases (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed, Science Direct) and other resources were queried, which focused on the papers published between 2018 and 2024 within the framework of PRISMA guidelines, which resulted in 65 eligible research articles. These were categorized by text classification type (e.g., binary classification, multi-label classification), application (e.g., clinical decision support, public health and opinion analysis), methodology, type of healthcare text, and metrics used for evaluation and validation. This review reveals the existing gaps in the literature and suggests future research lines that can be investigated and explored.

While likelihood-based generative models, particularly diffusion and autoregressive models, have achieved remarkable fidelity in visual generation, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) objective inherently suffers from a mode-covering tendency that limits the generation quality under limited model capacity. In this work, we propose Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO) as a unified framework that bridges likelihood-based generative training and the GAN objective to bypass this fundamental constraint. Our key insight is to parameterize a discriminator implicitly using the likelihood ratio between a learnable target model and a fixed reference model, drawing parallels with the philosophy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Unlike GANs, this parameterization eliminates the need for joint training of generator and discriminator networks, allowing for direct, efficient, and effective finetuning of a well-trained model to its full potential beyond the limits of MLE. DDO can be performed iteratively in a self-play manner for progressive model refinement, with each round requiring less than 1% of pretraining epochs. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DDO by significantly advancing the previous SOTA diffusion model EDM, reducing FID scores from 1.79/1.58 to new records of 1.30/0.97 on CIFAR-10/ImageNet-64 datasets, and by consistently improving both guidance-free and CFG-enhanced FIDs of visual autoregressive models on ImageNet 256$\times$256.

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on some dataset (e.g. human preferences) before using it to provide online feedback as part of a downstream reinforcement learning (RL) procedure, rather than directly optimizing the policy parameters on the dataset via offline maximum likelihood estimation. In fact, from an information-theoretic perspective, we can only lose information via passing through a reward model and cannot create any new information via on-policy sampling. To explain this discrepancy, we scrutinize several hypotheses on the value of RL in FT through both theoretical and empirical lenses. Of the hypotheses considered, we find the most support for the explanation that on problems with a generation-verification gap, the combination of the ease of learning the relatively simple RM (verifier) from the preference data, coupled with the ability of the downstream RL procedure to then filter its search space to the subset of policies (generators) that are optimal for relatively simple verifiers is what leads to the superior performance of online FT.

Satisfiability Modulo Counting (SMC) is a recently proposed general language to reason about problems integrating statistical and symbolic artificial intelligence. An SMC formula is an extended SAT formula in which the truth values of a few Boolean variables are determined by probabilistic inference. Existing approximate solvers optimize surrogate objectives, which lack formal guarantees. Current exact solvers directly integrate SAT solvers and probabilistic inference solvers resulting in slow performance because of many back-and-forth invocations of both solvers. We propose KOCO-SMC, an integrated exact SMC solver that efficiently tracks lower and upper bounds in the probabilistic inference process. It enhances computational efficiency by enabling early estimation of probabilistic inference using only partial variable assignments, whereas existing methods require full variable assignments. In the experiment, we compare KOCO-SMC with currently available approximate and exact SMC solvers on large-scale datasets and real-world applications. Our approach delivers high-quality solutions with high efficiency.