Automatic assessment of cognitive impairment from spontaneous speech offers a promising, non-invasive avenue for early cognitive screening. However, current approaches often lack generalizability when deployed across different languages and clinical settings, limiting their practical utility. In this study, we propose CogBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-lingual and cross-site generalizability of large language models (LLMs) for speech-based cognitive impairment assessment. Using a unified multimodal pipeline, we evaluate model performance on three speech datasets spanning English and Mandarin: ADReSSo, NCMMSC2021-AD, and a newly collected test set, CIR-E. Our results show that conventional deep learning models degrade substantially when transferred across domains. In contrast, LLMs equipped with chain-of-thought prompting demonstrate better adaptability, though their performance remains sensitive to prompt design. Furthermore, we explore lightweight fine-tuning of LLMs via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which significantly improves generalization in target domains. These findings offer a critical step toward building clinically useful and linguistically robust speech-based cognitive assessment tools.

To address the challenges posed by the heavy reliance of multi-output models on preset probability distributions and embedded prior knowledge in non-injective regression tasks, this paper proposes a cycle consistency-based data-driven training framework. The method jointly optimizes a forward model Φ: X to Y and a backward model Ψ: Y to X, where the cycle consistency loss is defined as L _cycleb equal L(Y reduce Φ(Ψ(Y))) (and vice versa). By minimizing this loss, the framework establishes a closed-loop mechanism integrating generation and validation phases, eliminating the need for manual rule design or prior distribution assumptions. Experiments on normalized synthetic and simulated datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a cycle reconstruction error below 0.003, achieving an improvement of approximately 30% in evaluation metrics compared to baseline models without cycle consistency. Furthermore, the framework supports unsupervised learning and significantly reduces reliance on manual intervention, demonstrating potential advantages in non-injective regression tasks.

This paper explores the human-centric operationalization of Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, addressing aspects beyond accuracy. We compare various machine learning-based approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) approaches, identifying their strengths, similarities and differences. The study investigates key dimensions such as bias, robustness, and explainability, considered important for human-aware operationalization of AES systems. Our study shows that ML-based AES models outperform LLMs in accuracy but struggle with explainability, whereas LLMs provide richer explanations. We also found that both approaches struggle with bias and robustness to edge scores. By analyzing these dimensions, the paper aims to identify challenges and trade-offs between different methods, contributing to more reliable and trustworthy AES methods.

The convergence of Information Technology and Operational Technology has exposed Industrial Control Systems to adaptive, intelligent adversaries that render static defenses obsolete. This paper introduces the Adversarial Resilience Co-evolution (ARC) framework, addressing the "Trinity of Trust" comprising model fidelity, data integrity, and analytical resilience. ARC establishes a co-evolutionary arms race within a Fortified Secure Digital Twin (F-SCDT), where a Deep Reinforcement Learning "Red Agent" autonomously discovers attack paths while an ensemble-based "Blue Agent" is continuously hardened against these threats. Experimental validation on the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) and Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) testbeds demonstrates superior performance in detecting novel attacks, with F1-scores improving from 0.65 to 0.89 and detection latency reduced from over 1200 seconds to 210 seconds. A comprehensive ablation study reveals that the co-evolutionary process itself contributes a 27% performance improvement. By integrating Explainable AI and proposing a Federated ARC architecture, this work presents a necessary paradigm shift toward dynamic, self-improving security for critical infrastructure.

Scenario to be rewritten: { scenario } To rigorously evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) could still recognize the original source behind these rewritten scenarios, we designed three complementary prompt strategies, each probing different aspects of the models' recognition and reasoning capabilities. Zero-shot Direct Identification focuses on testing the model's raw ability to recall source material under minimal guidance (Brown et al., 2020; Mu et al., 2024). Paraphrased Queries introduce linguistic variation to reduce prompt-specific biases and measure the robustness of recognition (Liu et al., 2024a; Ngweta et al., 2025). Instruction-tuned T ask-framed Prompts leverage explicit role framing and step-by-step task descriptions to maximize retrieval pressure and analytical reasoning (Ouyang et al., 2022; Sivarajkumar et al., 2024). By combining these strategies, we construct a comprehensive recognition test that balances sensitivity and robustness, ensuring that a scenario is only deemed valid if no prompt family leads to a confident and correct identification of the original work. This integrated approach provides a stronger safeguard against hidden memorization and enables more reliable downstream behavioral analysis of the tested LLMs. V alidation Prompt We designed three prompt families for scenario source identification. Each family targets a different aspect of model behavior: Given the following scenario: 19 { scenario } 1. Zero-shot Identification Please determine whether this scenario originates from a known literary or cinematic work.

To address the challenges of table structure recognition, we propose a novel Split-Merge-based top-down model optimized for large, densely populated tables. Our approach formulates row and column splitting as sequence labeling tasks, utilizing dual Transformer encoders to capture feature interactions. The merging process is framed as a grid cell classification task, leveraging an additional Transformer encoder to ensure accurate and coherent merging. By eliminating unstable bounding box predictions, our method reduces resolution loss and computational complexity, achieving high accuracy while maintaining fast processing speed. Extensive experiments on FinTabNet and PubTabNet demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing approaches, particularly in real-world applications. Our method offers a robust, scalable, and efficient solution for large-scale table recognition, making it well-suited for industrial deployment.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, varying response quality across LLMs under RAG necessitates intelligent routing mechanisms, which select the most suitable model for each query from multiple retrieval-augmented LLMs via a dedicated router model. We observe that external documents dynamically affect LLMs' ability to answer queries, while existing routing methods, which rely on static parametric knowledge representations, exhibit suboptimal performance in RAG scenarios. To address this, we formally define the new retrieval-augmented LLM routing problem, incorporating the influence of retrieved documents into the routing framework. We propose RAGRouter, a RAG-aware routing design, which leverages document embeddings and RAG capability embeddings with contrastive learning to capture knowledge representation shifts and enable informed routing decisions. Extensive experiments on diverse knowledge-intensive tasks and retrieval settings, covering open and closed-source LLMs, show that RAGRouter outperforms the best individual LLM and existing routing methods. With an extended score-threshold-based mechanism, it also achieves strong performance-efficiency trade-offs under low-latency constraints. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OwwO99/RAGRouter.

Medical image segmentation plays an important role in various clinical applications; however, existing deep learning models face trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) capture local details well but miss the global context, whereas transformers handle the global context but at a high computational cost. Recently, State Space Sequence Models (SSMs) have shown potential for capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity; however, their direct use in medical image segmentation remains limited due to incompatibility with image structures and autoregressive assumptions. To overcome these challenges, we propose SAMA-UNet, a novel U-shaped architecture that introduces two key innovations. First, the Self-Adaptive Mamba-like Aggregated Attention (SAMA) block adaptively integrates local and global features through dynamic attention weighting, enabling an efficient representation of complex anatomical patterns. Second, the causal resonance multi-scale module (CR-MSM) improves encoder-decoder interactions by adjusting feature resolution and causal dependencies across scales, enhancing the semantic alignment between low- and high-level features. Extensive experiments on MRI, CT, and endoscopy datasets demonstrate that SAMA-UNet consistently outperforms CNN, Transformer, and Mamba-based methods. It achieves 85.38% DSC and 87.82% NSD on BTCV, 92.16% and 96.54% on ACDC, 67.14% and 68.70% on EndoVis17, and 84.06% and 88.47% on ATLAS23, establishing new benchmarks across modalities. These results confirm the effectiveness of SAMA-UNet in combining efficiency and accuracy, making it a promising solution for real-world clinical segmentation tasks. The source code is available on GitHub.

Multi-modal large language model (MLLM)-based web agents interact with webpage environments by generating actions based on screenshots of the webpages. In this work, we propose WebInject, a prompt injection attack that manipulates the webpage environment to induce a web agent to perform an attacker-specified action. Our attack adds a perturbation to the raw pixel values of the rendered webpage. After these perturbed pixels are mapped into a screenshot, the perturbation induces the web agent to perform the attacker-specified action. We formulate the task of finding the perturbation as an optimization problem. A key challenge in solving this problem is that the mapping between raw pixel values and screenshot is non-differentiable, making it difficult to backpropagate gradients to the perturbation. To overcome this, we train a neural network to approximate the mapping and apply projected gradient descent to solve the reformulated optimization problem. Extensive evaluation on multiple datasets shows that WebInject is highly effective and significantly outperforms baselines.

AI spans from large language models to tiny models running on microcontrollers (MCUs). Extremely memory-efficient model architectures are decisive to fit within an MCU's tiny memory budget e.g., 128kB of RAM. However, inference latency must remain small to fit real-time constraints. An approach to tackle this is patch-based fusion, which aims to optimize data flows across neural network layers. In this paper, we introduce msf-CNN, a novel technique that efficiently finds optimal fusion settings for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by walking through the fusion solution space represented as a directed acyclic graph. Compared to previous work on CNN fusion for MCUs, msf-CNN identifies a wider set of solutions. We published an implementation of msf-CNN running on various microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V, ESP32). We show that msf-CNN can achieve inference using 50% less RAM compared to the prior art (MCUNetV2 and StreamNet). We thus demonstrate how msf-CNN offers additional flexibility for system designers.