adherence
Health Leaders Talk How AI Can Help Patients Be More Proactive
Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. America's healthcare system is notoriously reactive. Could AI shift it from a system that treats illness to one that prevents it? The question framed a panel discussion at the inaugural TIME100 AI Leadership Forum on May 27, which featured Dr. Omar Lateef, the president and CEO of Rush University System for Health; Arianna Huffington, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global; and Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services (Amazon One Medical, an Amazon health service, was an event sponsor). The conversation was moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park.
Policy Learning with Observational Data: The Case of Hepatitis C Treatment for HIV/HCV Co-Infected Patients
Decision-makers frequently must choose a single action from a finite set of alternatives -- for example, physicians selecting a treatment, investors choosing a portfolio risk level, or judges determining sentences. To improve outcomes, policymakers often issue policy rules or guidelines to inform such choices. In this paper, I show how to generally derive policy rules from observational data in a multi-action framework under relatively weak assumptions about the underlying structure of the heterogeneous sampled population. Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are consistently estimated via a weighted K-means algorithm, assuming the outcome model is correctly specified within each homogeneous subgroup. Feasible policy rules are then implemented via a standard decision tree, allowing for both perfect and imperfect adherence to treatment. The methodology is applied to treatment options for Hepatitis C (HCV) among patients co-infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a setting in which no uniform guideline exists for modern pharmaceutical therapies. The results identify a subgroup of patients with approximately an 80% probability of spontaneous HCV clearance without treatment. Estimation results also show that reallocating treatments among treated individuals could have reduced total treatment costs by CAN$3.6-4.9 million while still increasing aggregate health benefits relative to the status quo. These findings demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate improved, data-driven treatment guidelines for the management of HIV/HCV co-infected patients.
Generative Stochastic Optimal Transport: Guided Harmonic Path-Integral Diffusion
We introduce Guided Harmonic Path-Integral Diffusion (GH-PID), a linearly-solvable framework for guided Stochastic Optimal Transport (SOT) with a hard terminal distribution and soft, application-driven path costs. A low-dimensional guidance protocol shapes the trajectory ensemble while preserving analytic structure: the forward and backward Kolmogorov equations remain linear, the optimal score admits an explicit Green-function ratio, and Gaussian-Mixture Model (GMM) terminal laws yield closed-form expressions. This enables stable sampling and differentiable protocol learning under exact terminal matching. We develop guidance-centric diagnostics -- path cost, centerline adherence, variance flow, and drift effort -- that make GH-PID an interpretable variational ansatz for empirical SOT. Three navigation scenarios illustrated in 2D: (i) Case A: hand-crafted protocols revealing how geometry and stiffness shape lag, curvature effects, and mode evolution; (ii) Case B: single-task protocol learning, where a PWC centerline is optimized to minimize integrated cost; (iii) Case C: multi-expert fusion, in which a commander reconciles competing expert/teacher trajectories and terminal beliefs through an exact product-of-experts law and learns a consensus protocol. Across all settings, GH-PID generates geometry-aware, trust-aware trajectories that satisfy the prescribed terminal distribution while systematically reducing integrated cost.
Rethinking Prompt Design for Inference-time Scaling in Text-to-Visual Generation
Kim, Subin, Mo, Sangwoo, Rizve, Mamshad Nayeem, Xu, Yiran, Liu, Difan, Shin, Jinwoo, Hinz, Tobias
Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because the prompt, crucial for guiding generation, is kept fixed. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time. Visualizations are available at the website: https://subin-kim-cv.github.io/PRIS.
Agentic AI Framework for Individuals with Disabilities and Neurodivergence: A Multi-Agent System for Healthy Eating, Daily Routines, and Inclusive Well-Being
Jan, Salman, Syed, Toqeer Ali, Ali, Gohar, Akarma, Ali, Belgaum, Mohammad Riyaz, Ali, Ahmad
The paper presents a detailed Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that would enable people with disabilities and neurodivergence to lead healthier lives and have more regular days. The system will use a multi-layer structure; it will include an Application and Interface Layer, an Agents Layer, and a Data Source Layer to provide adaptive, transparent, and inclusive support. Fundamentally, a hybrid reasoning engine will synchronize four special-purpose agents, which include: a personalized-nutrition-based, called a Meal Planner Agent; an adaptive-scheduling-based, called a Reminder Agent; interactive assistance during grocery shopping and cooking, called a Food Guidance Agent; and a continuous-intake-and-physiological-tracking, called a Monitoring Agent. All the agents interact through a central communicative system called the Blackboard/Event Bus, which allows autonomous interaction and real-time feedback loops with multimedia user interfaces. Privacy-sensitive data sources, including electronic health records (EHRs), nutritional databases, wearable sensors, and smart kitchen Internet of Things, are also included in the framework and placed into a policy-controlled layer, which ensures data safety and compliance with consent. Collaborative care and clinician dashboards allow common supervision, and discussable artificial intelligence (XAI) modules give brief explanations of why a decision was made, making users responsible and reliant. The proposed agentic AI framework is an extension beyond traditional assistive systems since it incorporates inclusiveness, personalization, and accessibility at all levels. It displays the intersection of multi-agent reasoning, multi-modal interfaces, and human-centered design that will enable the development of autonomy, health, and digital equity among people with disabilities and neurodivergence.
When LLMs Can't Help: Real-World Evaluation of LLMs in Nutrition
Li, Karen Jia-Hui, Balloccu, Simone, Dusek, Ondrej, Reiter, Ehud
The increasing trust in large language models (LLMs), especially in the form of chatbots, is often undermined by the lack of their extrinsic evaluation. This holds particularly true in nutrition, where randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard, and experts demand them for evidence-based deployment. LLMs have shown promising results in this field, but these are limited to intrinsic setups. We address this gap by running the first RCT involving LLMs for nutrition. We augment a rule-based chatbot with two LLM-based features: (1) message rephrasing for conversational variety and engagement, and (2) nutritional counselling through a fine-tuned model. In our seven-week RCT (n=81), we compare chatbot variants with and without LLM integration. We measure effects on dietary outcome, emotional well-being, and engagement. Despite our LLM-based features performing well in intrinsic evaluation, we find that they did not yield consistent benefits in real-world deployment. These results highlight critical gaps between intrinsic evaluations and real-world impact, emphasising the need for interdisciplinary, human-centred approaches.\footnote{We provide all of our code and results at: \\ \href{https://github.com/saeshyra/diet-chatbot-trial}{https://github.com/saeshyra/diet-chatbot-trial}}
Reward Engineering for Spatial Epidemic Simulations: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Individual Behavioral Learning
Rakhshandehroo, Radman, Coombs, Daniel
We present ContagionRL, a Gymnasium-compatible reinforcement learning platform specifically designed for systematic reward engineering in spatial epidemic simulations. Unlike traditional agent-based models that rely on fixed behavioral rules, our platform enables rigorous evaluation of how reward function design affects learned survival strategies across diverse epidemic scenarios. ContagionRL integrates a spatial SIRS+D epidemiological model with configurable environmental parameters, allowing researchers to stress-test reward functions under varying conditions including limited observability, different movement patterns, and heterogeneous population dynamics. We evaluate five distinct reward designs, ranging from sparse survival bonuses to a novel potential field approach, across multiple RL algorithms (PPO, SAC, A2C). Through systematic ablation studies, we identify that directional guidance and explicit adherence incentives are critical components for robust policy learning. Our comprehensive evaluation across varying infection rates, grid sizes, visibility constraints, and movement patterns reveals that reward function choice dramatically impacts agent behavior and survival outcomes. Agents trained with our potential field reward consistently achieve superior performance, learning maximal adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions while developing sophisticated spatial avoidance strategies. The platform's modular design enables systematic exploration of reward-behavior relationships, addressing a knowledge gap in models of this type where reward engineering has received limited attention. ContagionRL is an effective platform for studying adaptive behavioral responses in epidemic contexts and highlight the importance of reward design, information structure, and environmental predictability in learning.
Large language models for automated PRISMA 2020 adherence checking
Kataoka, Yuki, So, Ryuhei, Banno, Masahiro, Tsujimoto, Yasushi, Takayama, Tomohiro, Yamagishi, Yosuke, Tsuge, Takahiro, Yamamoto, Norio, Suda, Chiaki, Furukawa, Toshi A.
Evaluating adherence to PRISMA 2020 guideline remains a burden in the peer review process. To address the lack of shareable benchmarks, we constructed a copyright-aware benchmark of 108 Creative Commons-licensed systematic reviews and evaluated ten large language models (LLMs) across five input formats. In a development cohort, supplying structured PRISMA 2020 checklists (Markdown, JSON, XML, or plain text) yielded 78.7-79.7% accuracy versus 45.21% for manuscript-only input (p less than 0.0001), with no differences between structured formats (p>0.9). Across models, accuracy ranged from 70.6-82.8% with distinct sensitivity-specificity trade-offs, replicated in an independent validation cohort. We then selected Qwen3-Max (a high-sensitivity open-weight model) and extended evaluation to the full dataset (n=120), achieving 95.1% sensitivity and 49.3% specificity. Structured checklist provision substantially improves LLM-based PRISMA assessment, though human expert verification remains essential before editorial decisions.