Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems rely on in-context policy documents encoding diverse business rules. As requirements grow, these documents expand rapidly, causing high computational overhead. This motivates developing internalization methods that embed policy documents into model priors while preserving performance. Prior prompt compression work targets generic prompts, but agentic policy documents span multiple complexity levels and require deeper reasoning, making internalization harder. We introduce CC-Gen, an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity across four levels, enabling systematic evaluation of agents' ability to handle complexity and offering a unified framework for assessing policy internalization. Our analysis shows that complex policy specifications governing workflows pose major reasoning challenges. Supporting internalization with gold user agent interaction trajectories containing chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is data-intensive and degrades sharply as policy complexity increases. To mitigate data and reasoning burdens, we propose Category-Aware Policy Continued Pretraining (CAP-CPT). Our automated pipeline parses policy documents to extract key specifications, grouping them into factual, behavioral, and conditional categories, and isolating complex conditions that drive workflow complexity. This guides targeted data synthesis and enables agents to internalize policy information through an autoregressive pretraining loss. Experiments show CAP-CPT improves SFT baselines in all settings, with up to 41% and 22% gains on Qwen-3-32B, achieving 97.3% prompt length reduction on CC-Gen and further enhancing tau-Bench with minimal SFT data.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to identify and interpret human emotions by integrating information from heterogeneous data sources such as text, video, and audio. While deep learning models have advanced in network architecture design, they remain heavily limited by scarce multimodal annotated data. Although Mixup-based augmentation improves generalization in unimodal tasks, its direct application to MSA introduces critical challenges: random mixing often amplifies label ambiguity and semantic inconsistency due to the lack of emotion-aware mixing mechanisms. To overcome these issues, we propose MS-Mix, an adaptive, emotion-sensitive augmentation framework that automatically optimizes sample mixing in multimodal settings. The key components of MS-Mix include: (1) a Sentiment-Aware Sample Selection (SASS) strategy that effectively prevents semantic confusion caused by mixing samples with contradictory emotions. (2) a Sentiment Intensity Guided (SIG) module using multi-head self-attention to compute modality-specific mixing ratios dynamically based on their respective emotional intensities. (3) a Sentiment Alignment Loss (SAL) that aligns the prediction distributions across modalities, and incorporates the Kullback-Leibler-based loss as an additional regularization term to train the emotion intensity predictor and the backbone network jointly. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets with six state-of-the-art backbones confirm that MS-Mix consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a new standard for robust multimodal sentiment augmentation. The source code is available at: https://github.com/HongyuZhu-s/MS-Mix.

Modern learning systems increasingly rely on amortized learning - the idea of reusing computation or inductive biases shared across tasks to enable rapid generalization to novel problems. This principle spans a range of approaches, including meta-learning, in-context learning, prompt tuning, learned optimizers and more. While motivated by similar goals, these approaches differ in how they encode and leverage task-specific information, often provided as in-context examples. In this work, we propose a unified framework which describes how such methods differ primarily in the aspects of learning they amortize - such as initializations, learned updates, or predictive mappings - and how they incorporate task data at inference. We introduce a taxonomy that categorizes amortized models into parametric, implicit, and explicit regimes, based on whether task adaptation is externalized, internalized, or jointly modeled. Building on this view, we identify a key limitation in current approaches: most methods struggle to scale to large datasets because their capacity to process task data at inference (e.g., context length) is often limited. To address this, we propose iterative amortized inference, a class of models that refine solutions step-by-step over mini-batches, drawing inspiration from stochastic optimization. Our formulation bridges optimization-based meta-learning with forward-pass amortization in models like LLMs, offering a scalable and extensible foundation for general-purpose task adaptation.

Twelve-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) are the clinical gold standard for cardiac diagnosis, providing comprehensive spatial coverage of the heart necessary to detect conditions such as myocardial infarction (MI). However, their lack of portability limits continuous and large-scale use. Three-lead ECG systems are widely used in wearable devices due to their simplicity and mobility, but they often fail to capture pathologies in unmeasured regions. To address this, we propose WearECG, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) method that reconstructs twelve-lead ECGs from three leads: II, V1, and V5. Our model includes architectural improvements to better capture temporal and spatial dependencies in ECG signals. We evaluate generation quality using MSE, MAE, and Frechet Inception Distance (FID), and assess clinical validity via a Turing test with expert cardiologists. To further validate diagnostic utility, we fine-tune ECGFounder, a large-scale pretrained ECG model, on a multi-label classification task involving over 40 cardiac conditions, including six different myocardial infarction locations, using both real and generated signals. Experiments on the MIMIC dataset show that our method produces physiologically realistic and diagnostically informative signals, with robust performance in downstream tasks. This work demonstrates the potential of generative modeling for ECG reconstruction and its implications for scalable, low-cost cardiac screening.

Generative Models are a valuable tool for the controlled creation of high-quality image data. Controlled diffusion models like the ControlNet have allowed the creation of labeled distributions. Such synthetic datasets can augment the original training distribution when discriminative models, like semantic segmentation, are trained. However, this augmentation effect is limited since ControlNets tend to reproduce the original training distribution. This work introduces a method to utilize data from unlabeled domains to train ControlNets by introducing the concept of uncertainty into the control mechanism. The uncertainty indicates that a given image was not part of the training distribution of a downstream task, e.g., segmentation. Thus, two types of control are engaged in the final network: an uncertainty control from an unlabeled dataset and a semantic control from the labeled dataset. The resulting ControlNet allows us to create annotated data with high uncertainty from the target domain, i.e., synthetic data from the unlabeled distribution with labels. In our scenario, we consider retinal OCTs, where typically high-quality Spectralis images are available with given ground truth segmentations, enabling the training of segmentation networks. The recent development in Home-OCT devices, however, yields retinal OCTs with lower quality and a large domain shift, such that out-of-the-pocket segmentation networks cannot be applied for this type of data. Synthesizing annotated images from the Home-OCT domain using the proposed approach closes this gap and leads to significantly improved segmentation results without adding any further supervision. The advantage of uncertainty-guidance becomes obvious when compared to style transfer: it enables arbitrary domain shifts without any strict learning of an image style. This is also demonstrated in a traffic scene experiment.

This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) self-management. We constructed a database of approximately 3,000 anteroposterior X-rays with diagnostic texts and evaluated five MLLMs through a `Divide and Conquer' framework consisting of a visual question-answering task, a domain knowledge assessment task, and a patient education counseling assessment task. Our investigation revealed limitations of MLLMs' ability in interpreting complex spinal radiographs and comprehending AIS care knowledge. To address these, we pioneered enhancing MLLMs with spinal keypoint prompting and compiled an AIS knowledge base for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), respectively. Results showed varying effectiveness of visual prompting across different architectures, while RAG substantially improved models' performances on the knowledge assessment task. Our findings indicate current MLLMs are far from capable in realizing personalized assistant in AIS care. The greatest challenge lies in their abilities to obtain accurate detections of spinal deformity locations (best accuracy: 0.55) and directions (best accuracy: 0.13).

Multimodal text-to-image generation remains constrained by the difficulty of maintaining semantic alignment and professional-level detail across diverse visual domains. We propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that coordinates domain-specialized agents (e.g., focused on architecture, portraiture, and landscape imagery) within two coupled subsystems: a text enhancement module and an image generation module, each augmented with multimodal integration components. Agents are trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) under a composite reward function that balances semantic similarity, linguistic visual quality, and content diversity. Cross-modal alignment is enforced through contrastive learning, bidirectional attention, and iterative feedback between text and image. Across six experimental settings, our system significantly enriches generated content (word count increased by 1614%) while reducing ROUGE-1 scores by 69.7%. Among fusion methods, Transformer-based strategies achieve the highest composite score (0.521), despite occasional stability issues. Multimodal ensembles yield moderate consistency (ranging from 0.444 to 0.481), reflecting the persistent challenges of cross-modal semantic grounding. These findings underscore the promise of collaborative, specialization-driven architectures for advancing reliable multimodal generative systems.

UNESCO has classified 2500 out of 7000 languages spoken worldwide as endangered. Attrition of a language leads to loss of traditional wisdom, folk literature, and the essence of the community that uses it. It is therefore imperative to bring digital inclusion to these languages and avoid its extinction. Low resource languages are at a greater risk of extinction. Lack of unsupervised Optical Character Recognition(OCR) methodologies for low resource languages is one of the reasons impeding their digital inclusion. We propose VOLTAGE - a contrastive learning based OCR methodology, leveraging auto-glyph feature recommendation for cluster-based labelling. We augment the labelled data for diversity and volume using image transformations and Generative Adversarial Networks. Voltage has been designed using Takri - a family of scripts used in 16th to 20th century in the Himalayan regions of India. We present results for Takri along with other Indic scripts (both low and high resource) to substantiate the universal behavior of the methodology. An accuracy of 95% for machine printed and 87% for handwritten samples on Takri script has been achieved. We conduct baseline and ablation studies along with building downstream use cases for Takri, demonstrating the usefulness of our work.

Understanding and predicting pedestrian dynamics has become essential for shaping safer, more responsive, and human-centered urban environments. This study conducts a comprehensive scien-tometric analysis of research on data-driven pedestrian trajectory prediction and crowd simulation, mapping its intellectual evolution and interdisciplinary structure. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, we employ SciExplorer and Bibliometrix to identify major trends, influential contributors, and emerging frontiers. Results reveal a strong convergence between artificial intelligence, urban informatics, and crowd behavior modeling--driven by graph neural networks, transformers, and generative models. Beyond technical advances, the field increasingly informs urban mobility design, public safety planning, and digital twin development for smart cities. However, challenges remain in ensuring interpretability, inclusivity, and cross-domain transferability. By connecting methodological trajectories with urban applications, this work highlights how data-driven approaches can enrich urban governance and pave the way for adaptive, socially responsible mobility intelligence in future cities. Introduction Pedestrian trajectory prediction and simulation is an interdisciplinary research field where data-driven models, particularly machine learning and deep learning techniques, are employed to model, predict, and simulate human movement dynamics in diverse environments [4, 8, 17]. Although research on pedestrian dynamics can be traced back to the seminal social force model [7], the advent of large-scale mobility datasets and sensing technologies has substantially transformed the landscape in recent decades.

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion understanding and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may inadvertently reinforce social inequalities.