The expansion of the Internet and social networks has led to an explosion of user-generated content. Author intent understanding plays a crucial role in interpreting social media content. This paper addresses author intent classification in Bangla social media posts by leveraging both textual and visual data. Recognizing limitations in previous unimodal approaches, we systematically benchmark transformer-based language models (mBERT, DistilBERT, XLM-RoBERTa) and vision architectures (ViT, Swin, SwiftFormer, ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet), utilizing the Uddessho dataset of 3,048 posts spanning six practical intent categories. We introduce a novel intermediate fusion strategy that significantly outperforms early and late fusion on this task. Experimental results show that intermediate fusion, particularly with mBERT and Swin Transformer, achieves 84.11% macro-F1 score, establishing a new state-of-the-art with an 8.4 percentage-point improvement over prior Bangla multimodal approaches. Our analysis demonstrates that integrating visual context substantially enhances intent classification. Cross-modal feature integration at intermediate levels provides optimal balance between modality-specific representation and cross-modal learning. This research establishes new benchmarks and methodological standards for Bangla and other low-resource languages. We call our proposed framework BangACMM (Bangla Author Content MultiModal).

Large language model agents are increasingly used to automate web tasks such as product search, offer comparison, and checkout. Current research explores different interfaces through which these agents interact with websites, including traditional HTML browsing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over pre-crawled content, communication via Web APIs using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and natural-language querying through the NLWeb interface. However, no prior work has compared these four architectures within a single controlled environment using identical tasks. To address this gap, we introduce a testbed consisting of four simulated e-shops, each offering its products via HTML, MCP, and NLWeb interfaces. For each interface (HTML, RAG, MCP, and NLWeb) we develop specialized agents that perform the same sets of tasks, ranging from simple product searches and price comparisons to complex queries for complementary or substitute products and checkout processes. We evaluate the agents using GPT 4.1, GPT 5, GPT 5 mini, and Claude Sonnet 4 as underlying LLM. Our evaluation shows that the RAG, MCP and NLWeb agents outperform HTML on both effectiveness and efficiency. Averaged over all tasks, F1 rises from 0.67 for HTML to between 0.75 and 0.77 for the other agents. Token usage falls from about 241k for HTML to between 47k and 140k per task. The runtime per task drops from 291 seconds to between 50 and 62 seconds. The best overall configuration is RAG with GPT 5 achieving an F1 score of 0.87 and a completion rate of 0.79. Also taking cost into consideration, RAG with GPT 5 mini offers a good compromise between API usage fees and performance. Our experiments show the choice of the interaction interface has a substantial impact on both the effectiveness and efficiency of LLM-based web agents.

Effective surveillance of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) requires forecasts accounting for epidemiological patterns and contextual drivers like school calendars and weather. While classical models and recent foundation models (e.g., Chronos, TimesFM) incorporate covariates, they often lack the semantic reasoning to interpret the causal interplay between conflicting drivers. In this work, we propose a two-agent framework decoupling contextual interpretation from probabilistic forecasting. An LLM "event interpreter" processes heterogeneous signals-including school schedules, meteorological summaries, and reports-into a scalar transmission-impact signal. A neuro-symbolic core then combines this with historical case counts to produce calibrated probabilistic forecasts. We evaluate the framework on real-world HFMD datasets from Hong Kong (2023-2024) and Lishui, China (2024). Compared to traditional and foundation-model baselines, our approach achieves competitive point forecasting accuracy while providing robust 90% prediction intervals (coverage 0.85-1.00) and human-interpretable rationales. Our results suggest that structurally integrating domain knowledge through LLMs can match state-of-the-art performance while yielding context-aware forecasts that align with public health workflows. Code is available at https://github.com/jw-chae/forecast_MED .

MR data are acquired in the frequency domain, known as k-space. Acquiring high-quality and high-resolution MR images can be time-consuming, posing a significant challenge when multiple sequences providing complementary contrast information are needed or when the patient is unable to remain in the scanner for an extended period of time. Reducing k-space measurements is a strategy to speed up acquisition, but often leads to reduced quality in reconstructed images. Additionally, in real-world MRI, both under-sampled and full-sampled images are prone to artefacts, and correcting these artefacts is crucial for maintaining diagnostic accuracy. Deep learning methods have been proposed to restore image quality from under-sampled data, while others focused on the correction of artefacts that result from the noise or motion. No approach has however been proposed so far that addresses both acceleration and artefacts correction, limiting the performance of these models when these degradation factors occur simultaneously. To address this gap, we present a method for recovering high-quality images from under-sampled data with simultaneously correction for noise and motion artefact called USArt (Under-Sampling and Artifact correction model). Customized for 2D brain anatomical images acquired with Cartesian sampling, USArt employs a dual sub-model approach. The results demonstrate remarkable increase of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast in the images restored. Various under-sampling strategies and degradation levels were explored, with the gradient under-sampling strategy yielding the best outcomes. We achieved up to 5x acceleration and simultaneously artefacts correction without significant degradation, showcasing the model's robustness in real-world settings.

Carefully engineered system prompts play a critical role in guiding the behavior of LLM agents, but their considerable length introduces significant drawbacks, including increased inference latency, higher computational cost, and reduced effective context length. This raises the question of whether such lengthy prompts can be replaced by a drastically reduced number of tokens while preserving their behavioral effect on downstream tasks. To enable this, we propose a lightweight three-stage training framework that learns a single prompt-specific Behavior-Equivalent token ([BE]). The framework first trains [BE] to encode the natural-language content of the original system prompt via reconstruction, and then distills the prompt 's downstream behavior into this single token. Importantly, our method requires no access to model internals, no auxiliary compression models, and no labeled responses. Empirical evaluations on three datasets show that a single [BE] token achieves up to a 3000x reduction in prompt length, while retaining about 98% of the downstream performance of the original system prompts. This substantially reduces inference cost and leaves almost the entire context window available for user inputs.

Multi-aspect sentiment analysis of Bangla e-commerce reviews remains challenging due to limited annotated datasets, morphological complexity, code-mixing phenomena, and domain shift issues, affecting 300 million Bangla-speaking users. Existing approaches lack explainability and cross-domain generalization capabilities crucial for practical deployment. We present BanglaSentNet, an explainable hybrid deep learning framework integrating LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, and BanglaBERT through dynamic weighted ensemble learning for multi-aspect sentiment classification. We introduce a dataset of 8,755 manually annotated Bangla product reviews across four aspects (Quality, Service, Price, Decoration) from major Bangladeshi e-commerce platforms. Our framework incorporates SHAP-based feature attribution and attention visualization for transparent insights. BanglaSentNet achieves 85% accuracy and 0.88 F1-score, outperforming standalone deep learning models by 3-7% and traditional approaches substantially. The explainability suite achieves 9.4/10 interpretability score with 87.6% human agreement. Cross-domain transfer learning experiments reveal robust generalization: zero-shot performance retains 67-76% effectiveness across diverse domains (BanglaBook reviews, social media, general e-commerce, news headlines); few-shot learning with 500-1000 samples achieves 90-95% of full fine-tuning performance, significantly reducing annotation costs. Real-world deployment demonstrates practical utility for Bangladeshi e-commerce platforms, enabling data-driven decision-making for pricing optimization, service improvement, and customer experience enhancement. This research establishes a new state-of-the-art benchmark for Bangla sentiment analysis, advances ensemble learning methodologies for low-resource languages, and provides actionable solutions for commercial applications.

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong perceptual reasoning abilities, yet they often struggle to adapt efficiently when encountering novel tasks at test time. In contrast, humans leverage the metacognitive model with memory, enabling continuous strategy refinement through metacognitive control when faced with new challenges. T o bridge this gap, we propose metacognitive test-time reasoning (MCTR), a framework that equips models with the ability to learn, adapt, and improve during test time through metacognitive self-updating. Inspired by the dual structure of human metacognition, MCTR comprises meta-level and object-level VLM reasoning modules, each equipped with dedicated memory systems for hierarchical adaptive reasoning. Specifically, MCTR consists of (1) a meta-reasoning module which incrementally builds a structured memory by discovering and storing task-relevant rules, environmental patterns, and action-outcome relationships from test-time observations as natural language descriptions; and (2) an action-reasoning module that determines optimal actions through context-aware perception and strategic reasoning by dynamically retrieving and integrating knowledge from memory. The action-reasoning module continuously updates its policy through proposed metacognitive test-time reinforcement learning, adapting as knowledge memory evolves. W e evaluate MCTR on 45 Atari games (33 seen, 12 unseen). MCTR demonstrates robust test-time adaptation, achieving 9/12 top-1 results on unseen games compared with baselines. Analyses through ablations, learning dynamics, and case studies reveal the complementary contributions of both components and show meta-reasoning evolving toward human-like adaptation strategies.

Deep neural network-based time series prediction models have recently demonstrated superior capabilities in capturing complex temporal dependencies. However, it is challenging for these models to account for uncertainty associated with their predictions, because they directly output scalar values at each time step. To address such a challenge, we propose a novel model named interleaved dual-branch Probability Distribution Network (interPDN), which directly constructs discrete probability distributions per step instead of a scalar. The regression output at each time step is derived by computing the expectation of the predictive distribution on a predefined support set. To mitigate prediction anomalies, a dual-branch architecture is introduced with interleaved support sets, augmented by coarse temporal-scale branches for long-term trend forecasting. Outputs from another branch are treated as auxiliary signals to impose self-supervised consistency constraints on the current branch's prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of interPDN.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly transformed various industries. In agriculture, these dual-modal capabilities offer promising applications such as precision farming, crop monitoring, pest detection, and environmental sustainability. While several Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets and benchmarks have been developed to evaluate VLM performance, they often fail to adequately assess the critical reasoning and problem-solving skills required in complex agricultural contexts. T o address this gap, we introduce AgriCoT, a VQA dataset that incorporates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, specifically designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of VLMs. With 4,535 carefully curated samples, AgriCoT offers a comprehensive and robust evaluation of reasoning abilities for VLMs, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, by focusing on their capacity to engage in logical reasoning and effective problem-solving. Our evaluations, conducted with 26 representative VLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models, reveal that while some proprietary models excel at answering questions, there is a notable and significant gap in their reasoning capabilities. This underscores the importance of incorporating CoT for more precise and effective assessments.

Irregularly sampled time series with substantial missing observations are common in healthcare and sensor networks. We introduce SDE-Attention, a family of SDE-RNNs equipped with channel-level attention on the latent pre-RNN state, including channel recalibration, time-varying feature attention, and pyramidal multi-scale self-attention. We therefore conduct a comparison on a synthetic periodic dataset and real-world benchmarks, under varying missing rate. Latent-space attention consistently improves over a vanilla SDE-RNN. On the univariate UCR datasets, the LSTM-based time-varying feature model SDE-TVF-L achieves the highest average accuracy, raising mean performance by approximately 4, 6, and 10 percentage points over the baseline at 30%, 60% and 90% missingness, respectively (averaged across datasets). On multivariate UEA benchmarks, attention-augmented models again outperform the backbone, with SDE-TVF-L yielding up to a 7% gain in mean accuracy under high missingness. Among the proposed mechanisms, time-varying feature attention is the most robust on univariate datasets. On multivariate datasets, different attention types excel on different tasks, showing that SDE-Attention can be flexibly adapted to the structure of each problem.