However, categorical features present a unique challenge as they require embedding a typically vast vocabulary into a smaller vector space for further calculations.

In many real-world tasks, the concerned objects can be represented as a multi-instance bag associated with a candidate label set, which consists of one ground-truth label and several false positive labels. Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is a learning paradigm to deal with such tasks and has achieved favorable performances. Existing MIPL approach follows the instance-space paradigm by assigning augmented candidate label sets of bags to each instance and aggregating bag-level labels from instance-level labels. However, this scheme may be suboptimal as global bag-level information is ignored and the predicted labels of bags are sensitive to predictions of negative instances. In this paper, we study an alternative scheme where a multi-instance bag is embedded into a single vector representation. Accordingly, an intuitive algorithm named DEMIPL, i.e., Disambiguated attention Embedding for Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning, is proposed. DEMIPL employs a disambiguation attention mechanism to aggregate a multi-instance bag into a single vector representation, followed by a momentum-based disambiguation strategy to identify the ground-truth label from the candidate label set. Furthermore, we introduce a real-world MIPL dataset for colorectal cancer classification. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets validate the superiority of DEMIPL against the compared MIPL and partial-label learning approaches.

Recent token reduction methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) incorporate token merging, which measures the similarities between token embeddings and combines the most similar pairs.However, their merging policies are directly dependent on intermediate features in ViTs, which prevents exploiting features tailored for merging and requires end-to-end training to improve token merging.In this paper, we propose Decoupled Token Embedding for Merging (DTEM) that enhances token merging through a decoupled embedding learned via a continuously relaxed token merging process.Our method introduces a lightweight embedding module decoupled from the ViT forward pass to extract dedicated features for token merging, thereby addressing the restriction from using intermediate features.The continuously relaxed token merging, applied during training, enables us to learn the decoupled embeddings in a differentiable manner.Thanks to the decoupled structure, our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing ViT backbones and trained either modularly by learning only the decoupled embeddings or end-to-end by fine-tuning. We demonstrate the applicability of DTEM on various tasks, including classification, captioning, and segmentation, with consistent improvement in token merging.Especially in the ImageNet-1k classification, DTEM achieves a 37.2\% reduction in FLOPs while maintaining a top-1 accuracy of 79.85\% with DeiT-small.

Many objects in the real world undergo dramatic variations in visual appearance. For example, a tomato may be red or green, sliced or chopped, fresh or fried, liquid or solid. Training a single detector to accurately recognize tomatoes in all these different states is challenging. On the other hand, contextual cues (e.g., the presence of a knife, a cutting board, a strainer or a pan) are often strongly indicative of how the object appears in the scene. Recognizing such contextual cues is useful not only to improve the accuracy of object detection or to determine the state of the object, but also to understand its functional properties and to infer ongoing or upcoming human-object interactions.

Modern neural language models achieve high accuracy in text generation, yet precise control over generation length remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we first investigate a recent length control method based on Reverse Positional Embeddings (RPE) and show its limits when control is requested beyond the training distribution. In particular, using a discrete countdown signal tied to the absolute remaining token count leads to instability. To provide robust length control, we introduce Progress Ratio Embeddings (PRE), as continuous embeddings tied to a trigonometric impatience signal. PRE integrates seamlessly into standard Transformer architectures, providing stable length fidelity without degrading text accuracy under standard evaluation metrics. We further show that PRE generalizes well to unseen target lengths. Experiments on two widely used news-summarization benchmarks validate these findings.

Rapid expansion of social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Reddit has enabled large-scale analysis of public perceptions on diverse topics, including social issues, politics, natural disasters, and consumer sentiment. Topic modeling is a widely used approach for uncovering latent themes in text data, typically framed as an unsupervised classification task. However, traditional models, originally designed for longer and more formal documents, struggle with short social media posts due to limited co-occurrence statistics, fragmented semantics, inconsistent spelling, and informal language. To address these challenges, we propose a new method, TopiCLEAR: Topic extraction by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensional Reduction. Specifically, each text is embedded using Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and provisionally clustered using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The clusters are then refined iteratively using a supervised projection based on linear discriminant analysis, followed by GMM-based clustering until convergence. Notably, our method operates directly on raw text, eliminating the need for preprocessing steps such as stop word removal. We evaluate our approach on four diverse datasets, 20News, AgNewsTitle, Reddit, and TweetTopic, each containing human-labeled topic information. Compared with seven baseline methods, including a recent SBERT-based method and a zero-shot generative AI method, our approach achieves the highest similarity to human-annotated topics, with significant improvements for both social media posts and online news articles. Additionally, qualitative analysis shows that our method produces more interpretable topics, highlighting its potential for applications in social media data and web content analytics.

Decision trees and random forest remain highly competitive for classification on medium-sized, standard datasets due to their robustness, minimal preprocessing requirements, and interpretability. However, a single tree suffers from high estimation variance, while large ensembles reduce this variance at the cost of substantial computational overhead and diminished interpretability. In this paper, we propose Decision Tree Embedding (DTE), a fast and effective method that leverages the leaf partitions of a trained classification tree to construct an interpretable feature representation. By using the sample means within each leaf region as anchor points, DTE maps inputs into an embedding space defined by the tree's partition structure, effectively circumventing the high variance inherent in decision-tree splitting rules. We further introduce an ensemble extension based on additional bootstrap trees, and pair the resulting embedding with linear discriminant analysis for classification. We establish several population-level theoretical properties of DTE, including its preservation of conditional density under mild conditions and a characterization of the resulting classification error. Empirical studies on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that DTE strikes a strong balance between accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming or matching random forest and shallow neural networks while requiring only a fraction of their training time in most cases. Overall, the proposed DTE method can be viewed either as a scalable decision tree classifier that improves upon standard split rules, or as a neural network model whose weights are learned from tree-derived anchor points, achieving an intriguing integration of both paradigms.

We evaluate the performance of various text embedding models and pipeline configurations for AI-driven search systems. We compare sentence-transformer and generative embedding models (e.g., All-MPNet, BGE, GTE, and Qwen) at different dimensions, indexing methods (Milvus HNSW/IVF), and chunking strategies. A custom evaluation dataset of 11,975 query-chunk pairs was synthesized from US City Council meeting transcripts using a local large language model (LLM). The data pipeline includes preprocessing, automated question generation per chunk, manual validation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) integration. We measure retrieval accuracy using reference-based metrics: Top-K Accuracy and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Our results demonstrate that higher-dimensional embeddings significantly boost search quality (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-8B/4096 achieves Top-3 accuracy about 0.571 versus 0.412 for GTE-large/1024), and that neural re-rankers (e.g., a BGE cross-encoder) further improve ranking accuracy (Top-3 up to 0.527). Finer-grained chunking (512 characters versus 2000 characters) also improves accuracy. We discuss the impact of these factors and outline future directions for pipeline automation and evaluation.

Abstract--This paper investigates fake news detection as a downstream evaluation of Transformer representations, bench-marking encoder-only and decoder-only pre-trained models (BERT, GPT -2, Transformer-XL) as frozen embedders paired with lightweight classifiers. Through controlled preprocessing comparing pooling versus padding and neural versus linear heads, results demonstrate that contextual self-attention encodings consistently transfer effectively. BERT embeddings combined with logistic regression outperform neural baselines on LIAR dataset splits, while analyses of sequence length and aggregation reveal robustness to truncation and advantages from simple max or average pooling. In the pre-digital era, the dissemination of information to mass audiences was predominantly controlled by established publishing organizations and media conglomerates that maintained editorial standards and fact-checking processes. The advent of the Internet and the subsequent proliferation of social media platforms have fundamentally transformed this landscape, democratizing information sharing by enabling any individual to broadcast news and content to global audiences with unprecedented speed and scale [6]. While this democratization has fostered greater accessibility to diverse perspectives, it has simultaneously introduced significant challenges to ensuring the validity, authenticity, and reliability of the information being circulated [8].