Advancing Email Spam Detection: Leveraging Zero-Shot Learning and Large Language Models

Email spam detection is a critical task in modern communication systems, essential for maintaining productivity, security, and user experience. Traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches, while effective in static settings, face significant limitations in adapting to evolving spam tactics, addressing class imbalance, and managing data scarcity. These challenges necessitate innovative approaches that reduce dependency on extensive labeled datasets and frequent retraining. This study investigates the effectiveness of Zero-Shot Learning using FLAN-T5, combined with advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as BERT for email spam detection. By employing BERT to preprocess and extract critical information from email content, and FLAN-T5 to classify emails in a Zero-Shot framework, the proposed approach aims to address the limitations of traditional spam detection systems. The integration of FLAN-T5 and BERT enables robust spam detection without relying on extensive labeled datasets or frequent retraining, making it highly adaptable to unseen spam patterns and adversarial environments. This research highlights the potential of leveraging zero-shot learning and NLPs for scalable and efficient spam detection, providing insights into their capability to address the dynamic and challenging nature of spam detection tasks.

Can Language Models Understand Social Behavior in Clinical Conversations?

Effective communication between providers and their patients influences health and care outcomes. The effectiveness of such conversations has been linked not only to the exchange of clinical information, but also to a range of interpersonal behaviors; commonly referred to as social signals, which are often conveyed through non-verbal cues and shape the quality of the patient-provider relationship. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an increasing ability to infer emotional and social behaviors even when analyzing only textual information. As automation increases also in clinical settings, such as for transcription of patient-provider conversations, there is growing potential for LLMs to automatically analyze and extract social behaviors from these interactions. To explore the foundational capabilities of LLMs in tracking social signals in clinical dialogue, we designed task-specific prompts and evaluated model performance across multiple architectures and prompting styles using a highly imbalanced, annotated dataset spanning 20 distinct social signals such as provider dominance, patient warmth, etc. We present the first system capable of tracking all these 20 coded signals, and uncover patterns in LLM behavior. Further analysis of model configurations and clinical context provides insights for enhancing LLM performance on social signal processing tasks in healthcare settings.

fastabx: A library for efficient computation of ABX discriminability

We introduce fastabx, a high-performance Python library for building ABX discrimination tasks. ABX is a measure of the separation between generic categories of interest. It has been used extensively to evaluate phonetic discriminability in self-supervised speech representations. However, its broader adoption has been limited by the absence of adequate tools. fastabx addresses this gap by providing a framework capable of constructing any type of ABX task while delivering the efficiency necessary for rapid development cycles, both in task creation and in calculating distances between representations. We believe that fastabx will serve as a valuable resource for the broader representation learning community, enabling researchers to systematically investigate what information can be directly extracted from learned representations across several domains beyond speech processing. The source code is available at https://github.com/bootphon/fastabx.

Learning Item Representations Directly from Multimodal Features for Effective Recommendation

Conventional multimodal recommender systems predominantly leverage Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) optimization to learn item representations by amalgamating item identity (ID) embeddings with multimodal features. Nevertheless, our empirical and theoretical findings unequivocally demonstrate a pronounced optimization gradient bias in favor of acquiring representations from multimodal features over item ID embeddings. As a consequence, item ID embeddings frequently exhibit suboptimal characteristics despite the convergence of multimodal feature parameters. Given the rich informational content inherent in multimodal features, in this paper, we propose a novel model (i.e., LIRDRec) that learns item representations directly from these features to augment recommendation performance. Recognizing that features derived from each modality may capture disparate yet correlated aspects of items, we propose a multimodal transformation mechanism, integrated with modality-specific encoders, to effectively fuse features from all modalities. Moreover, to differentiate the influence of diverse modality types, we devise a progressive weight copying fusion module within LIRDRec. This module incrementally learns the weight assigned to each modality in synthesizing the final user or item representations. Finally, we utilize the powerful visual understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to convert the item images into texts and extract semantics embeddings upon the texts via LLMs. Empirical evaluations conducted on five real-world datasets validate the superiority of our approach relative to competing baselines. It is worth noting the proposed model, equipped with embeddings extracted from MLLMs and LLMs, can further improve the recommendation accuracy of NDCG@20 by an average of 4.21% compared to the original embeddings.

A Fusion-Guided Inception Network for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

The fusion of low-spatial-resolution hyperspectral images (HSIs) with high-spatial-resolution conventional images (e.g., panchromatic or RGB) has played a significant role in recent advancements in HSI super-resolution. However, this fusion process relies on the availability of precise alignment between image pairs, which is often challenging in real-world scenarios. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a single-image super-resolution model called the Fusion-Guided Inception Network (FGIN). Specifically, we first employ a spectral-spatial fusion module to effectively integrate spectral and spatial information at an early stage. Next, an Inception-like hierarchical feature extraction strategy is used to capture multiscale spatial dependencies, followed by a dedicated multi-scale fusion block. To further enhance reconstruction quality, we incorporate an optimized upsampling module that combines bilinear interpolation with depthwise separable convolutions. Experimental evaluations on two publicly available hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our method.

Token Coordinated Prompt Attention is Needed for Visual Prompting

Visual prompting techniques are widely used to efficiently fine-tune pretrained Vision Transformers (ViT) by learning a small set of shared prompts for all tokens. However, existing methods overlook the unique roles of different tokens in conveying discriminative information and interact with all tokens using the same prompts, thereby limiting the representational capacity of ViT. This often leads to indistinguishable and biased prompt-extracted features, hindering performance. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play Token Coordinated Prompt Attention (TCPA) module, which assigns specific coordinated prompts to different tokens for attention-based interactions. Firstly, recognizing the distinct functions of CLS and image tokens-global information aggregation and local feature extraction, we disentangle the prompts into CLS Prompts and Image Prompts, which interact exclusively with CLS tokens and image tokens through attention mechanisms. This enhances their respective discriminative abilities. Furthermore, as different image tokens correspond to distinct image patches and contain diverse information, we employ a matching function to automatically assign coordinated prompts to individual tokens. This enables more precise attention interactions, improving the diversity and representational capacity of the extracted features. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that TCPA significantly enhances the diversity and discriminative power of the extracted features. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICML2025-TCPA.

UPMAD-Net: A Brain Tumor Segmentation Network with Uncertainty Guidance and Adaptive Multimodal Feature Fusion

Background: Brain tumor segmentation has a significant impact on the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors. Accurate brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to their irregular shapes, vague boundaries, and high variability. Objective: We propose a brain tumor segmentation method that combines deep learning with prior knowledge derived from a region-growing algorithm. Methods: The proposed method utilizes a multi-scale feature fusion (MSFF) module and adaptive attention mechanisms (AAM) to extract multi-scale features and capture global contextual information. To enhance the model's robustness in low-confidence regions, the Monte Carlo Dropout (MC Dropout) strategy is employed for uncertainty estimation. Results: Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance on Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) datasets, significantly outperforming various state-of-the-art methods. On the BraTS2021 dataset, the test Dice scores are 89.18% for Enhancing Tumor (ET) segmentation, 93.67% for Whole Tumor (WT) segmentation, and 91.23% for Tumor Core (TC) segmentation. On the BraTS2019 validation set, the validation Dice scores are 87.43%, 90.92%, and 90.40% for ET, WT, and TC segmentation, respectively. Ablation studies further confirmed the contribution of each module to segmentation accuracy, indicating that each component played a vital role in overall performance improvement. Conclusion: This study proposed a novel 3D brain tumor segmentation network based on the U-Net architecture. By incorporating the prior knowledge and employing the uncertainty estimation method, the robustness and performance were improved. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/chenzhao2023/UPMAD_Net_BrainSeg.

Base-Detail Feature Learning Framework for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) provides a solution for ReID tasks in 24-hour scenarios; however, significant challenges persist in achieving satisfactory performance due to the substantial discrepancies between visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) modalities. Existing methods inadequately leverage information from different modalities, primarily focusing on digging distinguishing features from modality-shared information while neglecting modality-specific details. To fully utilize differentiated minutiae, we propose a Base-Detail Feature Learning Framework (BDLF) that enhances the learning of both base and detail knowledge, thereby capitalizing on both modality-shared and modality-specific information. Specifically, the proposed BDLF mines detail and base features through a lossless detail feature extraction module and a complementary base embedding generation mechanism, respectively, supported by a novel correlation restriction method that ensures the features gained by BDLF enrich both detail and base knowledge across VIS and IR features. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the SYSU-MM01, RegDB, and LLCM datasets validate the effectiveness of BDLF.

Decoding Open-Ended Information Seeking Goals from Eye Movements in Reading

When reading, we often have specific information that interests us in a text. For example, you might be reading this paper because you are curious about LLMs for eye movements in reading, the experimental design, or perhaps you only care about the question ``but does it work?''. More broadly, in daily life, people approach texts with any number of text-specific goals that guide their reading behavior. In this work, we ask, for the first time, whether open-ended reading goals can be automatically decoded from eye movements in reading. To address this question, we introduce goal classification and goal reconstruction tasks and evaluation frameworks, and use large-scale eye tracking for reading data in English with hundreds of text-specific information seeking tasks. We develop and compare several discriminative and generative multimodal LLMs that combine eye movements and text for goal classification and goal reconstruction. Our experiments show considerable success on both tasks, suggesting that LLMs can extract valuable information about the readers' text-specific goals from eye movements.

Detecting Quishing Attacks with Machine Learning Techniques Through QR Code Analysis

The rise of QR code based phishing ("Quishing") poses a growing cybersecurity threat, as attackers increasingly exploit QR codes to bypass traditional phishing defenses. Existing detection methods predominantly focus on URL analysis, which requires the extraction of the QR code payload, and may inadvertently expose users to malicious content. Moreover, QR codes can encode various types of data beyond URLs, such as Wi-Fi credentials and payment information, making URL-based detection insufficient for broader security concerns. To address these gaps, we propose the first framework for quishing detection that directly analyzes QR code structure and pixel patterns without extracting the embedded content. We generated a dataset of phishing and benign QR codes and we used it to train and evaluate multiple machine learning models, including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, LightGBM, and XGBoost. Our best-performing model (XGBoost) achieves an AUC of 0.9106, demonstrating the feasibility of QR-centric detection. Through feature importance analysis, we identify key visual indicators of malicious intent and refine our feature set by removing non-informative pixels, improving performance to an AUC of 0.9133 with a reduced feature space. Our findings reveal that the structural features of QR code correlate strongly with phishing risk. This work establishes a foundation for quishing mitigation and highlights the potential of direct QR analysis as a critical layer in modern phishing defenses.