Accurately modeling complex dynamic spatio-temporal systems requires capturing flow-mediated interdependencies and context-sensitive interaction dynamics. Existing methods, predominantly graph-based or attention-driven, rely on similarity-driven connectivity assumptions, neglecting asymmetric flow exchanges that govern system evolution. We propose Spatio-Temporal Flow, a physics-inspired paradigm that explicitly models dynamic node couplings through quantifiable flow transfers governed by conservation principles. Building on this, we design FlowNet, a novel architecture leveraging flow tokens as information carriers to simulate source-to-destination transfers via Flow Allocation Modules, ensuring state redistribution aligns with conservation laws. FlowNet dynamically adjusts the interaction radius through an Adaptive Spatial Masking module, suppressing irrelevant noise while enabling context-aware propagation. A cascaded architecture enhances scalability and nonlinear representation capacity. Experiments demonstrate that FlowNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on seven metrics in the modeling of three real-world systems, validating its efficiency and physical interpretability. We establish a principled methodology for modeling complex systems through spatio-temporal flow interactions.

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its extensions have become indispensable tools for visualizing the evidence behind deep network predictions. However, by relying on a final softmax classifier, these methods suffer from two fundamental distortions: additive logit shifts that arbitrarily bias importance scores, and sign collapse that conflates excitatory and inhibitory features. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic dual-branch sigmoid head that decouples localization from classification. Given any pretrained model, we clone its classification head into a parallel branch ending in per-class sigmoid outputs, freeze the original softmax head, and fine-tune only the sigmoid branch with class-balanced binary supervision. At inference, softmax retains recognition accuracy, while class evidence maps are generated from the sigmoid branch -- preserving both magnitude and sign of feature contributions. Our method integrates seamlessly with most CAM variants and incurs negligible overhead. Extensive evaluations on fine-grained tasks (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars) and WSOL benchmarks (ImageNet-1K, OpenImages30K) show improved explanation fidelity and consistent Top-1 Localization gains -- without any drop in classification accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/finallyupper/beyond-softmax.

Existing Multi-view Clustering (MVC) methods based on subspace learning focus on consensus representation learning while neglecting the inherent topological structure of data. Despite the integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) into MVC, their input graph structures remain susceptible to noise interference. Methods based on Multi-view Graph Refinement (MGRC) also have limitations such as insufficient consideration of cross-view consistency, difficulty in handling hard-to-distinguish samples in the feature space, and disjointed optimization processes caused by graph construction algorithms. To address these issues, a Multi-View Clustering method via a Fusion-Consensus Graph Convolutional Network (MCFCN) is proposed. The network learns the consensus graph of multi-view data in an end-to-end manner and learns effective consensus representations through a view feature fusion model and a Unified Graph Structure Adapter (UGA). It designs Similarity Matrix Alignment Loss (SMAL) and Feature Representation Alignment Loss (FRAL). With the guidance of consensus, it optimizes view-specific graphs, preserves cross-view topological consistency, promotes the construction of intra-class edges, and realizes effective consensus representation learning with the help of GCN to improve clustering performance. MCFCN demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on eight multi-view benchmark datasets, and its effectiveness is verified by extensive qualitative and quantitative implementations. The code will be provided at https://github.com/texttao/MCFCN.

Electricity price forecasting has become a critical tool for decision-making in energy markets, particularly as the increasing penetration of renewable energy introduces greater volatility and uncertainty. Historically, research in this field has been dominated by point forecasting methods, which provide single-value predictions but fail to quantify uncertainty. However, as power markets evolve due to renewable integration, smart grids, and regulatory changes, the need for probabilistic forecasting has become more pronounced, offering a more comprehensive approach to risk assessment and market participation. This paper presents a review of probabilistic forecasting methods, tracing their evolution from Bayesian and distribution based approaches, through quantile regression techniques, to recent developments in conformal prediction. Particular emphasis is placed on advancements in probabilistic forecasting, including validity-focused methods which address key limitations in uncertainty estimation. Additionally, this review extends beyond the Day-Ahead Market to include the Intra-Day and Balancing Markets, where forecasting challenges are intensified by higher temporal granularity and real-time operational constraints. We examine state of the art methodologies, key evaluation metrics, and ongoing challenges, such as forecast validity, model selection, and the absence of standardised benchmarks, providing researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive and timely resource for navigating the complexities of modern electricity markets.

Oscar nominations are an important factor in the movie industry because they can boost both the visibility and the commercial success. This work explores whether it is possible to predict Oscar nominations for screenplays using modern language models. Since no suitable dataset was available, a new one called Movie-O-Label was created by combining the MovieSum collection of movie scripts with curated Oscar records. Each screenplay was represented by its title, Wikipedia summary, and full script. Long scripts were split into overlapping text chunks and encoded with the E5 sentence em bedding model. Then, the screenplay embed dings were classified using a logistic regression model. The best results were achieved when three feature inputs related to screenplays (script, summary, and title) were combined. The best-performing model reached a macro F1 score of 0.66, a precision recall AP of 0.445 with baseline 0.19 and a ROC-AUC of 0.79. The results suggest that even simple models based on modern text embeddings demonstrate good prediction performance and might be a starting point for future research.

Abstract--Submodular maximization is an optimization problem benefiting many machine learning applications, where we seek a small subset best representing an extremely large dataset. We focus on the federated setting where the data are locally owned by decentralized clients who have their own definitions for the quality of representability. This setting requires repetitive aggregation of local information computed by the clients. While the main motivation is to respect the privacy and autonomy of the clients, the federated setting is vulnerable to client misbehaviors: malicious clients might share fake information. An analogy is backdoor attack in conventional federated learning, but our challenge differs freshly due to the unique characteristics of submodular maximization. We propose RobustFSM, a federated submodular maximization solution that is robust to various practical client attacks. Its performance is substantiated with an empirical evaluation study using real-world datasets. Numerical results show that the solution quality of RobustFSM substantially exceeds that of the conventional federated algorithm when attacks are severe. The degree of this improvement depends on the dataset and attack scenarios, which can be as high as 200%.

Realizing personalized medicine at scale calls for methods that distill insights from longitudinal patient journeys, which can be viewed as a sequence of medical events. Foundation models pretrained on large-scale medical event data represent a promising direction for scaling real-world evidence generation and generalizing to diverse downstream tasks. Using Epic Cosmos, a dataset with medical events from de-identified longitudinal health records for 16.3 billion encounters over 300 million unique patient records from 310 health systems, we introduce the Curiosity models, a family of decoder-only transformer models pretrained on 118 million patients representing 115 billion discrete medical events (151 billion tokens). We present the largest scaling-law study of medical event data, establishing a methodology for pretraining and revealing power-law scaling relationships for compute, tokens, and model size. Consequently, we pretrained a series of compute-optimal models with up to 1 billion parameters. Conditioned on a patient's real-world history, Curiosity autoregressively predicts the next medical event to simulate patient health timelines. We studied 78 real-world tasks, including diagnosis prediction, disease prognosis, and healthcare operations. Remarkably for a foundation model with generic pretraining and simulation-based inference, Curiosity generally outperformed or matched task-specific supervised models on these tasks, without requiring task-specific fine-tuning or few-shot examples. Curiosity's predictive power consistently improves as the model and pretraining scale. Our results show that Curiosity, a generative medical event foundation model, can effectively capture complex clinical dynamics, providing an extensible and generalizable framework to support clinical decision-making, streamline healthcare operations, and improve patient outcomes.

This paper addresses the current lack of a unified formal framework in machine learning theory, as well as the absence of robust theoretical foundations for interpretability and ethical safety assurance. We first construct a formal information model, employing sets of well-formed formulas (WFFs) to explicitly define the ontological states and carrier mappings for the core components of machine learning. By introducing learnable and processable predicates, as well as learning and processing functions, we analyze the logical inference and constraint rules underlying causal chains in models, thereby establishing the Machine Learning Theory Meta-Framework (MLT-MF). Building upon this framework, we propose universal definitions for model interpretability and ethical safety, and rigorously prove and validate four key theorems: the equivalence between model interpretability and information existence, the constructive formulation of ethical safety assurance and two types of total variation distance (TVD) upper bounds. This work overcomes the limitations of previous fragmented approaches, providing a unified theoretical foundation from an information science perspective to systematically address the critical challenges currently facing machine learning.

$n$-particle reduced density matrices ($n$-RDMs) play a central role in understanding correlated phases of matter. Yet the calculation of $n$-RDMs is often computationally inefficient for strongly-correlated states, particularly when the system sizes are large. In this work, we propose to use neural network (NN) architectures to accelerate the calculation of, and even predict, the $n$-RDMs for large-size systems. The underlying intuition is that $n$-RDMs are often smooth functions over the Brillouin zone (BZ) (certainly true for gapped states) and are thus interpolable, allowing NNs trained on small-size $n$-RDMs to predict large-size ones. Building on this intuition, we devise two NNs: (i) a self-attention NN that maps random RDMs to physical ones, and (ii) a Sinusoidal Representation Network (SIREN) that directly maps momentum-space coordinates to RDM values. We test the NNs in three 2D models: the pair-pair correlation functions of the Richardson model of superconductivity, the translationally-invariant 1-RDM in a four-band model with short-range repulsion, and the translation-breaking 1-RDM in the half-filled Hubbard model. We find that a SIREN trained on a $6\times 6$ momentum mesh can predict the $18\times 18$ pair-pair correlation function with a relative accuracy of $0.839$. The NNs trained on $6\times 6 \sim 8\times 8$ meshes can provide high-quality initial guesses for $50\times 50$ translation-invariant Hartree-Fock (HF) and $30\times 30$ fully translation-breaking-allowed HF, reducing the number of iterations required for convergence by up to $91.63\%$ and $92.78\%$, respectively, compared to random initializations. Our results illustrate the potential of using NN-based methods for interpolable $n$-RDMs, which might open a new avenue for future research on strongly correlated phases.

Functional connectivity has been widely investigated to understand brain disease in clinical studies and imaging-based neuroscience, and analyzing changes in functional connectivity has proven to be valuable for understanding and computationally evaluating the effects on brain function caused by diseases or experimental stimuli. By using Mahalanobis data whitening prior to the use of dimensionality reduction algorithms, we are able to distill meaningful information from fMRI signals about subjects and the experimental stimuli used to prompt them. Furthermore, we offer an interpretation of Mahalanobis whitening as a two-stage de-individualization of data which is motivated by similarity as captured by the Bures distance, which is connected to quantum mechanics. These methods have potential to aid discoveries about the mechanisms that link brain function with cognition and behavior and may improve the accuracy and consistency of Alzheimer's diagnosis, especially in the preclinical stage of disease progression.