EffiMiniVLM: A Compact Dual-Encoder Regression Framework

Predicting product quality from multimodal item information is critical in cold-start scenarios, where user interaction history is unavailable and predictions must rely on images and textual metadata. However, existing vision-language models typically depend on large architectures and/or extensive external datasets, resulting in high computational cost. To address this, we propose EffiMiniVLM, a compact dual-encoder vision-language regression framework that integrates an EfficientNet-B0 image encoder and a MiniLM-based text encoder with a lightweight regression head. To improve training sample efficiency, we introduce a weighted Huber loss that leverages rating counts to emphasize more reliable samples, yielding consistent performance gains. Trained using only 20% of the Amazon Reviews 2023 dataset, the proposed model contains 27.7M parameters and requires 6.8 GFLOPs, yet achieves a CES score of 0.40 with the lowest resource cost in the benchmark. Despite its small size, it remains competitive with significantly larger models, achieving comparable performance while being approximately 4x to 8x more resource-efficient than other top-5 methods and being the only approach that does not use external datasets. Further analysis shows that scaling the data to 40% alone allows our model to overtake other methods, which use larger models and datasets, highlighting strong scalability despite the model's compact design.

BioAlchemy: Distilling Biological Literature into Reasoning-Ready Reinforcement Learning Training Data

Despite the large corpus of biology training text, the impact of reasoning models on biological research generally lags behind math and coding. In this work, we show that biology questions from current large-scale reasoning datasets do not align well with modern research topic distributions in biology, and that this topic imbalance may negatively affect performance. In addition, we find that methods for extracting challenging and verifiable research problems from biology research text are a critical yet underdeveloped ingredient in applying reinforcement learning for better performance on biology research tasks. We introduce BioAlchemy, a pipeline for sourcing a diverse set of verifiable question-and-answer pairs from a scientific corpus of biology research text. We curate BioAlchemy-345K, a training dataset containing over 345K scientific reasoning problems in biology. Then, we demonstrate how aligning our dataset to the topic distribution of modern scientific biology can be used with reinforcement learning to improve reasoning performance. Finally, we present BioAlchemist-8B, which improves over its base reasoning model by 9.12% on biology benchmarks. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for developing stronger scientific reasoning capabilities in biology. The BioAlchemist-8B model is available at: https://huggingface.co/BioAlchemy.

Resource-Conscious Modeling for Next- Day Discharge Prediction Using Clinical Notes

Timely discharge prediction is essential for optimizing bed turnover and resource allocation in elective spine surgery units. This study evaluates the feasibility of lightweight, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) and traditional text-based models for predicting next-day discharge using postoperative clinical notes. We compared 13 models, including TF-IDF with XGBoost and LGBM, and compact LLMs (DistilGPT-2, Bio_ClinicalBERT) fine-tuned via LoRA. TF-IDF with LGBM achieved the best balance, with an F1-score of 0.47 for the discharge class, a recall of 0.51, and the highest AUC-ROC (0.80). While LoRA improved recall in DistilGPT2, overall transformer-based and generative models underperformed. These findings suggest interpretable, resource-efficient models may outperform compact LLMs in real-world, imbalanced clinical prediction tasks.

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs from Complex Documents

Knowledge graph construction typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a multimodal framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

Do Robots Need Body Language? Comparing Communication Modalities for Legible Motion Intent in Human-Shared Spaces

Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to understand how such cues are perceived. We present an online video study evaluating how different signaling modalities, expressive motion, lights, text, and audio, shape people's ability to understand a quadruped robot's upcoming navigation actions (Boston Dynamics Spot). Across four common scenarios, we measure how each modality influences humans' (1) accuracy in predicting the robot's next navigation action, (2) confidence in that prediction, and (3) trust in the robot to act safely. The study tests how expressive motions compare to explicit channels, whether aligned multimodal cues enhance interpretability, and how conflicting cues affect user confidence and trust. We contribute initial evidence on the relative effectiveness of implicit versus explicit signaling strategies.

Hume's Representational Conditions for Causal Judgment: What Bayesian Formalization Abstracted Away

Hume's account of causal judgment presupposes three representational conditions: experiential grounding (ideas must trace to impressions), structured retrieval (association must operate through organized networks exceeding pairwise connection), and vivacity transfer (inference must produce felt conviction, not merely updated probability). This paper extracts these conditions from Hume's texts and argues that they are integral to his causal psychology. It then traces their fate through the formalization trajectory from Hume to Bayesian epistemology and predictive processing, showing that later frameworks preserve the updating structure of Hume's insight while abstracting away these further representational conditions. Large language models serve as an illustrative contemporary case: they exhibit a form of statistical updating without satisfying the three conditions, thereby making visible requirements that were previously background assumptions in Hume's framework.

BridgeRAG: Training-Free Bridge-Conditioned Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Multi-hop retrieval is not a single-step relevance problem: later-hop evidence should be ranked by its utility conditioned on retrieved bridge evidence, not by similarity to the original query alone. We present BridgeRAG, a training-free, graph-free retrieval method for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over multi-hop questions that operationalizes this view with a tripartite scorer s(q,b,c) over (question, bridge, candidate). BridgeRAG separates coverage from scoring: dual-entity ANN expansion broadens the second-hop candidate pool, while a bridge-conditioned LLM judge identifies the active reasoning chain among competing candidates without any offline graph or proposition index. Across four controlled experiments we show that this conditioning signal is (i) selective: +2.55pp on parallel-chain queries (p<0.001) vs. ~0 on single-chain subtypes; (ii) irreplaceable: substituting the retrieved passage with generated SVO query text reduces R@5 by 2.1pp, performing worse than even the lowest-SVO-similarity pool passage; (iii) predictable: cos(b,g2) correlates with per-query gain (Spearman rho=0.104, p<0.001); and (iv) mechanistically precise: bridge conditioning causes productive re-rankings (18.7% flip-win rate on parallel-chain vs. 0.6% on single-chain), not merely more churn. Combined with lightweight coverage expansion and percentile-rank score fusion, BridgeRAG achieves the best published training-free R@5 under matched benchmark evaluation on all three standard MHQA benchmarks without a graph database or any training: 0.8146 on MuSiQue (+3.1pp vs. PropRAG, +6.8pp vs. HippoRAG2), 0.9527 on 2WikiMultiHopQA (+1.2pp vs. PropRAG), and 0.9875 on HotpotQA (+1.35pp vs. PropRAG).

Noise Steering for Controlled Text Generation: Improving Diversity and Reading-Level Fidelity in Arabic Educational Story Generation

Generating diverse, pedagogically valid stories for Arabic early-grade reading assessments requires balancing tight constraints on vocabulary, reading level, and narrative structure against the need to avoid repetitive plots that undermine assessment validity. We investigate noise steering, injecting calibrated Gaussian perturbations into the internal representations of transformer models at inference time, as a training-free diversity method evaluated across five small Arabic-centric language models (7-9B parameters). We compare four injection strategies against high-temperature sampling baselines, measuring diversity, quality, constraint adherence, and reading grade level. Residual stream noise consistently improves narrative diversity with minimal quality or constraint cost and preserves early-grade reading level across all models. Attention entropy noise injection (AENI) stabilizes the otherwise unreliable attention-logit noise while recovering quality. High-temperature sampling inflates reading grade level and causes catastrophic collapse on several models. We find internal representation-level perturbation to be a more suitable diversity strategy than output-level stochasticity for constrained educational content generation.

Generative AI for Video Trailer Synthesis: From Extractive Heuristics to Autoregressive Creativity

The domain of automatic video trailer generation is currently undergoing a profound paradigm shift, transitioning from heuristic-based extraction methods to deep generative synthesis. While early methodologies relied heavily on low-level feature engineering, visual saliency, and rule-based heuristics to select representative shots, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and diffusion-based video synthesis have enabled systems that not only identify key moments but also construct coherent, emotionally resonant narratives. This survey provides a comprehensive technical review of this evolution, with a specific focus on generative techniques including autoregressive Transformers, LLM-orchestrated pipelines, and text-to-video foundation models like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo. We analyze the architectural progression from Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to Trailer Generation Transformers (TGT), evaluate the economic implications of automated content velocity on User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms, and discuss the ethical challenges posed by high-fidelity neural synthesis. By synthesizing insights from recent literature, this report establishes a new taxonomy for AI-driven trailer generation in the era of foundation models, suggesting that future promotional video systems will move beyond extractive selection toward controllable generative editing and semantic reconstruction of trailers.

PromptEvolver: Prompt Inversion through Evolutionary Optimization in Natural-Language Space

Text-to-image generation has progressed rapidly, but faithfully generating complex scenes requires extensive trial-and-error to find the exact prompt. In the prompt inversion task, the goal is to recover a textual prompt that can faithfully reconstruct a given target image. Currently, existing methods frequently yield suboptimal reconstructions and produce unnatural, hard-to-interpret prompts that hinder transparency and controllability. In this work, we present PromptEvolver, a prompt inversion approach that generates natural-language prompts while achieving high-fidelity reconstructions of the target image. Our method uses a genetic algorithm to optimize the prompt, leveraging a strong vision-language model to guide the evolution process. Importantly, it works on black-box generation models by requiring only image outputs. Finally, we evaluate PromptEvolver across multiple prompt inversion benchmarks and show that it consistently outperforms competing methods.