Musical instrument classification is essential for music information retrieval (MIR) and generative music systems. However, research on non-Western traditions, particularly Persian music, remains limited. We address this gap by introducing a new dataset of isolated recordings covering seven traditional Persian instruments, two common but originally non-Persian instruments (i.e., violin, piano), and vocals. We propose a culturally informed data augmentation strategy that generates realistic polyphonic mixtures from monophonic samples. Using the MERT model (Music undERstanding with large-scale self-supervised Training) with a classification head, we evaluate our approach with out-of-distribution data which was obtained by manually labeling segments of traditional songs. On real-world polyphonic Persian music, the proposed method yielded the best ROC-AUC (0.795), highlighting complementary benefits of tonal and temporal coherence. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of culturally grounded augmentation for robust Persian instrument recognition and provide a foundation for culturally inclusive MIR and diverse music generation systems.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

Clinical trials play an important role in cancer care and research, yet participation rates remain low. We developed MSK-MATCH (Memorial Sloan Kettering Multi-Agent Trial Coordination Hub), an AI system for automated eligibility screening from clinical text. MSK-MATCH integrates a large language model with a curated oncology trial knowledge base and retrieval-augmented architecture providing explanations for all AI predictions grounded in source text. In a retrospective dataset of 88,518 clinical documents from 731 patients across six breast cancer trials, MSK-MATCH automatically resolved 61.9% of cases and triaged 38.1% for human review. This AI-assisted workflow achieved 98.6% accuracy, 98.4% sensitivity, and 98.7% specificity for patient-level eligibility classification, matching or exceeding performance of the human-only and AI-only comparisons. For the triaged cases requiring manual review, prepopulating eligibility screens with AI-generated explanations reduced screening time from 20 minutes to 43 seconds at an average cost of $0.96 per patient-trial pair.

As foundation models become more sophisticated, ensuring their trustworthiness becomes increasingly critical; yet, unlike text and image, the video modality still lacks comprehensive trustworthiness benchmarks. We introduce VMDT (Video-Modal DecodingTrust), the first unified platform for evaluating text-to-video (T2V) and video-to-text (V2T) models across five key trustworthiness dimensions: safety, hallucination, fairness, privacy, and adversarial robustness. Through our extensive evaluation of 7 T2V models and 19 V2T models using VMDT, we uncover several significant insights. For instance, all open-source T2V models evaluated fail to recognize harmful queries and often generate harmful videos, while exhibiting higher levels of unfairness compared to image modality models. In V2T models, unfairness and privacy risks rise with scale, whereas hallucination and adversarial robustness improve -- though overall performance remains low. Uniquely, safety shows no correlation with model size, implying that factors other than scale govern current safety levels. Our findings highlight the urgent need for developing more robust and trustworthy video foundation models, and VMDT provides a systematic framework for measuring and tracking progress toward this goal. The code is available at https://sunblaze-ucb.github.io/VMDT-page/.

Functional and structural connectivity (FC/SC) are key multimodal biomarkers for brain analysis, yet their clinical utility is hindered by costly acquisition, complex preprocessing, and frequent missing modalities. Existing foundation models either process single modalities or lack explicit mechanisms for cross-modal and cross-scale consistency. We propose BrainCSD, a hierarchical mixture-of-experts (MoE) foundation model that jointly synthesizes FC/SC biomarkers and supports downstream decoding tasks (diagnosis and prediction). BrainCSD features three neuroanatomically grounded components: (1) a ROI-specific MoE that aligns regional activations from canonical networks (e.g., DMN, FPN) with a global atlas via contrastive consistency; (2) a Encoding-Activation MOE that models dynamic cross-time/gradient dependencies in fMRI/dMRI; and (3) a network-aware refinement MoE that enforces structural priors and symmetry at individual and population levels. Evaluated on the datasets under complete and missing-modality settings, BrainCSD achieves SOTA results: 95.6\% accuracy for MCI vs. CN classification without FC, low synthesis error (FC RMSE: 0.038; SC RMSE: 0.006), brain age prediction (MAE: 4.04 years), and MMSE score estimation (MAE: 1.72 points). Code is available in \href{https://github.com/SXR3015/BrainCSD}{BrainCSD}

Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning mechanisms. In this work, we propose a novel analytical framework that recasts a multi-layer ReLU network into an equivalent single-layer linear model with input-dependent "effective weights". For any given input sample, the activation pattern of ReLU units creates a unique computational path, effectively zeroing out a subset of weights in the network. By composing the active weights across all layers, we can derive an effective weight matrix, $W_{\text{eff}}(x)$, that maps the input directly to the output for that specific sample. We posit that the evolution of these effective weights reveals fundamental principles of representation learning. Our work demonstrates that as training progresses, the effective weights corresponding to samples from the same class converge, while those from different classes diverge. By tracking the trajectories of these sample-wise effective weights, we provide a new lens through which to interpret the formation of class-specific decision boundaries and the emergence of semantic representations within the network.

Accessing legal help in Bangladesh is hard. People face high fees, complex legal language, a shortage of lawyers, and millions of unresolved court cases. Generative AI models like OpenAI GPT-4.1 Mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Meta Llama 3 70B, and DeepSeek R1 could potentially democratize legal assistance by providing quick and affordable legal advice. In this study, we collected 250 authentic legal questions from the Facebook group "Know Your Rights," where verified legal experts regularly provide authoritative answers. These questions were subsequently submitted to four four advanced AI models and responses were generated using a consistent, standardized prompt. A comprehensive dual evaluation framework was employed, in which a state-of-the-art LLM model served as a judge, assessing each AI-generated response across four critical dimensions: factual accuracy, legal appropriateness, completeness, and clarity. Following this, the same set of questions was evaluated by three licensed Bangladeshi legal professionals according to the same criteria. In addition, automated evaluation metrics, including BLEU scores, were applied to assess response similarity. Our findings reveal a complex landscape where AI models frequently generate high-quality, well-structured legal responses but also produce dangerous misinformation, including fabricated case citations, incorrect legal procedures, and potentially harmful advice. These results underscore the critical need for rigorous expert validation and comprehensive safeguards before AI systems can be safely deployed for legal consultation in Bangladesh.

As machine learning (ML) is increasingly implemented in hardware to address real-time challenges in scientific applications, the development of advanced toolchains has significantly reduced the time required to iterate on various designs. These advancements have solved major obstacles, but also exposed new challenges. For example, processes that were not previously considered bottlenecks, such as hardware synthesis, are becoming limiting factors in the rapid iteration of designs. To mitigate these emerging constraints, multiple efforts have been undertaken to develop an ML-based surrogate model that estimates resource usage of ML accelerator architectures. We introduce wa-hls4ml, a benchmark for ML accelerator resource and latency estimation, and its corresponding initial dataset of over 680,000 fully connected and convolutional neural networks, all synthesized using hls4ml and targeting Xilinx FPGAs. The benchmark evaluates the performance of resource and latency predictors against several common ML model architectures, primarily originating from scientific domains, as exemplar models, and the average performance across a subset of the dataset. Additionally, we introduce GNN- and transformer-based surrogate models that predict latency and resources for ML accelerators. We present the architecture and performance of the models and find that the models generally predict latency and resources for the 75% percentile within several percent of the synthesized resources on the synthetic test dataset.

Foundation models are increasingly central to high-stakes AI systems, and governance frameworks now depend on evaluations to assess their risks and capabilities. Although general capability evaluations are widespread, social impact assessments covering bias, fairness, privacy, environmental costs, and labor practices remain uneven across the AI ecosystem. To characterize this landscape, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of both first-party and third-party social impact evaluation reporting across a wide range of model developers. Our study examines 186 first-party release reports and 183 post-release evaluation sources, and complements this quantitative analysis with interviews of model developers. We find a clear division of evaluation labor: first-party reporting is sparse, often superficial, and has declined over time in key areas such as environmental impact and bias, while third-party evaluators including academic researchers, nonprofits, and independent organizations provide broader and more rigorous coverage of bias, harmful content, and performance disparities. However, this complementarity has limits. Only model developers can authoritatively report on data provenance, content moderation labor, financial costs, and training infrastructure, yet interviews reveal that these disclosures are often deprioritized unless tied to product adoption or regulatory compliance. Our findings indicate that current evaluation practices leave major gaps in assessing AI's societal impacts, highlighting the urgent need for policies that promote developer transparency, strengthen independent evaluation ecosystems, and create shared infrastructure to aggregate and compare third-party evaluations in a consistent and accessible way.

Photon scattering has traditionally limited the ability of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to extract accurate, layer-specific information from the brain. This limitation restricts its clinical utility for precise neurological monitoring. To address this, we introduce an AI-driven, high-density NIRS system optimized to provide real-time, layer-specific oxygenation data from the brain cortex, specifically targeting acute neuro-emergencies. Our system integrates high-density NIRS reflectance data with a neural network trained on MRI-based synthetic datasets. This approach achieves robust cortical oxygenation accuracy across diverse anatomical variations. In simulations, our AI-assisted NIRS demonstrated a strong correlation (R2=0.913) with actual cortical oxygenation, markedly outperforming conventional methods (R2=0.469). Furthermore, biomimetic phantom experiments confirmed its superior anatomical reliability (R2=0.986) compared to standard commercial devices (R2=0.823). In clinical validation with healthy subjects and ischemic stroke patients, the system distinguished between the two groups with an AUC of 0.943. This highlights its potential as an accessible, high-accuracy diagnostic tool for emergency and point-of-care settings. These results underscore the system's capability to advance neuro-monitoring precision through AI, enabling timely, data-driven decisions in critical care environments.