Statistical Opportunities in Neuroimaging

Neuroimaging has profoundly enhanced our understanding of the human brain by characterizing its structure, function, and connectivity through modalities like MRI, fMRI, EEG, and PET. These technologies have enabled major breakthroughs across the lifespan, from early brain development to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite these advances, the brain is a complex, multiscale system, and neuroimaging measurements are correspondingly high-dimensional. This creates major statistical challenges, including measurement noise, motion-related artifacts, substantial inter-subject and site/scanner variability, and the sheer scale of modern studies. This paper explores statistical opportunities and challenges in neuroimaging across four key areas: (i) brain development from birth to age 20, (ii) the adult and aging brain, (iii) neurodegeneration and neuropsychiatric disorders, and (iv) brain encoding and decoding. After a quick tutorial on major imaging technologies, we review cutting-edge studies, underscore data and modeling challenges, and highlight research opportunities for statisticians. We conclude by emphasizing that close collaboration among statisticians, neuroscientists, and clinicians is essential for translating neuroimaging advances into improved diagnostics, deeper mechanistic insight, and more personalized treatments.

Kernel-Based Learning of Chest X-ray Images for Predicting ICU Escalation among COVID-19 Patients

Kernel methods have been extensively utilized in machine learning for classification and prediction tasks due to their ability to capture complex non-linear data patterns. However, single kernel approaches are inherently limited, as they rely on a single type of kernel function (e.g., Gaussian kernel), which may be insufficient to fully represent the heterogeneity or multifaceted nature of real-world data. Multiple kernel learning (MKL) addresses these limitations by constructing composite kernels from simpler ones and integrating information from heterogeneous sources. Despite these advances, traditional MKL methods are primarily designed for continuous outcomes. We extend MKL to accommodate the outcome variable belonging to the exponential family, representing a broader variety of data types, and refer to our proposed method as generalized linear models with integrated multiple additive regression with kernels (GLIMARK). Empirically, we demonstrate that GLIMARK can effectively recover or approximate the true data-generating mechanism. We have applied it to a COVID-19 chest X-ray dataset, predicting binary outcomes of ICU escalation and extracting clinically meaningful features, underscoring the practical utility of this approach in real-world scenarios.

"Rebuilding" Statistics in the Age of AI: A Town Hall Discussion on Culture, Infrastructure, and Training

This article presents the full, original record of the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) town hall, "Statistics in the Age of AI," which convened leading statisticians to discuss how the field is evolving in response to advances in artificial intelligence, foundation models, large-scale empirical modeling, and data-intensive infrastructures. The town hall was structured around open panel discussion and extensive audience Q&A, with the aim of eliciting candid, experience-driven perspectives rather than formal presentations or prepared statements. This document preserves the extended exchanges among panelists and audience members, with minimal editorial intervention, and organizes the conversation around five recurring questions concerning disciplinary culture and practices, data curation and "data work," engagement with modern empirical modeling, training for large-scale AI applications, and partnerships with key AI stakeholders. By providing an archival record of this discussion, the preprint aims to support transparency, community reflection, and ongoing dialogue about the evolving role of statistics in the data- and AI-centric future.

A Unified Spoken Language Model with Injected Emotional-Attribution Thinking for Human-like Interaction

This paper presents a unified spoken language model for emotional intelligence, enhanced by a novel data construction strategy termed Injected Emotional-Attribution Thinking (IEAT). IEAT incorporates user emotional states and their underlying causes into the model's internal reasoning process, enabling emotion-aware reasoning to be internalized rather than treated as explicit supervision. The model is trained with a two-stage progressive strategy. The first stage performs speech-text alignment and emotional attribute modeling via self-distillation, while the second stage conducts end-to-end cross-modal joint optimization to ensure consistency between textual and spoken emotional expressions. Experiments on the Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems Challenge (HumDial) Emotional Intelligence benchmark demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves top-ranked performance across emotional trajectory modeling, emotional reasoning, and empathetic response generation under both LLM-based and human evaluations.

FairExpand: Individual Fairness on Graphs with Partial Similarity Information

Individual fairness, which requires that similar individuals should be treated similarly by algorithmic systems, has become a central principle in fair machine learning. Individual fairness has garnered traction in graph representation learning due to its practical importance in high-stakes Web areas such as user modeling, recommender systems, and search. However, existing methods assume the existence of predefined similarity information over all node pairs, an often unrealistic requirement that prevents their operationalization in practice. In this paper, we assume the similarity information is only available for a limited subset of node pairs and introduce FairExpand, a flexible framework that promotes individual fairness in this more realistic partial information scenario. FairExpand follows a two-step pipeline that alternates between refining node representations using a backbone model (e.g., a graph neural network) and gradually propagating similarity information, which allows fairness enforcement to effectively expand to the entire graph. Extensive experiments show that FairExpand consistently enhances individual fairness while preserving performance, making it a practical solution for enabling graph-based individual fairness in real-world applications with partial similarity information.

TELEVAL: A Dynamic Benchmark Designed for Spoken Language Models in Chinese Interactive Scenarios

Spoken language models (SLMs) have seen rapid progress in recent years, along with the development of numerous benchmarks for evaluating their performance. However, most existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating whether SLMs can perform complex tasks comparable to those tackled by large language models (LLMs), often failing to align with how users naturally interact in real-world conversational scenarios. In this paper, we propose TELEVAL, a dynamic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate SLMs' effectiveness as conversational agents in realistic Chinese interactive settings. TELEVAL defines three evaluation dimensions: Explicit Semantics, Paralinguistic and Implicit Semantics, and System Abilities. It adopts a dialogue format consistent with real-world usage and evaluates text and audio outputs separately. TELEVAL particularly focuses on the model's ability to extract implicit cues from user speech and respond appropriately without additional instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that despite recent progress, existing SLMs still have considerable room for improvement in natural conversational tasks. We hope that TELEVAL can serve as a user-centered evaluation framework that directly reflects the user experience and contributes to the development of more capable dialogue-oriented SLMs.

BoSS: Beyond-Semantic Speech

Human communication involves more than explicit semantics, with implicit signals and contextual cues playing a critical role in shaping meaning. However, modern speech technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) often fail to capture these beyond-semantic dimensions. To better characterize and benchmark the progression of speech intelligence, we introduce Spoken Interaction System Capability Levels (L1-L5), a hierarchical framework illustrated the evolution of spoken dialogue systems from basic command recognition to human-like social interaction. To support these advanced capabilities, we propose Beyond-Semantic Speech (BoSS), which refers to the set of information in speech communication that encompasses but transcends explicit semantics. It conveys emotions, contexts, and modifies or extends meanings through multidimensional features such as affective cues, contextual dynamics, and implicit semantics, thereby enhancing the understanding of communicative intentions and scenarios. We present a formalized framework for BoSS, leveraging cognitive relevance theories and machine learning models to analyze temporal and contextual speech dynamics. We evaluate BoSS-related attributes across five different dimensions, reveals that current spoken language models (SLMs) are hard to fully interpret beyond-semantic signals. These findings highlight the need for advancing BoSS research to enable richer, more context-aware human-machine communication.

Non-exchangeable Conformal Prediction for Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Conformal prediction for graph neural networks (GNNs) offers a promising framework for quantifying uncertainty, enhancing GNN reliability in high-stakes applications. However, existing methods predominantly focus on static graphs, neglecting the evolving nature of real-world graphs. Temporal dependencies in graph structure, node attributes, and ground truth labels violate the fundamental exchangeability assumption of standard conformal prediction methods, limiting their applicability. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce NCPNET, a novel end-to-end conformal prediction framework tailored for temporal graphs. Our approach extends conformal prediction to dynamic settings, mitigating statistical coverage violations induced by temporal dependencies. To achieve this, we propose a diffusion-based non-conformity score that captures both topological and temporal uncertainties within evolving networks. Additionally, we develop an efficiency-aware optimization algorithm that improves the conformal prediction process, enhancing computational efficiency and reducing coverage violations. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world temporal graphs, including WIKI, REDDIT, DBLP, and IBM Anti-Money Laundering dataset, demonstrate NCPNET's capability to ensure guaranteed coverage in temporal graphs, achieving up to a 31% reduction in prediction set size on the WIKI dataset, significantly improving efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/ODYSSEYWT/NCPNET.

EVINET: Towards Open-World Graph Learning via Evidential Reasoning Network

Graph learning has been crucial to many real-world tasks, but they are often studied with a closed-world assumption, with all possible labels of data known a priori. To enable effective graph learning in an open and noisy environment, it is critical to inform the model users when the model makes a wrong prediction to in-distribution data of a known class, i.e., misclassification detection or when the model encounters out-of-distribution from novel classes, i.e., out-of-distribution detection. This paper introduces Evidential Reasoning Network (EVINET), a framework that addresses these two challenges by integrating Beta embedding within a subjective logic framework. EVINET includes two key modules: Dissonance Reasoning for misclassification detection and Vacuity Reasoning for out-of-distribution detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVINET outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics in the tasks of in-distribution classification, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. EVINET demonstrates the necessity of uncertainty estimation and logical reasoning for misclassification detection and out-of-distribution detection and paves the way for open-world graph learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SSSKJ/EviNET.

EviNet: Evidential Reasoning Network for Resilient Graph Learning in the Open and Noisy Environments

Graph learning has been crucial to many real-world tasks, but they are often studied with a closed-world assumption, with all possible labels of data known a priori. To enable effective graph learning in an open and noisy environment, it is critical to inform the model users when the model makes a wrong prediction to in-distribution data of a known class, i.e., misclassification detection or when the model encounters out-of-distribution from novel classes, i.e., out-of-distribution detection. This paper introduces Evidential Reasoning Network (EVINET), a framework that addresses these two challenges by integrating Beta embedding within a subjective logic framework. EVINET includes two key modules: Dissonance Reasoning for misclassification detection and Vacuity Reasoning for out-of-distribution detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVINET outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics in the tasks of in-distribution classification, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. EVINET demonstrates the necessity of uncertainty estimation and logical reasoning for misclassification detection and out-of-distribution detection and paves the way for open-world graph learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SSSKJ/EviNET.