A Semantic Segmentation Algorithm for Pleural Effusion Based on DBIF-AUNet

Pleural effusion semantic segmentation can significantly enhance the accuracy and timeliness of clinical diagnosis and treatment by precisely identifying disease severity and lesion areas. Currently, semantic segmentation of pleural effusion CT images faces multiple challenges. These include similar gray levels between effusion and surrounding tissues, blurred edges, and variable morphology. Existing methods often struggle with diverse image variations and complex edges, primarily because direct feature concatenation causes semantic gaps. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Branch Interactive Fusion Attention model (DBIF-AUNet). This model constructs a densely nested skip-connection network and innovatively refines the Dual-Domain Feature Disentanglement module (DDFD). The DDFD module orthogonally decouples the functions of dual-domain modules to achieve multi-scale feature complementarity and enhance characteristics at different levels. Concurrently, we design a Branch Interaction Attention Fusion module (BIAF) that works synergistically with the DDFD. This module dynamically weights and fuses global, local, and frequency band features, thereby improving segmentation robustness. Furthermore, we implement a nested deep supervision mechanism with hierarchical adaptive hybrid loss to effectively address class imbalance. Through validation on 1,622 pleural effusion CT images from Southwest Hospital, DBIF-AUNet achieved IoU and Dice scores of 80.1% and 89.0% respectively. These results outperform state-of-the-art medical image segmentation models U-Net++ and Swin-UNet by 5.7%/2.7% and 2.2%/1.5% respectively, demonstrating significant optimization in segmentation accuracy for complex pleural effusion CT images.

Recurrent Visual Feature Extraction and Stereo Attentions for CT Report Generation

Generating reports for computed tomography (CT) images is a challenging task, while similar to existing studies for medical image report generation, yet has its unique characteristics, such as spatial encoding of multiple images, alignment between image volume and texts, etc. Existing solutions typically use general 2D or 3D image processing techniques to extract features from a CT volume, where they firstly compress the volume and then divide the compressed CT slices into patches for visual encoding. These approaches do not explicitly account for the transformations among CT slices, nor do they effectively integrate multi-level image features, particularly those containing specific organ lesions, to instruct CT report generation (CTRG). In considering the strong correlation among consecutive slices in CT scans, in this paper, we propose a large language model (LLM) based CTRG method with recurrent visual feature extraction and stereo attentions for hierarchical feature modeling. Specifically, we use a vision Transformer to recurrently process each slice in a CT volume, and employ a set of attentions over the encoded slices from different perspectives to selectively obtain important visual information and align them with textual features, so as to better instruct an LLM for CTRG. Experiment results and further analysis on the benchmark M3D-Cap dataset show that our method outperforms strong baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its validity and effectiveness.

Large Language Models Enhanced by Plug and Play Syntactic Knowledge for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) generally requires a deep understanding of the contextual information, including the words associated with the aspect terms and their syntactic dependencies. Most existing studies employ advanced encoders (e.g., pre-trained models) to capture such context, especially large language models (LLMs). However, training these encoders is resource-intensive, and in many cases, the available data is insufficient for necessary fine-tuning. Therefore it is challenging for learning LLMs within such restricted environments and computation efficiency requirement. As a result, it motivates the exploration of plug-and-play methods that adapt LLMs to ABSA with minimal effort. In this paper, we propose an approach that integrates extendable components capable of incorporating various types of syntactic knowledge, such as constituent syntax, word dependencies, and combinatory categorial grammar (CCG). Specifically, we propose a memory module that records syntactic information and is incorporated into LLMs to instruct the prediction of sentiment polarities. Importantly, this encoder acts as a versatile, detachable plugin that is trained independently of the LLM. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets, which show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and previous approaches, thus demonstrates its effectiveness.

Representation Decomposition for Learning Similarity and Contrastness Across Modalities for Affective Computing

Multi-modal affective computing aims to automatically recognize and interpret human attitudes from diverse data sources such as images and text, thereby enhancing human-computer interaction and emotion understanding. Existing approaches typically rely on unimodal analysis or straightforward fusion of cross-modal information that fail to capture complex and conflicting evidence presented across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-based approach for affective computing that explicitly deconstructs visual and textual representations into shared (modality-invariant) and modality-specific components. Specifically, our approach firstly encodes and aligns input modalities using pre-trained multi-modal encoders, then employs a representation decomposition framework to separate common emotional content from unique cues, and finally integrates these decomposed signals via an attention mechanism to form a dynamic soft prompt for a multi-modal LLM. Extensive experiments on three representative tasks for affective computing, namely, multi-modal aspect-based sentiment analysis, multi-modal emotion analysis, and hateful meme detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art models.

ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{ForceVLA}, a novel end-to-end manipulation framework that treats external force sensing as a first-class modality within VLA systems. ForceVLA introduces \textbf{FVLMoE}, a force-aware Mixture-of-Experts fusion module that dynamically integrates pretrained visual-language embeddings with real-time 6-axis force feedback during action decoding. This enables context-aware routing across modality-specific experts, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to subtle contact dynamics. We also introduce \textbf{ForceVLA-Data}, a new dataset comprising synchronized vision, proprioception, and force-torque signals across five contact-rich manipulation tasks. ForceVLA improves average task success by 23.2\% over strong $\pi_0$-based baselines, achieving up to 80\% success in tasks such as plug insertion. Our approach highlights the importance of multimodal integration for dexterous manipulation and sets a new benchmark for physically intelligent robotic control. Code and data will be released at https://sites.google.com/view/forcevla2025.

DNAZEN: Enhanced Gene Sequence Representations via Mixed Granularities of Coding Units

Genome modeling conventionally treats gene sequence as a language, reflecting its structured motifs and long-range dependencies analogous to linguistic units and organization principles such as words and syntax. Recent studies utilize advanced neural networks, ranging from convolutional and recurrent models to Transformer-based models, to capture contextual information of gene sequence, with the primary goal of obtaining effective gene sequence representations and thus enhance the models' understanding of various running gene samples. However, these approaches often directly apply language modeling techniques to gene sequences and do not fully consider the intrinsic information organization in them, where they do not consider how units at different granularities contribute to representation. In this paper, we propose DNAZEN, an enhanced genomic representation framework designed to learn from various granularities in gene sequences, including small polymers and G-grams that are combinations of several contiguous polymers. Specifically, we extract the G-grams from large-scale genomic corpora through an unsupervised approach to construct the G-gram vocabulary, which is used to provide G-grams in the learning process of DNA sequences through dynamically matching from running gene samples. A Transformer-based G-gram encoder is also proposed and the matched G-grams are fed into it to compute their representations and integrated into the encoder for basic unit (E4BU), which is responsible for encoding small units and maintaining the learning and inference process. To further enhance the learning process, we propose whole G-gram masking to train DNAZEN, where the model largely favors the selection of each entire G-gram to mask rather than an ordinary masking mechanism performed on basic units. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DNAZEN on various downstream tasks.

Multimodal Conditioned Diffusive Time Series Forecasting

Diffusion models achieve remarkable success in processing images and text, and have been extended to special domains such as time series forecasting (TSF). Existing diffusion-based approaches for TSF primarily focus on modeling single-modality numerical sequences, overlooking the rich multimodal information in time series data. To effectively leverage such information for prediction, we propose a multimodal conditioned diffusion model for TSF, namely, MCD-TSF, to jointly utilize timestamps and texts as extra guidance for time series modeling, especially for forecasting. Specifically, Timestamps are combined with time series to establish temporal and semantic correlations among different data points when aggregating information along the temporal dimension. Texts serve as supplementary descriptions of time series' history, and adaptively aligned with data points as well as dynamically controlled in a classifier-free manner. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets across eight domains demonstrate that the proposed MCD-TSF model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Recent research on Reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sought to further enhance their performance by integrating meta-thinking -- enabling models to monitor, evaluate, and control their reasoning processes for more adaptive and effective problem-solving. However, current single-agent work lacks a specialized design for acquiring meta-thinking, resulting in low efficacy. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforced Meta-thinking Agents (ReMA), a novel framework that leverages Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to elicit meta-thinking behaviors, encouraging LLMs to think about thinking. ReMA decouples the reasoning process into two hierarchical agents: a high-level meta-thinking agent responsible for generating strategic oversight and plans, and a low-level reasoning agent for detailed executions. Through iterative reinforcement learning with aligned objectives, these agents explore and learn collaboration, leading to improved generalization and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that ReMA outperforms single-agent RL baselines on complex reasoning tasks, including competitive-level mathematical benchmarks and LLM-as-a-Judge benchmarks. Comprehensive ablation studies further illustrate the evolving dynamics of each distinct agent, providing valuable insights into how the meta-thinking reasoning process enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

From Target Tracking to Targeting Track -- Part II: Regularized Polynomial Trajectory Optimization

Target tracking entails the estimation of the evolution of the target state over time, namely the target trajectory. Different from the classical state space model, our series of studies, including this paper, model the collection of the target state as a stochastic process (SP) that is further decomposed into a deterministic part which represents the trend of the trajectory and a residual SP representing the residual fitting error. Subsequently, the tracking problem is formulated as a learning problem regarding the trajectory SP for which a key part is to estimate a trajectory FoT (T-FoT) best fitting the measurements in time series. For this purpose, we consider the polynomial T-FoT and address the regularized polynomial T-FoT optimization employing two distinct regularization strategies seeking trade-off between the accuracy and simplicity. One limits the order of the polynomial and then the best choice is determined by grid searching in a narrow, bounded range while the other adopts $\ell_0$ norm regularization for which the hybrid Newton solver is employed. Simulation results obtained in both single and multiple maneuvering target scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

ThinkBench: Dynamic Out-of-Distribution Evaluation for Robust LLM Reasoning

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) poses significant challenges, particularly due to issues of data contamination and the leakage of correct answers. To address these challenges, we introduce ThinkBench, a novel evaluation framework designed to evaluate LLMs' reasoning capability robustly. ThinkBench proposes a dynamic data generation method for constructing out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets and offers an OOD dataset that contains 2,912 samples drawn from reasoning tasks. ThinkBench unifies the evaluation of reasoning models and non-reasoning models. We evaluate 16 LLMs and 4 PRMs under identical experimental conditions and show that most of the LLMs' performance are far from robust and they face a certain level of data leakage. By dynamically generating OOD datasets, ThinkBench effectively provides a reliable evaluation of LLMs and reduces the impact of data contamination.