QG-MIL: A Gated Transformer Aggregator for Domain-Agnostic Multiple Instance Learning in Medical Imaging

Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregators in medical imaging are prone to attention concentration, producing overconfident and unstable predictions. We introduce QG-MIL, a gated transformer aggregator that addresses this through four synergistic architectural components: RMSNorm-based pre-normalization, per-head QK normalization, fine-grained attention output gating, and SwiGLU-style feed-forward modules. Together, these design choices stabilize training and distribute attention more uniformly across instances without auxiliary losses, masking, or multi-stage regularization. We evaluate QG-MIL across six benchmarks spanning whole-slide pathology and cell-level hematology, covering two fundamentally different MIL scales. The best-performing QG-MIL variants outperform leading baselines on all six benchmarks, with an average improvement of +6.1 mean macro F1 points. Attention overlays and attention mass analysis confirm more distributed instance weighting. Ablation studies show that while individual components can match the full model on specific datasets, the QG-MIL design provides the most consistent cross-domain performance and tightest variance when compared to selected baselines. We release a configurable implementation to support reproducibility at: https://github.com/unica-visual-intelligence-lab/QG-MIL

From User Preferences to Optimization Constraints Using Large Language Models

This work explores using Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate user preferences into energy optimization constraints for home appliances. We describe a task where natural language user utterances are converted into formal constraints for smart appliances, within the broader context of a renewable energy community (REC) and in the Italian scenario. We evaluate the effectiveness of various LLMs currently available for Italian in translating these preferences resorting to classical zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning settings, using a pilot dataset of Italian user requests paired with corresponding formal constraint representation. Our contributions include establishing a baseline performance for this task, publicly releasing the dataset and code for further research, and providing insights on observed best practices and limitations of LLMs in this particular domain

A Comparative Analysis of Image Descriptors for Histopathological Classification of Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer ranks as the fifth most common and fourth most lethal cancer globally, with a dismal 5-year survival rate of approximately 20%. Despite extensive research on its pathobiology, the prognostic predictability remains inadequate, compounded by pathologists' high workload and potential diagnostic errors. Thus, automated, accurate histopathological diagnosis tools are crucial. This study employs Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques to classify histopathological images into healthy and cancerous categories. Using handcrafted and deep features with shallow learning classifiers on the GasHisSDB dataset, we offer a comparative analysis and insights into the most robust and high-performing combinations of features and classifiers for distinguishing between normal and abnormal histopathological images without fine-tuning strategies. With the RF classifier, our approach can reach F1 of 93.4%, demonstrating its validity.