Physical symmetries provide a strong inductive bias for constructing functions to analyze data. In particular, this bias may improve robustness, data efficiency, and interpretability of machine learning models. However, building machine learning models that explicitly respect symmetries can be difficult due to the dedicated components required. Moreover, real-world experiments may not exactly respect fundamental symmetries at the level of finite granularities and energy thresholds. In this work, we explore an alternative approach to create symmetry-aware machine learning models. We introduce soft constraints that allow the model to decide the importance of added symmetries during the learning process instead of enforcing exact symmetries. We investigate two complementary approaches, one that penalizes the model based on specific transformations of the inputs and one inspired by group theory and infinitesimal transformations of the inputs. Using top quark jet tagging and Lorentz equivariance as examples, we observe that the addition of the soft constraints leads to more robust performance while requiring negligible changes to current state-of-the-art models.

The debate over whether "thinking machines" could replace human intellectual labor has existed in both public and expert discussions since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept and terminology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) first emerged. For decades, this idea remained largely theoretical. However, with the recent advent of Generative AI - particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) - and the widespread adoption of tools such as ChatGPT, the issue has become a practical reality. Many fields that rely on human intellectual effort are now being reshaped by AI tools that both expand human capabilities and challenge the necessity of certain forms of work once deemed uniquely human but now easily automated. Education, somewhat unexpectedly, faces a pivotal responsibility: to devise long-term strategies for cultivating human skills that will remain relevant in an era of pervasive AI in the intellectual domain. In this context, we identify the limitations of current AI systems - especially those rooted in LLM technology - argue that the fundamental causes of these weaknesses cannot be resolved through existing methods, and propose directions within the constructivist paradigm for transforming education to preserve the long-term advantages of human intelligence over AI tools.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) derive their capabilities from extensive training on vast corpora of visual and textual data. Empowered by large-scale parameters, these models often exhibit strong memorization of their training data, rendering them susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs). Existing MIA methods for LVLMs typically operate under white- or gray-box assumptions, by extracting likelihood-based features for the suspected data samples based on the target LVLMs. However, mainstream LVLMs generally only expose generated outputs while concealing internal computational features during inference, limiting the applicability of these methods. In this work, we propose the first black-box MIA framework for LVLMs, based on a prior knowledge-calibrated memory probing mechanism. The core idea is to assess the model memorization of the private semantic information embedded within the suspected image data, which is unlikely to be inferred from general world knowledge alone. We conducted extensive experiments across four LVLMs and three datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method effectively identifies training data of LVLMs in a purely black-box setting and even achieves performance comparable to gray-box and white-box methods. Further analysis reveals the robustness of our method against potential adversarial manipulations, and the effectiveness of the methodology designs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/spmede/KCMP.

Standard Recurrent Neural Networks, including LSTMs, struggle to model long-range dependencies, particularly in sequences containing noisy or misleading information. We propose a new architectural principle, Output-Conditioned Gating, which enables a model to perform self-reflection by modulating its internal memory gates based on its own past inferences. This creates a stabilizing feedback loop that enhances memory retention. Our final model, the EchoLSTM, integrates this principle with an attention mechanism. We evaluate the EchoLSTM on a series of challenging benchmarks. On a custom-designed Distractor Signal Task, the EchoLSTM achieves 69.0% accuracy, decisively outperforming a standard LSTM baseline by 33 percentage points. Furthermore, on the standard ListOps benchmark, the EchoLSTM achieves performance competitive with a modern Transformer model, 69.8% vs. 71.8%, while being over 5 times more parameter-efficient. A final Trigger Sensitivity Test provides qualitative evidence that our model's self-reflective mechanism leads to a fundamentally more robust memory system.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a critical global health concern, demanding reliable and interpretable predictive models for early risk assessment. This study presents a large-scale analysis using the Heart Disease Health Indicators Dataset, developing a strategically weighted ensemble model that combines tree-based methods (LightGBM, XGBoost) with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict CVD risk. The model was trained on a preprocessed dataset of 229,781 patients where the inherent class imbalance was managed through strategic weighting and feature engineering enhanced the original 22 features to 25. The final ensemble achieves a statistically significant improvement over the best individual model, with a Test AUC of 0.8371 (p=0.003) and is particularly suited for screening with a high recall of 80.0%. To provide transparency and clinical interpretability, surrogate decision trees and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are used. The proposed model delivers a combination of robust predictive performance and clinical transparency by blending diverse learning architectures and incorporating explainability through SHAP and surrogate decision trees, making it a strong candidate for real-world deployment in public health screening.

Image generation models are usually personalized in practical uses in order to better meet the individual users' heterogeneous needs, but most personalized models lack explainability about how they are being personalized. Such explainability can be provided via visual features in generated images, but is difficult for human users to understand. Explainability in natural language is a better choice, but the existing approaches to explainability in natural language are limited to be coarse-grained. They are unable to precisely identify the multiple aspects of personalization, as well as the varying levels of personalization in each aspect. To address such limitation, in this paper we present a new technique, namely \textbf{FineXL}, towards \textbf{Fine}-grained e\textbf{X}plainability in natural \textbf{L}anguage for personalized image generation models. FineXL can provide natural language descriptions about each distinct aspect of personalization, along with quantitative scores indicating the level of each aspect of personalization. Experiment results show that FineXL can improve the accuracy of explainability by 56\%, when different personalization scenarios are applied to multiple types of image generation models.

Human trajectory data is crucial in urban planning, traffic engineering, and public health. However, directly using real-world trajectory data often faces challenges such as privacy concerns, data acquisition costs, and data quality. A practical solution to these challenges is trajectory generation, a method developed to simulate human mobility behaviors. Existing trajectory generation methods mainly focus on capturing individual movement patterns but often overlook the influence of population distribution on trajectory generation. In reality, dynamic population distribution reflects changes in population density across different regions, significantly impacting individual mobility behavior. Thus, we propose a novel trajectory generation framework based on a diffusion model, which integrates the dynamic population distribution constraints to guide high-fidelity generation outcomes. Specifically, we construct a spatial graph to enhance the spatial correlation of trajectories. Then, we design a dynamic population distribution aware denoising network to capture the spatiotemporal dependencies of human mobility behavior as well as the impact of population distribution in the denoising process. Extensive experiments show that the trajectories generated by our model can resemble real-world trajectories in terms of some critical statistical metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms by over 54%.

Human mobility generation in disaster scenarios plays a vital role in resource allocation, emergency response, and rescue coordination. During disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, human mobility patterns often deviate from their normal states, which makes the task more challenging. However, existing works usually rely on limited data from a single city or specific disaster, significantly restricting the model's generalization capability in new scenarios. In fact, disasters are highly sudden and unpredictable, and any city may encounter new types of disasters without prior experience. Therefore, we aim to develop a one-for-all model for mobility generation that can generalize to new disaster scenarios. However, building a universal framework faces two key challenges: 1) the diversity of disaster types and 2) the heterogeneity among different cities. In this work, we propose a unified model for human mobility generation in natural disasters (named UniDisMob). To enable cross-disaster generalization, we design physics-informed prompt and physics-guided alignment that leverage the underlying common patterns in mobility changes after different disasters to guide the generation process. To achieve cross-city generalization, we introduce a meta-learning framework that extracts universal patterns across multiple cities through shared parameters and captures city-specific features via private parameters. Extensive experiments across multiple cities and disaster scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average performance improvement exceeding 13%.

We introduce Neural Green's Function, a neural solution operator for linear partial differential equations (PDEs) whose differential operators admit eigendecompositions. Inspired by Green's functions, the solution operators of linear PDEs that depend exclusively on the domain geometry, we design Neural Green's Function to imitate their behavior, achieving superior generalization across diverse irregular geometries and source and boundary functions. Specifically, Neural Green's Function extracts per-point features from a volumetric point cloud representing the problem domain and uses them to predict a decomposition of the solution operator, which is subsequently applied to evaluate solutions via numerical integration. Unlike recent learning-based solution operators, which often struggle to generalize to unseen source or boundary functions, our framework is, by design, agnostic to the specific functions used during training, enabling robust and efficient generalization. In the steady-state thermal analysis of mechanical part geometries from the MCB dataset, Neural Green's Function outperforms state-of-the-art neural operators, achieving an average error reduction of 13.9\% across five shape categories, while being up to 350 times faster than a numerical solver that requires computationally expensive meshing.

Traditional methods for high-dimensional diffeomorphic mapping often struggle with the curse of dimensionality. We propose a mesh-free learning framework designed for $n$-dimensional mapping problems, seamlessly combining variational principles with quasi-conformal theory. Our approach ensures accurate, bijective mappings by regulating conformality distortion and volume distortion, enabling robust control over deformation quality. The framework is inherently compatible with gradient-based optimization and neural network architectures, making it highly flexible and scalable to higher-dimensional settings. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world medical image data validate the accuracy, robustness, and effectiveness of the proposed method in complex registration scenarios.