Deep Learning
DE3S: Dual-Enhanced Soft-Sparse-Shape Learning for Medical Early Time-Series Classification
Xie, Tao, Tan, Zexi, Xiao, Haoyi, Sun, Binbin, Zhang, Yiqun
Early Time Series Classification (ETSC) is critical in time-sensitive medical applications such as sepsis, yet it presents an inherent trade-off between accuracy and earliness. This trade-off arises from two core challenges: 1) models should effectively model inherently weak and noisy early-stage snippets, and 2) they should resolve the complex, dual requirement of simultaneously capturing local, subject-specific variations and overarching global temporal patterns. Existing methods struggle to overcome these underlying challenges, often forcing a severe compromise: sacrificing accuracy to achieve earliness, or vice-versa. We propose \textbf{DE3S}, a \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{S}oft-\textbf{S}parse \textbf{S}equence Learning framework, which systematically solves these challenges. A dual enhancement mechanism is proposed to enhance the modeling of weak, early signals. Then, an attention-based patch module is introduced to preserve discriminative information while reducing noise and complexity. A dual-path fusion architecture is designed, using a sparse mixture of experts to model local, subject-specific variations. A multi-scale inception module is also employed to capture global dependencies. Experiments on six real-world medical datasets show the competitive performance of DE3S, particularly in early prediction windows. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in addressing its targeted challenge. The source code is available \href{https://github.com/kuxit/DE3S}{\textbf{here}}.
VoiceAgentBench: Are Voice Assistants ready for agentic tasks?
Jain, Dhruv, Shukla, Harshit, Rajeev, Gautam, Kulkarni, Ashish, Khatri, Chandra, Agarwal, Shubham
Large-scale Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs) have enabled voice assistants capable of understanding natural spoken queries and performing complex tasks. However, existing speech benchmarks primarily focus on isolated capabilities such as transcription, or question-answering, and do not systematically evaluate agentic scenarios encompassing multilingual and cultural understanding, as well as adversarial robustness. To address this, we introduce VoiceAgentBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate SpeechLMs in realistic spoken agentic settings. It comprises over 5,500 synthetic spoken queries, including dialogues grounded in Indian context, covering single-tool invocations, multi-tool workflows, multi-turn interactions, and safety evaluations. The benchmark supports English, Hindi, and 5 other Indian languages, reflecting real-world linguistic and cultural diversity. We simulate speaker variability using a novel sampling algorithm that selects audios for TTS voice conversion based on its speaker embeddings, maximizing acoustic and speaker diversity. Our evaluation measures tool selection accuracy, structural consistency, and the correctness of tool invocations, including adversarial robustness. Our experiments reveal significant gaps in contextual tool orchestration tasks, Indic generalization, and adversarial robustness, exposing critical limitations of current SpeechLMs.
Training Optimal Large Diffusion Language Models
Ni, Jinjie, Liu, Qian, Du, Chao, Dou, Longxu, Yan, Hang, Wang, Zili, Pang, Tianyu, Shieh, Michael Qizhe
We introduce Quokka, the first systematic scaling law for diffusion language models (DLMs), encompassing both compute-constrained and data-constrained regimes, and studying the key modeling and optimization designs. Quokka is a good friend of Chinchilla and provides wider scopes. We hope the results would bring short-term practical guidance in DLMs training and long-term inspirations for the whole AI community.
Evaluating Large Language Models for Detecting Antisemitism
Patel, Jay, Mehta, Hrudayangam, Blackburn, Jeremy
Detecting hateful content is a challenging and important problem. Automated tools, like machine-learning models, can help, but they require continuous training to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of social media. In this work, we evaluate eight open-source LLMs' capability to detect antisemitic content, specifically leveraging in-context definition. We also study how LLMs understand and explain their decisions given a moderation policy as a guideline. First, we explore various prompting techniques and design a new CoT-like prompt, Guided-CoT, and find that injecting domain-specific thoughts increases performance and utility. Guided-CoT handles the in-context policy well, improving performance and utility by reducing refusals across all evaluated models, regardless of decoding configuration, model size, or reasoning capability. Notably, Llama 3.1 70B outperforms fine-tuned GPT-3.5. Additionally, we examine LLM errors and introduce metrics to quantify semantic divergence in model-generated rationales, revealing notable differences and paradoxical behaviors among LLMs. Our experiments highlight the differences observed across LLMs' utility, explainability, and reliability. Code and resources available at: https://github.com/idramalab/quantify-llm-explanations
ForTIFAI: Fending Off Recursive Training Induced Failure for AI Model Collapse
Shabgahi, Soheil Zibakhsh, Aghazadeh, Pedram, Mirhoseini, Azalia, Koushanfar, Farinaz
The increasing reliance on generative AI models is rapidly increasing the volume of synthetic data, with some projections suggesting that most available new data for training could be machine-generated by 2030 Gartner, Inc. (2022). This shift to a mainly synthetic content presents a critical challenge: repeated training in synthetic data leads to a phenomenon known as model collapse, where model performance degrades over generations of training, eventually rendering the models ineffective. While the causes of model collapse are increasingly understood, effective mitigation strategies remain scarce. We address this challenge by leveraging a key insight: auto-regressive models tend to generate text sequences to which they assign high confidence (i.e., high log-likelihood). Based on this observation, we introduce the Truncated-Cross-Entropy (TCE) loss function. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained with TCE not only learn effectively but also exhibit significantly increased resilience, tolerating over 2.3 more synthetic data before the onset of collapse. In addition, we provide an open-source benchmark for collapse dynamics in mixed-data settings. Our results demonstrate that confidence-aware training objectives can substantially delay collapse onset, offering a practical and generalizable tool for model robustness under synthetic-data exposure. Generative models have become the foundation for modern AI applications in several modalities, including text, image, code, and audio. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT (OpenAI et al., 2024), LLaMA (Grattafiori et al., 2024) and Gemma (Team et al., 2025), as well as image generators DALL-E (Ramesh et al., 2021) and Imagen (Saharia et al., 2022), all rely on large datasets scraped from the Web. As these models are continuously updated to reflect recent knowledge and linguistic patterns, the need for ever larger and frequently refreshed training corpora has grown substantially. However, this demand is colliding with a shift in the data landscape: synthetic content is increasingly populating the Internet, contaminating the very datasets used for model training. This shift raises fundamental concerns.
"Accessibility people, you go work on that thing of yours over there": Addressing Disability Inclusion in AI Product Organizations
Moharana, Sanika, Bennett, Cynthia L., Buehler, Erin, Madaio, Michael, Tibdewal, Vinita, Kane, Shaun K.
The rapid emergence of generative AI has changed the way that technology is designed, constructed, maintained, and evaluated. Decisions made when creating AI-powered systems may impact some users disproportionately, such as people with disabilities. In this paper, we report on an interview study with 25 AI practitioners across multiple roles (engineering, research, UX, and responsible AI) about how their work processes and artifacts may impact end users with disabilities. We found that practitioners experienced friction when triaging problems at the intersection of responsible AI and accessibility practices, navigated contradictions between accessibility and responsible AI guidelines, identified gaps in data about users with disabilities, and gathered support for addressing the needs of disabled stakeholders by leveraging informal volunteer and community groups within their company. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions for new resources and process changes to better support people with disabilities as end users of AI.
Probability Density from Latent Diffusion Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Järve, Joonas, Haavel, Karl Kaspar, Kull, Meelis
Despite rapid advances in AI, safety remains the main bottleneck to deploying machine-learning systems. A critical safety component is out-of-distribution detection: given an input, decide whether it comes from the same distribution as the training data. In generative models, the most natural OOD score is the data likelihood. Actually, under the assumption of uniformly distributed OOD data, the likelihood is even the optimal OOD detector, as we show in this work. However, earlier work reported that likelihood often fails in practice, raising doubts about its usefulness. We explore whether, in practice, the representation space also suffers from the inability to learn good density estimation for OOD detection, or if it is merely a problem of the pixel space typically used in generative models. To test this, we trained a Variational Diffusion Model not on images, but on the representation space of a pre-trained ResNet-18 to assess the performance of our likelihood-based detector in comparison to state-of-the-art methods from the OpenOOD suite.
AnalogSeeker: An Open-source Foundation Language Model for Analog Circuit Design
Chen, Zihao, Zhuang, Ji, Shen, Jinyi, Ke, Xiaoyue, Yang, Xinyi, Zhou, Mingjie, Du, Zhuoyao, Yan, Xu, Wu, Zhouyang, Xu, Zhenyu, Huang, Jiangli, Shang, Li, Zeng, Xuan, Yang, Fan
In this paper, we propose AnalogSeeker, an effort toward an open-source foundation language model for analog circuit design, with the aim of integrating domain knowledge and giving design assistance. To overcome the scarcity of data in this field, we employ a corpus collection strategy based on the domain knowledge framework of analog circuits. High-quality, accessible textbooks across relevant subfields are systematically curated and cleaned into a textual domain corpus. To address the complexity of knowledge of analog circuits, we introduce a granular domain knowledge distillation method. Raw, unlabeled domain corpus is decomposed into typical, granular learning nodes, where a multi-agent framework distills implicit knowledge embedded in unstructured text into question-answer data pairs with detailed reasoning processes, yielding a fine-grained, learnable dataset for fine-tuning. To address the unexplored challenges in training analog circuit foundation models, we explore and share our training methods through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation. We finally establish a fine-tuning-centric training paradigm, customizing and implementing a neighborhood self-constrained supervised fine-tuning algorithm. This approach enhances training outcomes by constraining the perturbation magnitude between the model's output distributions before and after training. In practice, we train the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model to obtain AnalogSeeker, which achieves 85.04% accuracy on AMSBench-TQA, the analog circuit knowledge evaluation benchmark, with a 15.67% point improvement over the original model and is competitive with mainstream commercial models. Furthermore, AnalogSeeker also shows effectiveness in the downstream operational amplifier design task. AnalogSeeker is open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/analogllm/analogseeker for research use.
Automated Segmentation of Coronal Brain Tissue Slabs for 3D Neuropathology
Ramirez, Jonathan Williams, Zemlyanker, Dina, Deden-Binder, Lucas, Herisse, Rogeny, Pallares, Erendira Garcia, Gopinath, Karthik, Gazula, Harshvardhan, Mount, Christopher, Kozanno, Liana N., Marshall, Michael S., Connors, Theresa R., Frosch, Matthew P., Montine, Mark, Oakley, Derek H., Mac Donald, Christine L., Keene, C. Dirk, Hyman, Bradley T., Iglesias, Juan Eugenio
Advances in image registration and machine learning have recently enabled volumetric analysis of postmortem brain tissue from conventional photographs of coronal slabs, which are routinely collected in brain banks and neuropathology laboratories worldwide. One caveat of this methodology is the requirement of segmentation of the tissue from photographs, which currently requires costly manual intervention. In this article, we present a deep learning model to automate this process. The automatic segmentation tool relies on a U-Net architecture that was trained with a combination of 1,414 manually segmented images of both fixed and fresh tissue, from specimens with varying diagnoses, photographed at two different sites. Automated model predictions on a subset of photographs not seen in training were analyzed to estimate performance compared to manual labels, including both inter- and intra-rater variability. Our model achieved a median Dice score over 0.98, mean surface distance under 0.4mm, and 95\% Hausdorff distance under 1.60mm, which approaches inter-/intra-rater levels. Our tool is publicly available at surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/PhotoTools.
Live Music Models
Lyria Team, null, Caillon, Antoine, McWilliams, Brian, Tarakajian, Cassie, Simon, Ian, Manco, Ilaria, Engel, Jesse, Constant, Noah, Li, Yunpeng, Denk, Timo I., Lalama, Alberto, Agostinelli, Andrea, Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna, Manilow, Ethan, Brower, George, Erdogan, Hakan, Lei, Heidi, Rolnick, Itai, Grishchenko, Ivan, Orsini, Manu, Kastelic, Matej, Zuluaga, Mauricio, Verzetti, Mauro, Dooley, Michael, Skopek, Ondrej, Ferrer, Rafael, Petridis, Savvas, Borsos, Zalán, Oord, Äaron van den, Eck, Douglas, Collins, Eli, Baldridge, Jason, Hume, Tom, Donahue, Chris, Han, Kehang, Roberts, Adam
We introduce a new class of generative models for music called live music models that produce a continuous stream of music in real-time with synchronized user control. We release Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that can be steered using text or audio prompts to control acoustic style. On automatic metrics of music quality, Magenta RealTime outperforms other open-weights music generation models, despite using fewer parameters and offering first-of-its-kind live generation capabilities. We also release Lyria RealTime, an API-based model with extended controls, offering access to our most powerful model with wide prompt coverage. These models demonstrate a new paradigm for AI-assisted music creation that emphasizes human-in-the-loop interaction for live music performance.