Survival analysis relies fundamentally on the semi-parametric Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) model and the parametric Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model. CoxPH assumes constant hazard ratios, often failing to capture real-world dynamics, while traditional AFT models are limited by rigid distributional assumptions. Although deep learning models like DeepAFT address these constraints by improving predictive accuracy and handling censoring, they inherit the significant challenge of black-box interpretability. The recent introduction of CoxKAN demonstrated the successful integration of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), a novel architecture that yields highly accurate and interpretable symbolic representations, within the CoxPH framework. Motivated by the interpretability gains of CoxKAN, we introduce KAN-AFT (Kolmogorov Arnold Network-based AFT), the first framework to apply KANs to the AFT model. Our primary contributions include: (i) a principled AFT-KAN formulation, (ii) robust optimization strategies for right-censored observations (e.g., Buckley-James and IPCW), and (iii) an interpretability pipeline that converts the learned spline functions into closed-form symbolic equations for survival time. Empirical results on multiple datasets confirm that KAN-AFT achieves performance comparable to or better than DeepAFT, while uniquely providing transparent, symbolic models of the survival process.

Unlike standard prediction tasks, survival analysis requires modeling right censored data, which must be treated with care.

Regression models are essential for a wide range of real-world applications. However, in practice, target values are not always precisely known; instead, they may be represented as intervals of acceptable values. This challenge has led to the development of Interval Regression models. In this study, we provide a comprehensive review of existing Interval Regression models and introduce alternative models for comparative analysis. Experiments are conducted on both real-world and synthetic datasets to offer a broad perspective on model performance. The results demonstrate that no single model is universally optimal, highlighting the importance of selecting the most suitable model for each specific scenario.

Considering the growing prominence of production-level AI and the threat of adversarial attacks that can evade a model at run-time, evaluating the robustness of models to these evasion attacks is of critical importance. Additionally, testing model changes likely means deploying the models to (e.g. a car or a medical imaging device), or a drone to see how it affects performance, making un-tested changes a public problem that reduces development speed, increases cost of development, and makes it difficult (if not impossible) to parse cause from effect. In this work, we used survival analysis as a cloud-native, time-efficient and precise method for predicting model performance in the presence of adversarial noise. For neural networks in particular, the relationships between the learning rate, batch size, training time, convergence time, and deployment cost are highly complex, so researchers generally rely on benchmark datasets to assess the ability of a model to generalize beyond the training data. To address this, we propose using accelerated failure time models to measure the effect of hardware choice, batch size, number of epochs, and test-set accuracy by using adversarial attacks to induce failures on a reference model architecture before deploying the model to the real world. We evaluate several GPU types and use the Tree Parzen Estimator to maximize model robustness and minimize model run-time simultaneously. This provides a way to evaluate the model and optimise it in a single step, while simultaneously allowing us to model the effect of model parameters on training time, prediction time, and accuracy. Using this technique, we demonstrate that newer, more-powerful hardware does decrease the training time, but with a monetary and power cost that far outpaces the marginal gains in accuracy.

Recent work has developed optimization procedures to find token sequences, called adversarial triggers, which can elicit unsafe responses from aligned language models. These triggers are believed to be universally transferable, i.e., a trigger optimized on one model can jailbreak other models. In this paper, we concretely show that such adversarial triggers are not universal. We extensively investigate trigger transfer amongst 13 open models and observe inconsistent transfer. Our experiments further reveal a significant difference in robustness to adversarial triggers between models Aligned by Preference Optimization (APO) and models Aligned by Fine-Tuning (AFT). We find that APO models are extremely hard to jailbreak even when the trigger is optimized directly on the model. On the other hand, while AFT models may appear safe on the surface, exhibiting refusals to a range of unsafe instructions, we show that they are highly susceptible to adversarial triggers. Lastly, we observe that most triggers optimized on AFT models also generalize to new unsafe instructions from five diverse domains, further emphasizing their vulnerability. Overall, our work highlights the need for more comprehensive safety evaluations for aligned language models.

We propose AFTNet, a novel network-constraint survival analysis method based on the Weibull accelerated failure time (AFT) model solved by a penalized likelihood approach for variable selection and estimation. When using the log-linear representation, the inference problem becomes a structured sparse regression problem for which we explicitly incorporate the correlation patterns among predictors using a double penalty that promotes both sparsity and grouping effect. Moreover, we establish the theoretical consistency for the AFTNet estimator and present an efficient iterative computational algorithm based on the proximal gradient descent method. Finally, we evaluate AFTNet performance both on synthetic and real data examples.

Purely medical cancer screening methods are often costly, time-consuming, and weakly applicable on a large scale. Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods greatly help cancer detection but require specific or deep medical data. These aspects affect the mass implementation of cancer screening methods. For these reasons, it is a disruptive change for healthcare to apply AI methods for mass personalized assessment of the cancer risk among patients based on the existing Electronic Health Records (EHR) volume. This paper presents a novel method for mass cancer risk prediction using EHR data. Among other methods, our one stands out by the minimum data greedy policy, requiring only a history of medical service codes and diagnoses from EHR. We formulate the problem as a binary classification. This dataset contains 175 441 de-identified patients (2 861 diagnosed with cancer). As a baseline, we implement a solution based on a recurrent neural network (RNN). We propose a method that combines machine learning and survival analysis since these approaches are less computationally heavy, can be combined into an ensemble (the Survival Ensemble), and can be reproduced in most medical institutions. We test the Survival Ensemble in some studies. Firstly, we obtain a significant difference between values of the primary metric (Average Precision) with 22.8% (ROC AUC 83.7%, F1 17.8%) for the Survival Ensemble versus 15.1% (ROC AUC 84.9%, F1 21.4%) for the Baseline. Secondly, the performance of the Survival Ensemble is also confirmed during the ablation study. Thirdly, our method exceeds age baselines by a significant margin. Fourthly, in the blind retrospective out-of-time experiment, the proposed method is reliable in cancer patient detection (9 out of 100 selected). Such results exceed the estimates of medical screenings, e.g., the best Number Needed to Screen (9 out of 1000 screenings).

Time-to-event analysis, also known as survival analysis, aims to predict the time of occurrence of an event, given a set of features. One of the major challenges in this area is dealing with censored data, which can make learning algorithms more complex. Traditional methods such as Cox's proportional hazards model and the accelerated failure time (AFT) model have been popular in this field, but they often require assumptions such as proportional hazards and linearity. In particular, the AFT models often require pre-specified parametric distributional assumptions. To improve predictive performance and alleviate strict assumptions, there have been many deep learning approaches for hazard-based models in recent years. However, representation learning for AFT has not been widely explored in the neural network literature, despite its simplicity and interpretability in comparison to hazard-focused methods. In this work, we introduce the Deep AFT Rank-regression model for Time-to-event prediction (DART). This model uses an objective function based on Gehan's rank statistic, which is efficient and reliable for representation learning. On top of eliminating the requirement to establish a baseline event time distribution, DART retains the advantages of directly predicting event time in standard AFT models. The proposed method is a semiparametric approach to AFT modeling that does not impose any distributional assumptions on the survival time distribution. This also eliminates the need for additional hyperparameters or complex model architectures, unlike existing neural network-based AFT models. Through quantitative analysis on various benchmark datasets, we have shown that DART has significant potential for modeling high-throughput censored time-to-event data.

Real-time individual endpoint prediction has always been a challenging task but of great clinic utility for both patients and healthcare providers. GRU-D-Weibull has a maximum C-index of 0.77 at 4.3 years of follow-up, compared to 0.68 achieved by competing models. The average absolute L1-loss of GRU-D-Weibull is around one year, with a minimum of 40% Parkes' serious error after index date. GRU-D-Weibull is not calibrated and significantly underestimates true survival probability. Feature importance tests indicate blood pressure becomes increasingly important during follow-up, while eGFR and blood albumin are less important. Most continuous features have non-linear/parabola impact on predicted survival time, and the results are generally consistent with existing knowledge. GRU-D-Weibull as a semi-parametric temporal model shows advantages in built-in parameterization of missingness, native support for asynchronously arrived measurement, capability of output both probability and point estimates at arbitrary time point for arbitrary prediction horizon, improved discrimination and point estimate accuracy after incorporating newly arrived data. Further research on its performance with more comprehensive input features, in-process or post-process calibration are warranted to benefit CKD4 or alike terminally-ill patients. Author Contribution: XR performed data analysis and manuscript writing. LW performed data extraction, curation, and proof-reading. CT and WC provided expert opinion on selection of study population, explanation of observations, and proof-reading.