Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities across general domains, yet their application to specialized sectors such as mortgage finance requires domain-specific knowledge augmentation while preserving instruction-following fidelity. We present MortgageLLM, a novel domain-specific large language model that addresses this dual challenge. It is developed using a dual-track specialization framework from a single base model (LLaMA-3.1-8B). We opted for this dual-expert approach as a single multi-task model suffers from performance trade-offs, where optimizing for structured tasks (via SFT) degrades conversational fidelity (via DPO). Our dual-track method solves this by creating two specialists, allowing each to be optimally trained for its distinct capability. Our approach applies the instruction residual technique to restore instruction-following capabilities post-domain adaptation without supervised fine-tuning. We contribute: (1) application of this residual technique to the highly specialized mortgage finance domain; (2) a dual-expert architecture combining a conversational Q&A model and a structured task model for classification and summarization; and (3) an intelligent task routing mechanism using few-shot classification performed by one of the expert models itself. We validate our approach on domain-specific benchmarks, where our final model (MLM v2) significantly outperforms the base LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving an LLM-as-a-Judge summarization score of 4.58 (vs. 3.99), a Q&A score of 4.09 (vs. 4.0), and a classification score of 2.6 (vs. 1.2). On semantic similarity, our model achieved a BERTScore of 0.77 for summarization (vs. 0.74), 0.68 for Q&A (vs. 0.58), and 0.75 for classification (vs. 0.73), substantially outperforming baseline approaches.

Over the last decade, machine learning has been extensively applied to identify malicious Android applications. However, such approaches remain vulnerable against adversarial examples, i.e., examples that are subtly manipulated to fool a machine learning model into making incorrect predictions. This research presents DeepTrust, a novel metaheuristic that arranges flexible classifiers, like deep neural networks, into an ordered sequence where the final decision is made by a single internal model based on conditions activated in cascade. In the Robust Android Malware Detection competition at the 2025 IEEE Conference SaTML, DeepTrust secured the first place and achieved state-of-the-art results, outperforming the next-best competitor by up to 266% under feature-space evasion attacks. This is accomplished while maintaining the highest detection rate on non-adversarial malware and a false positive rate below 1%. The method's efficacy stems from maximizing the divergence of the learned representations among the internal models. By using classifiers inducing fundamentally dissimilar embeddings of the data, the decision space becomes unpredictable for an attacker. This frustrates the iterative perturbation process inherent to evasion attacks, enhancing system robustness without compromising accuracy on clean examples.

The Low-Resource Audio Codec (LRAC) Challenge aims to advance neural audio coding for deployment in resource-constrained environments. The first edition focuses on low-resource neural speech codecs that must operate reliably under everyday noise and reverberation, while satisfying strict constraints on computational complexity, latency, and bitrate. Track 1 targets transparency codecs, which aim to preserve the perceptual transparency of input speech under mild noise and reverberation. Track 2 addresses enhancement codecs, which combine coding and compression with denoising and dereverberation. This paper presents the official baseline systems for both tracks in the 2025 LRAC Challenge. The baselines are convolutional neural codec models with Residual Vector Quantization, trained end-to-end using a combination of adversarial and reconstruction objectives. We detail the data filtering and augmentation strategies, model architectures, optimization procedures, and checkpoint selection criteria.

MIDOG 2025 Track 1 requires mitosis detection in whole-slideimages (WSIs) containing non-tumor, inflamed, and necrotic re-gions. Due to the complicated and heterogeneous context, aswell as possible artifacts, there are often false positives and falsenegatives, thus degrading the detection F1-score. To addressthis problem, we propose a two-stage framework. Firstly, an im-proved YOLO11x, integrated with EMA attention and LSConv,is employed to generate mitosis candidates. We use a low confi-dence threshold to generate as many proposals as possible, en-suring the detection recall. Then, a ConvNeXt-Tiny classifieris employed to filter out the false positives, ensuring the detec-tion precision. Consequently, the proposed two-stage frame-work can generate a high detection F1-score. Evaluated on afused dataset comprising MIDOG++, MITOS_WSI_CCMCT,and MITOS_WSI_CMC, our framework achieves an F1-scoreof 0.882, which is 0.035 higher than the single-stage YOLO11xbaseline. This performance gain is produced by a significantprecision improvement, from 0.762 to 0.839, and a comparablerecall. On the MIDOG 2025 Track 1 preliminary test set, thealgorithm scores an F1 score of 0.7587. The code is available athttps://github.com/xxiao0304/MIDOG-2025-Track-1-of-SZTU.

We introduce AraHealthQA 2025, the Comprehensive Arabic Health Question Answering Shared Task, held in conjunction with ArabicNLP 2025 (co-located with EMNLP 2025). This shared task addresses the paucity of high-quality Arabic medical QA resources by offering two complementary tracks: MentalQA, focusing on Arabic mental health Q&A (e.g., anxiety, depression, stigma reduction), and MedArabiQ, covering broader medical domains such as internal medicine, pediatrics, and clinical decision making. Each track comprises multiple subtasks, evaluation datasets, and standardized metrics, facilitating fair benchmarking. The task was structured to promote modeling under realistic, multilingual, and culturally nuanced healthcare contexts. We outline the dataset creation, task design and evaluation framework, participation statistics, baseline systems, and summarize the overall outcomes. We conclude with reflections on the performance trends observed and prospects for future iterations in Arabic health QA.

Counting mitotic figures is time-intensive for pathologists and leads to inter-observer variability. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a solution by automatically detecting mitotic figures while maintaining decision consistency. However, AI tools are susceptible to domain shift, where a significant drop in performance can occur due to differences in the training and testing sets, including morphological diversity between organs, species, and variations in staining protocols. Furthermore, the number of mitoses is much less than the count of normal nuclei, which introduces severely imbalanced data for the detection task. In this work, we formulate mitosis detection as a pixel-level segmentation and propose a teacher-student model that simultaneously addresses mitosis detection (Track 1) and atypical mitosis classification (Track 2). Our method is based on a UNet segmentation backbone that integrates domain generalization modules, namely contrastive representation learning and domain-adversarial training. A teacher-student strategy is employed to generate pixel-level pseudo-masks not only for annotated mitoses and hard negatives but also for normal nuclei, thereby enhancing feature discrimination and improving robustness against domain shift. For the classification task, we introduce a multi-scale CNN classifier that leverages feature maps from the segmentation model within a multi-task learning paradigm. On the preliminary test set, the algorithm achieved an F1 score of 0.7660 in Track 1 and balanced accuracy of 0.8414 in Track 2, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating segmentation-based detection and classification into a unified framework for robust mitosis analysis.

The ninth AI City Challenge continues to advance real-world applications of computer vision and AI in transportation, industrial automation, and public safety. The 2025 edition featured four tracks and saw a 17% increase in participation, with 245 teams from 15 countries registered on the evaluation server. Public release of challenge datasets led to over 30,000 downloads to date. Track 1 focused on multi-class 3D multi-camera tracking, involving people, humanoids, autonomous mobile robots, and forklifts, using detailed calibration and 3D bounding box annotations. Track 2 tackled video question answering in traffic safety, with multi-camera incident understanding enriched by 3D gaze labels. Track 3 addressed fine-grained spatial reasoning in dynamic warehouse environments, requiring AI systems to interpret RGB-D inputs and answer spatial questions that combine perception, geometry, and language. Both Track 1 and Track 3 datasets were generated in NVIDIA Omniverse. Track 4 emphasized efficient road object detection from fisheye cameras, supporting lightweight, real-time deployment on edge devices. The evaluation framework enforced submission limits and used a partially held-out test set to ensure fair benchmarking. Final rankings were revealed after the competition concluded, fostering reproducibility and mitigating overfitting. Several teams achieved top-tier results, setting new benchmarks in multiple tasks.

We present Team BD's submission to the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors, under Track 1 (Mistake Identification) and Track 2 (Mistake Location). Both tracks involve three-class classification of tutor responses in educational dialogues - determining if a tutor correctly recognizes a student's mistake (Track 1) and whether the tutor pinpoints the mistake's location (Track 2). Our system is built on MPNet, a Transformer-based language model that combines BERT and XLNet's pre-training advantages. We fine-tuned MPNet on the task data using a class-weighted cross-entropy loss to handle class imbalance, and leveraged grouped cross-validation (10 folds) to maximize the use of limited data while avoiding dialogue overlap between training and validation. We then performed a hard-voting ensemble of the best models from each fold, which improves robustness and generalization by combining multiple classifiers. Our approach achieved strong results on both tracks, with exact-match macro-F1 scores of approximately 0.7110 for Mistake Identification and 0.5543 for Mistake Location on the official test set. We include comprehensive analysis of our system's performance, including confusion matrices and t-SNE visualizations to interpret classifier behavior, as well as a taxonomy of common errors with examples. We hope our ensemble-based approach and findings provide useful insights for designing reliable tutor response evaluation systems in educational dialogue settings.

Detecting and tracking multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in thermal infrared video is inherently challenging due to low contrast, environmental noise, and small target sizes. This paper provides a straightforward approach to address multi-UAV tracking in thermal infrared video, leveraging recent advances in detection and tracking. Instead of relying on the YOLOv5 with the DeepSORT pipeline, we present a tracking framework built on YOLOv12 and BoT-SORT, enhanced with tailored training and inference strategies. We evaluate our approach following the metrics from the 4th Anti-UAV Challenge and demonstrate competitive performance. Notably, we achieve strong results without using contrast enhancement or temporal information fusion to enrich UAV features, highlighting our approach as a "Strong Baseline" for the multi-UAV tracking task. We provide implementation details, in-depth experimental analysis, and a discussion of potential improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/wish44165/YOLOv12-BoT-SORT-ReID .

The AgentSociety Challenge is the first competition in the Web Conference that aims to explore the potential of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in modeling user behavior and enhancing recommender systems on web platforms. The Challenge consists of two tracks: the User Modeling Track and the Recommendation Track. Participants are tasked to utilize a combined dataset from Yelp, Amazon, and Goodreads, along with an interactive environment simulator, to develop innovative LLM agents. The Challenge has attracted 295 teams across the globe and received over 1,400 submissions in total over the course of 37 official competition days. The participants have achieved 21.9% and 20.3% performance improvement for Track 1 and Track 2 in the Development Phase, and 9.1% and 15.9% in the Final Phase, representing a significant accomplishment. This paper discusses the detailed designs of the Challenge, analyzes the outcomes, and highlights the most successful LLM agent designs. To support further research and development, we have open-sourced the benchmark environment at https://tsinghua-fib-lab.github.io/AgentSocietyChallenge.