Urban forecasting models often face a severe data imbalance problem: only a few cities have dense, long-span records, while many others expose short or incomplete histories. Direct transfer from data-rich to data-scarce cities is unreliable because only a limited subset of source patterns truly benefits the target domain, whereas indiscriminate transfer risks introducing noise and negative transfer. We present STRATA-TS (Selective TRAnsfer via TArget-aware retrieval for Time Series), a framework that combines domain-adapted retrieval with reasoning-capable large models to improve forecasting in scarce data regimes. STRATA-TS employs a patch-based temporal encoder to identify source subsequences that are semantically and dynamically aligned with the target query. These retrieved exemplars are then injected into a retrieval-guided reasoning stage, where an LLM performs structured inference over target inputs and retrieved support. To enable efficient deployment, we distill the reasoning process into a compact open model via supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on three parking availability datasets across Singapore, Nottingham, and Glasgow demonstrate that STRATA-TS consistently outperforms strong forecasting and transfer baselines, while providing interpretable knowledge transfer pathways.

The structure of biological neural circuits-modular, hierarchical, and sparsely interconnected-reflects an efficient trade-off between wiring cost, functional specialization, and robustness. These principles offer valuable insights for artificial neural network (ANN) design, especially as networks grow in depth and scale. Sparsity, in particular, has been widely explored for reducing memory and computation, improving speed, and enhancing generalization. Motivated by systems neuroscience findings, we explore how patterns of functional connectivity in the mouse visual cortex-specifically, ensemble-to-ensemble communication, can inform ANN design. We introduce G2GNet, a novel architecture that imposes sparse, modular connectivity across feedforward layers. Despite having significantly fewer parameters than fully connected models, G2GNet achieves superior accuracy on standard vision benchmarks. To our knowledge, this is the first architecture to incorporate biologically observed functional connectivity patterns as a structural bias in ANN design. We complement this static bias with a dynamic sparse training (DST) mechanism that prunes and regrows edges during training. We also propose a Hebbian-inspired rewiring rule based on activation correlations, drawing on principles of biological plasticity. G2GNet achieves up to 75% sparsity while improving accuracy by up to 4.3% on benchmarks, including Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, outperforming dense baselines with far fewer computations.

Foundational modelling of multi-dimensional time-series data in industrial systems presents a central trade-off: channel-dependent (CD) models capture specific cross-variable dynamics but lack robustness and adaptability as model layers are commonly bound to the data dimensionality of the tackled use-case, while channel-independent (CI) models offer generality at the cost of modelling the explicit interactions crucial for system-level predictive regression tasks. To resolve this, we propose the Causally-Guided Pairwise Transformer (CGPT), a novel architecture that integrates a known causal graph as an inductive bias. The core of CGPT is built around a pairwise modeling paradigm, tackling the CD/CI conflict by decomposing the multidimensional data into pairs. The model uses channel-agnostic learnable layers where all parameter dimensions are independent of the number of variables. CGPT enforces a CD information flow at the pair-level and CI-like generalization across pairs. This approach disentangles complex system dynamics and results in a highly flexible architecture that ensures scalability and any-variate adaptability. We validate CGPT on a suite of synthetic and real-world industrial datasets on long-term and one-step forecasting tasks designed to simulate common industrial complexities. Results demonstrate that CGPT significantly outperforms both CI and CD baselines in predictive accuracy and shows competitive performance with end-to-end trained CD models while remaining agnostic to the problem dimensionality.

Pathological images play an essential role in cancer prognosis, while survival analysis, which integrates computational techniques, can predict critical clinical events such as patient mortality or disease recurrence from whole-slide images (WSIs). Recent advancements in multiple instance learning have significantly improved the efficiency of survival analysis. However, existing methods often struggle to balance the modeling of long-range spatial relationships with local contextual dependencies and typically lack inherent interpretability, limiting their clinical utility. To address these challenges, we propose the Interpretable Pathology Graph-Transformer (IPGPhormer), a novel framework that captures the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment and models their spatial dependencies across the tissue. IPGPhormer uniquely provides interpretability at both tissue and cellular levels without requiring post-hoc manual annotations, enabling detailed analyses of individual WSIs and cross-cohort assessments. Comprehensive evaluations on four public benchmark datasets demonstrate that IPGPhormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In summary, our method, IPGPhormer, offers a promising tool for cancer prognosis assessment, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable decision-support systems in pathology. The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IPGPhormer-6EEB.

As interest grows in applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to mental health, an expanding body of work explores the automatic detection and classification of cognitive distortions (CDs). CDs are habitual patterns of negatively biased or flawed thinking that distort how people perceive events, judge themselves, and react to the world. Identifying and addressing them is a central goal of therapy. Despite this momentum, the field remains fragmented, with inconsistencies in CD taxonomies, task formulations, and evaluation practices limiting comparability across studies. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of 38 studies spanning two decades, mapping how CDs have been implemented in computational research and evaluating the methods applied. We provide a consolidated CD taxonomy reference, summarise common task setups, and highlight persistent challenges to support more coherent and reproducible research. Alongside our review, we introduce practical resources, including curated evaluation metrics from surveyed papers, a standardised datasheet template, and an ethics flowchart, available online.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), such as Massive Open Online Courses, offer new opportunities for human learning. At the core of such systems, knowledge tracing (KT) predicts students' future performance by analyzing their historical learning activities, enabling an accurate evaluation of students' knowledge states over time. We show that existing KT methods often encounter correlation conflicts when analyzing the relationships between historical learning sequences and future performance. To address such conflicts, we propose to extract so-called Follow-up Performance Trends (FPTs) from historical ITS data and to incorporate them into KT. We propose a method called Forward-Looking Knowledge Tracing (FINER) that combines historical learning sequences with FPTs to enhance student performance prediction accuracy. FINER constructs learning patterns that facilitate the retrieval of FPTs from historical ITS data in linear time; FINER includes a novel similarity-aware attention mechanism that aggregates FPTs based on both frequency and contextual similarity; and FINER offers means of combining FPTs and historical learning sequences to enable more accurate prediction of student future performance. Experiments on six real-world datasets show that FINER can outperform ten state-of-the-art KT methods, increasing accuracy by 8.74% to 84.85%.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances knowledge grounding, and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which optimizes complex reasoning abilities. However, these two capabilities are often developed in isolation, and existing efforts to unify them remain narrow in scope -- typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings and task-specific constraints. This lack of integration constrains generalization and limits the applicability of RAG-RL methods to broader domains. To bridge this gap, we propose UR2 (Unified RAG and Reasoning), a general framework that unifies retrieval and reasoning through reinforcement learning. UR2 introduces two key contributions: a difficulty-aware curriculum training that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging problems, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy combining domain-specific offline corpora with LLM-generated summaries. These components are designed to enable dynamic coordination between retrieval and reasoning, improving adaptability across a diverse range of tasks. Experiments across open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that UR$^2$ (built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B) significantly outperforms existing RAG and RL methods, achieving comparable performance to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. We have released all code, models, and data at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/UR2.

Generative agents powered by Large Language Models demonstrate human-like characteristics through sophisticated natural language interactions. Their ability to assume roles and personalities based on predefined character biographies has positioned them as cost-effective substitutes for human participants in social science research. This paper explores the validity of such persona-based agents in representing human populations; we recreate the HEXACO personality inventory experiment by surveying 310 GPT-4 powered agents, conducting factor analysis on their responses, and comparing these results to the original findings presented by Ashton, Lee, & Goldberg in 2004. Our results found 1) a coherent and reliable personality structure was recoverable from the agents' responses demonstrating partial alignment to the HEXACO framework. 2) the derived personality dimensions were consistent and reliable within GPT-4, when coupled with a sufficiently curated population, and 3) cross-model analysis revealed variability in personality profiling, suggesting model-specific biases and limitations. We discuss the practical considerations and challenges encountered during the experiment. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the potential benefits and limitations of using generative agents in social science research and provides useful guidance on designing consistent and representative agent personas to maximise coverage and representation of human personality traits.

Since any ReLU network is piecewise affine, its hidden units can be characterized by their pullbacks through the active subnetwork, i.e., by their gradients (up to bias terms). However, gradients of deeper neurons are notoriously misaligned, which obscures the network's internal representations. We posit that models do align gradients with data, yet this is concealed by the intrinsic noise of the ReLU hard gating. We validate this intuition by applying soft gating in the backward pass only, reducing the local impact of weakly excited neurons. The resulting modified gradients, which we call "excitation pullbacks", exhibit striking perceptual alignment on a number of ImageNet-pretrained architectures, while the rudimentary pixel-space gradient ascent quickly produces easily interpretable input- and target-specific features. Inspired by these findings, we formulate the "path stability" hypothesis, claiming that the binary activation patterns largely stabilize during training and get encoded in the pre-activation distribution of the final model. When true, excitation pullbacks become aligned with the gradients of a kernel machine that mainly determines the network's decision. This provides a theoretical justification for the apparent faithfulness of the feature attributions based on excitation pullbacks, potentially even leading to mechanistic interpretability of deep models. Incidentally, we give a possible explanation for the effectiveness of Batch Normalization and Deep Features, together with a novel perspective on the network's internal memory and generalization properties. We release the code and an interactive app for easier exploration of the excitation pullbacks.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into users' daily lives, leading to a growing demand for personalized outputs. Previous work focuses on leveraging a user's own history, overlooking inter-user differences that are crucial for effective personalization. While recent work has attempted to model such differences, the reliance on language-based prompts often hampers the effective extraction of meaningful distinctions. To address these issues, we propose Difference-aware Embedding-based Personalization (DEP), a framework that models inter-user differences in the latent space instead of relying on language prompts. DEP constructs soft prompts by contrasting a user's embedding with those of peers who engaged with similar content, highlighting relative behavioral signals. A sparse autoencoder then filters and compresses both user-specific and difference-aware embeddings, preserving only task-relevant features before injecting them into a frozen LLM. Experiments on personalized review generation show that DEP consistently outperforms baseline methods across multiple metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/SnowCharmQ/DEP.