Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in a variety of vision-language tasks involving image-conditioned free-form text generation. However, growing concerns about hallucinations in LVLMs, where the generated text is inconsistent with the visual context, are becoming a major impediment to deploying these models in applications that demand guaranteed reliability. In this paper, we introduce a framework to address this challenge, ConfLVLM, which is grounded on conformal prediction to achieve finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees on the factuality of LVLM output. This framework treats an LVLM as a hypothesis generator, where each generated text detail (or claim) is considered an individual hypothesis. It then applies a statistical hypothesis testing procedure to verify each claim using efficient heuristic uncertainty measures to filter out unreliable claims before returning any responses to users. We conduct extensive experiments covering three representative application domains, including general scene understanding, medical radiology report generation, and document understanding. Remarkably, ConfLVLM reduces the error rate of claims generated by LLaVa-1.5 for scene descriptions from 87.8\% to 10.0\% by filtering out erroneous claims with a 95.3\% true positive rate. Our results further demonstrate that ConfLVLM is highly flexible, and can be applied to any black-box LVLMs paired with any uncertainty measure for any image-conditioned free-form text generation task while providing a rigorous guarantee on controlling the risk of hallucination.

Transformers have increasingly become the de facto method to model sequential data with state-of-the-art performance. Due to its widespread use, being able to estimate and calibrate its modeling uncertainty is important to understand and design robust transformer models. To achieve this, previous works have used Gaussian processes (GPs) to perform uncertainty calibration for the attention units of transformers and attained notable successes. However, such approaches have to confine the transformers to the space of symmetric attention to ensure the necessary symmetric requirement of their GP's kernel specification, which reduces the representation capacity of the model. To mitigate this restriction, we propose the Correlated Gaussian Process Transformer (CGPT), a new class of transformers whose self-attention units are modeled as cross-covariance between two correlated GPs (CGPs). This allows asymmetries in attention and can enhance the representation capacity of GP-based transformers. We also derive a sparse approximation for CGP to make it scale better. Our empirical studies show that both CGP-based and sparse CGP-based transformers achieve better performance than state-of-the-art GP-based transformers on a variety of benchmark tasks. The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/MinhLong210/CGP-Transformers.

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a research area focusing on using optimisation techniques to design machine learning (ML) algorithms, alleviating the need for a human to perform manual algorithm design. Real-time AutoML enables the design process to happen while the ML algorithm is being applied to a task. Real-time AutoML is an emerging research area, as such existing real-time AutoML techniques need improvement with respect to the quality of designs and time taken to create designs. To address these issues, this study proposes an Online Meta-learning for AutoML in Real-time (OnMAR) approach. Meta-learning gathers information about the optimisation process undertaken by the ML algorithm in the form of meta-features. Meta-features are used in conjunction with a meta-learner to optimise the optimisation process. The OnMAR approach uses a meta-learner to predict the accuracy of an ML design. If the accuracy predicted by the meta-learner is sufficient, the design is used, and if the predicted accuracy is low, an optimisation technique creates a new design. A genetic algorithm (GA) is the optimisation technique used as part of the OnMAR approach. Different meta-learners (k-nearest neighbours, random forest and XGBoost) are tested. The OnMAR approach is model-agnostic (i.e. not specific to a single real-time AutoML application) and therefore evaluated on three different real-time AutoML applications, namely: composing an image clustering algorithm, configuring the hyper-parameters of a convolutional neural network, and configuring a video classification pipeline. The OnMAR approach is effective, matching or outperforming existing real-time AutoML approaches, with the added benefit of a faster runtime.

Infections in Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) can cause severe complications, including tissue death and limb amputation, highlighting the need for accurate, timely diagnosis. Previous machine learning methods have focused on identifying infections by analyzing wound images alone, without utilizing additional metadata such as medical notes. In this study, we aim to improve infection detection by introducing Synthetic Caption Augmented Retrieval for Wound Infection Detection (SCARWID), a novel deep learning framework that leverages synthetic textual descriptions to augment DFU images. SCARWID consists of two components: (1) Wound-BLIP, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) fine-tuned on GPT-4o-generated descriptions to synthesize consistent captions from images; and (2) an Image-Text Fusion module that uses cross-attention to extract cross-modal embeddings from an image and its corresponding Wound-BLIP caption. Infection status is determined by retrieving the top-k similar items from a labeled support set. To enhance the diversity of training data, we utilized a latent diffusion model to generate additional wound images. As a result, SCARWID outperformed state-of-the-art models, achieving average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.85, 0.78, and 0.81, respectively, for wound infection classification. Displaying the generated captions alongside the wound images and infection detection results enhances interpretability and trust, enabling nurses to align SCARWID outputs with their medical knowledge. This is particularly valuable when wound notes are unavailable or when assisting novice nurses who may find it difficult to identify visual attributes of wound infection.

--Open-World Continual Learning (OWCL) is a challenging paradigm where models must incrementally learn new knowledge without forgetting while operating under an open-world assumption. This requires handling incomplete training data and recognizing unknown samples during inference. However, existing OWCL methods often treat open detection and continual learning as separate tasks, limiting their ability to integrate open-set detection and incremental classification in OWCL. Moreover, current approaches primarily focus on transferring knowledge from known samples, neglecting the insights derived from unknown/open samples. T o address these limitations, we formalize four distinct OWCL scenarios and conduct comprehensive empirical experiments to explore potential challenges in OWCL. Our findings reveal a significant interplay between the open detection of unknowns and incremental classification of knowns, challenging a widely held assumption that unknown detection and known classification are orthogonal processes. Building on our insights, we propose HoliTrans (Holistic Knowns-Unknowns Knowledge Transfer), a novel OWCL framework that integrates nonlinear random projection (NRP) to create a more linearly separable embedding space and distribution-aware prototypes (DAPs) to construct an adaptive knowledge space. Particularly, our HoliTrans effectively supports knowledge transfer for both known and unknown samples while dynamically updating representations of open samples during OWCL. Extensive experiments across various OWCL scenarios demonstrate that HoliTrans outperforms 22 competitive baselines, bridging the gap between OWCL theory and practice and providing a robust, scalable framework for advancing open-world learning paradigms. Open-World Continual Learning (OWCL) [1], [2] represents a highly practical yet profoundly challenging machine learning paradigm. In OWCL, a model must continually adapt to an unbounded sequence of tasks in a dynamic open environment [3], [4], where novelties might emerge in testing unpredictably over time [5]-[7]. Xin Y ang is the corresponding author (yangxin@swufe.edu.cn). Y ujie Li, Guannan Lai, Xin Y ang and Y onghao Li are with the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China (E-mail: liyj1201@gmail.com, Y ujie Li and Marcello Bonsangue are with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Netherlands (E-mail: liyj1201@gmail.com, Tianrui Li is with the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China (e-mail: trli@swjtu.edu.cn). Manuscript received XX XX, 2025; revised XX XX, 2025.

However, accurate predictive models are essential for their operation, especially when dealing with fluctuating environmental conditions and increased demand. Traditional hydrological models often struggle to capture the complexity of such systems. The advent of machine learning (ML) offers new opportunities to enhance predictive capabilities by utilizing large datasets and advanced algorithms (Maity et al., 202 4) . This work aims to develop a machine - learning model that predicts dam volume using features such as water area, physical dam attributes, and other characteristics, including full supply capacity. Multiple models were iteratively built to improve predictive accuracy and performance comparison, each incorporating additional features to refine the outputs . Accurately monitoring reservoir storage is challenging since in - situ data are often unavailable; therefore, remote sensing observations of water extent and height combined with data - driven models are i ncreasingly used for reservoir volume estimation ( Ghosh et al., 2014; Hou et al., 2021) . This study seeks to enhance the precision of dam volume estimates, providing a valuable tool for decision - makers in water management.

Money laundering is the process that intends to legalize the income derived from illicit activities, thus facilitating their entry into the monetary flow of the economy without jeopardizing their source. It is crucial to identify such activities accurately and reliably in order to enforce anti-money laundering (AML). Despite considerable efforts to AML, a large number of such activities still go undetected. Rule-based methods were first introduced and are still widely used in current detection systems. With the rise of machine learning, graph-based learning methods have gained prominence in detecting illicit accounts through the analysis of money transfer graphs. Nevertheless, these methods generally assume that the transaction graph is centralized, whereas in practice, money laundering activities usually span multiple financial institutions. Due to regulatory, legal, commercial, and customer privacy concerns, institutions tend not to share data, restricting their utility in practical usage. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm that supports performing AML over multiple institutions while protecting the security and privacy of local data. To evaluate, we construct Alipay-ECB, a real-world dataset comprising digital transactions from Alipay, the world's largest mobile payment platform, alongside transactions from E-Commerce Bank (ECB). The dataset includes over 200 million accounts and 300 million transactions, covering both intra-institution transactions and those between Alipay and ECB. This makes it the largest real-world transaction graph available for analysis. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively identify cross-institution money laundering subgroups. Additionally, experiments on synthetic datasets also demonstrate that our method is efficient, requiring only a few minutes on datasets with millions of transactions.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a widely used non-invasive physiological sensing technique, suitable for various clinical applications. Such clinical applications are increasingly supported by machine learning methods, raising the question of the most appropriate input representation and model choice. Comprehensive comparisons, in particular across different input representations, are scarce. We address this gap in the research landscape by a comprehensive benchmarking study covering three kinds of input representations, interpretable features, image representations and raw waveforms, across prototypical regression and classification use cases: blood pressure and atrial fibrillation prediction. In both cases, the best results are achieved by deep neural networks operating on raw time series as input representations. Within this model class, best results are achieved by modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). but depending on the task setup, shallow CNNs are often also very competitive. We envision that these results will be insightful for researchers to guide their choice on machine learning tasks for PPG data, even beyond the use cases presented in this work.

The analytic characterization of the high-dimensional behavior of optimization for Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) with Gaussian data has been a central focus in statistics and probability in recent years. While convex cases, such as the LASSO, ridge regression, and logistic regression, have been extensively studied using a variety of techniques, the non-convex case remains far less understood despite its significance. A non-rigorous statistical physics framework has provided remarkable predictions for the behavior of high-dimensional optimization problems, but rigorously establishing their validity for non-convex problems has remained a fundamental challenge. In this work, we address this challenge by developing a systematic framework that rigorously proves replica-symmetric formulas for non-convex GLMs and precisely determines the conditions under which these formulas are valid. Remarkably, the rigorous replica-symmetric predictions align exactly with the conjectures made by physicists, and the so-called replicon condition. The originality of our approach lies in connecting two powerful theoretical tools: the Gaussian Min-Max Theorem, which we use to provide precise lower bounds, and Approximate Message Passing (AMP), which is shown to achieve these bounds algorithmically. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through significant applications: (i) by proving the optimality of the Tukey loss over the more commonly used Huber loss under a $\varepsilon$ contaminated data model, (ii) establishing the optimality of negative regularization in high-dimensional non-convex regression and (iii) characterizing the performance limits of linearized AMP algorithms. By rigorously validating statistical physics predictions in non-convex settings, we aim to open new pathways for analyzing increasingly complex optimization landscapes beyond the convex regime.

Addressing sensor drift is essential in industrial measurement systems, where precise data output is necessary for maintaining accuracy and reliability in monitoring processes, as it progressively degrades the performance of machine learning models over time. Our findings indicate that the standard cross-validation method used in existing model training overestimates performance by inadequately accounting for drift. This is primarily because typical cross-validation techniques allow data instances to appear in both training and testing sets, thereby distorting the accuracy of the predictive evaluation. As a result, these models are unable to precisely predict future drift effects, compromising their ability to generalize and adapt to evolving data conditions. This paper presents two solutions: (1) a novel sensor drift compensation learning paradigm for validating models, and (2) automated machine learning (AutoML) techniques to enhance classification performance and compensate sensor drift. By employing strategies such as data balancing, meta-learning, automated ensemble learning, hyperparameter optimization, feature selection, and boosting, our AutoML-DC (Drift Compensation) model significantly improves classification performance against sensor drift. AutoML-DC further adapts effectively to varying drift severities.