FEAT: A Multi-Agent Forensic AI System with Domain-Adapted Large Language Model for Automated Cause-of-Death Analysis

Forensic cause-of-death determination faces systemic challenges, including workforce shortages and diagnostic variability, particularly in high-volume systems like China's medicolegal infrastructure. We introduce FEAT (ForEnsic AgenT), a multi-agent AI framework that automates and standardizes death investigations through a domain-adapted large language model. FEAT's application-oriented architecture integrates: (i) a central Planner for task decomposition, (ii) specialized Local Solvers for evidence analysis, (iii) a Memory & Reflection module for iterative refinement, and (iv) a Global Solver for conclusion synthesis. The system employs tool-augmented reasoning, hierarchical retrieval-augmented generation, forensic-tuned LLMs, and human-in-the-loop feedback to ensure legal and medical validity. In evaluations across diverse Chinese case cohorts, FEAT outperformed state-of-the-art AI systems in both long-form autopsy analyses and concise cause-of-death conclusions. It demonstrated robust generalization across six geographic regions and achieved high expert concordance in blinded validations. Senior pathologists validated FEAT's outputs as comparable to those of human experts, with improved detection of subtle evidentiary nuances. To our knowledge, FEAT is the first LLM-based AI agent system dedicated to forensic medicine, offering scalable, consistent death certification while maintaining expert-level rigor. By integrating AI efficiency with human oversight, this work could advance equitable access to reliable medicolegal services while addressing critical capacity constraints in forensic systems.

Large-vocabulary forensic pathological analyses via prototypical cross-modal contrastive learning

Forensic pathology is critical in determining the cause and manner of death through post-mortem examinations, both macroscopic and microscopic. The field, however, grapples with issues such as outcome variability, laborious processes, and a scarcity of trained professionals. This paper presents SongCi, an innovative visual-language model (VLM) designed specifically for forensic pathology. SongCi utilizes advanced prototypical cross-modal self-supervised contrastive learning to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability of forensic analyses. It was pre-trained and evaluated on a comprehensive multi-center dataset, which includes over 16 million high-resolution image patches, 2,228 vision-language pairs of post-mortem whole slide images (WSIs), and corresponding gross key findings, along with 471 distinct diagnostic outcomes. Our findings indicate that SongCi surpasses existing multi-modal AI models in many forensic pathology tasks, performs comparably to experienced forensic pathologists and significantly better than less experienced ones, and provides detailed multi-modal explainability, offering critical assistance in forensic investigations. To the best of our knowledge, SongCi is the first VLM specifically developed for forensic pathological analysis and the first large-vocabulary computational pathology (CPath) model that directly processes gigapixel WSIs in forensic science.

Jointly Sparse Signal Recovery and Support Recovery via Deep Learning with Applications in MIMO-based Grant-Free Random Access

In this paper, we investigate jointly sparse signal recovery and jointly sparse support recovery in Multiple Measurement Vector (MMV) models for complex signals, which arise in many applications in communications and signal processing. Recent key applications include channel estimation and device activity detection in MIMO-based grant-free random access which is proposed to support massive machine-type communications (mMTC) for Internet of Things (IoT). Utilizing techniques in compressive sensing, optimization and deep learning, we propose two model-driven approaches, based on the standard auto-encoder structure for real numbers. One is to jointly design the common measurement matrix and jointly sparse signal recovery method, and the other aims to jointly design the common measurement matrix and jointly sparse support recovery method. The proposed model-driven approaches can effectively utilize features of sparsity patterns in designing common measurement matrices and adjusting model-driven decoders, and can greatly benefit from the underlying state-of-the-art recovery methods with theoretical guarantee. Hence, the obtained common measurement matrices and recovery methods can significantly outperform the underlying advanced recovery methods. We conduct extensive numerical results on channel estimation and device activity detection in MIMO-based grant-free random access. The numerical results show that the proposed approaches provide pilot sequences and channel estimation or device activity detection methods which can achieve higher estimation or detection accuracy with shorter computation time than existing ones. Furthermore, the numerical results explain how such gains are achieved via the proposed approaches.