HiCI: Hierarchical Construction-Integration for Long-Context Attention

Long-context language modeling is commonly framed as a scalability challenge of token-level attention, yet local-to-global information structuring remains largely implicit in existing approaches. Drawing on cognitive theories of discourse comprehension, we propose HiCI (Hierarchical Construction--Integration), a hierarchical attention module that constructs segment-level representations, integrates them into a shared global context, and broadcasts both to condition segment-level attention. We validate HiCI through parameter-efficient adaptation of LLaMA-2 with only <5.5% additional parameters, extending context from 4K to 100K tokens (7B) and 64K tokens (13B). Across language modeling, retrieval, and instruction-following benchmarks, HiCI yields consistent improvements over strong baselines, including matching proprietary models on topic retrieval and surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K on code comprehension. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit hierarchical structuring as an inductive bias for long-context modeling.

Reversible Lifelong Model Editing via Semantic Routing-Based LoRA

The dynamic evolution of real-world necessitates model editing within Large Language Models. While existing methods explore modular isolation or parameter-efficient strategies, they still suffer from semantic drift or knowledge forgetting due to continual updating. To address these challenges, we propose SoLA, a Semantic routing-based LoRA framework for lifelong model editing. In SoLA, each edit is encapsulated as an independent LoRA module, which is frozen after training and mapped to input by semantic routing, allowing dynamic activation of LoRA modules via semantic matching. This mechanism avoids semantic drift caused by cluster updating and mitigates catastrophic forgetting from parameter sharing. More importantly, SoLA supports precise revocation of specific edits by removing key from semantic routing, which restores model's original behavior. To our knowledge, this reversible rollback editing capability is the first to be achieved in existing literature. Furthermore, SoLA integrates decision-making process into edited layer, eliminating the need for auxiliary routing networks and enabling end-to-end decision-making process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoLA effectively learns and retains edited knowledge, achieving accurate, efficient, and reversible lifelong model editing.

Representation Finetuning for Continual Learning

The world is inherently dynamic, and continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to ever-evolving data streams. While pre-trained models have shown powerful performance in continual learning, they still require finetuning to adapt effectively to downstream tasks. However, prevailing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods operate through empirical, black-box optimization at the weight level. These approaches lack explicit control over representation drift, leading to sensitivity to domain shifts and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning scenarios. In this work, we introduce Continual Representation Learning (CoRe), a novel framework that for the first time shifts the finetuning paradigm from weight space to representation space. Unlike conventional methods, CoRe performs task-specific interventions within a low-rank linear subspace of hidden representations, adopting a learning process with explicit objectives, which ensures stability for past tasks while maintaining plasticity for new ones. By constraining updates to a low-rank subspace, CoRe achieves exceptional parameter efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple continual learning benchmarks demonstrate that CoRe not only preserves parameter efficiency but also significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work introduces representation finetuning as a new, more effective and interpretable paradigm for continual learning.

A Simple Efficiency Incremental Learning Framework via Vision-Language Model with Nonlinear Multi-Adapters

Incremental Learning (IL) aims to learn new tasks while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Integrating the zero-shot learning capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models into IL methods has marked a significant advancement. However, these methods face three primary challenges: (1) the need for improved training efficiency; (2) reliance on a memory bank to store previous data; and (3) the necessity of a strong backbone to augment the model's capabilities. In this paper, we propose SimE, a Simple and Efficient framework that employs a vision-language model with adapters designed specifically for the IL task. We report a remarkable phenomenon: there is a nonlinear correlation between the number of adaptive adapter connections and the model's IL capabilities. While increasing adapter connections between transformer blocks improves model performance, adding more adaptive connections within transformer blocks during smaller incremental steps does not enhance, and may even degrade the model's IL ability. Extensive experimental results show that SimE surpasses traditional methods by 9.6% on TinyImageNet and outperforms other CLIP-based methods by 5.3% on CIFAR-100. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic study to enhance the utilization of the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. We suggest replacing SimE's encoder with a CLIP model trained on larger datasets (e.g., LAION2B) and stronger architectures (e.g., ViT-L/14).

DT-BEHRT: Disease Trajectory-aware Transformer for Interpretable Patient Representation Learning

The growing adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems has provided unprecedented opportunities for predictive modeling to guide clinical decision making. Structured EHRs contain longitudinal observations of patients across hospital visits, where each visit is represented by a set of medical codes. While sequence-based, graph-based, and graph-enhanced sequence approaches have been developed to capture rich code interactions over time or within the same visits, they often overlook the inherent heterogeneous roles of medical codes arising from distinct clinical characteristics and contexts. To this end, in this study we propose the Disease Trajectory-aware Transformer for EHR (DT-BEHRT), a graph-enhanced sequential architecture that disentangles disease trajectories by explicitly modeling diagnosis-centric interactions within organ systems and capturing asynchronous progression patterns. To further enhance the representation robustness, we design a tailored pre-training methodology that combines trajectory-level code masking with ontology-informed ancestor prediction, promoting semantic alignment across multiple modeling modules. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DT-BEHRT achieves strong predictive performance and provides interpretable patient representations that align with clinicians' disease-centered reasoning. The source code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/GatorAIM/DT-BEHRT.git.

ULW-SleepNet: An Ultra-Lightweight Network for Multimodal Sleep Stage Scoring

Automatic sleep stage scoring is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Although deep learning models have advanced the field, many existing models are computationally demanding and designed for single-channel electroencephalography (EEG), limiting their practicality for multimodal polysomnography (PSG) data. To overcome this, we propose ULW-SleepNet, an ultra-lightweight multimodal sleep stage scoring framework that efficiently integrates information from multiple physiological signals. ULW-SleepNet incorporates a novel Dual-Stream Separable Convolution (DSSC) Block, depthwise separable convolutions, channel-wise parameter sharing, and global average pooling to reduce computational overhead while maintaining competitive accuracy. Evaluated on the Sleep-EDF-20 and Sleep-EDF-78 datasets, ULW-SleepNet achieves accuracies of 86.9% and 81.4%, respectively, with only 13.3K parameters and 7.89M FLOPs. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our model reduces parameters by up to 98.6% with only marginal performance loss, demonstrating its strong potential for real-time sleep monitoring on wearable and IoT devices. The source code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/wzw999/ULW-SLEEPNET.

Causal Decoding for Hallucination-Resistant Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deliver detailed responses on vision-language tasks, yet remain susceptible to object hallucination (introducing objects not present in the image), undermining reliability in practice. Prior efforts often rely on heuristic penalties, post-hoc correction, or generic decoding tweaks, which do not directly intervene in the mechanisms that trigger object hallucination and thus yield limited gains. To address this challenge, we propose a causal decoding framework that applies targeted causal interventions during generation to curb spurious object mentions. By reshaping the decoding dynamics to attenuate spurious dependencies, our approach reduces false object tokens while maintaining descriptive quality. Across captioning and QA benchmarks, our framework substantially lowers object-hallucination rates and achieves state-of-the-art faithfulness without degrading overall output quality.

Key-Value Pair-Free Continual Learner via Task-Specific Prompt-Prototype

Continual learning aims to enable models to acquire new knowledge while retaining previously learned information. Prompt-based methods have shown remarkable performance in this domain; however, they typically rely on key-value pairing, which can introduce inter-task interference and hinder scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach employing task-specific Prompt-Prototype (ProP), thereby eliminating the need for key-value pairs. In our method, task-specific prompts facilitate more effective feature learning for the current task, while corresponding prototypes capture the representative features of the input. During inference, predictions are generated by binding each task-specific prompt with its associated prototype. Additionally, we introduce regularization constraints during prompt initialization to penalize excessively large values, thereby enhancing stability. Experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In contrast to mainstream prompt-based approaches, our framework removes the dependency on key-value pairs, offering a fresh perspective for future continual learning research.

AVM: Towards Structure-Preserving Neural Response Modeling in the Visual Cortex Across Stimuli and Individuals

While deep learning models have shown strong performance in simulating neural responses, they often fail to clearly separate stable visual encoding from condition-specific adaptation, which limits their ability to generalize across stimuli and individuals. We introduce the Adaptive Visual Model (AVM), a structure-preserving framework that enables condition-aware adaptation through modular subnetworks, without modifying the core representation. AVM keeps a Vision Transformer-based encoder frozen to capture consistent visual features, while independently trained modulation paths account for neural response variations driven by stimulus content and subject identity. We evaluate AVM in three experimental settings, including stimulus-level variation, cross-subject generalization, and cross-dataset adaptation, all of which involve structured changes in inputs and individuals. Across two large-scale mouse V1 datasets, AVM outperforms the state-of-the-art V1T model by approximately 2% in predictive correlation, demonstrating robust generalization, interpretable condition-wise modulation, and high architectural efficiency. Specifically, AVM achieves a 9.1% improvement in explained variance (FEVE) under the cross-dataset adaptation setting. These results suggest that AVM provides a unified framework for adaptive neural modeling across biological and experimental conditions, offering a scalable solution under structural constraints. Its design may inform future approaches to cortical modeling in both neuroscience and biologically inspired AI systems.

Distillation-Guided Structural Transfer for Continual Learning Beyond Sparse Distributed Memory

Sparse neural systems are gaining traction for efficient continual learning due to their modularity and low interference. Architectures such as Sparse Distributed Memory Multi-Layer Perceptrons (SDMLP) construct task-specific subnetworks via Top-K activation and have shown resilience against catastrophic forgetting. However, their rigid modularity limits cross-task knowledge reuse and leads to performance degradation under high sparsity. We propose Selective Subnetwork Distillation (SSD), a structurally guided continual learning framework that treats distillation not as a regularizer but as a topology-aligned information conduit. SSD identifies neurons with high activation frequency and selectively distills knowledge within previous Top-K subnetworks and output logits, without requiring replay or task labels. This enables structural realignment while preserving sparse modularity. Experiments on Split CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST demonstrate that SSD improves accuracy, retention, and representation coverage, offering a structurally grounded solution for sparse continual learning.