VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

Stretchable and High-Precision Optical Tactile Sensor for Trajectory Tracking of Parallel Mechanisms

Stretchable sensors indicate promising prospects for soft robotics, medical devices, and human-machine interactions due to the high compliance of soft materials. Discrete sensing strategies, including sensor arrays and distributed sensors, are broadly involved in tactile sensors across versatile applications. However, it remains a challenge to achieve high spatial resolution with self-decoupled capacity and insensitivity to other off-axis stimuli for stretchable tactile sensors. Herein, we develop a stretchable tactile sensor based on the proposed continuous spectral-filtering principle, allowing superhigh resolution for applied stimuli. This proposed sensor enables a high-linear spatial response (0.996) even during stretching and bending, and high continuous spatial (7 μm) and force (5 mN) resolutions with design scalability and interaction robustness to survive piercing and cutting. We further demonstrate the sensors' performance by integrating them into a planar parallel mechanism for precise trajectory tracking (rotational resolution: 0.02°) in real time.

CFLight: Enhancing Safety with Traffic Signal Control through Counterfactual Learning

Traffic accidents result in millions of injuries and fatalities globally, with a significant number occurring at intersections each year. Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is an effective strategy for enhancing safety at these urban junctures. Despite the growing popularity of Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods in optimizing TSC, these methods often prioritize driving efficiency over safety, thus failing to address the critical balance between these two aspects. Additionally, these methods usually need more interpretability. CounterFactual (CF) learning is a promising approach for various causal analysis fields. In this study, we introduce a novel framework to improve RL for safety aspects in TSC. This framework introduces a novel method based on CF learning to address the question: ``What if, when an unsafe event occurs, we backtrack to perform alternative actions, and will this unsafe event still occur in the subsequent period?'' To answer this question, we propose a new structure causal model to predict the result after executing different actions, and we propose a new CF module that integrates with additional ``X'' modules to promote safe RL practices. Our new algorithm, CFLight, which is derived from this framework, effectively tackles challenging safety events and significantly improves safety at intersections through a near-zero collision control strategy. Through extensive numerical experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that CFLight reduces collisions and improves overall traffic performance compared to conventional RL methods and the recent safe RL model. Moreover, our method represents a generalized and safe framework for RL methods, opening possibilities for applications in other domains. The data and code are available in the github https://github.com/AdvancedAI-ComplexSystem/SmartCity/tree/main/CFLight.

Incomplete Depression Feature Selection with Missing EEG Channels

As a critical mental health disorder, depression has severe effects on both human physical and mental well-being. Recent developments in EEG-based depression analysis have shown promise in improving depression detection accuracies. However, EEG features often contain redundant, irrelevant, and noisy information. Additionally, real-world EEG data acquisition frequently faces challenges, such as data loss from electrode detachment and heavy noise interference. To tackle the challenges, we propose a novel feature selection approach for robust depression analysis, called Incomplete Depression Feature Selection with Missing EEG Channels (IDFS-MEC). IDFS-MEC integrates missing-channel indicator information and adaptive channel weighting learning into orthogonal regression to lessen the effects of incomplete channels on model construction, and then utilizes global redundancy minimization learning to reduce redundant information among selected feature subsets. Extensive experiments conducted on MODMA and PRED-d003 datasets reveal that the EEG feature subsets chosen by IDFS-MEC have superior performance than 10 popular feature selection methods among 3-, 64-, and 128-channel settings.

STN: a new tensor network method to identify stimulus category from brain activity pattern

Neural decoding is still a challenge and hot topic in neurocomputing science. Recently, many studies have shown that brain network pattern containing rich spatial and temporal structure information, which represented the activation information of brain under external stimuli. The traditional method is to extract brain network features directly from the common machine learning method, then put these features into the classifier, and realize to decode external stimuli. However, this method cannot effectively extract the multi-dimensional structural information, which is hidden in the brain network. The tensor researchers show that the tensor decomposition model can fully mine unique spatio-temporal structure characteristics in multi-dimensional structure data. This research proposed a stimulus constrain tensor brain model(STN), which involved the tensor decomposition idea and stimulus category constraint information. The model was verified on the real neuroimaging data sets (MEG and fMRI). The experimental results show that the STN model achieved more 11.06% and 18.46% compared with others methods on two modal data sets. These results imply the superiority of extracting discriminative characteristics about STN model, especially for decoding object stimuli with semantic information.