Individual-level human mobility prediction has emerged as a significant topic of research with applications in infectious disease monitoring, child, and elderly care. Existing studies predominantly focus on the microscopic aspects of human trajectories: such as predicting short-term trajectories or the next location visited, while offering limited attention to macro-level mobility patterns and the corresponding life routines. In this paper, we focus on an underexplored problem in human mobility prediction: determining the best practices to train a machine learning model using historical data to forecast an individuals complete trajectory over the next days and weeks. In this experiment paper, we undertake a comprehensive experimental analysis of diverse models, parameter configurations, and training strategies, accompanied by an in-depth examination of the statistical distribution inherent in human mobility patterns. Our empirical evaluations encompass both Long Short-Term Memory and Transformer-based architectures, and further investigate how incorporating individual life patterns can enhance the effectiveness of the prediction. We show that explicitly including semantic information such as day-of-the-week and user-specific historical information can help the model better understand individual patterns of life and improve predictions. Moreover, since the absence of explicit user information is often missing due to user privacy, we show that the sampling of users may exacerbate data skewness and result in a substantial loss in predictive accuracy. To mitigate data imbalance and preserve diversity, we apply user semantic clustering with stratified sampling to ensure that the sampled dataset remains representative. Our results further show that small-batch stochastic gradient optimization improves model performance, especially when human mobility training data is limited.

Motivated by empirical observations of prolonged plateaus and stage-wise progression during training, we investigate the loss landscape of transformer models trained on in-context next-token prediction tasks. In particular, we focus on learning in-context $n$-gram language models under cross-entropy loss, and establish a sufficient condition for parameter configurations to be stationary points. We then construct a set of parameter configurations for a simplified transformer model that represent $k$-gram estimators (for $k \leq n$), and show that the gradient of the population loss at these solutions vanishes in the limit of infinite sequence length and parameter norm. This reveals a key property of the loss landscape: {sub-$n$-grams are near-stationary points of the population cross-entropy loss}, offering theoretical insight into widely observed phenomena such as stage-wise learning dynamics and emergent phase transitions. These insights are further supported by numerical experiments that illustrate the learning dynamics of $n$-grams, characterized by discrete transitions between near-stationary solutions.

Transportation influence health by shaping exposure to physical activity, air pollution and injury risk. Comparative data on cycling and motorcycling behaviours is scarce, particularly at a global scale. Street view imagery, such as Google Street View (GSV), combined with computer vision, is a valuable resource for efficiently capturing travel behaviour data. This study demonstrates a novel approach using deep learning on street view images to estimate cycling and motorcycling levels across diverse cities worldwide. We utilized data from 185 global cities. The data on mode shares of cycling and motorcycling estimated using travel surveys or censuses. We used GSV images to detect cycles and motorcycles in sampled locations, using 8000 images per city. The YOLOv4 model, fine-tuned using images from six cities, achieved a mean average precision of 89% for detecting cycles and motorcycles. A global prediction model was developed using beta regression with city-level mode shares as outcome, with log transformed explanatory variables of counts of GSV-detected images with cycles and motorcycles, while controlling for population density. We found strong correlations between GSV motorcycle counts and motorcycle mode share (0.78) and moderate correlations between GSV cycle counts and cycling mode share (0.51). Beta regression models predicted mode shares with $R^2$ values of 0.614 for cycling and 0.612 for motorcycling, achieving median absolute errors (MDAE) of 1.3% and 1.4%, respectively. Scatterplots demonstrated consistent prediction accuracy, though cities like Utrecht and Cali were outliers. The model was applied to 60 cities globally for which we didn't have recent mode share data. We provided estimates for some cities in the Middle East, Latin America and East Asia. With computer vision, GSV images capture travel modes and activity, providing insights alongside traditional data sources.

Bioacoustics, the study of sounds produced by living organisms, plays a vital role in conservation, biodiversity monitoring, and behavioral studies. Many tasks in this field, such as species, individual, and behavior classification and detection, are well-suited to machine learning. However, they often suffer from limited annotated data, highlighting the need for a general-purpose bioacoustic encoder capable of extracting useful representations for diverse downstream tasks. Such encoders have been proposed before, but are often limited in scope due to a focus on a narrow range of species (typically birds), and a reliance on a single model architecture or training paradigm. Moreover, they are usually evaluated on a small set of tasks and datasets. In this work, we present a large-scale empirical study that covers aspects of bioacoustics that are relevant to research but have previously been scarcely considered: training data diversity and scale, model architectures and training recipes, and the breadth of evaluation tasks and datasets. We obtain encoders that are state-of-the-art on the existing and proposed benchmarks. We also identify what matters for training these encoders, such that this work can be extended when more data are available or better architectures are proposed. Specifically, across 26 datasets with tasks including species classification, detection, individual ID, and vocal repertoire discovery, we find self-supervised pre-training followed by supervised post-training on a mixed bioacoustics + general-audio corpus yields the strongest in- and out-of-distribution performance. We show the importance of data diversity in both stages. To support ongoing research and application, we will release the model checkpoints.

Monitoring cattle health and optimizing yield are key challenges faced by dairy farmers due to difficulties in tracking all animals on the farm. This work aims to showcase modern data-driven farming practices based on explainable machine learning(ML) methods that explain the activity and behaviour of dairy cattle (cows). Continuous data collection of 3-axis accelerometer sensors and usage of robust ML methodologies and algorithms, provide farmers and researchers with actionable information on cattle activity, allowing farmers to make informed decisions and incorporate sustainable practices. This study utilizes Bluetooth-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices and 4G networks for seamless data transmission, immediate analysis, inference generation, and explains the models performance with explainability frameworks. Special emphasis is put on the pre-processing of the accelerometers time series data, including the extraction of statistical characteristics, signal processing techniques, and lag-based features using the sliding window technique. Various hyperparameter-optimized ML models are evaluated across varying window lengths for activity classification. The k-nearest neighbour Classifier achieved the best performance, with AUC of mean 0.98 and standard deviation of 0.0026 on the training set and 0.99 on testing set). In order to ensure transparency, Explainable AI based frameworks such as SHAP is used to interpret feature importance that can be understood and used by practitioners. A detailed comparison of the important features, along with the stability analysis of selected features, supports development of explainable and practical ML models for sustainable livestock management.

Using more test-time computation during language model inference, such as generating more intermediate thoughts or sampling multiple candidate answers, has proven effective in significantly improving model performance. This paper takes an initial step toward bridging the gap between practical language model inference and theoretical transformer analysis by incorporating randomness and sampling. We focus on in-context linear regression with continuous/binary coefficients, where our framework simulates language model decoding through noise injection and binary coefficient sampling. Through this framework, we provide detailed analyses of widely adopted inference techniques. Supported by empirical results, our theoretical framework and analysis demonstrate the potential for offering new insights into understanding inference behaviors in real-world language models.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the deadliest c ancers, and early detection remains a major clinical challenge due to the absence of spec ific symptoms and reliable biomarkers. In this work, we propose a new multimodal appro ach that integrates longitudinal diagnosis code histories and routinely collected laborato ry measurements from electronic health records to detect PDAC up to one year prior to clin ical diagnosis. Our method combines neural controlled differential equations to model irregular lab time series, pretrained language models and recurrent networks to learn diagnosis code trajectory representations, and cross-attention mechanisms to capture in teractions between the two modalities. We develop and evaluate our approach on a real-world dat aset of nearly 4,700 patients and achieve significant improvements in AUC ranging from 6.5 % to 15.5% over state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our model identifies diagnosis codes and laboratory panels associated with elevated PDAC risk, including both established and new biomarkers.

Reinforcement learning with offline data suffers from Q-value extrapolation errors. To address this issue, we first demonstrate that linear extrapolation of the Q-function beyond the data range is particularly problematic. To mitigate this, we propose guiding the gradual decrease of Q-values outside the data range, which is achieved through reward scaling with layer normalization (RS-LN) and a penalization mechanism for infeasible actions (PA). By combining RS-LN and PA, we develop a new algorithm called PARS. We evaluate PARS across a range of tasks, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms in both offline training and online fine-tuning on the D4RL benchmark, with notable success in the challenging AntMaze Ultra task.

The growth and characterization of materials using empirical optimization typically requires a significant amount of expert time, experience, and resources. Several complementary characterization methods are routinely performed to determine the quality and properties of a grown sample. Machine learning (ML) can support the conventional approaches by using historical data to guide and provide speed and efficiency to the growth and characterization of materials. Specifically, ML can provide quantitative information from characterization data that is typically obtained from a different modality. In this study, we have investigated the feasibility of projecting the quantitative metric from microscopy measurements, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), using data obtained from spectroscopy measurements, like Raman spectroscopy. Generative models were also trained to generate the full and specific features of the Raman and photoluminescence spectra from each other and the AFM images of the thin film MoS$_2$. The results are promising and have provided a foundational guide for the use of ML for the cross-modal characterization of materials for their accelerated, efficient, and cost-effective discovery.

This study explores the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate the extraction of requirements from unstructured French Building Technical Specification (BTS) documents within the construction industry. Employing Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) techniques, the study leverages the transformer-based model CamemBERT and applies transfer learning with the French language model Fr\_core\_news\_lg, both pre-trained on a large French corpus in the general domain. To benchmark these models, additional approaches ranging from rule-based to deep learning-based methods are developed. For RE, four different supervised models, including Random Forest, are implemented using a custom feature vector. A hand-crafted annotated dataset is used to compare the effectiveness of NER approaches and RE models. Results indicate that CamemBERT and Fr\_core\_news\_lg exhibited superior performance in NER, achieving F1-scores over 90\%, while Random Forest proved most effective in RE, with an F1 score above 80\%. The outcomes are intended to be represented as a knowledge graph in future work to further enhance automatic verification systems.