Accurately predicting the drift (displacement) of leeway objects in maritime environments remains a critical challenge, particularly in time-sensitive scenarios such as search and rescue operations. In this study, we propose a multi-modal machine learning framework that integrates Sentence Transformer embeddings with attention-based sequence-to-sequence architectures to predict the drift of leeway objects in water. We begin by experimentally collecting environmental and physical data, including water current and wind velocities, object mass, and surface area, for five distinct leeway objects. Using simulated data from a Navier-Stokes-based model to train a convolutional neural network on geometrical image representations, we estimate drag and lift coefficients of the leeway objects. These coefficients are then used to derive the net forces responsible for driving the objects' motion. The resulting time series, comprising physical forces, environmental velocities, and object-specific features, combined with textual descriptions encoded via a language model, are inputs to attention-based sequence-to-sequence long-short-term memory and Transformer models, to predict future drift trajectories. We evaluate the framework across multiple time horizons ($1$, $3$, $5$, and $10$ seconds) and assess its generalization across different objects. We compare our approach against a fitted physics-based model and traditional machine learning methods, including recurrent neural networks and temporal convolutional neural networks. Our results show that these multi-modal models perform comparably to traditional models while also enabling longer-term forecasting in place of single-step prediction. Overall, our findings demonstrate the ability of a multi-modal modeling strategy to provide accurate and adaptable predictions of leeway object drift in dynamic maritime conditions.

Large annotated datasets are vital for training segmentation models, but pixel-level labeling is time-consuming, error-prone, and often requires scarce expert annotators, especially in medical imaging. In contrast, coarse annotations are quicker, cheaper, and easier to produce, even by non-experts. In this paper, we propose to use coarse drawings from both positive (target) and negative (background) classes in the image, even with noisy pixels, to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) for semantic segmentation. We present a method for learning the true segmentation label distributions from purely noisy coarse annotations using two coupled CNNs. The separation of the two CNNs is achieved by high fidelity with the characters of the noisy training annotations. We propose to add a complementary label learning that encourages estimating negative label distribution. To illustrate the properties of our method, we first use a toy segmentation dataset based on MNIST. We then present the quantitative results of experiments using publicly available datasets: Cityscapes dataset for multi-class segmentation, and retinal images for medical applications. In all experiments, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in the cases where the ratio of coarse annotations is small compared to the given dense annotations.

--Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving unprecedented communication efficiency in sixth-generation (6G) networks by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to extract and transmit the underlying meanings of source data. However, deploying SemCom over digital systems presents new challenges, particularly in ensuring robustness against transmission errors that may distort semantically critical content. T o address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework, termed generative feature imputing, which comprises three key techniques. First, we introduce a spatial-error-concentration packetization strategy that spatially concentrates feature distortions by encoding feature elements based on their channel mappings--a property crucial for both the effectiveness and reduced complexity of the subsequent techniques. Second, building on this strategy, we propose a generative feature imputing method that utilizes a diffusion model to efficiently reconstruct missing features caused by packet losses. Finally, we develop a semantic-aware power allocation scheme that enables unequal error protection by allocating transmission power according to the semantic importance of each packet. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms conventional approaches, such as Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (DJSCC) and JPEG2000, under block fading conditions, achieving higher semantic accuracy and lower Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) scores. The sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks promise to support a broad range of emerging applications, such as immersive internet-of-things (IoT), multimedia streaming, and augmented reality, which necessitate ultra-high rates and reliability, and low latency [1]-[5]. However, as dictated by Shannon's information theory, these objectives are in conflict with each other given limited radio resources [6].

Accurate air quality prediction is becoming increasingly important in the environmental field. To address issues such as low prediction accuracy and slow real-time updates in existing models, which lead to lagging prediction results, we propose a Transformer-based spatiotemporal data prediction method (Ada-TransGNN) that integrates global spatial semantics and temporal behavior. The model constructs an efficient and collaborative spatiotemporal block set comprising a multi-head attention mechanism and a graph convolutional network to extract dynamically changing spatiotemporal dependency features from complex air quality monitoring data. Considering the interaction relationships between different monitoring points, we propose an adaptive graph structure learning module, which combines spatiotemporal dependency features in a data-driven manner to learn the optimal graph structure, thereby more accurately capturing the spatial relationships between monitoring points. Additionally, we design an auxiliary task learning module that enhances the decoding capability of temporal relationships by integrating spatial context information into the optimal graph structure representation, effectively improving the accuracy of prediction results. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on a benchmark dataset and a novel dataset (Mete-air). The results demonstrate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art prediction models in short-term and long-term predictions.

Recent advances in LLMs have made automated scientific research the next frontline in the path to artificial superintelligence. However, these systems are bound either to tasks of narrow scope or the limited creative capabilities of LLMs. We propose Spacer, a scientific discovery system that develops creative and factually grounded concepts without external intervention. Spacer attempts to achieve this via 'deliberate decontextualization,' an approach that disassembles information into atomic units - keywords - and draws creativity from unexplored connections between them. Spacer consists of (i) Nuri, an inspiration engine that builds keyword sets, and (ii) the Manifesting Pipeline that refines these sets into elaborate scientific statements. Nuri extracts novel, high-potential keyword sets from a keyword graph built with 180,000 academic publications in biological fields. The Manifesting Pipeline finds links between keywords, analyzes their logical structure, validates their plausibility, and ultimately drafts original scientific concepts. According to our experiments, the evaluation metric of Nuri accurately classifies high-impact publications with an AUROC score of 0.737. Our Manifesting Pipeline also successfully reconstructs core concepts from the latest top-journal articles solely from their keyword sets. An LLM-based scoring system estimates that this reconstruction was sound for over 85% of the cases. Finally, our embedding space analysis shows that outputs from Spacer are significantly more similar to leading publications compared with those from SOTA LLMs.

Despite the overwhelming performance improvements offered by recent natural language processing (NLP) models, the decisions made by these models are largely a black box. Towards closing this gap, the field of causal NLP combines causal inference literature with modern NLP models to elucidate causal effects of text features. We replicate and extend Bansal et al's work on regularizing text classifiers to adhere to estimated effects, focusing instead on model interpretability. Specifically, we focus on developing a two-headed RieszNet-based neural network architecture which achieves better treatment effect estimation accuracy. Our framework, CausalSent, accurately predicts treatment effects in semi-synthetic IMDB movie reviews, reducing MAE of effect estimates by 2-3x compared to Bansal et al's MAE on synthetic Civil Comments data. With an ensemble of validated models, we perform an observational case study on the causal effect of the word "love" in IMDB movie reviews, finding that the presence of the word "love" causes a +2.9% increase in the probability of a positive sentiment.

Modern computer vision models have proven to be highly useful for medical imaging classification and segmentation tasks, but the scarcity of medical imaging data often limits the efficacy of models trained from scratch. Transfer learning has emerged as a pivotal solution to this, enabling the fine-tuning of high-performance models on small data. Mei et al. (2022) found that pre-training CNNs on a large dataset of radiologist-labeled images (RadImageNet) enhanced model performance on downstream tasks compared to ImageNet pretraining. The present work extends Mei et al. (2022) by conducting a comprehensive investigation to determine optimal CNN architectures for breast lesion malignancy detection and ACL tear detection, as well as performing statistical analysis to compare the effect of RadImageNet and ImageNet pre-training on downstream model performance. Our findings suggest that 1-dimensional convolutional classifiers with skip connections, ResNet50 pre-trained backbones, and partial backbone unfreezing yields optimal downstream medical classification performance. Our best models achieve AUCs of 0.9969 for ACL tear detection and 0.9641 for breast nodule malignancy detection, competitive with the results reported by Mei et al. (2022) and surpassing other previous works. We do not find evidence confirming RadImageNet pre-training to provide superior downstream performance for ACL tear and breast lesion classification tasks.

We introduce MMCRICBENCH-3K, a benchmark for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on cricket scorecards, designed to evaluate large vision-language models (LVLMs) on complex numerical and cross-lingual reasoning over semi-structured tabular images. MMCRICBENCH-3K comprises 1,463 synthetically generated scorecard images from ODI, T20, and Test formats, accompanied by 1,500 English QA pairs. It includes two subsets: MMCRICBENCH-E-1.5K, featuring English scorecards, and MMCRICBENCH-H-1.5K, containing visually similar Hindi scorecards, with all questions and answers kept in English to enable controlled cross-script evaluation. The task demands reasoning over structured numerical data, multi-image context, and implicit domain knowledge. Empirical results show that even state-of-the-art LVLMs, such as GPT-4o and Qwen2.5VL, struggle on the English subset despite it being their primary training language and exhibit a further drop in performance on the Hindi subset. This reveals key limitations in structure-aware visual text understanding, numerical reasoning, and cross-lingual generalization. The dataset is publicly available via Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DIALab/MMCricBench, to promote LVLM research in this direction.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the development, functioning, and application of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), with an emphasis on their implications for research and education. It traces the conceptual evolution from artificial intelligence (AI) through machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) to transformer architectures, which constitute the foundation of contemporary generative systems. Technical aspects, including prompting strategies, word embeddings, and probabilistic sampling methods (temperature, top-k, and top-p), are examined alongside the emergence of autonomous agents. These elements are considered in relation to both the opportunities they create and the limitations and risks they entail. The work critically evaluates the integration of GenAI across the research process, from ideation and literature review to research design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination. While particular attention is given to geographical research, the discussion extends to wider academic contexts. A parallel strand addresses the pedagogical applications of GenAI, encompassing course and lesson design, teaching delivery, assessment, and feedback, with geography education serving as a case example. Central to the analysis are the ethical, social, and environmental challenges posed by GenAI. Issues of bias, intellectual property, governance, and accountability are assessed, alongside the ecological footprint of LLMs and emerging technological strategies for mitigation. The concluding section considers near- and long-term futures of GenAI, including scenarios of sustained adoption, regulation, and potential decline. By situating GenAI within both scholarly practice and educational contexts, the study contributes to critical debates on its transformative potential and societal responsibilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant deployment challenges due to their immense size and computational requirements. Model compression techniques are essential for making these models practical for resource-constrained environments. A prominent compression strategy is low-rank factorization via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to reduce model parameters by approximating weight matrices. However, standard SVD focuses on minimizing matrix reconstruction error, often leading to a substantial loss of the model's functional performance. This performance degradation occurs because existing methods do not adequately correct for the functional information lost during compression. To address this gap, we introduce Corrective Adaptive Low-Rank Decomposition (CALR), a two-component compression approach. CALR combines a primary path of SVD-compressed layers with a parallel, learnable, low-rank corrective module that is explicitly trained to recover the functional residual error. Our experimental evaluation on SmolLM2-135M, Qwen3-0.6B, and Llama-3.2-1B, demonstrates that CALR can reduce parameter counts by 26.93% to 51.77% while retaining 59.45% to 90.42% of the original model's performance, consistently outperforming LaCo, ShortGPT, and LoSparse. CALR's success shows that treating functional information loss as a learnable signal is a highly effective compression paradigm. This approach enables the creation of significantly smaller, more efficient LLMs, advancing their accessibility and practical deployment in real-world applications.