UdonCare: Hierarchy Pruning for Unseen Domain Discovery in Predictive Healthcare

Domain generalization has become a critical challenge in clinical prediction, where patient cohorts often exhibit shifting data distributions that degrade model performance. Typical domain generalization approaches struggle in real-world healthcare settings for two main reasons: (1) patient-specific domain labels are typically unavailable, making domain discovery especially difficult; (2) purely data-driven approaches overlook key clinical insights, leading to a gap in medical knowledge integration. To address these problems, we leverage hierarchical medical ontologies like the ICD-9-CM hierarchy to group diseases into higher-level categories and discover more flexible latent domains. In this paper, we introduce UdonCare, a hierarchy-guided framework that iteratively prunes fine-grained domains, encodes these refined domains, and applies a Siamese-type inference mechanism to separate domain-related signals from patient-level features. Experimental results on clinical datasets (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) show that the proposed model achieves higher performance compared to other domain generalization baselines when substantial domain gaps presents, highlighting the untapped potential of medical knowledge for enhancing domain generalization in practical healthcare applications.

No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery

Deep learning models trained on extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR) data have achieved high accuracy in diagnosis prediction, offering the potential to assist clinicians in decision-making and treatment planning. However, these models lack two crucial features that clinicians highly value: interpretability and interactivity. The ``black-box'' nature of these models makes it difficult for clinicians to understand the reasoning behind predictions, limiting their ability to make informed decisions. Additionally, the absence of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge and experience into the decision-making process. To address these limitations, we propose II-KEA, a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework that integrates personalized knowledge databases and agentic LLMs. II-KEA enhances interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis, while also improving interactivity by allowing clinicians to inject their knowledge and experience through customized knowledge bases and prompts. II-KEA is evaluated on both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrating superior performance along with enhanced interpretability and interactivity, as evidenced by its strong results from extensive case studies.

Accelerating Autoregressive Speech Synthesis Inference With Speech Speculative Decoding

Modern autoregressive speech synthesis models leveraging language models have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, the sequential nature of next token prediction in these models leads to significant latency, hindering their deployment in scenarios where inference speed is critical. In this work, we propose Speech Speculative Decoding (SSD), a novel framework for autoregressive speech synthesis acceleration. Specifically, our method employs a lightweight draft model to generate candidate token sequences, which are subsequently verified in parallel by the target model using the proposed SSD framework. Experimental results demonstrate that SSD achieves a significant speedup of 1.4x compared with conventional autoregressive decoding, while maintaining high fidelity and naturalness. Subjective evaluations further validate the effectiveness of SSD in preserving the perceptual quality of the target model while accelerating inference.

Shadow-FT: Tuning Instruct via Base

Large language models (LLMs) consistently benefit from further fine-tuning on various tasks. However, we observe that directly tuning the INSTRUCT (i.e., instruction tuned) models often leads to marginal improvements and even performance degeneration. Notably, paired BASE models, the foundation for these INSTRUCT variants, contain highly similar weight values (i.e., less than 2% on average for Llama 3.1 8B). Therefore, we propose a novel Shadow-FT framework to tune the INSTRUCT models by leveraging the corresponding BASE models. The key insight is to fine-tune the BASE model, and then directly graft the learned weight updates to the INSTRUCT model. Our proposed Shadow-FT introduces no additional parameters, is easy to implement, and significantly improves performance. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning mainstream LLMs, such as Qwen 3 and Llama 3 series, and evaluate them across 19 benchmarks covering coding, reasoning, and mathematical tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that Shadow-FT consistently outperforms conventional full-parameter and parameter-efficient tuning approaches. Further analyses indicate that Shadow-FT can be applied to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and combined with direct preference optimization (DPO). Codes and weights are available at \href{https://github.com/wutaiqiang/Shadow-FT}{Github}.

Enhancing the Geometric Problem-Solving Ability of Multimodal LLMs via Symbolic-Neural Integration

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in general domains and demonstrated promise in multimodal mathematical reasoning. However, applying MLLMs to geometry problem solving (GPS) remains challenging due to lack of accurate step-by-step solution data and severe hallucinations during reasoning. In this paper, we propose GeoGen, a pipeline that can automatically generates step-wise reasoning paths for geometry diagrams. By leveraging the precise symbolic reasoning, \textbf{GeoGen} produces large-scale, high-quality question-answer pairs. To further enhance the logical reasoning ability of MLLMs, we train \textbf{GeoLogic}, a Large Language Model (LLM) using synthetic data generated by GeoGen. Serving as a bridge between natural language and symbolic systems, GeoLogic enables symbolic tools to help verifying MLLM outputs, making the reasoning process more rigorous and alleviating hallucinations. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the performance of MLLMs, achieving remarkable results on benchmarks for geometric reasoning tasks. This improvement stems from our integration of the strengths of LLMs and symbolic systems, which enables a more reliable and interpretable approach for the GPS task. Codes are available at https://github.com/ycpNotFound/GeoGen.

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in video contexts remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation of LVLMs. Our work distinguishes from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the explicit narrative; 2) Fact-seeking question: targeting objective, undisputed events or relationships, avoiding subjective interpretation; 3) Definitive & short-form answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format, enabling automated evaluation through LLM-as-a-judge frameworks with minimal scoring variance; 4) External-source verified: All annotations undergo rigorous validation against authoritative external references to ensure the reliability; 5) Temporal reasoning required: The annotated question types encompass both static single-frame understanding and dynamic temporal reasoning, explicitly evaluating LVLMs factuality under the long-context dependencies. We extensively evaluate 41 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, particularly for open-source models. The best-performing model Gemini-1.5-Pro achieves merely an F-score of 54.4%; 2) Test-time compute paradigms show insignificant performance gains, revealing fundamental constraints for enhancing factuality through post-hoc computation; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead, presenting a critical efficiency-performance trade-off.

Skeleton and Font Generation Network for Zero-shot Chinese Character Generation

Automatic font generation remains a challenging research issue, primarily due to the vast number of Chinese characters, each with unique and intricate structures. Our investigation of previous studies reveals inherent bias capable of causing structural changes in characters. Specifically, when generating a Chinese character similar to, but different from, those in the training samples, the bias is prone to either correcting or ignoring these subtle variations. To address this concern, we propose a novel Skeleton and Font Generation Network (SFGN) to achieve a more robust Chinese character font generation. Our approach includes a skeleton builder and font generator. The skeleton builder synthesizes content features using low-resource text input, enabling our technique to realize font generation independently of content image inputs. Unlike previous font generation methods that treat font style as a global embedding, we introduce a font generator to align content and style features on the radical level, which is a brand-new perspective for font generation. Except for common characters, we also conduct experiments on misspelled characters, a substantial portion of which slightly differs from the common ones. Our approach visually demonstrates the efficacy of generated images and outperforms current state-of-the-art font generation methods. Moreover, we believe that misspelled character generation have significant pedagogical implications and verify such supposition through experiments. We used generated misspelled characters as data augmentation in Chinese character error correction tasks, simulating the scenario where students learn handwritten Chinese characters with the help of misspelled characters. The significantly improved performance of error correction tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach and the value of misspelled character generation.

DynamicLip: Shape-Independent Continuous Authentication via Lip Articulator Dynamics

Biometrics authentication has become increasingly popular due to its security and convenience; however, traditional biometrics are becoming less desirable in scenarios such as new mobile devices, Virtual Reality, and Smart Vehicles. For example, while face authentication is widely used, it suffers from significant privacy concerns. The collection of complete facial data makes it less desirable for privacy-sensitive applications. Lip authentication, on the other hand, has emerged as a promising biometrics method. However, existing lip-based authentication methods heavily depend on static lip shape when the mouth is closed, which can be less robust due to lip shape dynamic motion and can barely work when the user is speaking. In this paper, we revisit the nature of lip biometrics and extract shape-independent features from the lips. We study the dynamic characteristics of lip biometrics based on articulator motion. Building on the knowledge, we propose a system for shape-independent continuous authentication via lip articulator dynamics. This system enables robust, shape-independent and continuous authentication, making it particularly suitable for scenarios with high security and privacy requirements. We conducted comprehensive experiments in different environments and attack scenarios and collected a dataset of 50 subjects. The results indicate that our system achieves an overall accuracy of 99.06% and demonstrates robustness under advanced mimic attacks and AI deepfake attacks, making it a viable solution for continuous biometric authentication in various applications.

Joint Knowledge Editing for Information Enrichment and Probability Promotion

Knowledge stored in large language models requires timely updates to reflect the dynamic nature of real-world information. To update the knowledge, most knowledge editing methods focus on the low layers, since recent probes into the knowledge recall process reveal that the answer information is enriched in low layers. However, these probes only and could only reveal critical recall stages for the original answers, while the goal of editing is to rectify model's prediction for the target answers. This inconsistency indicates that both the probe approaches and the associated editing methods are deficient. To mitigate the inconsistency and identify critical editing regions, we propose a contrast-based probe approach, and locate two crucial stages where the model behavior diverges between the original and target answers: Information Enrichment in low layers and Probability Promotion in high layers. Building upon the insights, we develop the Joint knowledge Editing for information Enrichment and probability Promotion (JEEP) method, which jointly edits both the low and high layers to modify the two critical recall stages. Considering the mutual interference and growing forgetting due to dual modifications, JEEP is designed to ensure that updates to distinct regions share the same objectives and are complementary. We rigorously evaluate JEEP by editing up to thousands of facts on various models, i.e., GPT-J (6B) and LLaMA (7B), and addressing diverse editing objectives, i.e., adding factual and counterfactual knowledge. In all tested scenarios, JEEP achieves best performances, validating the effectiveness of the revealings of our probe approach and the designs of our editing method. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Eric8932/JEEP.

RFL: Simplifying Chemical Structure Recognition with Ring-Free Language

The primary objective of Optical Chemical Structure Recognition is to identify chemical structure images into corresponding markup sequences. However, the complex two-dimensional structures of molecules, particularly those with rings and multiple branches, present significant challenges for current end-to-end methods to learn one-dimensional markup directly. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Ring-Free Language (RFL), which utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy to describe chemical structures in a hierarchical form. RFL allows complex molecular structures to be decomposed into multiple parts, ensuring both uniqueness and conciseness while enhancing readability. This approach significantly reduces the learning difficulty for recognition models. Leveraging RFL, we propose a universal Molecular Skeleton Decoder (MSD), which comprises a skeleton generation module that progressively predicts the molecular skeleton and individual rings, along with a branch classification module for predicting branch information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RFL and MSD can be applied to various mainstream methods, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in both printed and handwritten scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/JingMog/RFL-MSD.