The development of AI-based methods to analyze radiology reports could lead to significant advances in medical diagnosis, from improving diagnostic accuracy to enhancing efficiency and reducing workload. However, the lack of interpretability of AI-based methods could hinder their adoption in clinical settings. In this paper, we propose an interpretable-by-design framework for classifying chest radiology reports. First, we extract a set of representative facts from a large set of reports. Then, given a new report, we query whether a small subset of the representative facts is entailed by the report, and predict a diagnosis based on the selected subset of query-answer pairs. The explanation for a prediction is, by construction, the set of selected queries and answers. We use the Information Pursuit framework to select the most informative queries, a natural language inference model to determine if a fact is entailed by the report, and a classifier to predict the disease. Experiments on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, highlighting its potential to enhance trust and usability in medical AI.

This paper presents the "Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment" (NOCASA) - a data competition part of the IEEE MLSP 2025 conference. NOCASA challenges participants to develop new systems that can assess single-word pronunciations of young second language (L2) learners as part of a gamified pronunciation training app. To achieve this, several issues must be addressed, most notably the limited nature of available training data and the highly unbalanced distribution among the pronunciation level categories. To expedite the development, we provide a pseudo-anonymized training data (TeflonNorL2), containing 10,334 recordings from 44 speakers attempting to pronounce 205 distinct Norwegian words, human-rated on a 1 to 5 scale (number of stars that should be given in the game). In addition to the data, two already trained systems are released as official baselines: an SVM classifier trained on the ComParE_16 acoustic feature set and a multi-task wav2vec 2.0 model. The latter achieves the best performance on the challenge test set, with an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 36.37%.

Heterogeneous graph representation learning aims to learn low-dimensional vector representations of different types of entities and relations to empower downstream tasks. Existing methods either capture semantic relationships but indirectly leverage node/edge attributes in a complex way, or leverage node/edge attributes directly without taking semantic relationships into account. When involving multiple convolution operations, they also have poor scalability. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a flexible and efficient Graph information propagation Network (GripNet) framework. Specifically, we introduce a new supergraph data structure consisting of supervertices and superedges. A supervertex is a semantically-coherent subgraph. A superedge defines an information propagation path between two supervertices. GripNet learns new representations for the supervertex of interest by propagating information along the defined path using multiple layers. We construct multiple large-scale graphs and evaluate GripNet against competing methods to show its superiority in link prediction, node classification, and data integration.

Preference learning has gained significant attention in tasks involving subjective human judgments, such as \emph{speech emotion recognition} (SER) and image aesthetic assessment. While pairwise frameworks such as RankNet offer robust modeling of relative preferences, they are inherently limited to local comparisons and struggle to capture global ranking consistency. To address these limitations, we propose RankList, a novel listwise preference learning framework that generalizes RankNet to structured list-level supervision. Our formulation explicitly models local and non-local ranking constraints within a probabilistic framework. The paper introduces a log-sum-exp approximation to improve training efficiency. We further extend RankList with skip-wise comparisons, enabling progressive exposure to complex list structures and enhancing global ranking fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method across diverse modalities. On benchmark SER datasets (MSP-Podcast, IEMOCAP, BIIC Podcast), RankList achieves consistent improvements in Kendall's Tau and ranking accuracy compared to standard listwise baselines. We also validate our approach on aesthetic image ranking using the Artistic Image Aesthetics dataset, highlighting its broad applicability. Through ablation and cross-domain studies, we show that RankList not only improves in-domain ranking but also generalizes better across datasets. Our framework offers a unified, extensible approach for modeling ordered preferences in subjective learning scenarios.

Electric load forecasting is pivotal for power system operation, planning and decision-making. The rise of smart grids and meters has provided more detailed and high-quality load data at multiple levels of granularity, from home to bus and cities. Motivated by similar patterns of loads across different cities in a province in eastern China, in this paper we focus on the Multi-Region Electric Load Forecasting (MRELF) problem, targeting accurate short-term load forecasting for multiple sub-regions within a large region. We identify three challenges for MRELF, including regional variation, contextual variation, and temporal variation. To address them, we propose TriForecaster, a new framework leveraging the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach within a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) paradigm to overcome these challenges. TriForecaster features RegionMixer and Context-Time Specializer (CTSpecializer) layers, enabling dynamic cooperation and specialization of expert models across regional, contextual, and temporal dimensions. Based on evaluation on four real-world MRELF datasets with varied granularity, TriForecaster outperforms state-of-the-art models by achieving an average forecast error reduction of 22.4\%, thereby demonstrating its flexibility and broad applicability. In particular, the deployment of TriForecaster on the eForecaster platform in eastern China exemplifies its practical utility, effectively providing city-level, short-term load forecasts for 17 cities, supporting a population exceeding 110 million and daily electricity usage over 100 gigawatt-hours.

Recent years have witnessed a rising trend in social-sensor cloud identity cloning incidents. However, existing approaches suffer from unsatisfactory performance, a lack of solutions for detecting duplicated accounts, and a lack of large-scale evaluations on real-world datasets. We introduce a novel method for detecting identity cloning in social-sensor cloud service providers. Our proposed technique consists of two primary components: 1) a similar identity detection method and 2) a cryptography-based authentication protocol. Initially, we developed a weakly supervised deep forest model to identify similar identities using non-privacy-sensitive user profile features provided by the service. Subsequently, we designed a cryptography-based authentication protocol to verify whether similar identities were generated by the same provider. Our extensive experiments on a large real-world dataset demonstrate the feasibility and superior performance of our technique compared to current state-of-the-art identity clone detection methods.

Malware detection increasingly relies on AI systems that integrate signature-based detection with machine learning. However, these components are typically developed and combined in isolation, missing opportunities to reduce data complexity and strengthen defenses against adversarial EXEmples, carefully crafted programs designed to evade detection. Hence, in this work we investigate the influence that signature-based detection exerts on model training, when they are included inside the training pipeline. Specifically, we compare models trained on a comprehensive dataset with an AI system whose machine learning component is trained solely on samples not already flagged by signatures. Our results demonstrate improved robustness to both adversarial EXEmples and temporal data drift, although this comes at the cost of a fixed lower bound on false positives, driven by suboptimal rule selection. We conclude by discussing these limitations and outlining how future research could extend AI-based malware detection to include dynamic analysis, thereby further enhancing system resilience.

One of the key challenges to predict odor from molecular structure is unarguably our limited understanding of the odor space and the complexity of the underlying structure-odor relationships. Here, we show that the predictive performance of machine learning models for structure-based odor predictions can be improved using both, an expert and a data-driven odor taxonomy. The expert taxonomy is based on semantic and perceptual similarities, while the data-driven taxonomy is based on clustering co-occurrence patterns of odor descriptors directly from the prepared dataset. Both taxonomies improve the predictions of different machine learning models and outperform random groupings of descriptors that do not reflect existing relations between odor descriptors. We assess the quality of both taxonomies through their predictive performance across different odor classes and perform an in-depth error analysis highlighting the complexity of odor-structure relationships and identifying potential inconsistencies within the taxonomies by showcasing pear odorants used in perfumery. The data-driven taxonomy allows us to critically evaluate our expert taxonomy and better understand the molecular odor space. Both taxonomies as well as a full dataset are made available to the community, providing a stepping stone for a future community-driven exploration of the molecular basis of smell. In addition, we provide a detailed multi-layer expert taxonomy including a total of 777 different descriptors from the Pyrfume repository.

Coupon distribution is a critical marketing strategy used by online platforms to boost revenue and enhance user engagement. Regrettably, existing coupon distribution strategies fall far short of effectively leveraging the complex sequential interactions between platforms and users. This critical oversight, despite the abundance of e-commerce log data, has precipitated a performance plateau. In this paper, we focus on the scene that the platforms make sequential coupon distribution decision multiple times for various users, with each user interacting with the platform repeatedly. Based on this marketing scenario, we propose a novel marketing framework, named Aligned Decision Transformer for Coupons (ADT4Coupons), to directly devise coupon distribution policy for long-term revenue boosting. ADT4Coupons enables optimized online decision-making in a variety of real-world marketing scenarios. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating three key characteristics, general scenarios, sequential modeling with more comprehensive historical data, and efficient iterative updates within a unified framework. Furthermore, empirical results on real-world industrial dataset, alongside public and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework.