Despite the ubiquity of vector search applications, prevailing search algorithms overlook the metric structure of vector embeddings, treating it as a constraint rather than exploiting its underlying properties. In this paper, we demonstrate that in $q$-metric spaces, metric trees can leverage a stronger version of the triangle inequality to reduce comparisons for exact search. Notably, as $q$ approaches infinity, the search complexity becomes logarithmic. Therefore, we propose a novel projection method that embeds vector datasets with arbitrary dissimilarity measures into $q$-metric spaces while preserving the nearest neighbor. We propose to learn an approximation of this projection to efficiently transform query points to a space where euclidean distances satisfy the desired properties. Our experimental results with text and image vector embeddings show that learning $q$-metric approximations enables classic metric tree algorithms -- which typically underperform with high-dimensional data -- to achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art search methods.

Extreme events, such as market crashes, natural disasters, and pandemics, are rare but catastrophic, often triggering cascading failures across interconnected systems. Accurate prediction and early warning can help minimize losses and improve preparedness. While data-driven methods offer powerful capabilities for extreme event modeling, they require abundant training data, yet extreme event data is inherently scarce, creating a fundamental challenge. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a powerful solution. However, existing surveys focus on general data with privacy preservation emphasis, rather than extreme events' unique performance requirements. This survey provides the first overview of synthetic data generation for extreme events. We systematically review generative modeling techniques and large language models, particularly those enhanced by statistical theory as well as specialized training and sampling mechanisms to capture heavy-tailed distributions. We summarize benchmark datasets and introduce a tailored evaluation framework covering statistical, dependence, visual, and task-oriented metrics. A central contribution is our in-depth analysis of each metric's applicability in extremeness and domain-specific adaptations, providing actionable guidance for model evaluation in extreme settings. We categorize key application domains and identify underexplored areas like behavioral finance, wildfires, earthquakes, windstorms, and infectious outbreaks. Finally, we outline open challenges, providing a structured foundation for advancing synthetic rare-event research.

Accurately detecting drowsiness is vital to driving safety. Among all measures, physiological-signal-based drowsiness monitoring can be more privacy-preserving than a camera-based approach. However, conflicts exist regarding how physiological metrics are associated with different drowsiness labels across datasets. Thus, we analyzed key features from electrocardiograms (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiratory (RESP) signals across four datasets, where different drowsiness inducers (such as fatigue and low arousal) and assessment methods (subjective vs. objective) were used. Binary logistic regression models were built to identify the physiological metrics that are associated with drowsiness. Findings indicate that distinct different drowsiness inducers can lead to different physiological responses, and objective assessments were more sensitive than subjective ones in detecting drowsiness. Further, the increased heart rate stability, reduced respiratory amplitude, and decreased tonic EDA are robustly associated with increased drowsiness. The results enhance understanding of drowsiness detection and can inform future generalizable monitoring designs.

As machine learning systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as criminal justice, finance, and healthcare, the demand for interpretable and trustworthy models has intensified. Despite the proliferation of local explanation techniques, including SHAP, LIME, and counterfactual methods, there exists no standardized, reproducible framework for their comparative evaluation, particularly in fairness-sensitive settings. We introduce ExplainBench, an open-source benchmarking suite for systematic evaluation of local model explanations across ethically consequential datasets. ExplainBench provides unified wrappers for popular explanation algorithms, integrates end-to-end pipelines for model training and explanation generation, and supports evaluation via fidelity, sparsity, and robustness metrics. The framework includes a Streamlit-based graphical interface for interactive exploration and is packaged as a Python module for seamless integration into research workflows. We demonstrate ExplainBench on datasets commonly used in fairness research, such as COMPAS, UCI Adult Income, and LendingClub, and showcase how different explanation methods behave under a shared experimental protocol. By enabling reproducible, comparative analysis of local explanations, ExplainBench advances the methodological foundations of interpretable machine learning and facilitates accountability in real-world AI systems.

Is BERTopic Better than PLSA for Extracting Key Topics in Aviation Safety Reports? Abstract -- This study compares the effectiveness of BERTopic and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) in extracting meaningful topics from aviation safety reports aiming to enhance the understanding of patterns in aviation incident data. Using a dataset of o ver 36,000 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports from 2000 - 2020, BERTopic employed transformer - based embeddings and hierarchical clustering, while PLSA utilized probabilistic modelling through the Expectation - Maximization (EM) algori thm. Results showed that BERTopic outperformed PLSA in topic coherence, achieving a C_v score of 0.41 compared to PLSA's 0.37, while also demonstrating superior interpretability as validated by aviation safety experts. These findings underscore the advantages of modern transformer - based approaches in analyzing complex aviatio n datasets, paving the way for enhanced insights and informed decision - making in aviation safety. Future work will explore hybrid models, multilingual datasets, and advanced clustering techniques to further improve topic modelling in this domain . The analysis of aviation safety reports is critical for identifying recurring issues and implementing measures to improve flight safety [1] .

Accurate and reproducible wine-quality assessment is critical for production control yet remains dominated by subjective, labour-intensive tasting panels. We present the first unified benchmark of five ensemble learners (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost) on the canonical Vinho Verde red- and white-wine datasets (1,599 and 4,898 instances, 11 physicochemical attributes). Our leakage-free workflow employs an 80:20 stratified train-test split, five-fold StratifiedGroupKFold within the training set, per-fold standardisation, SMOTE-Tomek resampling, inverse-frequency cost weighting, Optuna hyper-parameter search (120-200 trials per model) and a two-stage feature-selection refit. Final scores on untouched test sets are reported with weighted F1 as the headline metric. Gradient Boosting achieves the highest accuracy (weighted F1 0.693 +/- 0.028 for red and 0.664 +/- 0.016 for white), followed within three percentage points by Random Forest and XGBoost. Limiting each model to its five top-ranked variables lowers dimensionality by 55 percent while reducing weighted F1 by only 2.6 percentage points for red and 3.0 percentage points for white, indicating that alcohol, volatile acidity, sulphates, free SO2 and chlorides capture most predictive signal. Runtime profiling on an EPYC 9K84/H20 node reveals a steep efficiency gradient: Gradient Boosting averages 12 h per five-fold study, XGBoost and LightGBM require 2-3 h, CatBoost 1 h, and Random Forest under 50 min. We therefore recommend Random Forest as the most cost-effective production model, XGBoost and LightGBM as GPU-efficient alternatives, and Gradient Boosting as the accuracy ceiling for offline benchmarking. The fully documented pipeline and metric set provide a reproducible baseline for future work on imbalanced multi-class wine-quality prediction.

Extracranial tissues visible on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may hold significant value for characterizing health conditions and clinical decision-making, yet they are rarely quantified. Current tools have not been widely validated, particularly in settings of developing brains or underlying pathology. We present TissUnet, a deep learning model that segments skull bone, subcutaneous fat, and muscle from routine three-dimensional T1-weighted MRI, with or without contrast enhancement. The model was trained on 155 paired MRI-computed tomography (CT) scans and validated across nine datasets covering a wide age range and including individuals with brain tumors. In comparison to AI-CT-derived labels from 37 MRI-CT pairs, TissUnet achieved a median Dice coefficient of 0.79 [IQR: 0.77-0.81] in a healthy adult cohort. In a second validation using expert manual annotations, median Dice was 0.83 [IQR: 0.83-0.84] in healthy individuals and 0.81 [IQR: 0.78-0.83] in tumor cases, outperforming previous state-of-the-art method. Acceptability testing resulted in an 89% acceptance rate after adjudication by a tie-breaker(N=108 MRIs), and TissUnet demonstrated excellent performance in the blinded comparative review (N=45 MRIs), including both healthy and tumor cases in pediatric populations. TissUnet enables fast, accurate, and reproducible segmentation of extracranial tissues, supporting large-scale studies on craniofacial morphology, treatment effects, and cardiometabolic risk using standard brain T1w MRI.

Language models excel in various tasks by making complex decisions, yet understanding the rationale behind these decisions remains a challenge. This paper investigates \emph{data-centric interpretability} in language models, focusing on the next-word prediction task. Using representer theorem, we identify two types of \emph{support samples}-those that either promote or deter specific predictions. Our findings reveal that being a support sample is an intrinsic property, predictable even before training begins. Additionally, while non-support samples are less influential in direct predictions, they play a critical role in preventing overfitting and shaping generalization and representation learning. Notably, the importance of non-support samples increases in deeper layers, suggesting their significant role in intermediate representation formation. These insights shed light on the interplay between data and model decisions, offering a new dimension to understanding language model behavior and interpretability.

Recently, extensive deep learning architectures and pretraining strategies have been explored to support downstream protein applications. Additionally, domain-specific models incorporating biological knowledge have been developed to enhance performance in specialized tasks. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{Protap}$, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically compares backbone architectures, pretraining strategies, and domain-specific models across diverse and realistic downstream protein applications. Specifically, Protap covers five applications: three general tasks and two novel specialized tasks, i.e., enzyme-catalyzed protein cleavage site prediction and targeted protein degradation, which are industrially relevant yet missing from existing benchmarks. For each application, Protap compares various domain-specific models and general architectures under multiple pretraining settings. Our empirical studies imply that: (i) Though large-scale pretraining encoders achieve great results, they often underperform supervised encoders trained on small downstream training sets. (ii) Incorporating structural information during downstream fine-tuning can match or even outperform protein language models pretrained on large-scale sequence corpora. (iii) Domain-specific biological priors can enhance performance on specialized downstream tasks. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Trust-App-AI-Lab/protap.

Fatigue-induced crack growth is a leading cause of structural failure across critical industries such as aerospace, civil engineering, automotive, and energy. Accurate prediction of stress intensity factors (SIFs) -- the key parameters governing crack propagation in linear elastic fracture mechanics -- is essential for assessing fatigue life and ensuring structural integrity. While machine learning (ML) has shown great promise in SIF prediction, its advancement has been severely limited by the lack of rich, transparent, well-organized, and high-quality datasets. To address this gap, we introduce SIFBench, an open-source, large-scale benchmark database designed to support ML-based SIF prediction. SIFBench contains over 5 million different crack and component geometries derived from high-fidelity finite element simulations across 37 distinct scenarios, and provides a unified Python interface for seamless data access and customization. We report baseline results using a range of popular ML models -- including random forests, support vector machines, feedforward neural networks, and Fourier neural operators -- alongside comprehensive evaluation metrics and template code for model training, validation, and assessment. By offering a standardized and scalable resource, SIFBench substantially lowers the entry barrier and fosters the development and application of ML methods in damage tolerance design and predictive maintenance.