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Precision Physical Activity Prescription via Reinforcement Learning for Functional Actions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in maintaining and improving health. Daily steps have been a key PA measure that is easily accessible with common wearable devices. However, methods are lacking to recommend a personalized optimal distribution of daily steps over a period of time for the best of certain health biomarkers. In this paper, we fill this void based on the data from the All of Us Research Program which includes months of step counts as well as repeated measurements of key health biomarkers. We develop a new offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn personalized and optimal PA distributions associated with cardiometabolic risk, where the action is a function representing the daily step distribution over a period of time. Simulation studies demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over existing continuous-action RL methods. The learned optimal policy from the All of Us data generally suggests people take more daily steps and also follow a more consistent pattern of PA over time while offering tailored recommendations for subgroups in blood glucose level, body mass index, blood pressure, age, and sex.


UnfoldML_Nuerips

Neural Information Processing Systems

Algorithm 1 Hard-gating Algorithm for In-Stage IDKCascade Input Ds: Training data containing Ns samples in stage-s Ms: Sorted list of the models trained for stage-s C: Dictionary of models' spatio-temporal costs cs: User-defined budget of spatio-temporal cost for stage-s q: Confidence function maxA: Value for the upper bound of the cutoffs to avoid over-fitting nBins: Number of bins for the grid search Output s: The optimal IDK cutoff vector for stage-s 1: procedure HARDGATING(Ds, Ms, cs, C, q, maxA, nBins) 2: s =[], ModelAssign = 1, cost = P We use the Sepsis-3 toolkit3 to obtain the suspected infection time in patients, and following the process in Seymour et al. (2016) to finally label the onset of sepsis. We result at a total number of 20,009 sepsis patients out of the 52,902 adult patients from MIMIC-III database. We exclude those patients who stay in ICUs less than 6 hours and also exclude those patients who developed sepsis within the first 6 hours after ICU admission. This reduces our cohort to a total of 34,475ICU patient, and only 2,370(6.8%) Then according to Singer et al. (2016), we identify the onset of septic shock as Algorithm 3 End-to-End Training algorithm for UnfoldML Input D: Full training data containing N instances M: Full model zoo C: Dictionary of models' spatio-temporal costs q: Confidence criterion Output: the optimal ICK1 gate parameters (or a,b): the optimal IDK gate parameters 1: procedure END-TO-ENDTRAINING (D, M) 2: Pre-allocate costs cs for each stage s. Figure 4: Transitions in model calls: both cascades always call the first model per each stage for an entrance and transition to next models (IDK) or next stage (ICK).


Smoothing the Landscape: Causal Structure Learning via Diffusion Denoising Objectives

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Understanding causal dependencies in observational data is critical for informing decision-making. These relationships are often modeled as Bayesian Networks (BNs) and Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Existing methods, such as NOTEARS and DAG-GNN, often face issues with scalability and stability in high-dimensional data, especially when there is a feature-sample imbalance. Here, we show that the denoising score matching objective of diffusion models could smooth the gradients for faster, more stable convergence. We also propose an adaptive k-hop acyclicity constraint that improves runtime over existing solutions that require matrix inversion. We name this framework Denoising Diffusion Causal Discovery (DDCD). Unlike generative diffusion models, DDCD utilizes the reverse denoising process to infer a parameterized causal structure rather than to generate data. We demonstrate the competitive performance of DDCDs on synthetic benchmarking data. We also show that our methods are practically useful by conducting qualitative analyses on two real-world examples. Code is available at this url: https://github.com/haozhu233/ddcd.





5 breakthrough health innovations in 2025

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For years, needing reading glasses to correct farsightedness seemed like an inevitable part of aging. This year, the visual accessories might officially be a thing of the past. The newly approved drops are powerful enough to improve vision by three or more lines on an eye chart within only 30 minutes. That wide-ranging impact is why chose the drops as the 2025 Health category winner.


Mitigating Exposure Bias in Risk-Aware Time Series Forecasting with Soft Tokens

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autoregressive forecasting is central to predictive control in diabetes and hemodynamic management, where different operating zones carry different clinical risks. Standard models trained with teacher forcing suffer from exposure bias, yielding unstable multi-step forecasts for closed-loop use. We introduce Soft-Token Trajectory Forecasting (SoTra), which propagates continuous probability distributions (``soft tokens'') to mitigate exposure bias and learn calibrated, uncertainty-aware trajectories. A risk-aware decoding module then minimizes expected clinical harm. In glucose forecasting, SoTra reduces average zone-based risk by 18\%; in blood-pressure forecasting, it lowers effective clinical risk by approximately 15\%. These improvements support its use in safety-critical predictive control.


The 50 greatest innovations of 2025

Popular Science

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. At, we've published our prestigious Best of What's New list since 1988. For 153 years, we've celebrated the science and technology that shapes our everyday lives and launches humanity forward. Innovation doesn't follow a straight path, and the detours, stumbles, and dead ends force great minds to pioneer change. Looking back at the early days of our Best of What's New lists, we see technologies that now seem quaint or have been completely forgotten, but we also see the roots of future greatness. Our list this year is the culmination of countless hours of debate, hands-on testing, and expert conversations. This is the Best of What's New 2025. From the most detailed movie of the night sky ever made to the first commercial soft landing on the moon, this year has been an inflection point for exploring and understanding the vast expanse above our heads. We also saw breakthroughs in small changes to commercial airliners that improve efficiency, as well as a new type of rocket engine that might be the future of extremely high speed air travel, plus the closest view of Mercury we've ever seen! Vera C. Rubin Observatory by U.S. National Science Foundation & Department of Energy: World's largest digital camera to conduct 10-year survey of the night sky Prepare to see space like never before. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a groundbreaking US-funded project that will capture the most detailed, dynamic map of the night sky ever made. Using the world's largest digital camera, it will capture a time-lapse of the entire sky every few nights to reveal billions of objects and catch fast-changing events like supernovae and near-Earth asteroids. Its massive dataset will help scientists better understand dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe while also improving planetary defense. The 3,200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is the size of a small car and twice as heavy, tipping the scales at 6,000 pounds. The sensor's huge number of megapixels is equivalent to 260 modern cell phone sensors. The camera is so powerful, it could snap a clear image of a golf ball from 15 miles away. By making its data widely available, the observatory will also open new doors for discovery for researchers, students, and citizen scientists around the world. Deployed on Boeing 787-9 aircraft starting in January, the coating uses tiny, sharkskin-like grooves called riblets to guide airflow smoothly along the aircraft's surface.


Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation from Six Wearable Sensor Modalities in Multi-Motion-State Scenarios

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and sustained hypertension is an often silent risk factor, making cuffless continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring with wearable devices important for early screening and long-term management. Most existing cuffless BP estimation methods use only photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiography (ECG) signals, alone or in combination. These models are typically developed under resting or quasi-static conditions and struggle to maintain robust accuracy in multi-motion-state scenarios. In this study, we propose a six-modal BP estimation framework that jointly leverages ECG, multi-channel PPG, attachment pressure, sensor temperature, and triaxial acceleration and angular velocity. Each modality is processed by a lightweight branch encoder, contrastive learning enforces cross-modal semantic alignment, and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) regression head adaptively maps the fused features to BP across motion states. Comprehensive experiments on the public Pulse Transit Time PPG Dataset, which includes running, walking, and sitting data from 22 subjects, show that the proposed method achieves mean absolute errors (MAE) of 3.60 mmHg for systolic BP (SBP) and 3.01 mmHg for diastolic BP (DBP). From a clinical perspective, it attains Grade A for SBP, DBP, and mean arterial pressure (MAP) according to the British Hypertension Society (BHS) protocol and meets the numerical criteria of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard for mean error (ME) and standard deviation of error (SDE). Hypertension is one of the most prevalent and important risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) [1].