Despite significant advances in document understanding, determining the correct orientation of scanned or photographed documents remains a critical pre-processing step in the real world settings. Accurate rotation correction is essential for enhancing the performance of downstream tasks such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) where misalignment commonly arises due to user errors, particularly incorrect base orientations of the camera during capture. In this study, we first introduce OCR-Rotation-Bench (ORB), a new benchmark for evaluating OCR robustness to image rotations, comprising (i) ORB-En, built from rotation-transformed structured and free-form English OCR datasets, and (ii) ORB-Indic, a novel multilingual set spanning 11 Indic mid to low-resource languages. We also present a fast, robust and lightweight rotation classification pipeline built on the vision encoder of Phi-3.5-Vision model with dynamic image cropping, fine-tuned specifically for 4-class rotation task in a standalone fashion. Our method achieves near-perfect 96% and 92% accuracy on identifying the rotations respectively on both the datasets. Beyond classification, we demonstrate the critical role of our module in boosting OCR performance: closed-source (up to 14%) and open-weights models (up to 4x) in the simulated real-world setting.

This study proposes a Transformer-based longitudinal modeling method to address challenges in clinical risk classification with heterogeneous Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, including irregular temporal patterns, large modality differences, and complex semantic structures. The method takes multi-source medical features as input and employs a feature embedding layer to achieve a unified representation of structured and unstructured data. A learnable temporal encoding mechanism is introduced to capture dynamic evolution under uneven sampling intervals. The core model adopts a multi-head self-attention structure to perform global dependency modeling on longitudinal sequences, enabling the aggregation of long-term trends and short-term fluctuations across different temporal scales. To enhance semantic representation, a semantic-weighted pooling module is designed to assign adaptive importance to key medical events, improving the discriminative ability of risk-related features. Finally, a linear mapping layer generates individual-level risk scores. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms traditional machine learning and temporal deep learning models in accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-Score, achieving stable and precise risk identification in multi-source heterogeneous EHR environments and providing an efficient and reliable framework for clinical intelligent decision-making.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in software engineering tasks such as requirements elicitation, design, and evaluation, raising critical questions regarding their alignment with human judgments on responsible AI values. This study investigates how closely LLMs' value preferences align with those of two human groups: a US-representative sample and AI practitioners. We evaluate 23 LLMs across four tasks: (T1) selecting key responsible AI values, (T2) rating their importance in specific contexts, (T3) resolving trade-offs between competing values, and (T4) prioritizing software requirements that embody those values. The results show that LLMs generally align more closely with AI practitioners than with the US-representative sample, emphasizing fairness, privacy, transparency, safety, and accountability. However, inconsistencies appear between the values that LLMs claim to uphold (Tasks 1-3) and the way they prioritize requirements (Task 4), revealing gaps in faithfulness between stated and applied behavior. These findings highlight the practical risk of relying on LLMs in requirements engineering without human oversight and motivate the need for systematic approaches to benchmark, interpret, and monitor value alignment in AI-assisted software development.

Text-to-SQL systems provide a natural language interface that can enable even laymen to access information stored in databases. However, existing Large Language Models (LLM) struggle with SQL generation from natural instructions due to large schema sizes and complex reasoning. Prior work often focuses on complex, somewhat impractical pipelines using flagship models, while smaller, efficient models remain overlooked. In this work, we explore three multi-agent LLM pipelines, with systematic performance benchmarking across a range of small to large open-source models: (1) Multi-agent discussion pipeline, where agents iteratively critique and refine SQL queries, and a judge synthesizes the final answer; (2) Planner-Coder pipeline, where a thinking model planner generates stepwise SQL generation plans and a coder synthesizes queries; and (3) Coder-Aggregator pipeline, where multiple coders independently generate SQL queries, and a reasoning agent selects the best query. Experiments on the Bird-Bench Mini-Dev set reveal that Multi-Agent discussion can improve small model performance, with up to 10.6% increase in Execution Accuracy for Qwen2.5-7b-Instruct seen after three rounds of discussion. Among the pipelines, the LLM Reasoner-Coder pipeline yields the best results, with DeepSeek-R1-32B and QwQ-32B planners boosting Gemma 3 27B IT accuracy from 52.4% to the highest score of 56.4%. Codes are available at https://github.com/treeDweller98/bappa-sql.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT now provide novice programmers with unprecedented access to instant, personalized support. While this holds clear promise, their influence on students' metacognitive processes remains underexplored. Existing work has largely focused on correctness and usability, with limited attention to whether and how students' use of AI assistants supports or bypasses key metacognitive processes. This study addresses that gap by analyzing student-AI interactions through a metacognitive lens in university-level programming courses. We examined more than 10,000 dialogue logs collected over three years, complemented by surveys of students and educators. Our analysis focused on how prompts and responses aligned with metacognitive phases and strategies. Synthesizing these findings across data sources, we distill design considerations for AI-powered coding assistants that aim to support rather than supplant metacognitive engagement. Our findings provide guidance for developing educational AI tools that strengthen students' learning processes in programming education.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical for language accessibility, yet low-resource Cantonese remains challenging due to limited annotated data, six lexical tones, tone sandhi, and accent variation. Existing ASR models, such as Whisper, often suffer from high word error rates. Large audio-language models (LALMs), in contrast, can leverage broader contextual reasoning but still require explicit tonal and prosodic acoustic cues. We introduce CantoASR, a collaborative ASR-LALM error correction framework that integrates forced alignment for acoustic feature extraction, a LoRA-finetuned Whisper for improved tone discrimination, and an instruction-tuned Qwen-Audio for prosody-aware correction. Evaluations on spontaneous Cantonese data show substantial CER gains over Whisper-Large-V3. These findings suggest that integrating acoustic cues with LALM reasoning provides a scalable strategy for low-resource tonal and dialectal ASR.

In recent years, end-to-end Large Language Model (LLM) technology has shown substantial advantages across various domains. As critical system software and infrastructure, compilers are responsible for transforming source code into target code. While LLMs have been leveraged to assist in compiler development and maintenance, their potential as an end-to-end compiler remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of LLM as a Compiler (LaaC) and its future directions. We designed the CompilerEval dataset and framework specifically to evaluate the capabilities of mainstream LLMs in source code comprehension and assembly code generation. In the evaluation, we analyzed various errors, explored multiple methods to improve LLM-generated code, and evaluated cross-platform compilation capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit basic capabilities as compilers but currently achieve low compilation success rates. By optimizing prompts, scaling up the model, and incorporating reasoning methods, the quality of assembly code generated by LLMs can be significantly enhanced. Based on these findings, we maintain an optimistic outlook for LaaC and propose practical architectural designs and future research directions. We believe that with targeted training, knowledge-rich prompts, and specialized infrastructure, LaaC has the potential to generate high-quality assembly code and drive a paradigm shift in the field of compilation.

This study presents a complete pipeline for automated tennis match analysis. Our framework integrates multiple deep learning models to detect and track players and the tennis ball in real time, while also identifying court keypoints for spatial reference. Using YOLOv8 for player detection, a custom-trained YOLOv5 model for ball tracking, and a ResNet50-based architecture for court keypoint detection, our system provides detailed analytics including player movement patterns, ball speed, shot accuracy, and player reaction times. The experimental results demonstrate robust performance in varying court conditions and match scenarios. The model outputs an annotated video along with detailed performance metrics, enabling coaches, broadcasters, and players to gain actionable insights into the dynamics of the game.

Symbolic regression (SR) models complex systems by discovering mathematical expressions that capture underlying relationships in observed data. However, most SR methods prioritize minimizing prediction error over identifying the governing equations, often producing overly complex or inaccurate expressions. To address this, we present a decomposable SR method that generates interpretable multivariate expressions leveraging transformer models, genetic algorithms (GAs), and genetic programming (GP). In particular, our explainable SR method distills a trained ``opaque'' regression model into mathematical expressions that serve as explanations of its computed function. Our method employs a Multi-Set Transformer to generate multiple univariate symbolic skeletons that characterize how each variable influences the opaque model's response. We then evaluate the generated skeletons' performance using a GA-based approach to select a subset of high-quality candidates before incrementally merging them via a GP-based cascade procedure that preserves their original skeleton structure. The final multivariate skeletons undergo coefficient optimization via a GA. We evaluated our method on problems with controlled and varying degrees of noise, demonstrating lower or comparable interpolation and extrapolation errors compared to two GP-based methods, three neural SR methods, and a hybrid approach. Unlike them, our approach consistently learned expressions that matched the original mathematical structure.

With the increasing frequency and sophistication of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, it has become critical to develop more efficient and interpretable detection methods. Traditional detection systems often struggle with scalability and transparency, hindering real-time response and understanding of attack vectors. This paper presents an automated framework for detecting and interpreting DDoS attacks using machine learning (ML). The proposed method leverages the Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT) to automate the selection and optimization of ML models and features, reducing the need for manual experimentation. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is incorporated to enhance model interpretability, providing detailed insights into the contribution of individual features to the detection process. By combining TPOT's automated pipeline selection with SHAP interpretability, this approach improves the accuracy and transparency of DDoS detection. Experimental results demonstrate that key features such as mean backward packet length and minimum forward packet header length are critical in detecting DDoS attacks, offering a scalable and explainable cybersecurity solution.