Accurate segmentation of carotid artery structures in histopathological images is vital for advancing cardiovascular disease research and diagnosis. However, deep learning model development in this domain is constrained by the scarcity of annotated cardiovascular histopathological data. This study investigates a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art deep learning segmentation models, including convolutional neural networks (U-Net, DeepLabV3+), a Vision Transformer (SegFormer), and recent foundation models (SAM, MedSAM, MedSAM+UNet), on a limited dataset of cardiovascular histology images. Despite employing an extensive hyperparameter optimization strategy with Bayesian search, our findings reveal that model performance is highly sensitive to data splits, with minor differences driven more by statistical noise than by true algorithmic superiority. This instability exposes the limitations of standard benchmarking practices in low-data clinical settings and challenges the assumption that performance rankings reflect meaningful clinical utility.

Dust storms harm health and reduce visibility; quick detection from satellites is needed. We present a near real-time system that flags dust at the pixel level using multi-band images from NASA's Terra and Aqua (MODIS). A 3D convolutional network learns patterns across all 36 bands, plus split thermal bands, to separate dust from clouds and surface features. Simple normalization and local filling handle missing data. An improved version raises training speed by 21x and supports fast processing of full scenes. On 17 independent MODIS scenes, the model reaches about 0.92 accuracy with a mean squared error of 0.014. Maps show strong agreement in plume cores, with most misses along edges. These results show that joint band-and-space learning can provide timely dust alerts at global scale; using wider input windows or attention-based models may further sharpen edges.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen rapid adoption in recent years, with industries increasingly relying on them to maintain a competitive advantage. These models excel at interpreting user instructions and generating human-like responses, leading to their integration across diverse domains, including consulting and information retrieval. However, their widespread deployment also introduces substantial security risks, most notably in the form of prompt injection and jailbreak attacks. To systematically evaluate LLM vulnerabilities -- particularly to external prompt injection -- we conducted a series of experiments on eight commercial models. Each model was tested without supplementary sanitization, relying solely on its built-in safeguards. The results exposed exploitable weaknesses and emphasized the need for stronger security measures. Four categories of attacks were examined: direct injection, indirect (external) injection, image-based injection, and prompt leakage. Comparative analysis indicated that Claude 3 demonstrated relatively greater robustness; nevertheless, empirical findings confirm that additional defenses, such as input normalization, remain necessary to achieve reliable protection.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled growing interest in automating geospatial analysis and GIS workflows, yet their actual capabilities remain uncertain. In this work, we call for rigorous evaluation of LLMs on well-defined geoprocessing tasks before making claims about full GIS automation. To this end, we present GeoAnalystBench, a benchmark of 50 Python-based tasks derived from real-world geospatial problems and carefully validated by GIS experts. Each task is paired with a minimum deliverable product, and evaluation covers workflow validity, structural alignment, semantic similarity, and code quality (CodeBLEU). Using this benchmark, we assess both proprietary and open source models. Results reveal a clear gap: proprietary models such as ChatGPT-4o-mini achieve high validity 95% and stronger code alignment (CodeBLEU 0.39), while smaller open source models like DeepSeek-R1-7B often generate incomplete or inconsistent workflows (48.5% validity, 0.272 CodeBLEU). Tasks requiring deeper spatial reasoning, such as spatial relationship detection or optimal site selection, remain the most challenging across all models. These findings demonstrate both the promise and limitations of current LLMs in GIS automation and provide a reproducible framework to advance GeoAI research with human-in-the-loop support.

Evaluating factual accuracy in Large Language Model (LLM)-generated clinical text is a critical barrier to adoption, as expert review is unscalable for the continuous quality assurance these systems require. We address this challenge with two complementary contributions. First, we introduce MedFactEval, a framework for scalable, fact-grounded evaluation where clinicians define high-salience key facts and an "LLM Jury"--a multi-LLM majority vote--assesses their inclusion in generated summaries. Second, we present MedAgentBrief, a model-agnostic, multi-step workflow designed to generate high-quality, factual discharge summaries. To validate our evaluation framework, we established a gold-standard reference using a seven-physician majority vote on clinician-defined key facts from inpatient cases. The MedFactEval LLM Jury achieved almost perfect agreement with this panel (Cohen's kappa=81%), a performance statistically non-inferior to that of a single human expert (kappa=67%, P < 0.001). Our work provides both a robust evaluation framework (MedFactEval) and a high-performing generation workflow (MedAgentBrief), offering a comprehensive approach to advance the responsible deployment of generative AI in clinical workflows.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formulas play a significant role in treating epidemics and complex diseases. Existing models for TCM utilize traditional algorithms or deep learning techniques to analyze formula relationships, yet lack comprehensive results, such as complete formula compositions and detailed explanations. Although recent efforts have used TCM instruction datasets to fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) for explainable formula generation, existing datasets lack sufficient details, such as the roles of the formula's sovereign, minister, assistant, courier; efficacy; contraindications; tongue and pulse diagnosis-limiting the depth of model outputs. To address these challenges, we propose ZhiFangDanTai, a framework combining Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) with LLM fine-tuning. ZhiFangDanTai uses GraphRAG to retrieve and synthesize structured TCM knowledge into concise summaries, while also constructing an enhanced instruction dataset to improve LLMs' ability to integrate retrieved information. Furthermore, we provide novel theoretical proofs demonstrating that integrating GraphRAG with fine-tuning techniques can reduce generalization error and hallucination rates in the TCM formula task. Experimental results on both collected and clinical datasets demonstrate that ZhiFangDanTai achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our model is open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/tczzx6/ZhiFangDanTai1.0.

We give an overview on the emerging applications of GenAI in the financial industry, especially within investment banks. Inherent to these exciting opportunities is a new realm of risks that must be managed properly. By heeding both the Yin and Yang sides of GenAI, we can accelerate its organic growth while safeguarding the entire financial industry during this nascent era of AI.

While queueing network models are powerful tools for analyzing service systems, they traditionally require substantial human effort and domain expertise to construct. To make this modeling approach more scalable and accessible, we propose a data-driven framework for queueing network modeling and simulation based on autoregressive sequence models trained on event-stream data. Instead of explicitly specifying arrival processes, service mechanisms, or routing logic, our approach learns the conditional distributions of event types and event times, recasting the modeling task as a problem of sequence distribution learning. We show that Transformer-style architectures can effectively parameterize these distributions, enabling automated construction of high-fidelity simulators. As a proof of concept, we validate our framework on event tables generated from diverse queueing networks, showcasing its utility in simulation, uncertainty quantification, and counterfactual evaluation. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and the growing availability of data, our framework takes a step toward more automated, data-driven modeling pipelines to support broader adoption of queueing network models across service domains.

It is widely recognized in modern machine learning practice that access to a diverse set of tasks can enhance performance across those tasks. This observation suggests that, unlike in general multi-objective optimization, the objectives in many real-world settings may not be inherently conflicting. To address this, prior work introduced the Aligned Multi-Objective Optimization (AMOO) framework and proposed gradient-based algorithms with provable convergence guarantees. However, existing analysis relies on strong assumptions, particularly strong convexity, which implies the existence of a unique optimal solution. In this work, we relax this assumption and study gradient-descent algorithms for convex AMOO under standard smoothness or Lipschitz continuity conditions-assumptions more consistent with those used in deep learning practice. This generalization requires new analytical tools and metrics to characterize convergence in the convex AMOO setting. We develop such tools, propose scalable algorithms for convex AMOO, and establish their convergence guarantees. Additionally, we prove a novel lower bound that demonstrates the suboptimality of naive equal-weight approaches compared to our methods.

Spatio-temporal forecasting aims to predict the future state of dynamic systems and plays an important role in multiple fields. However, existing solutions only focus on modeling using a limited number of observed target variables. In real-world scenarios, exogenous variables can be integrated into the model as additional input features and associated with the target signal to promote forecast accuracy. Although promising, this still encounters two challenges: the inconsistent effects of different exogenous variables to the target system, and the imbalance effects between historical variables and future variables. To address these challenges, this paper introduces \model, a novel framework for modeling \underline{exo}genous variables in \underline{s}patio-\underline{t}emporal forecasting, which follows a ``select, then balance'' paradigm. Specifically, we first construct a latent space gated expert module, where fused exogenous information is projected into a latent space to dynamically select and recompose salient signals via specialized sub-experts. Furthermore, we design a siamese network architecture in which recomposed representations of past and future exogenous variables are fed into dual-branch spatio-temporal backbones to capture dynamic patterns. The outputs are integrated through a context-aware weighting mechanism to achieve dynamic balance during the modeling process. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, generality, robustness, and efficiency of our proposed framework.