Safeguard models help large language models (LLMs) detect and block harmful content, but most evaluations remain English-centric and overlook linguistic and cultural diversity. Existing multilingual safety benchmarks often rely on machine-translated English data, which fails to capture nuances in low-resource languages. Southeast Asian (SEA) languages are underrepresented despite the region's linguistic diversity and unique safety concerns, from culturally sensitive political speech to region-specific misinformation. Addressing these gaps requires benchmarks that are natively authored to reflect local norms and harm scenarios. We introduce SEA-SafeguardBench, the first human-verified safety benchmark for SEA, covering eight languages, 21,640 samples, across three subsets: general, in-the-wild, and content generation. The experimental results from our benchmark demonstrate that even state-of-the-art LLMs and guardrails are challenged by SEA cultural and harm scenarios and underperform when compared to English texts.

In the intensive care setting, sepsis continues to be a major contributor to patient illness and death; however, its timely detection is hindered by the complex, sparse, and heterogeneous nature of electronic health record (EHR) data. We propose Triplet-GCN, a single-branch graph convolutional model that represents each encounter as patient-feature-value triplets, constructs a bipartite EHR graph, and learns patient embeddings via a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) followed by a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP). The pipeline applies type-specific preprocessing -- median imputation and standardization for numeric variables, effect coding for binary features, and mode imputation with low-dimensional embeddings for rare categorical attributes -- and initializes patient nodes with summary statistics, while retaining measurement values on edges to preserve "who measured what and by how much". In a retrospective, multi-center Chinese cohort (N = 648; 70/30 train-test split) drawn from three tertiary hospitals, Triplet-GCN consistently outperforms strong tabular baselines (KNN, SVM, XGBoost, Random Forest) across discrimination and balanced error metrics, yielding a more favorable sensitivity-specificity trade-off and improved overall utility for early warning. These findings indicate that encoding EHR as triplets and propagating information over a patient-feature graph produce more informative patient representations than feature-independent models, offering a simple, end-to-end blueprint for deployable sepsis risk stratification.

One of the greatest challenges for detecting moving objects in the solar system from wide-field survey data is determining whether a signal indicates a true object or is due to some other source, like noise. Object verification has relied heavily on human eyes, which usually results in significant labor costs. In order to address this limitation and reduce the reliance on manual intervention, we propose a multi-input convolutional neural network integrated with a convolutional block attention module. This method is specifically tailored to enhance the moving object detection system that we have developed and used previously. The current method introduces two innovations. This first one is a multi-input architecture that processes multiple stacked images simultaneously. The second is the incorporation of the convolutional block attention module which enables the model to focus on essential features in both spatial and channel dimensions. These advancements facilitate efficient learning from multiple inputs, leading to more robust detection of moving objects. The performance of the model is evaluated on a dataset consisting of approximately 2,000 observational images. We achieved an accuracy of nearly 99% with AUC (an Area Under the Curve) of >0.99. These metrics indicate that the proposed model achieves excellent classification performance. By adjusting the threshold for object detection, the new model reduces the human workload by more than 99% compared to manual verification.

We present a machine learning framework for predicting the structural dimensionality of hybrid metal halides (HMHs), including organic-inorganic perovskites, using a combination of chemically-informed feature engineering and advanced class-imbalance handling techniques. The dataset, consisting of 494 HMH structures, is highly imbalanced across dimensionality classes (0D, 1D, 2D, 3D), posing significant challenges to predictive modeling. This dataset was later augmented to 1336 via the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to mitigate the effects of the class imbalance. We developed interaction-based descriptors and integrated them into a multi-stage workflow that combines feature selection, model stacking, and performance optimization to improve dimensionality prediction accuracy. Our approach significantly improves F1-scores for underrepresented classes, achieving robust cross-validation performance across all dimensionalities.

Accurate prediction of protein function is essential for elucidating molecular mechanisms and advancing biological and therapeutic discovery. Yet experimental annotation lags far behind the rapid growth of protein sequence data. Computational approaches address this gap by associating proteins with Gene Ontology (GO) terms, which encode functional knowledge through hierarchical relations and textual definitions. However, existing models often emphasize one modality over the other, limiting their ability to generalize, particularly to unseen or newly introduced GO terms that frequently arise as the ontology evolves, and making the previously trained models outdated. We present STAR-GO, a Transformer-based framework that jointly models the semantic and structural characteristics of GO terms to enhance zero-shot protein function prediction. STAR-GO integrates textual definitions with ontology graph structure to learn unified GO representations, which are processed in hierarchical order to propagate information from general to specific terms. These representations are then aligned with protein sequence embeddings to capture sequence-function relationships. STAR-GO achieves state-of-the-art performance and superior zero-shot generalization, demonstrating the utility of integrating semantics and structure for robust and adaptable protein function prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/boun-tabi-lifelu/stargo.

Influenza A viruses (IAVs) evolve antigenically at a pace that requires frequent vaccine updates, yet the haemagglutination inhibition (HI) assays used to quantify antigenicity are labor-intensive and unscalable. As a result, genomic data vastly outpace available phenotypic labels, limiting the effectiveness of traditional supervised models. We hypothesize that combining pre-trained Protein Language Models (PLMs) with Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) can retain high predictive accuracy even when labeled data are scarce. We evaluated two SSL strategies, Self-training and Label Spreading, against fully supervised baselines using four PLM-derived embeddings (ESM-2, ProtVec, ProtT5, ProtBert) applied to haemagglutinin (HA) sequences. A nested cross-validation framework simulated low-label regimes (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% label availability) across four IAV subtypes (H1N1, H3N2, H5N1, H9N2). SSL consistently improved performance under label scarcity. Self-training with ProtVec produced the largest relative gains, showing that SSL can compensate for lower-resolution representations. ESM-2 remained highly robust, achieving F1 scores above 0.82 with only 25% labeled data, indicating that its embeddings capture key antigenic determinants. While H1N1 and H9N2 were predicted with high accuracy, the hypervariable H3N2 subtype remained challenging, although SSL mitigated the performance decline. These findings demonstrate that integrating PLMs with SSL can address the antigenicity labeling bottleneck and enable more effective use of unlabeled surveillance sequences, supporting rapid variant prioritization and timely vaccine strain selection.

Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to restore communication for people with paralysis by translating neural activity into text. Most systems use cascaded frameworks that decode phonemes before assembling sentences with an n-gram language model (LM), preventing joint optimization of all stages simultaneously. Here, we introduce an end-to-end Brain-to-Text (BIT) framework that translates neural activity into coherent sentences using a single differentiable neural network. Central to our approach is a cross-task, cross-species pretrained neural encoder, whose representations transfer to both attempted and imagined speech. In a cascaded setting with an n-gram LM, the pretrained encoder establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Brain-to-Text '24 and '25 benchmarks. Integrated end-to-end with audio large language models (LLMs) and trained with contrastive learning for cross-modal alignment, BIT reduces the word error rate (WER) of the prior end-to-end method from 24.69% to 10.22%. Notably, we find that small-scale audio LLMs markedly improve end-to-end decoding. Beyond record-setting performance, BIT aligns attempted and imagined speech embeddings to enable cross-task generalization. Altogether, our approach advances the integration of large, diverse neural datasets, paving the way for an end-to-end decoding framework that supports seamless, differentiable optimization.

As AI systems become more capable of complex agentic tasks, they also become more capable of pursuing undesirable objectives and causing harm. Previous work has attempted to catch these unsafe instances by interrogating models directly about their objectives and behaviors. However, the main weakness of trusting interrogations is that models can lie. We propose self-report fine-tuning (SRFT), a simple supervised fine-tuning technique that trains models to occasionally make factual mistakes, then admit them when asked. We show that the admission of factual errors in simple question-answering settings generalizes out-of-distribution (OOD) to the admission of hidden misaligned objectives in adversarial agentic settings. We evaluate SRFT in OOD stealth tasks, where models are instructed to complete a hidden misaligned objective alongside a user-specified objective without being caught by monitoring. After SRFT, models are more likely to confess the details of their hidden objectives when interrogated, even under strong pressure not to disclose them. Interrogation on SRFT models can detect hidden objectives with near-ceiling performance (F1 score = 0.98), while the baseline model lies when interrogated under the same conditions (F1 score = 0). Interrogation on SRFT models can further elicit the content of the hidden objective, recovering 28-100% details, compared to 0% details recovered in the baseline model and by prefilled assistant turn attacks. This provides a promising technique for promoting honesty propensity and incriminating misaligned AIs.

Social recommendation has been proven effective in addressing data sparsity in user-item interaction modeling by leveraging social networks. The recent integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has further enhanced prediction accuracy in contemporary social recommendation algorithms. However, many GNN-based approaches in social recommendation lack the ability to furnish meaningful explanations for their predictions. In this study, we confront this challenge by introducing SoREX, a self-explanatory GNN-based social recommendation framework. SoREX adopts a two-tower framework enhanced by friend recommendation, independently modeling social relations and user-item interactions, while jointly optimizing an auxiliary task to reinforce social signals. To offer explanations, we propose a novel ego-path extraction approach. This method involves transforming the ego-net of a target user into a collection of multi-hop ego-paths, from which we extract factor-specific and candidate-aware ego-path subsets as explanations. This process facilitates the summarization of detailed comparative explanations among different candidate items through intricate substructure analysis. Furthermore, we conduct explanation re-aggregation to explicitly correlate explanations with downstream predictions, imbuing our framework with inherent self-explainability. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four widely adopted benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of SoREX in predictive accuracy. Additionally, qualitative and quantitative analyses confirm the efficacy of the extracted explanations in SoREX. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/antman9914/SoREX.

Internal clustering validity indices (ICVIs) assess clustering quality without ground truth labels. Comparative studies consistently find that no single ICVI outperforms others across datasets, leaving practitioners without principled ICVI selection. We argue that inconsistent ICVI performance arises because studies evaluate them based on matching human labels rather than measuring the quality of the discovered structure in the data, using datasets without formally quantifying the structure type and quality. Structure type refers to the mathematical organisation in data that clustering aims to discover. Validity theory requires a theoretical definition of clustering quality, which depends on structure type. We demonstrate this through the first validity assessment of clustering quality measures for correlation patterns, a structure type that arises from clustering time series by correlation relationships. We formalise 23 canonical correlation patterns as the theoretical optimal clustering and use synthetic data modelling this structure with controlled perturbations to evaluate validity across content, criterion, construct, and external validity. Our findings show that Silhouette Width Criterion (SWC) and Davies-Bouldin Index (DBI) are valid for correlation patterns, whilst Calinski-Harabasz (VRC) and Pakhira-Bandyopadhyay-Maulik (PBM) indices fail. Simple Lp norm distances achieve validity, whilst correlation-specific functions fail structural, criterion, and external validity. These results differ from previous studies where VRC and PBM performed well, demonstrating that validity depends on structure type. Our structure-type-specific validation method provides both practical guidance (quality thresholds SWC>0.9, DBI<0.15) and a methodological template for establishing validity for other structure types.