Deep Learning
Language Confusion Gate: Language-Aware Decoding Through Model Self-Distillation
Zhang, Collin, Huang, Fei, Yuan, Chenhan, Lin, Junyang
Large language models (LLMs) often experience language confusion, which is the unintended mixing of languages during text generation. Current solutions to this problem either necessitate model retraining or cannot differentiate between harmful confusion and acceptable code-switching. This paper introduces the Language Confusion Gate (LCG), a lightweight, plug-in solution that filters tokens during decoding without altering the base LLM. The LCG is trained using norm-adjusted self-distillation to predict appropriate language families and apply masking only when needed. Our method is based on the findings that language confusion is infrequent, correct-language tokens are usually among the top predictions, and output token embedding norms are larger for high-resource languages, which biases sampling. When evaluated across various models, including Qwen3, GPT-OSS, Gemma3, Llama3.1, LCG decreases language confusion significantly, often by an order of magnitude, without negatively impacting task performance. Code is available at https://github.com/collinzrj/language_confusion_gate.
OncoReason: Structuring Clinical Reasoning in LLMs for Robust and Interpretable Survival Prediction
Hemadri, Raghu Vamshi, Guruju, Geetha Krishna, Topollai, Kristi, Choromanska, Anna Ewa
Predicting cancer treatment outcomes requires models that are both accurate and interpretable, particularly in the presence of heterogeneous clinical data. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in biomedical NLP, they often lack structured reasoning capabilities critical for high-stakes decision support. We present a unified, multi-task learning framework that aligns autoregres-sive LLMs with clinical reasoning for outcome prediction on the MSK-CHORD dataset. Our models are trained to jointly perform binary survival classification, continuous survival time regression, and natural language rationale generation. We evaluate three alignment strategies: (1) standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT), (2) SFT with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to elicit step-by-step reasoning, and (3) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method that aligns model outputs to expert-derived reasoning trajectories. Experiments with LLaMa3-8B and Med42-8B backbones demonstrate that CoT prompting improves F1 by +6.0 and reduces MAE by 12%, while GRPO achieves state-of-the-art interpretability and predictive performance across BLEU, ROUGE, and BERTScore. We further show that existing biomedical LLMs often fail to produce valid reasoning traces due to architectural constraints. Our findings underscore the importance of reasoning-aware alignment in multi-task clinical modeling and set a new benchmark for interpretable, trustworthy LLMs in precision oncology.
How Does Label Noise Gradient Descent Improve Generalization in the Low SNR Regime?
Huang, Wei, Han, Andi, Song, Yujin, Chen, Yilan, Wu, Denny, Zou, Difan, Suzuki, Taiji
The capacity of deep learning models is often large enough to both learn the underlying statistical signal and overfit to noise in the training set. This noise memorization can be harmful especially for data with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), leading to poor generalization. Inspired by prior observations that label noise provides implicit regularization that improves generalization, in this work, we investigate whether introducing label noise to the gradient updates can enhance the test performance of neural network (NN) in the low SNR regime. Specifically, we consider training a two-layer NN with a simple label noise gradient descent (GD) algorithm, in an idealized signal-noise data setting. We prove that adding label noise during training suppresses noise memorization, preventing it from dominating the learning process; consequently, label noise GD enjoys rapid signal growth while the overfitting remains controlled, thereby achieving good generalization despite the low SNR. In contrast, we also show that NN trained with standard GD tends to overfit to noise in the same low SNR setting and establish a non-vanishing lower bound on its test error, thus demonstrating the benefit of introducing label noise in gradient-based training.
Mitigating Clever Hans Strategies in Image Classifiers through Generating Counterexamples
Bender, Sidney, Delzer, Ole, Herrmann, Jan, Marxfeld, Heike Antje, Mรผller, Klaus-Robert, Montavon, Grรฉgoire
Deep learning models remain vulnerable to spurious correlations, leading to so-called Clever Hans predictors that undermine robustness even in large-scale foundation and self-supervised models. Group distributional robustness methods, such as Deep Feature Reweighting (DFR) rely on explicit group labels to upweight underrepresented subgroups, but face key limitations: (1) group labels are often unavailable, (2) low within-group sample sizes hinder coverage of the subgroup distribution, and (3) performance degrades sharply when multiple spurious correlations fragment the data into even smaller groups. We propose Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation (CFKD), a framework that sidesteps these issues by generating diverse counterfactuals, enabling a human annotator to efficiently explore and correct the model's decision boundaries through a knowledge distillation step. Our method does not require any confounder labels, achieves effective scaling to multiple confounders, and yields balanced generalization across groups. We demonstrate CFKD's efficacy across five datasets, spanning synthetic tasks to an industrial application, with particularly strong gains in low-data regimes with pronounced spurious correlations. Additionally, we provide an ablation study on the effect of the chosen counterfactual explainer and teacher model, highlighting their impact on robustness.1. Introduction Deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, delivering state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and biomedical applications. However, despite these advancements, models frequently rely on spurious features--also known as confounders--which can give rise to so-called Clever Hans (CH) predictors [1, 2]. Such models may fit training data well and achieve high validation accuracy, yet fail catastrophically when deployed under realistic conditions.
DETree: DEtecting Human-AI Collaborative Texts via Tree-Structured Hierarchical Representation Learning
He, Yongxin, Zhang, Shan, Cao, Yixuan, Ma, Lei, Luo, Ping
Detecting AI-involved text is essential for combating misinformation, plagiarism, and academic misconduct. However, AI text generation includes diverse collaborative processes (AI-written text edited by humans, human-written text edited by AI, and AI-generated text refined by other AI), where various or even new LLMs could be involved. Texts generated through these varied processes exhibit complex characteristics, presenting significant challenges for detection. Current methods model these processes rather crudely, primarily employing binary classification (purely human vs. AI-involved) or multi-classification (treating human-AI collaboration as a new class). We observe that representations of texts generated through different processes exhibit inherent clustering relationships. Therefore, we propose DETree, a novel approach that models the relationships among different processes as a Hierarchical Affinity Tree structure, and introduces a specialized loss function that aligns text representations with this tree. To facilitate this learning, we developed RealBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that automatically incorporates a wide spectrum of hybrid texts produced through various human-AI collaboration processes. Our method improves performance in hybrid text detection tasks and significantly enhances robustness and generalization in out-of-distribution scenarios, particularly in few-shot learning conditions, further demonstrating the promise of training-based approaches in OOD settings. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DETree.
ReXMoE: Reusing Experts with Minimal Overhead in Mixture-of-Experts
Tan, Zheyue, Li, Zhiyuan, Yuan, Tao, Zhou, Dong, Liu, Weilin, Zhuang, Yueqing, Li, Yadong, Niu, Guowei, Qin, Cheng, Yao, Zhuyu, Liu, Congyi, Xu, Haiyang, Li, Boxun, Dai, Guohao, Zhao, Bo, Wang, Yu
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a promising approach to scale Large Language Models (LLMs). MoE boosts the efficiency by activating a subset of experts per token. Recent works show that fine-grained experts substantially enriches the combinatorial flexibility of active experts and enhances model expressiveness. However, such a design is fundamentally limited by the layer-local routing mechanism: each layer is restricted to its own expert pool. This requires a careful trade-off between expert dimensionality and routing diversity given fixed parameter budgets. We describe ReXMoE, a novel MoE architecture that improves routing beyond the existing layer-local approaches by allowing routers to reuse experts across adjacent layers. ReXMoE decouples expert dimensionality from per-layer budgets, enabling richer expert combinations without sacrificing individual expert capacity or inflating overall parameters. To this end, we propose a new progressive scaling routing (PSR) strategy to gradually increase the candidate expert pool during training. As a result, ReXMoE improves both language modeling and downstream task performance. Extensive experiments on models ranging from 0.5B to 7B parameters across different architectures demonstrate that ReXMoE consistently improves performance under fixed architectural dimensions, confirming ReXMoE as new design paradigm for parameter-efficient and scalable MoE-based LLMs.
Disparities in Multilingual LLM-Based Healthcare Q&A
Schlicht, Ipek Baris, Sayin, Burcu, Zhao, Zhixue, Labontรฉ, Frederik M., Barbera, Cesare, Viviani, Marco, Rosso, Paolo, Flek, Lucie
Equitable access to reliable health information is vital when integrating AI into healthcare. Yet, information quality varies across languages, raising concerns about the reliability and consistency of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs). We systematically examine cross-lingual disparities in pre-training source and factuality alignment in LLM answers for multilingual healthcare Q&A across English, German, Turkish, Chinese (Mandarin), and Italian. We (i) constructed Multilingual Wiki Health Care (MultiWikiHealthCare), a multilingual dataset from Wikipedia; (ii) analyzed cross-lingual healthcare coverage; (iii) assessed LLM response alignment with these references; and (iv) conducted a case study on factual alignment through the use of contextual information and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Our findings reveal substantial cross-lingual disparities in both Wikipedia coverage and LLM factual alignment. Across LLMs, responses align more with English Wikipedia, even when the prompts are non-English. Providing contextual excerpts from non-English Wikipedia at inference time effectively shifts factual alignment toward culturally relevant knowledge. These results highlight practical pathways for building more equitable, multilingual AI systems for healthcare.
DAMSDAN: Distribution-Aware Multi-Source Domain Adaptation Network for Cross-Domain EEG-based Emotion Recognition
Hu, Fo, Wang, Can, Zheng, Qinxu, Yang, Xusheng, Zhou, Bin, Li, Gang, Sun, Yu, Zhang, Wen-an
Significant inter-individual variability limits the generalization of EEG-based emotion recognition under cross-domain settings. We address two core challenges in multi-source adaptation: (1) dynamically modeling distributional heterogeneity across sources and quantifying their relevance to a target to reduce negative transfer; and (2) achieving fine-grained semantic consistency to strengthen class discrimination. We propose a distribution-aware multi-source domain adaptation network (DAMSDAN). DAMSDAN integrates prototype-based constraints with adversarial learning to drive the encoder toward discriminative, domain-invariant emotion representations. A domain-aware source weighting strategy based on maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) dynamically estimates inter-domain shifts and reweights source contributions. In addition, a prototype-guided conditional alignment module with dual pseudo-label interaction enhances pseudo-label reliability and enables category-level, fine-grained alignment, mitigating noise propagation and semantic drift. Experiments on SEED and SEED-IV show average accuracies of 94.86\% and 79.78\% for cross-subject, and 95.12\% and 83.15\% for cross-session protocols. On the large-scale FACED dataset, DAMSDAN achieves 82.88\% (cross-subject). Extensive ablations and interpretability analyses corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for cross-domain EEG-based emotion recognition.
CrossStateECG: Multi-Scale Deep Convolutional Network with Attention for Rest-Exercise ECG Biometrics
Zheng, Dan, Feng, Jing, Liu, Juan
Current research in Electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics mainly emphasizes resting - state conditions, leaving the performance decline in rest - exercise scenarios largely unresolved. This paper introduces CrossStateECG, a robust ECG - based authentication model e xplicitly tailored for cross - state (rest - exercise) conditions. The proposed model creatively combines multi - scale d eep c onvolu-tional feature extraction with attention mechanisms to ensure strong identification across different physiological states. Experim ental results on the exercise - ECGID dataset validate the effectiveness of CrossStateECG, achieving an identification accuracy of 92.50% in the Rest - to - Exercise scenario (training on resting ECG and testing on post - exercis e ECG) and 94.72% in the Exercise - t o - Rest scenario (training on post - exercis e ECG and testing on rest ing ECG). Furthermore, CrossStateECG demonstrates exceptional performance across both state combinations, reaching an accuracy of 99.94% in Rest - to - Rest scenarios and 97.85% in Mixed - to - Mixed scenarios. Additional validations on the ECG - ID and MIT - BIH datasets further confirmed the generalization abilities of CrossStateECG, underscoring it s potential as a practical solution for post - exercise ECG - based authentication in dynamic real - world settings.
Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idiom Translation
Khan, Muhammad Farmal, Akter, Mousumi
Idiomatic translation remains a significant challenge in machine translation, especially for low resource languages such as Urdu, and has received limited prior attention. To advance research in this area, we introduce the first evaluation datasets for Urdu to English idiomatic translation, covering both Native Urdu and Roman Urdu scripts and annotated with gold-standard English equivalents. We evaluate multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems on this task, focusing on their ability to preserve idiomatic and cultural meaning. Automatic metrics including BLEU, BERTScore, COMET, and XCOMET are used to assess translation quality. Our findings indicate that prompt engineering enhances idiomatic translation compared to direct translation, though performance differences among prompt types are relatively minor. Moreover, cross script comparisons reveal that text representation substantially affects translation quality, with Native Urdu inputs producing more accurate idiomatic translations than Roman Urdu.