Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for scalable, interactive mental health assessment, but excessive querying by LLMs burdens users and is inefficient for real-world screening across transdiagnostic symptom profiles. We introduce MAQuA, an adaptive question-asking framework for simultaneous, multidimensional mental health screening. Combining multi-outcome modeling on language responses with item response theory (IRT) and factor analysis, MAQuA selects the questions with most informative responses across multiple dimensions at each turn to optimize diagnostic information, improving accuracy and potentially reducing response burden. Empirical results on a novel dataset reveal that MAQuA reduces the number of assessment questions required for score stabilization by 50-87% compared to random ordering (e.g., achieving stable depression scores with 71% fewer questions and eating disorder scores with 85% fewer questions). MAQuA demonstrates robust performance across both internalizing (depression, anxiety) and externalizing (substance use, eating disorder) domains, with early stopping strategies further reducing patient time and burden. These findings position MAQuA as a powerful and efficient tool for scalable, nuanced, and interactive mental health screening, advancing the integration of LLM-based agents into real-world clinical workflows.

E-commerce sellers are advised to bid on keyphrases to boost their advertising campaigns. These keyphrases must be relevant to prevent irrelevant items from cluttering search systems and to maintain positive seller perception. It is vital that keyphrase suggestions align with seller, search and buyer judgments. Given the challenges in collecting negative feedback in these systems, LLMs have been used as a scalable proxy to human judgments. This paper presents an empirical study on a major ecommerce platform of a distillation framework involving an LLM teacher, a cross-encoder assistant and a bi-encoder Embedding Based Retrieval (EBR) student model, aimed at mitigating click-induced biases in keyphrase recommendations.

Unlike nature image classification where groundtruth label is explicit and of no doubt, physicians commonly interpret medical image conditioned on certainty like using phrase "probable" or "likely". Existing medical image datasets either simply overlooked the nuance and polarise into binary label. Here, we propose a novel framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to directly mine medical reports to utilise the uncertainty relevant expression for supervision signal. At first, we collect uncertainty keywords from medical reports. Then, we use Qwen-3 4B to identify the textual uncertainty and map them into an adaptive Generalized Label Smoothing (GLS) rate. This rate allows our model to treat uncertain labels not as errors, but as informative signals, effectively incorporating expert skepticism into the training process. W e establish a new clinical expert uncertainty-aware benchmark to rigorously evaluate this problem. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in medical disease detection. The curated uncertainty words database, code, and benchmark will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

We present an updated deep neural network model for inclusive electron-carbon scattering. Using the bootstrap model [Phys.Rev.C 110 (2024) 2, 025501] as a prior, we incorporate recent experimental data, as well as older measurements in the deep inelastic scattering region, to derive a re-optimized posterior model. We examine the impact of these new inputs on model predictions and associated uncertainties. Finally, we evaluate the resulting cross-section predictions in the kinematic range relevant to the Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE experiments.

Wildfires significantly impact natural ecosystems and human health, leading to biodiversity loss, increased hydrogeological risks, and elevated emissions of toxic substances. Climate change exacerbates these effects, particularly in regions with rising temperatures and prolonged dry periods, such as the Mediterranean. This requires the development of advanced risk management strategies that utilize state-of-the-art technologies. However, in this context, the data show a bias toward an imbalanced setting, where the incidence of wildfire events is significantly lower than typical situations. This imbalance, coupled with the inherent complexity of high-dimensional spatio-temporal data, poses significant challenges for training deep learning architectures. Moreover, since precise wildfire predictions depend mainly on weather data, finding a way to reduce computational costs to enable more frequent updates using the latest weather forecasts would be beneficial. This paper investigates how adopting a contrastive framework can address these challenges through enhanced latent representations for the patch's dynamic features. We thus introduce a new morphology-based curriculum contrastive learning that mitigates issues associated with diverse regional characteristics and enables the use of smaller patch sizes without compromising performance. An experimental analysis is performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling strategies.

Argument summarization aims to generate concise, structured representations of complex, multi-perspective debates. While recent work has advanced the identification and clustering of argumentative components, the generation stage remains underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on single-pass generation, offering limited support for factual correction or structural refinement. To address this gap, we introduce Arg-LLaDA, a novel large language diffusion framework that iteratively improves summaries via sufficiency-guided remasking and regeneration. Our method combines a flexible masking controller with a sufficiency-checking module to identify and revise unsupported, redundant, or incomplete spans, yielding more faithful, concise, and coherent outputs. Empirical results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that Arg-LLaDA surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in 7 out of 10 automatic evaluation metrics. In addition, human evaluations reveal substantial improvements across core dimensions, coverage, faithfulness, and conciseness, validating the effectiveness of our iterative, sufficiency-aware generation strategy.

Synthesizing realistic microstructure images conditioned on processing parameters is crucial for understanding process-structure relationships in materials design. However, this task remains challenging due to limited training micrographs and the continuous nature of processing variables. To overcome these challenges, we present a novel process-aware generative modeling approach based on Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large (SD3.5-Large), a state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model adapted for microstructure generation. Our method introduces numeric-aware embeddings that encode continuous variables (annealing temperature, time, and magnification) directly into the model's conditioning, enabling controlled image generation under specified process conditions and capturing process-driven microstructural variations. To address data scarcity and computational constraints, we fine-tune only a small fraction of the model's weights via DreamBooth and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), efficiently transferring the pre-trained model to the materials domain. We validate realism using a semantic segmentation model based on a fine-tuned U-Net with a VGG16 encoder on 24 labeled micrographs. It achieves 97.1% accuracy and 85.7% mean IoU, outperforming previous methods. Quantitative analyses using physical descriptors and spatial statistics show strong agreement between synthetic and real microstructures. Specifically, two-point correlation and lineal-path errors remain below 2.1% and 0.6%, respectively. Our method represents the first adaptation of SD3.5-Large for process-aware microstructure generation, offering a scalable approach for data-driven materials design.

Satellite Earth-observation (EO) time series in the optical and microwave ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum are often irregular due to orbital patterns and cloud obstruction. Compositing addresses these issues but loses information with respect to vegetation phenology, which is critical for many downstream tasks. Instead, we present TESSERA, a pixel-wise foundation model for multi-modal (Sentinel-1/2) EO time series that learns robust, label-efficient em-beddings. During model training, TESSERA uses Barlow Twins and sparse random temporal sampling to enforce invariance to the selection of valid observations. W e employ two key regularizers: global shuffling to decorrelate spatial neighborhoods and mix-based regulation to improve invariance under extreme sparsity. W e find that for diverse classification, segmentation, and regression tasks, TESSERA embeddings deliver state-of-the-art accuracy with high label efficiency, often requiring only a small task head and minimal computation. T o democratize access, adhere to F AIR principles, and simplify use, we release global, annual, 10m, pixel-wise int8 embeddings together with open weights/code and lightweight adaptation heads, thus providing practical tooling for large-scale retrieval and inference at planetary scale. The model training/inference code, downstream task code, and pre-generated embeddings can be accessed at https://github.com/ucam-eo.

Improving the visual understanding ability of vision-language models (VLMs) is crucial for enhancing their performance across various tasks. While using multiple pretrained visual experts has shown great promise, it often incurs significant computational costs during training and inference. To address this challenge, we propose HAWAII, a novel framework that distills knowledge from multiple visual experts into a single vision encoder, enabling it to inherit the complementary strengths of several experts with minimal computational overhead. To mitigate conflicts among different teachers and switch between different teacher-specific knowledge, instead of using a fixed set of adapters for multiple teachers, we propose to use teacher-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters with a corresponding router. Each adapter is aligned with a specific teacher, avoiding noisy guidance during distillation. To enable efficient knowledge distillation, we propose fine-grained and coarse-grained distillation. At the fine-grained level, token importance scores are employed to emphasize the most informative tokens from each teacher adaptively. At the coarse-grained level, we summarize the knowledge from multiple teachers and transfer it to the student using a set of general-knowledge LoRA adapters with a router. Extensive experiments on various vision-language tasks demonstrate the superiority of HAWAII compared to popular open-source VLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/wise-hawaii.

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to enable intuitive control of prosthetic limbs for individuals with upper limb amputations. However, existing EEG-based control systems face challenges related to signal noise, classification accuracy, and real-time adaptability. In this work, we present BRAVE, a hybrid EEG and voice-controlled prosthetic system that integrates ensemble learning-based EEG classification with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) correction framework for enhanced responsiveness. Unlike traditional electromyography (EMG)-based prosthetic control, BRAVE aims to interpret EEG-driven motor intent, enabling movement control without reliance on residual muscle activity. To improve classification robustness, BRAVE combines LSTM, CNN, and Random Forest models in an ensemble framework, achieving a classification accuracy of 96% across test subjects. EEG signals are preprocessed using a bandpass filter (0.5-45 Hz), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for artifact removal, and Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) feature extraction to minimize contamination from electromyographic (EMG) and electrooculographic (EOG) signals. Additionally, BRAVE incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR) to facilitate intuitive mode switching between different degrees of freedom (DOF) in the prosthetic arm. The system operates in real time, with a response latency of 150 ms, leveraging Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) networking for synchronized data acquisition. The system is evaluated on an in-house fabricated prosthetic arm and on multiple participants highlighting the generalizability across users. The system is optimized for low-power embedded deployment, ensuring practical real-world application beyond high-performance computing environments. Our results indicate that BRAVE offers a promising step towards robust, real-time, non-invasive prosthetic control.