A Unified Tokenization Framework for Pain Recognition using Heterogeneous 3D Modalities

Pain is a complex and pervasive phenomenon affecting a large percentage of the population, and accurate assessment is essential for effective clinical management and intervention. Computational pain recognition systems enable continuous monitoring, support clinical decision-making, and help mitigate pain-related distress and functional decline. This study introduces a unified tokenization framework for heterogeneous 3D modalities in pain recognition that provides a single processing pipeline across behavioral and brain-activity 3D data, without requiring separate architectures for each modality or handcrafted inductive biases. The framework preserves spatial, temporal, and time--frequency structure while mapping diverse inputs into a shared token space. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach effectively processes facial videos and fNIRS data in both raw-signal and spectrogram-based representations. On the AI4Pain benchmark dataset, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency and enabling real-time assessment on both GPU and CPU hardware.

Chance-Constrained Control with Lexicographic Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a lexicographic Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL)-based approach to chance-constrained Markov Decision Processes, in which the controller seeks to ensure that the probability of satisfying the constraint is above a given threshold. Standard DeepRL approaches require i) the constraints to be included as additional weighted terms in the cost function, in a multi-objective fashion, and ii) the tuning of the introduced weights during the training phase of the Deep Neural Network (DNN) according to the probability thresholds. The proposed approach, instead, requires to separately train one constraint-free DNN and one DNN associated to each constraint and then, at each time-step, to select which DNN to use depending on the system observed state. The presented solution does not require any hyper-parameter tuning besides the standard DNN ones, even if the probability thresholds changes. A lexicographic version of the well-known DeepRL algorithm DQN is also proposed and validated via simulations.