Removing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from clinical notes in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is essential for research and AI development. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, their high computational costs and the data privacy risks of API-based services limit their use, especially in low-resource settings. To address this, we developed LOGICAL (Local Obfuscation by GLINER for Impartial Context-Aware Lineage), an efficient, locally deployable PII removal system built on a fine-tuned Generalist and Lightweight Named Entity Recognition (GLiNER) model. We used 1515 clinical documents from a psychiatric hospital's EHR system. We defined nine PII categories for removal. A modern-gliner-bi-large-v1.0 model was fine-tuned on 2849 text instances and evaluated on a test set of 376 instances using character-level precision, recall, and F1-score. We compared its performance against Microsoft Azure NER, Microsoft Presidio, and zero-shot prompting with Gemini-Pro-2.5 and Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The fine-tuned GLiNER model achieved superior performance, with an overall micro-average F1-score of 0.980, significantly outperforming Gemini-Pro-2.5 (F1-score: 0.845). LOGICAL correctly sanitised 95% of documents completely, compared to 64% for the next-best solution. The model operated efficiently on a standard laptop without a dedicated GPU. However, a 2% entity-level false negative rate underscores the need for human-in-the-loop validation across all tested systems. Fine-tuned, specialised transformer models like GLiNER offer an accurate, computationally efficient, and secure solution for PII removal from clinical notes. This "sanitisation at the source" approach is a practical alternative to resource-intensive LLMs, enabling the creation of de-identified datasets for research and AI development while preserving data privacy, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Monitoring species distribution is vital for conservation efforts, enabling the assessment of environmental impacts and the development of effective preservation strategies. Traditional data collection methods, including citizen science, offer valuable insights but remain limited in coverage and completeness. Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) helps address these gaps by using occurrence data and environmental variables to predict species presence across large regions. In this study, we enhance SDM accuracy for frogs (Anura) by applying deep learning and data imputation techniques using data from the "EY - 2022 Biodiversity Challenge." Our experiments show that data balancing significantly improved model performance, reducing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) from 189 to 29 in frog counting tasks. Feature selection identified key environmental factors influencing occurrence, optimizing inputs while maintaining predictive accuracy. The multimodal ensemble model, integrating land cover, NDVI, and other environmental inputs, outperformed individual models and showed robust generalization across unseen regions. The fusion of image and tabular data improved both frog counting and habitat classification, achieving 84.9% accuracy with an AUC of 0.90. This study highlights the potential of multimodal learning and data preprocessing techniques such as balancing and imputation to improve predictive ecological modeling when data are sparse or incomplete, contributing to more precise and scalable biodiversity monitoring.

Abstract--Alzheimer's disease is a severe brain disorder that causes harm in various brain areas and leads to memory damage. The limited availability of labeled medical data poses a significant challenge for accurate Alzheimer's disease detection. There is a critical need for effective methods to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer's disease detection, considering the scarcity of labeled data, the complexity of the disease, and the constraints related to data privacy. T o address this challenge, our study leverages the power of big data in the form of pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within the framework of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and ensemble learning. We propose an ensemble approach based on a Prototypical Network (ProtoNet), a powerful method in FSL, integrating various pre-trained CNNs as encoders. This integration enhances the richness of features extracted from medical images. Our approach also includes a combination of class-aware loss and entropy loss to ensure a more precise classification of Alzheimer's disease progression levels. The effectiveness of our method was evaluated using two datasets, the Kaggle Alzheimer dataset, and the ADNI dataset, achieving an accuracy of 99.72% and 99.86%, respectively. The comparison of our results with relevant state-of-the-art studies demonstrated that our approach achieved superior accuracy and highlighted its validity and potential for real-world applications in early Alzheimer's disease detection. Index T erms--Few-shot learning, prototypical network, ensemble learning, transfer learning, pre-trained models, healthcare, Alzheimer disease. LZHEIMER'S disease is a progressive neurodegenera-tive disorder that mainly affects the elderly and causes memory loss and severe cognitive decline. The advances in medical imaging technologies, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET), have opened new avenues for the analysis and understanding of this severe disease [1], [2]. Employing data analytics on these images helps to provide detailed insights about the structural and functional changes in the brain caused by this disease, which facilitates the early diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression [3]. However, the application of traditional Machine Learning (ML) techniques in analyzing medical images for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis faces significant challenges [4]. One of the primary limitations is the scarcity of labeled data.

Predicting which hypothetical inorganic crystals can be experimentally realized remains a central challenge in accelerating materials discovery. SyntheFormer is a positive-unlabeled framework that learns synthesizability directly from crystal structure, combining a Fourier-transformed crystal periodicity (FTCP) representation with hierarchical feature extraction, Random-Forest feature selection, and a compact deep MLP classifier. The model is trained on historical data from 2011 through 2018 and evaluated prospectively on future years from 2019 to 2025, where the positive class constitutes only 1.02 per cent of samples. Under this temporally separated evaluation, SyntheFormer achieves a test area under the ROC curve of 0.735 and, with dual-threshold calibration, attains high-recall screening with 97.6 per cent recall at 94.2 per cent coverage, which minimizes missed opportunities while preserving discriminative power. Crucially, the model recovers experimentally confirmed metastable compounds that lie far from the convex hull and simultaneously assigns low scores to many thermodynamically stable yet unsynthesized candidates, demonstrating that stability alone is insufficient to predict experimental attainability. By aligning structure-aware representation with uncertainty-aware decision rules, SyntheFormer provides a practical route to prioritize synthesis targets and focus laboratory effort on the most promising new inorganic materials.

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women worldwide, emphasizing the need for early detection and accurate diagnosis. As such Ultrasound Imaging, a reliable and cost-effective tool, is used for this purpose, however the sensitive nature of medical data makes it challenging to develop accurate and private artificial intelligence models. A solution is Federated Learning as it is a promising technique for distributed machine learning on sensitive medical data while preserving patient privacy. However, training on non-Independent and non-Identically Distributed (non-IID) local datasets can impact the accuracy and generalization of the trained model, which is crucial for accurate tumour boundary delineation in BC segmentation. This study aims to tackle this challenge by applying the Federated Proximal (FedProx) method to non-IID Ultrasonic Breast Cancer Imaging datasets. Moreover, we focus on enhancing tumour segmentation accuracy by incorporating a modified U-Net model with attention mechanisms. Our approach resulted in a global model with 96% accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in enhancing tumour segmentation accuracy while preserving patient privacy. Our findings suggest that FedProx has the potential to be a promising approach for training precise machine learning models on non-IID local medical datasets.

Current medical practice depends on standardized treatment frameworks and empirical methodologies that neglect individual patient variations, leading to suboptimal health outcomes. We develop a comprehensive system integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks (CTGAN), T-learner counterfactual models, and contextual bandit approaches to provide customized, data-informed clinical recommendations. The approach utilizes LLMs to process unstructured medical narratives into structured datasets (93.2% accuracy), uses CTGANs to produce realistic synthetic patient data (55% accuracy via two-sample verification), deploys T-learners to forecast patient-specific treatment responses (84.3% accuracy), and integrates prior-informed contextual bandits to enhance online therapeutic selection by effectively balancing exploration of new possibilities with exploitation of existing knowledge. Testing on stage III colon cancer datasets revealed that our KernelUCB approach obtained 0.60-0.61 average reward scores across 5,000 rounds, exceeding other reference methods. This comprehensive system overcomes cold-start limitations in online learning environments, improves computational effectiveness, and constitutes notable progress toward individualized medicine adapted to specific patient characteristics.

While test-time scaling with verification has shown promise in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs), the role of the verifier and its imperfections remain underexplored. The effect of verification manifests through interactions of three quantities: (i) the generator's coverage, (ii) the verifier's region of convergence (ROC), and (iii) the sampling algorithm's sub-optimality. Though recent studies capture subsets of these factors, a unified framework quantifying the geometry of their interplay is missing. We frame verifiable test-time scaling as a transport problem. This characterizes the interaction of coverage, ROC, and sub-optimality, and uncovers that the sub-optimality--coverage curve exhibits three regimes. A transport regime -- where sub-optimality increases with coverage, a policy improvement regime -- where sub-optimality may decrease with coverage, depending on the verifier's ROC, and a saturation regime -- where sub-optimality plateaus, unaffected by coverage. We further propose and analyze two classes of sampling algorithms -- sequential and batched, and examine how their computational complexities shape these trade-offs. Empirical results with Qwen, Llama, and Gemma models corroborate our theoretical findings.

The growing integration of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models into high-stakes domains such as healthcare and scientific research calls for models that are not only accurate but also interpretable. Among the existing explainable methods, counterfactual explanations offer interpretability by identifying minimal changes to inputs that would alter a model's prediction, thus providing deeper insights. However, current counterfactual generation methods suffer from critical limitations, including gradient vanishing, discontinuous latent spaces, and an overreliance on the alignment between learned and true decision boundaries. To overcome these limitations, we propose LeapFactual, a novel counterfactual explanation algorithm based on conditional flow matching. LeapFactual generates reliable and informative counterfactuals, even when true and learned decision boundaries diverge. Following a model-agnostic approach, LeapFactual is not limited to models with differentiable loss functions. It can even handle human-in-the-loop systems, expanding the scope of counterfactual explanations to domains that require the participation of human annotators, such as citizen science. We provide extensive experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets showing that LeapFactual generates accurate and in-distribution counterfactual explanations that offer actionable insights. We observe, for instance, that our reliable counterfactual samples with labels aligning to ground truth can be beneficially used as new training data to enhance the model. The proposed method is broadly applicable and enhances both scientific knowledge discovery and non-expert interpretability.

Predicting precipitation maps is a highly complex spatiotemporal modeling task, critical for mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events. Short-term precipitation forecasting, or nowcasting, requires models that are not only accurate but also computationally efficient for real-time applications. Current methods, such as token-based autoregressive models, often suffer from flawed inductive biases and slow inference, while diffusion models can be computationally intensive. To address these limitations, we introduce BlockGPT, a generative autoregressive transformer using batched tokenization (Block) method that predicts full two-dimensional fields (frames) at each time step. Conceived as a model-agnostic paradigm for video prediction, BlockGPT factorizes space-time by using self-attention within each frame and causal attention across frames; in this work, we instantiate it for precipitation nowcasting. We evaluate BlockGPT on two precipitation datasets, viz. KNMI (Netherlands) and SEVIR (U.S.), comparing it to state-of-the-art baselines including token-based (NowcastingGPT) and diffusion-based (DiffCast+Phydnet) models. The results show that BlockGPT achieves superior accuracy, event localization as measured by categorical metrics, and inference speeds up to 31x faster than comparable baselines.

Recent advances in LLM watermarking methods such as SynthID-Text by Google DeepMind offer promising solutions for tracing the provenance of AI-generated text. However, our robustness assessment reveals that SynthID-Text is vulnerable to meaning-preserving attacks, such as paraphrasing, copy-paste modifications, and back-translation, which can significantly degrade watermark detectability. To address these limitations, we propose SynGuard, a hybrid framework that combines the semantic alignment strength of Semantic Information Retrieval (SIR) with the probabilistic watermarking mechanism of SynthID-Text. Our approach jointly embeds watermarks at both lexical and semantic levels, enabling robust provenance tracking while preserving the original meaning. Experimental results across multiple attack scenarios show that SynGuard improves watermark recovery by an average of 11.1\% in F1 score compared to SynthID-Text. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of semantic-aware watermarking in resisting real-world tampering. All code, datasets, and evaluation scripts are publicly available at: https://github.com/githshine/SynGuard.