Postural sway assessment is important for detecting balance problems and identifying people at risk of falls. Force plates (FP) are considered the gold standard postural sway assessment method in laboratory conditions, but their lack of portability and requirement of high-level expertise limit their widespread usage. This study evaluates the reliability and validity of a novel Balance Mat (BM) device, a low-cost portable alternative that uses optical fibre technology. The research includes two studies: a robot study and a human study. In the robot study, a UR10 robotic arm was used to obtain controlled sway patterns to assess the reliability and sensitivity of the BM. In the human study, 51 healthy young participants performed balance tasks on the BM in combination with an FP to evaluate the BM's validity. Sway metrics such as sway mean, sway absolute mean, sway root mean square (RMS), sway path, sway range, and sway velocity were calculated from both BM and FP and compared. Reliability was evaluated using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), where values greater than 0.9 were considered excellent and values between 0.75 and 0.9 were considered good. Results from the robot study demonstrated good to excellent ICC values in both single and double-leg stances. The human study showed moderate to strong correlations for sway path and range. Using Bland-Altman plots for agreement analysis revealed proportional bias between the BM and the FP where the BM overestimated sway metrics compared to the FP. Calibration was used to improve the agreement between the devices. The device demonstrated consistent sway measurement across varied stance conditions, establishing both reliability and validity following appropriate calibration.

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for efficiently estimating the 6-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) robot pose with a decoupled, non-iterative method that capitalizes on overlapping planar elements. Conventional RGB-D visual odometry(RGBD-VO) often relies on iterative optimization solvers to estimate pose and involves a process of feature extraction and matching. This results in significant computational burden and time delays. To address this, our innovative method for RGBD-VO separates the estimation of rotation and translation. Initially, we exploit the overlaid planar characteristics within the scene to calculate the rotation matrix. Following this, we utilize a kernel cross-correlator (KCC) to ascertain the translation. By sidestepping the resource-intensive iterative optimization and feature extraction and alignment procedures, our methodology offers improved computational efficacy, achieving a performance of 71Hz on a lower-end i5 CPU. When the RGBD-VO does not rely on feature points, our technique exhibits enhanced performance in low-texture degenerative environments compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Background: Hypertensive kidney disease (HKD) patients in intensive care units (ICUs) face high short-term mortality, but tailored risk prediction tools are lacking. Early identification of high-risk individuals is crucial for clinical decision-making. Methods: We developed a machine learning framework to predict 30-day in-hospital mortality among ICU patients with HKD using early clinical data from the MIMIC-IV v2.2 database. A cohort of 1,366 adults was curated with strict criteria, excluding malignancy cases. Eighteen clinical features-including vital signs, labs, comorbidities, and therapies-were selected via random forest importance and mutual information filtering. Several models were trained and compared with stratified five-fold cross-validation; CatBoost demonstrated the best performance. Results: CatBoost achieved an AUROC of 0.88 on the independent test set, with sensitivity of 0.811 and specificity of 0.798. SHAP values and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) plots showed the model relied on meaningful predictors such as altered consciousness, vasopressor use, and coagulation status. Additionally, the DREAM algorithm was integrated to estimate patient-specific posterior risk distributions, allowing clinicians to assess both predicted mortality and its uncertainty. Conclusions: We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline for early, real-time risk assessment in ICU patients with HKD. By combining high predictive performance with uncertainty quantification, our model supports individualized triage and transparent clinical decisions. This approach shows promise for clinical deployment and merits external validation in broader critical care populations.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has advanced WSI analysis but struggles with the complexity and heterogeneity of WSIs. Existing MIL methods face challenges in aggregating diverse patch information into robust WSI representations. While ViTs and clustering-based approaches show promise, they are computationally intensive and fail to capture task-specific and slide-specific variability. To address these limitations, we propose PTCMIL, a novel Prompt Token Clustering-based ViT for MIL aggregation. By introducing learnable prompt tokens into the ViT backbone, PTCMIL unifies clustering and prediction tasks in an end-to-end manner. It dynamically aligns clustering with downstream tasks, using projection-based clustering tailored to each WSI, reducing complexity while preserving patch heterogeneity. Through token merging and prototype-based pooling, PTCMIL efficiently captures task-relevant patterns. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate its superior performance in classification and survival analysis tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Systematic ablation studies confirm its robustness and strong interpretability. The code is released at https://github.com/ubc-tea/PTCMIL.

Recent advances in generative neural networks, particularly flow matching (FM), have enabled the generation of high-fidelity samples while significantly reducing computational costs. A promising application of these models is accelerating simulations in high-energy physics (HEP), helping research institutions meet their increasing computational demands. In this work, we leverage FM to develop surrogate models for fast simulations of zero degree calorimeters in the ALICE experiment. We present an effective training strategy that enables the training of fast generative models with an exceptionally low number of parameters. This approach achieves state-of-the-art simulation fidelity for both neutron (ZN) and proton (ZP) detectors, while offering substantial reductions in computational costs compared to existing methods. Our FM model achieves a Wasserstein distance of 1.27 for the ZN simulation with an inference time of 0.46 ms per sample, compared to the current best of 1.20 with an inference time of approximately 109 ms. The latent FM model further improves the inference speed, reducing the sampling time to 0.026 ms per sample, with a minimal trade-off in accuracy. Similarly, our approach achieves a Wasserstein distance of 1.30 for the ZP simulation, outperforming the current best of 2.08. The source code is available at https://github.com/m-wojnar/faster_zdc.

The diagonal of a model's Fisher Information Matrix (the "Fisher diagonal") has frequently been used as a way to measure parameter sensitivity. Typically, the Fisher diagonal is estimated via squared sampled gradients of the model's likelihood with respect to its parameters, averaged over a few hundred or thousand examples -- a process which incurs nontrivial computational costs. At the same time, adaptive gradient methods like the ubiquitous Adam optimizer compute a moving average of the squared gradient over the course of training. This paper therefore explores whether an approximation of the Fisher diagonal can be obtained "for free" by recycling the squared gradient accumulator that has already been computed over the course of training. Through a comprehensive set of experiments covering five applications of the Fisher diagonal, we demonstrate that the "Squisher" (SQUared gradient accumulator as an approximation of the FISHER) consistently performs similarly to the Fisher diagonal while outperforming baseline methods. Additionally, we clarify the exact differences between the Squisher and the Fisher diagonal and provide empirical quantification of their respective impact.

In natural language processing, multilingual models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa promise broad coverage but often struggle with languages that share a script yet differ in orthographic norms and cultural context. This issue is especially notable in Arabic-script languages such as Kurdish Sorani, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. We introduce the Arabic Script RoBERTa (AS-RoBERTa) family: four RoBERTa-based models, each pre-trained on a large corpus tailored to its specific language. By focusing pre-training on language-specific script features and statistics, our models capture patterns overlooked by general-purpose models. When fine-tuned on classification tasks, AS-RoBERTa variants outperform mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa by 2 to 5 percentage points. An ablation study confirms that script-focused pre-training is central to these gains. Error analysis using confusion matrices shows how shared script traits and domain-specific content affect performance. Our results highlight the value of script-aware specialization for languages using the Arabic script and support further work on pre-training strategies rooted in script and language specificity.

Share market is one of the most important sectors of economic development of a country. Everyday almost all companies issue their shares and investors buy and sell shares of these companies. Generally investors want to buy shares of the companies whose market liquidity is comparatively greater. Market liquidity depends on the average price of a share. In this paper, a thorough linear regression analysis has been performed on the stock market data of Dhaka Stock Exchange. Later, the linear model has been compared with random forest based on different metrics showing better results for random forest model. However, the amount of individual significance of different factors on the variability of stock price has been identified and explained. This paper also shows that the time series data is not capable of generating a predictive linear model for analysis.

Understanding how novices acquire and hone visual search skills is crucial for developing and optimizing training methods across domains. Network analysis methods can be used to analyze graph representations of visual expertise. This study investigates the relationship between eye-gaze movements and learning outcomes among undergraduate dentistry students who were diagnosing dental radiographs over multiple semesters. We use network analysis techniques to model eye-gaze scanpaths as directed graphs and examine changes in network metrics over time. Using time series clustering on each metric, we identify distinct patterns of visual search strategies and explore their association with students' diagnostic performance. Our findings suggest that the network metric of transition entropy is negatively correlated with performance scores, while the number of nodes and edges as well as average PageRank are positively correlated with performance scores. Changes in network metrics for individual students over time suggest a developmental shift from intermediate to expert-level processing. These insights contribute to understanding expertise acquisition in visual tasks and can inform the design of AI-assisted learning interventions.

This study investigates the effectiveness of several machine learning algorithms for static malware detection using the EMBER dataset, which contains feature representations of Portable Executable (PE) files. We evaluate eight classification models: LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost, Random Forest, Extra Trees, HistGradientBoosting, k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and TabNet, under three preprocessing settings: original feature space, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The models are assessed on accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and AUC to examine both predictive performance and robustness. Ensemble methods, especially LightGBM and XGBoost, show the best overall performance across all configurations, with minimal sensitivity to PCA and consistent generalization. LDA improves KNN performance but significantly reduces accuracy for boosting models. TabNet, while promising in theory, underperformed under feature reduction, likely due to architectural sensitivity to input structure. The analysis is supported by detailed exploratory data analysis (EDA), including mutual information ranking, PCA or t-SNE visualizations, and outlier detection using Isolation Forest and Local Outlier Factor (LOF), which confirm the discriminatory capacity of key features in the EMBER dataset. The results suggest that boosting models remain the most reliable choice for high-dimensional static malware detection, and that dimensionality reduction should be applied selectively based on model type. This work provides a benchmark for comparing classification models and preprocessing strategies in malware detection tasks and contributes insights that can guide future system development and real-world deployment.