Predicting Student Dropout Risk With A Dual-Modal Abrupt Behavioral Changes Approach

Timely prediction of students at high risk of dropout is critical for early intervention and improving educational outcomes. However, in offline educational settings, poor data quality, limited scale, and high heterogeneity often hinder the application of advanced machine learning models. Furthermore, while educational theories provide valuable insights into dropout phenomena, the lack of quantifiable metrics for key indicators limits their use in data-driven modeling. Through data analysis and a review of educational literature, we identified abrupt changes in student behavior as key early signals of dropout risk. To address this, we propose the Dual-Modal Multiscale Sliding Window (DMSW) Model, which integrates academic performance and behavioral data to dynamically capture behavior patterns using minimal data. The DMSW model improves prediction accuracy by 15% compared to traditional methods, enabling educators to identify high-risk students earlier, provide timely support, and foster a more inclusive learning environment. Our analysis highlights key behavior patterns, offering practical insights for preventive strategies and tailored support. These findings bridge the gap between theory and practice in dropout prediction, giving educators an innovative tool to enhance student retention and outcomes.

GRAPE: Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning for Genetic Perturbation with Coding and Non-Coding Biotype

Predicting genetic perturbations enables the identification of potentially crucial genes prior to wet-lab experiments, significantly improving overall experimental efficiency. Since genes are the foundation of cellular life, building gene regulatory networks (GRN) is essential to understand and predict the effects of genetic perturbations. However, current methods fail to fully leverage gene-related information, and solely rely on simple evaluation metrics to construct coarse-grained GRN. More importantly, they ignore functional differences between biotypes, limiting the ability to capture potential gene interactions. In this work, we leverage pre-trained large language model and DNA sequence model to extract features from gene descriptions and DNA sequence data, respectively, which serve as the initialization for gene representations. Additionally, we introduce gene biotype information for the first time in genetic perturbation, simulating the distinct roles of genes with different biotypes in regulating cellular processes, while capturing implicit gene relationships through graph structure learning (GSL). We propose GRAPE, a heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) that leverages gene representations initialized with features from descriptions and sequences, models the distinct roles of genes with different biotypes, and dynamically refines the GRN through GSL. The results on publicly available datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Towards Unified Molecule-Enhanced Pathology Image Representation Learning via Integrating Spatial Transcriptomics

Recent advancements in multimodal pre-training models have significantly advanced computational pathology. However, current approaches predominantly rely on visual-language models, which may impose limitations from a molecular perspective and lead to performance bottlenecks. Here, we introduce a Unified Molecule-enhanced Pathology Image REpresentationn Learning framework (UMPIRE). UMPIRE aims to leverage complementary information from gene expression profiles to guide the multimodal pre-training, enhancing the molecular awareness of pathology image representation learning. We demonstrate that this molecular perspective provides a robust, task-agnostic training signal for learning pathology image embeddings. Due to the scarcity of paired data, approximately 4 million entries of spatial transcriptomics gene expression were collected to train the gene encoder. By leveraging powerful pre-trained encoders, UMPIRE aligns the encoders across over 697K pathology image-gene expression pairs. The performance of UMPIRE is demonstrated across various molecular-related downstream tasks, including gene expression prediction, spot classification, and mutation state prediction in whole slide images. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of multimodal data integration and open new avenues for exploring computational pathology enhanced by molecular perspectives. The code and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/Hanminghao/UMPIRE.