DEEPMED: Building a Medical DeepResearch Agent via Multi-hop Med-Search Data and Turn-Controlled Agentic Training & Inference

Medical reasoning models remain constrained by parametric knowledge and are thus susceptible to forgetting and hallucinations. DeepResearch (DR) models ground outputs in verifiable evidence from tools and perform strongly in general domains, but their direct transfer to medical field yields relatively limited gains. We attribute this to two gaps: task characteristic and tool-use scaling. Medical questions require evidence interpretation in a knowledge-intensive clinical context; while general DR models can retrieve information, they often lack clinical-context reasoning and thus "find it but fail to use it," leaving performance limited by medical abilities. Moreover, in medical scenarios, blindly scaling tool-call can inject noisy context, derailing sensitive medical reasoning and prompting repetitive evidence-seeking along incorrect paths. Therefore, we propose DeepMed. For data, we deploy a multi-hop med-search QA synthesis method supporting the model to apply the DR paradigm in medical contexts. For training, we introduce a difficulty-aware turn-penalty to suppress excessive tool-call growth. For inference, we bring a monitor to help validate hypotheses within a controlled number of steps and avoid context rot. Overall, on seven medical benchmarks, DeepMed improves its base model by 9.79\% on average and outperforms larger medical reasoning and DR models.

One-Shot Federated Clustering of Non-Independent Completely Distributed Data

Federated Learning (FL) that extracts data knowledge while protecting the privacy of multiple clients has achieved remarkable results in distributed privacy-preserving IoT systems, including smart traffic flow monitoring, smart grid load balancing, and so on. Since most data collected from edge devices are unlabeled, unsupervised Federated Clustering (FC) is becoming increasingly popular for exploring pattern knowledge from complex distributed data. However, due to the lack of label guidance, the common Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) issue of clients have greatly challenged FC by posing the following problems: How to fuse pattern knowledge (i.e., cluster distribution) from Non-IID clients; How are the cluster distributions among clients related; and How does this relationship connect with the global knowledge fusion? In this paper, a more tricky but overlooked phenomenon in Non-IID is revealed, which bottlenecks the clustering performance of the existing FC approaches. That is, different clients could fragment a cluster, and accordingly, a more generalized Non-IID concept, i.e., Non-ICD (Non-Independent Completely Distributed), is derived. To tackle the above FC challenges, a new framework named GOLD (Global Oriented Local Distribution Learning) is proposed. GOLD first finely explores the potential incomplete local cluster distributions of clients, then uploads the distribution summarization to the server for global fusion, and finally performs local cluster enhancement under the guidance of the global distribution. Extensive experiments, including significance tests, ablation studies, scalability evaluations, qualitative results, etc., have been conducted to show the superiority of GOLD.

Robust Categorical Data Clustering Guided by Multi-Granular Competitive Learning

Data set composed of categorical features is very common in big data analysis tasks. Since categorical features are usually with a limited number of qualitative possible values, the nested granular cluster effect is prevalent in the implicit discrete distance space of categorical data. That is, data objects frequently overlap in space or subspace to form small compact clusters, and similar small clusters often form larger clusters. However, the distance space cannot be well-defined like the Euclidean distance due to the qualitative categorical data values, which brings great challenges to the cluster analysis of categorical data. In view of this, we design a Multi-Granular Competitive Penalization Learning (MGCPL) algorithm to allow potential clusters to interactively tune themselves and converge in stages with different numbers of naturally compact clusters. To leverage MGCPL, we also propose a Cluster Aggregation strategy based on MGCPL Encoding (CAME) to first encode the data objects according to the learned multi-granular distributions, and then perform final clustering on the embeddings. It turns out that the proposed MGCPL-guided Categorical Data Clustering (MCDC) approach is competent in automatically exploring the nested distribution of multi-granular clusters and highly robust to categorical data sets from various domains. Benefiting from its linear time complexity, MCDC is scalable to large-scale data sets and promising in pre-partitioning data sets or compute nodes for boosting distributed computing. Extensive experiments with statistical evidence demonstrate its superiority compared to state-of-the-art counterparts on various real public data sets.

SAD: A Large-Scale Strategic Argumentative Dialogue Dataset

Argumentation generation has attracted substantial research interest due to its central role in human reasoning and decision-making. However, most existing argumentative corpora focus on non-interactive, single-turn settings, either generating arguments from a given topic or refuting an existing argument. In practice, however, argumentation is often realized as multi-turn dialogue, where speakers defend their stances and employ diverse argumentative strategies to strengthen persuasiveness. To support deeper modeling of argumentation dialogue, we present the first large-scale \textbf{S}trategic \textbf{A}rgumentative \textbf{D}ialogue dataset, SAD, consisting of 392,822 examples. Grounded in argumentation theories, we annotate each utterance with five strategy types, allowing multiple strategies per utterance. Unlike prior datasets, SAD requires models to generate contextually appropriate arguments conditioned on the dialogue history, a specified stance on the topic, and targeted argumentation strategies. We further benchmark a range of pretrained generative models on SAD and present in-depth analysis of strategy usage patterns in argumentation.

TFEC: Multivariate Time-Series Clustering via Temporal-Frequency Enhanced Contrastive Learning

Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) clustering is crucial for signal processing and data analysis. Although deep learning approaches, particularly those leveraging Contrastive Learning (CL), are prominent for MTS representation, existing CL-based models face two key limitations: 1) neglecting clustering information during positive/negative sample pair construction, and 2) introducing unreasonable inductive biases, e.g., destroying time dependence and periodicity through augmentation strategies, compromising representation quality. This paper, therefore, proposes a Temporal-Frequency Enhanced Contrastive (TFEC) learning framework. To preserve temporal structure while generating low-distortion representations, a temporal-frequency Co-EnHancement (CoEH) mechanism is introduced. Accordingly, a synergistic dual-path representation and cluster distribution learning framework is designed to jointly optimize cluster structure and representation fidelity. Experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate TFEC's superiority, achieving 4.48% average NMI gains over SOTA methods, with ablation studies validating the design. The code of the paper is available at: https://github.com/yueliangy/TFEC.

LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing

Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the most suitable model from an ensemble. We introduce LLMRouterBench, a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing. It comprises over 400K instances from 21 datasets and 33 models. Moreover, it provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented routing and performance-cost trade-off routing, and integrates 10 representative routing baselines. Using LLMRouterBench, we systematically re-evaluate the field. While confirming strong model complementarity-the central premise of LLM routing-we find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation, and several recent approaches, including commercial routers, fail to reliably outperform a simple baseline. Meanwhile, a substantial gap remains to the Oracle, driven primarily by persistent model-recall failures. We further show that backbone embedding models have limited impact, that larger ensembles exhibit diminishing returns compared to careful model curation, and that the benchmark also enables latency-aware analysis. All code and data are available at https://github.com/ynulihao/LLMRouterBench.

One-Shot Hierarchical Federated Clustering

Driven by the growth of Web-scale decentralized services, Federated Clustering (FC) aims to extract knowledge from heterogeneous clients in an unsupervised manner while preserving the clients' privacy, which has emerged as a significant challenge due to the lack of label guidance and the Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) nature of clients. In real scenarios such as personalized recommendation and cross-device user profiling, the global cluster may be fragmented and distributed among different clients, and the clusters may exist at different granularities or even nested. Although Hierarchical Clustering (HC) is considered promising for exploring such distributions, the sophisticated recursive clustering process makes it more computationally expensive and vulnerable to privacy exposure, thus relatively unexplored under the federated learning scenario. This paper introduces an efficient one-shot hierarchical FC framework that performs client-end distribution exploration and server-end distribution aggregation through one-way prototype-level communication from clients to the server. A fine partition mechanism is developed to generate successive clusterlets to describe the complex landscape of the clients' clusters. Then, a multi-granular learning mechanism on the server is proposed to fuse the clusterlets, even when they have inconsistent granularities generated from different clients. It turns out that the complex cluster distributions across clients can be efficiently explored, and extensive experiments comparing state-of-the-art methods on ten public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Detecting Autism Spectrum Disorder with Deep Eye Movement Features

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and behavioral patterns. Eye movement data offers a non-invasive diagnostic tool for ASD detection, as it is inherently discrete and exhibits short-term temporal dependencies, reflecting localized gaze focus between fixation points. These characteristics enable the data to provide deeper insights into subtle behavioral markers, distinguishing ASD-related patterns from typical development. Eye movement signals mainly contain short-term and localized dependencies. However, despite the widespread application of stacked attention layers in Transformer-based models for capturing long-range dependencies, our experimental results indicate that this approach yields only limited benefits when applied to eye movement data. This may be because discrete fixation points and short-term dependencies in gaze focus reduce the utility of global attention mechanisms, making them less efficient than architectures focusing on local temporal patterns. To efficiently capture subtle and complex eye movement patterns, distinguishing ASD from typically developing (TD) individuals, a discrete short-term sequential (DSTS) modeling framework is designed with Class-aware Representation and Imbalance-aware Mechanisms. Through extensive experiments on several eye movement datasets, DSTS outperforms both traditional machine learning techniques and more sophisticated deep learning models.

Bridging the Semantic Gap for Categorical Data Clustering via Large Language Models

Categorical data are prevalent in domains such as healthcare, marketing, and bioinformatics, where clustering serves as a fundamental tool for pattern discovery. A core challenge in categorical data clustering lies in measuring similarity among attribute values that lack inherent ordering or distance. Without appropriate similarity measures, values are often treated as equidistant, creating a semantic gap that obscures latent structures and degrades clustering quality. Although existing methods infer value relationships from within-dataset co-occurrence patterns, such inference becomes unreliable when samples are limited, leaving the semantic context of the data underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present ARISE (Attention-weighted Representation with Integrated Semantic Embeddings), which draws on external semantic knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct semantic-aware representations that complement the metric space of categorical data for accurate clustering. That is, LLM is adopted to describe attribute values for representation enhancement, and the LLM-enhanced embeddings are combined with the original data to explore semantically prominent clusters. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over seven representative counterparts, with gains of 19-27%. Code is available at https://github.com/develop-yang/ARISE

Single-Agent Scaling Fails Multi-Agent Intelligence: Towards Foundation Models with Native Multi-Agent Intelligence

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly assuming the role of the ''brain'' of AI agents. While recent efforts have begun to equip FMs with native single-agent abilities -- such as GUI interaction or integrated tool use -- we argue that the next frontier is endowing FMs with native multi-agent intelligence. We identify four core capabilities of FMs in multi-agent contexts: understanding, planning, efficient communication, and adaptation. Contrary to assumptions about the spontaneous emergence of such abilities, we provide extensive empirical evidence, across 41 large language models and 7 challenging benchmarks, showing that scaling single-agent performance alone does not automatically yield robust multi-agent intelligence. To address this gap, we outline key research directions -- spanning dataset construction, evaluation, training paradigms, and safety considerations -- for building FMs with native multi-agent intelligence.