An effective physician should possess a combination of empathy, expertise, patience, and clear communication when treating a patient. Recent advances have successfully endowed AI doctors with expert diagnostic skills, particularly the ability to actively seek information through inquiry. However, other essential qualities of a good doctor remain overlooked. It features 3,000 realistically simulated patient agents that exhibit diverse linguistic patterns, cognitive limitations, emotional responses, and tendencies for passive disclosure. We also introduce a multi-faceted evaluation framework, covering task success, inquiry proficiency, dialogue competence, inquiry efficiency, and patient experience. Experiments on different LLMs reveal substantial challenges across the evaluation aspects. Even state-of-the-art models show significant room for improvement in their inquiry capabilities. These models are highly sensitive to variations in realistic patient behavior, which considerably impacts diagnostic accuracy. Furthermore, our fine-grained metrics expose trade-offs between different evaluation perspectives, highlighting the challenge of balancing performance and practicality in real-world clinical settings.Figure 1: Comparison between MAQ E enables more realistic patient simulation by integrating diverse behaviors and evaluates doctor inquiries from more comprehensive and fine-grained perspectives. A medical career is among the most demanding professions to master. A physician's role extends far beyond treating diseases; it also involves employing nuanced conversational skills to understand a patient's condition and guide them through moments of vulnerability. Current Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached the initial stage of this journey by grasping extensive medical knowledge and expertise in clinical examinations (Nori et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Saab et al., 2024; Singhal et al., 2025; Dou et al., 2025). However, their passive, response-driven nature (Li et al., 2024)--an inherent tendency to answer user queries directly rather than to engage in goal-oriented dialogue--limits their practical utility. This shortcoming is particularly critical in clinical consultation, the focus of this work, where an LLM must proactively converse with patients to gather information through thoughtful and compassionate inquiry. Existing studies (Liao et al., 2023; Li et al., 2024; Schmidgall et al., 2024; Nori et al., 2025) have proposed several benchmarks to evaluate the inquiry capabilities of LLMs. A prevalent method is to develop a virtual interaction environment in which a patient is simulated by an LLM based on a synthesized profile.

Cascade systems route computational requests to smaller models when possible and defer to larger models only when necessary, offering a promising approach to balance cost and quality in LLM deployment. However, they face a fundamental challenge in open-ended text generation: determining output reliability when generation quality lies on a continuous spectrum, often with multiple valid responses. To address this, we propose semantic agreement -- meaning-level consensus between ensemble outputs -- as a training-free signal for reliable deferral. We show that when diverse model outputs agree semantically, their consensus is a stronger reliability signal than token-level confidence. Evaluated from 500M to 70B-parameter models, we find that semantic cascades match or surpass target-model quality at 40% of the cost and reduce latency by up to 60%. Our method requires no model internals, works across black-box APIs, and remains robust to model updates, making it a practical baseline for real-world LLM deployment.

To enable robots to comprehend high-level human instructions and perform complex tasks, a key challenge lies in achieving comprehensive scene understanding: interpreting and interacting with the 3D environment in a meaningful way. This requires a smart map that fuses accurate geometric structure with rich, human-understandable semantics. To address this, we introduce the 3D Queryable Scene Representation (3D QSR), a novel framework built on multimedia data that unifies three complementary 3D representations: (1) 3D-consistent novel view rendering and segmentation from panoptic reconstruction, (2) precise geometry from 3D point clouds, and (3) structured, scalable organization via 3D scene graphs. Built on an object-centric design, the framework integrates with large vision-language models to enable semantic queryability by linking multimodal object embeddings, and supporting object-level retrieval of geometric, visual, and semantic information. The retrieved data are then loaded into a robotic task planner for downstream execution. We evaluate our approach through simulated robotic task planning scenarios in Unity, guided by abstract language instructions and using the indoor public dataset Replica. Furthermore, we apply it in a digital duplicate of a real wet lab environment to test QSR-supported robotic task planning for emergency response. The results demonstrate the framework's ability to facilitate scene understanding and integrate spatial and semantic reasoning, effectively translating high-level human instructions into precise robotic task planning in complex 3D environments.

As generative models are advancing in quality and quantity for creating synthetic content, deepfakes begin to cause online mistrust. Deepfake detectors are proposed to counter this effect, however, misuse of detectors claiming fake content as real or vice versa further fuels this misinformation problem. We present the first comprehensive uncertainty analysis of deepfake detectors, systematically investigating how generative artifacts influence prediction confidence. As reflected in detectors' responses, deepfake generators also contribute to this uncertainty as their generative residues vary, so we cross the uncertainty analysis of deepfake detectors and generators. Based on our observations, the uncertainty manifold holds enough consistent information to leverage uncertainty for deepfake source detection. Our approach leverages Bayesian Neural Networks and Monte Carlo dropout to quantify both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties across diverse detector architectures. We evaluate uncertainty on two datasets with nine generators, with four blind and two biological detectors, compare different uncertainty methods, explore region- and pixel-based uncertainty, and conduct ablation studies. We conduct and analyze binary real/fake, multi-class real/fake, source detection, and leave-one-out experiments between the generator/detector combinations to share their generalization capability, model calibration, uncertainty, and robustness against adversarial attacks. We further introduce uncertainty maps that localize prediction confidence at the pixel level, revealing distinct patterns correlated with generator-specific artifacts. Our analysis provides critical insights for deploying reliable deepfake detection systems and establishes uncertainty quantification as a fundamental requirement for trustworthy synthetic media detection.

Data loaders are used by Machine Learning (ML) frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow to apply transformations to data before feeding it into the accelerator. This operation is called data preprocessing. Data preprocessing plays an important role in the ML training workflow because if it is inefficiently pipelined with the training, it can yield high GPU idleness, resulting in important training delays. Unfortunately, existing data loaders turn out to waste GPU resources, with $76\%$ GPU idleness when using the PyTorch data loader, for example. One key source of inefficiency is the variability in preprocessing time across samples within the same dataset. Existing data loaders are oblivious to this variability, and they construct batches without any consideration of slow or fast samples. In this case, the entire batch is delayed by a single slow sample, stalling the training pipeline and resulting in head-of-line blocking. To address these inefficiencies, we present MinatoLoader, a general-purpose data loader for PyTorch that accelerates training and improves GPU utilization. MinatoLoader is designed for a single-server setup, containing multiple GPUs. It continuously prepares data in the background and actively constructs batches by prioritizing fast-to-preprocess samples, while slower samples are processed in parallel. We evaluate MinatoLoader on servers with V100 and A100 GPUs. On a machine with four A100 GPUs, MinatoLoader improves the training time of a wide range of workloads by up to $7.5\times$ ($3.6\times$ on average) over PyTorch DataLoader and Pecan, and up to $3\times$ ($2.2\times$ on average) over DALI. It also increases average GPU utilization from 46.4\% with PyTorch to 90.45\%, while preserving model accuracy and enabling faster convergence.

Scaling the amount of data used for supervied fine-tuning(SFT) does not guarantee the proportional gains in model performance, highlighting a critical need to understand what makes training samples effective. This work identifies two fundamental dataset properties that govern SFT scalability: \textbf{semantic coverage}, or the breadth of task domains, and \textbf{information depth}, or the richness of individual examples. We demonstrate that simple proxies for these properties explain the majority of validation loss variance in our experiments. In this work, we further propose the \textbf{Information Landscape Approximation (ILA)}, a model-agnostic data selection framework that jointly optimizes for these two factors. ILA constructs compact subsets that approximate the informational value of large datasets. Empirical results show that models tuned on ILA-selected data achieve faster and more sustained performance improvements across diverse tasks and model sizes compared to existing methods, a phenomenon we term \textbf{accelerated scaling}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown growing potential in molecular sciences, but they often produce chemically inaccurate descriptions and struggle to recognize or justify potential errors. This raises important concerns about their robustness and reliability in scientific applications. To support more rigorous evaluation of LLMs in chemical reasoning, we present the MolErr2Fix benchmark, designed to assess LLMs on error detection and correction in molecular descriptions. Unlike existing benchmarks focused on molecule-to-text generation or property prediction, MolErr2Fix emphasizes fine-grained chemical understanding. It tasks LLMs with identifying, localizing, explaining, and revising potential structural and semantic errors in molecular descriptions. Specifically, MolErr2Fix consists of 1,193 fine-grained annotated error instances. Each instance contains quadruple annotations, i.e,. (error type, span location, the explanation, and the correction). These tasks are intended to reflect the types of reasoning and verification required in real-world chemical communication. Evaluations of current state-of-the-art LLMs reveal notable performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust chemical reasoning capabilities. MolErr2Fix provides a focused benchmark for evaluating such capabilities and aims to support progress toward more reliable and chemically informed language models. All annotations and an accompanying evaluation API will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Location-tracking data from the Automatic Identification System, much of which is publicly available, plays a key role in a range of maritime safety and monitoring applications. However, the data suffers from missing values that hamper downstream applications. Imputing the missing values is challenging because the values of different heterogeneous attributes are updated at diverse rates, resulting in the occurrence of multi-scale dependencies among attributes. Existing imputation methods that assume similar update rates across attributes are unable to capture and exploit such dependencies, limiting their imputation accuracy. We propose MH-GIN, a Multi-scale Heterogeneous Graph-based Imputation Network that aims improve imputation accuracy by capturing multi-scale dependencies. Specifically, MH-GIN first extracts multi-scale temporal features for each attribute while preserving their intrinsic heterogeneous characteristics. Then, it constructs a multi-scale heterogeneous graph to explicitly model dependencies between heterogeneous attributes to enable more accurate imputation of missing values through graph propagation. Experimental results on two real-world datasets find that MH-GIN is capable of an average 57% reduction in imputation errors compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining computational efficiency. The source code and implementation details of MH-GIN are publicly available https://github.com/hyLiu1994/MH-GIN.

Deep learning models struggle with systematic compositional generalization, a hallmark of human cognition. We propose \textsc{Mirage}, a neuro-inspired dual-process model that offers a processing account for this ability. It combines a fast, intuitive ``System~1'' (a meta-trained Transformer) with a deliberate, rule-based ``System~2'' (a Schema Engine), mirroring the brain's neocortical and hippocampal--prefrontal circuits. Trained to perform general, single-step decomposition on a stream of random grammars, Mirage achieves $>$99\% accuracy on all splits of the SCAN benchmark in a task-agnostic setting. Ablations confirm that the model's systematic behavior emerges from the architectural interplay of its two systems, particularly its use of explicit, prioritized schemas and iterative refinement. In line with recent progress on recursive/recurrent Transformer approaches, Mirage preserves an iterative neural update while externalizing declarative control into an interpretable schema module. Our work provides a concrete computational model for interpreting how compositional reasoning can arise from a modular cognitive architecture.

Jamming devices disrupt signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and pose a significant threat by compromising the reliability of accurate positioning. Consequently, the detection and localization of these interference signals are essential to achieve situational awareness, mitigating their impact, and implementing effective counter-measures. Classical Angle of Arrival (AoA) methods exhibit reduced accuracy in multipath environments due to signal reflections and scattering, leading to localization errors. Additionally, AoA-based techniques demand substantial computational resources for array signal processing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting and classifying interference while estimating the distance, azimuth, and elevation of jamming sources. Our benchmark study evaluates 128 vision encoder and time-series models to identify the highest-performing methods for each task. We introduce an attention-based fusion framework that integrates in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-computed spectrograms while incorporating 22 AoA features to enhance localization accuracy. Furthermore, we present a novel dataset of moving jamming devices recorded in an indoor environment with dynamic multipath conditions and demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.