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Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks.



IMAGPose: A Unified Conditional Framework for Pose-Guided Person Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion models represent a promising avenue for image generation, having demonstrated competitive performance in pose-guided person image generation. However, existing methods are limited to generating target images from a source image and a target pose, overlooking two critical user scenarios: generating multiple target images with different poses simultaneously and generating target images from multi-view source images.To overcome these limitations, we propose IMAGPose, a unified conditional framework for pose-guided image generation, which incorporates three pivotal modules: a feature-level conditioning (FLC) module, an image-level conditioning (ILC) module, and a cross-view attention (CVA) module. Firstly, the FLC module combines the low-level texture feature from the VAE encoder with the high-level semantic feature from the image encoder, addressing the issue of missing detail information due to the absence of a dedicated person image feature extractor. Then, the ILC module achieves an alignment of images and poses to adapt to flexible and diverse user scenarios by injecting a variable number of source image conditions and introducing a masking strategy.Finally, the CVA module introduces decomposing global and local cross-attention, ensuring local fidelity and global consistency of the person image when multiple source image prompts. The three modules of IMAGPose work together to unify the task of person image generation under various user scenarios.Extensive experiment results demonstrate the consistency and photorealism of our proposed IMAGPose under challenging user scenarios.


Data-Efficient Operator Learning via Unsupervised Pretraining and In-Context Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent years have witnessed the promise of coupling machine learning methods and physical domain-specific insights for solving scientific problems based on partial differential equations (PDEs). However, being data-intensive, these methods still require a large amount of PDE data.


What your WALK says about you: Study reveals how your swagger can reveal how you're really feeling

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Supreme Court's top judge issues chilling warning as Trump targets his own appointees SARAH VINE: How telling that Meghan's joined the ranks of those peddling wellness and fake lifestyles to the gullible I moved my family OFF-GRID after a horrific series of events... now our tiny home saves us thousands each MONTH. We are richer and happier than ever. Here's how you can do it too Furious US troops erupt at CNN's $20m steak and lobster claims as grim photos expose reality Mother of cheating nurse shares horrific way daughter was killed after SUV sex... and shares heartbreaking details of her marriage to doctor Hollywood's top insider makes VERY catty observation about Kaitlan Collins CIA accused of'poisoning the sky' with toxins as files expose secret weather control agenda Mysterious'three-sided pyramid' similar to those in Egypt spotted on Mars in NASA footage Trump says he's'not afraid' of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran I've always been embarrassed by my spotty skin. I'd tried every lotion and potion, until I found a science-backed plan that restored my skin's health and my confidence Alix Earle stuns in white bikini in first glimpse at 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition... after turning heads with Tom Brady and Joe Burrow'We no longer need NATO': Trump sends shockwaves through Europe with ferocious attack on allies Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with What your WALK says about you: Study reveals how your swagger can reveal how you're really feeling READ MORE: 'Tough guy' walk in western movies makes you look powerful A new study has revealed exactly what your walk says about you - whether it's a slow swagger or a peppy stride. Scientists from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan carried out several experiments as part of their study.


Ad for AI editing app which said it could 'remove anything' banned

BBC News

Ad for AI editing app which said it could'remove anything' banned An advert for a video and image editing tool that implied viewers could digitally remove a woman's clothing has been banned by the UK advertising regulator. The YouTube ad for PixVideo - AI Video Maker, seen in January, showed a before and after image of a young women, with red scribble overlaid on her midriff in the former, and parts of her bare skin exposed in the latter. Text across the bottom of the picture stated: Erase anything followed by a heart-eyes emoji. Eight people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the ad sexualised and objectified women, and was irresponsible, offensive and harmful. It is not clear whether the image in the ad is of a real person or is itself AI-generated, with the ASA telling the BBC making such an assessment had not been part of its investigation.


Analyzing Error Sources in Global Feature Effect Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Global feature effects such as partial dependence (PD) and accumulated local effects (ALE) plots are widely used to interpret black-box models. However, they are only estimates of true underlying effects, and their reliability depends on multiple sources of error. Despite the popularity of global feature effects, these error sources are largely unexplored. In particular, the practically relevant question of whether to use training or holdout data to estimate feature effects remains unanswered. We address this gap by providing a systematic, estimator-level analysis that disentangles sources of bias and variance for PD and ALE. To this end, we derive a mean-squared-error decomposition that separates model bias, estimation bias, model variance, and estimation variance, and analyze their dependence on model characteristics, data selection, and sample size. We validate our theoretical findings through an extensive simulation study across multiple data-generating processes, learners, estimation strategies (training data, validation data, and cross-validation), and sample sizes. Our results reveal that, while using holdout data is theoretically the cleanest, potential biases arising from the training data are empirically negligible and dominated by the impact of the usually higher sample size. The estimation variance depends on both the presence of interactions and the sample size, with ALE being particularly sensitive to the latter. Cross-validation-based estimation is a promising approach that reduces the model variance component, particularly for overfitting models. Our analysis provides a principled explanation of the sources of error in feature effect estimates and offers concrete guidance on choosing estimation strategies when interpreting machine learning models.


Conditional Distributional Treatment Effects: Doubly Robust Estimation and Testing

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to capture such conditional distributional treatment effects, and develop a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal in the local asymptotic sense. Using this, we develop a test for the global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions that accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), has provably valid type 1 error, and is consistent against fixed alternatives -- the first test, to our knowledge, with such guarantees in this setting. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for two natural discrepancies (including the MMD), and provide a computationally efficient, permutation-free algorithm for our test.


Informative Perturbation Selection for Uncertainty-Aware Post-hoc Explanations

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Trust and ethical concerns due to the widespread deployment of opaque machine learning (ML) models motivating the need for reliable model explanations. Post-hoc model-agnostic explanation methods addresses this challenge by learning a surrogate model that approximates the behavior of the deployed black-box ML model in the locality of a sample of interest. In post-hoc scenarios, neither the underlying model parameters nor the training are available, and hence, this local neighborhood must be constructed by generating perturbed inputs in the neighborhood of the sample of interest, and its corresponding model predictions. We propose \emph{Expected Active Gain for Local Explanations} (\texttt{EAGLE}), a post-hoc model-agnostic explanation framework that formulates perturbation selection as an information-theoretic active learning problem. By adaptively sampling perturbations that maximize the expected information gain, \texttt{EAGLE} efficiently learns a linear surrogate explainable model while producing feature importance scores along with the uncertainty/confidence estimates. Theoretically, we establish that cumulative information gain scales as $\mathcal{O}(d \log t)$, where $d$ is the feature dimension and $t$ represents the number of samples, and that the sample complexity grows linearly with $d$ and logarithmically with the confidence parameter $1/δ$. Empirical results on tabular and image datasets corroborate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that \texttt{EAGLE} improves explanation reproducibility across runs, achieves higher neighborhood stability, and improves perturbation sample quality as compared to state-of-the-art baselines such as Tilia, US-LIME, GLIME and BayesLIME.


Bayesian Inference of Psychometric Variables From Brain and Behavior in Implicit Association Tests

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Objective. We establish a principled method for inferring mental health related psychometric variables from neural and behavioral data using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as the data generation engine, aiming to overcome the limited predictive performance (typically under 0.7 AUC) of the gold-standard D-score method, which relies solely on reaction times. Approach. We propose a sparse hierarchical Bayesian model that leverages multi-modal data to predict experiences related to mental illness symptoms in new participants. The model is a multivariate generalization of the D-score with trainable parameters, engineered for parameter efficiency in the small-cohort regime typical of IAT studies. Data from two IAT variants were analyzed: a suicidality-related E-IAT ($n=39$) and a psychosis-related PSY-IAT ($n=34$). Main Results. Our approach overcomes a high inter-individual variability and low within-session effect size in the dataset, reaching AUCs of 0.73 (E-IAT) and 0.76 (PSY-IAT) in the best modality configurations, though corrected 95% confidence intervals are wide ($\pm 0.18$) and results are marginally significant after FDR correction ($q=0.10$). Restricting the E-IAT to MDD participants improves AUC to 0.79 $[0.62, 0.97]$ (significant at $q=0.05$). Performance is on par with the best reference methods (shrinkage LDA and EEGNet) for each task, even when the latter were adapted to the task, while the proposed method was not. Accuracy was substantially above near-chance D-scores (0.50-0.53 AUC) in both tasks, with more consistent cross-task performance than any single reference method. Significance. Our framework shows promise for enhancing IAT-based assessment of experiences related to entrapment and psychosis, and potentially other mental health conditions, though further validation on larger and independent cohorts will be needed to establish clinical utility.