Abstract:Numerical time-series models can effectively process irregular electronic health record (EHR) trajectories, but they do not naturally expose the measurements and temporal patterns supporting each risk estimate as readable evidence. Existing text-based interfaces improve readability, but typically rely on either raw serialization, which is lengthy and redundant, or patient-level free-form summaries, which are difficult to trace to source measurements and time windows. To bridge this gap, we introduce TreeText-CTS (Clinical Time-Series), which converts irregular EHR trajectories into human-readable, compact, source-traceable tree-path evidence units without patient-level summarization or inference-time autoregressive decoding. TreeText-CTS routes multi-scale window summaries through frozen XGBoost models and verbalizes activated tree paths as deterministic, source-traceable evidence units composed of threshold conditions. An evidence selector assembles an informative subset of these units, which a language-model encoder then integrates for prediction. Across PhysioNet 2012 mortality, MIMIC-III mortality, and PhysioNet 2019 sepsis-onset forecasting, TreeText-CTS achieves the best AUROC and AUPRC among evaluated text-based EHR time-series interfaces, improving AUPRC by 6.0 to 9.7 absolute percentage points over the strongest prior text-based interface while remaining competitive with numerical time-series models. Ablations show that tree-path evidence construction, evidence selection, and language-model composition each contribute to performance. Because every span passed to the language-model encoder is constructed from activated tree-path threshold conditions, TreeText-CTS makes the evidence supplied to the final predictor inspectable and source-traceable.
Abstract:The inability to filter out in advance all potentially problematic data from the pre-training of large language models has given rise to the need for methods for unlearning specific pieces of knowledge after training. Existing techniques overlook the need for continuous and immediate action, causing them to suffer from degraded utility as updates accumulate and protracted exposure of sensitive information. To address these issues, we propose Continual Unlearning in Real Time with Ensured Preservation of LLM Knowledge (CURaTE). Our method begins by training a sentence embedding model on a dataset designed to enable the formation of sharp decision boundaries for determining whether a given input prompt corresponds to any stored forget requests. The similarity of a given input to the forget requests is then used to determine whether to answer or return a refusal response. We show that even with such a simple approach, not only does CURaTE achieve more effective forgetting than existing methods, but by avoiding modification of the language model parameters, it also maintains near perfect knowledge preservation over any number of updates and is the only method capable of continual unlearning in real-time.
Abstract:With the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles and robotics, amodal completion, which reconstructs the occluded parts of people and objects in an image, has become increasingly crucial. Just as humans infer hidden regions based on prior experience and common sense, this task inherently requires physical knowledge about real-world entities. However, existing approaches either depend solely on the image generation ability of visual generative models, which lack such knowledge, or leverage it only during the segmentation stage, preventing it from explicitly guiding the completion process. To address this, we propose AmodalCG, a novel framework that harnesses the real-world knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to guide amodal completion. Our framework first assesses the extent of occlusion to selectively invoke MLLM guidance only when the target object is heavily occluded. If guidance is required, the framework further incorporates MLLMs to reason about both the (1) extent and (2) content of the missing regions. Finally, a visual generative model integrates these guidance and iteratively refines imperfect completions that may arise from inaccurate MLLM guidance. Experimental results on various real-world images show impressive improvements compared to all existing works, suggesting MLLMs as a promising direction for addressing challenging amodal completion.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing group-based RLVR methods often suffer from severe sample inefficiency. This inefficiency stems from reliance on point estimation of rewards from a small number of rollouts, leading to high estimation variance, variance collapse, and ineffective utilization of generated responses. In this work, we reformulate RLVR from a statistical estimation perspective by modeling rewards as samples drawn from a policy-induced distribution and casting advantage computation as the problem of estimating the reward distribution from finite data. Building on this view, we propose Discounted Beta--Bernoulli (DBB) reward estimation, which leverages historical reward statistics for the non-stationary distribution. Although biased, the resulting estimator exhibits reduced and stable variance, theoretically avoids estimated variance collapse, and achieves lower mean squared error than standard point estimation. Extensive experiments across six in-distribution and three out-of-distribution reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GRPO with DBB consistently outperforms naive GRPO, achieving average Acc@8 improvements of 3.22/2.42 points in-distribution and 12.49/6.92 points out-of-distribution on the 1.7B and 8B models, respectively, without additional computational cost or memory usage.
Abstract:To think critically about arguments, human learners are trained to identify, reconstruct, and evaluate arguments. Argument reconstruction is especially important because it makes an argument's underlying inferences explicit. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs can similarly enhance their critical thinking ability by learning to reconstruct arguments. To address this question, we introduce a holistic framework with three contributions. We (1) propose an engine that automatically reconstructs arbitrary arguments (GAAR), (2) synthesize a new high-quality argument reconstruction dataset (Arguinas) using the GAAR engine, and (3) investigate whether learning argument reconstruction benefits downstream critical thinking tasks. Our experimental results show that, across seven critical thinking tasks, models trained to learn argument reconstruction outperform models that do not, with the largest performance gains observed when training on the proposed Arguinas dataset. The source code and dataset will be publicly available.
Abstract:We introduce EPAG, a benchmark dataset and framework designed for Evaluating the Pre-consultation Ability of LLMs using diagnostic Guidelines. LLMs are evaluated directly through HPI-diagnostic guideline comparison and indirectly through disease diagnosis. In our experiments, we observe that small open-source models fine-tuned with a well-curated, task-specific dataset can outperform frontier LLMs in pre-consultation. Additionally, we find that increased amount of HPI (History of Present Illness) does not necessarily lead to improved diagnostic performance. Further experiments reveal that the language of pre-consultation influences the characteristics of the dialogue. By open-sourcing our dataset and evaluation pipeline on https://github.com/seemdog/EPAG, we aim to contribute to the evaluation and further development of LLM applications in real-world clinical settings.
Abstract:Inference-time steering enables pretrained diffusion/flow models to be adapted to new tasks without retraining. A widely used approach is the ratio-of-densities method, which defines a time-indexed target path by reweighting probability-density trajectories from multiple models with positive, or in some cases, negative exponents. This construction, however, harbors a critical and previously unformalized failure mode: Marginal Path Collapse, where intermediate densities become non-normalizable even though endpoints remain valid. Collapse arises systematically when composing heterogeneous models trained on different noise schedules or datasets, including a common setting in molecular design where de-novo, conformer, and pocket-conditioned models must be combined for tasks such as flexible-pose scaffold decoration. We provide a novel and complete solution for the problem. First, we derive a simple path existence criterion that predicts exactly when collapse occurs from noise schedules and exponents alone. Second, we introduce Adaptive path Correction with Exponents (ACE), which extends Feynman-Kac steering to time-varying exponents and guarantees a valid probability path. On a synthetic 2D benchmark and on flexible-pose scaffold decoration, ACE eliminates collapse and enables high-guidance compositional generation, improving distributional and docking metrics over constant-exponent baselines and even specialized task-specific scaffold decoration models. Our work turns ratio-of-densities steering with heterogeneous experts from an unstable heuristic into a reliable tool for controllable generation.
Abstract:Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables efficient adaptation of deployed models, yet it often leads to poorly calibrated predictive uncertainty - a critical issue in high-stakes domains such as autonomous driving, finance, and healthcare. Existing calibration methods typically assume fixed models or static distributions, resulting in degraded performance under real-world, dynamic test conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce Style Invariance as a Correctness Likelihood (SICL), a framework that leverages style-invariance for robust uncertainty estimation. SICL estimates instance-wise correctness likelihood by measuring prediction consistency across style-altered variants, requiring only the model's forward pass. This makes it a plug-and-play, backpropagation-free calibration module compatible with any TTA method. Comprehensive evaluations across four baselines, five TTA methods, and two realistic scenarios with three model architecture demonstrate that SICL reduces calibration error by an average of 13 percentage points compared to conventional calibration approaches.
Abstract:The applicability of current lesion segmentation models for chest X-rays (CXRs) has been limited both by a small number of target labels and the reliance on long, detailed expert-level text inputs, creating a barrier to practical use. To address these limitations, we introduce a new paradigm: instruction-guided lesion segmentation (ILS), which is designed to segment diverse lesion types based on simple, user-friendly instructions. Under this paradigm, we construct MIMIC-ILS, the first large-scale instruction-answer dataset for CXR lesion segmentation, using our fully automated multimodal pipeline that generates annotations from chest X-ray images and their corresponding reports. MIMIC-ILS contains 1.1M instruction-answer pairs derived from 192K images and 91K unique segmentation masks, covering seven major lesion types. To empirically demonstrate its utility, we introduce ROSALIA, a vision-language model fine-tuned on MIMIC-ILS. ROSALIA can segment diverse lesions and provide textual explanations in response to user instructions. The model achieves high segmentation and textual accuracy in our newly proposed task, highlighting the effectiveness of our pipeline and the value of MIMIC-ILS as a foundational resource for pixel-level CXR lesion grounding.
Abstract:Machine learning models for clinical prediction rely on structured data extracted from Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), yet this process remains dominated by hardcoded, database-specific pipelines for cohort definition, feature selection, and code mapping. These manual efforts limit scalability, reproducibility, and cross-institutional generalization. To address this, we introduce EMR-AGENT (Automated Generalized Extraction and Navigation Tool), an agent-based framework that replaces manual rule writing with dynamic, language model-driven interaction to extract and standardize structured clinical data. Our framework automates cohort selection, feature extraction, and code mapping through interactive querying of databases. Our modular agents iteratively observe query results and reason over schema and documentation, using SQL not just for data retrieval but also as a tool for database observation and decision making. This eliminates the need for hand-crafted, schema-specific logic. To enable rigorous evaluation, we develop a benchmarking codebase for three EMR databases (MIMIC-III, eICU, SICdb), including both seen and unseen schema settings. Our results demonstrate strong performance and generalization across these databases, highlighting the feasibility of automating a process previously thought to require expert-driven design. The code will be released publicly at https://github.com/AITRICS/EMR-AGENT/tree/main. For a demonstration, please visit our anonymous demo page: https://anonymoususer-max600.github.io/EMR_AGENT/