Learning to Read Where to Look: Disease-Aware Vision-Language Pretraining for 3D CT

Recent 3D CT vision-language models align volumes with reports via contrastive pretraining, but typically rely on limited public data and provide only coarse global supervision. We train a 3D CT vision-language model on 98k report-volume pairs (50k patients) collected at a single hospital, combined with public datasets, using SigLIP-style contrastive pretraining together with prompt-based disease supervision in the shared vision-text embedding space. On CT-RATE, our model achieves state-of-the-art text-to-image retrieval (R@10 31.5 vs. 22.2) and competitive disease classification (AUC 83.8 vs. 83.8), with consistent results on Rad-ChestCT (AUC 77.0 vs. 77.3). We further observe that radiologists routinely reference specific images within their reports (e.g., ``series X, image Y''), linking textual descriptions to precise axial locations. We automatically mine 262k such snippet-slice pairs and introduce the task of intra-scan snippet localization -- predicting the axial depth referred to by a text snippet -- reducing mean absolute error to 36.3 mm at 12 mm feature resolution, compared with 67.0 mm for the best baseline. Adding this localization objective leaves retrieval and classification broadly unchanged within confidence bounds, yielding a single unified model for retrieval, classification, and intra-scan grounding.

DSH-Bench: A Difficulty- and Scenario-Aware Benchmark with Hierarchical Subject Taxonomy for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Significant progress has been achieved in subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) generation, which aims to synthesize new images depicting target subjects according to user instructions. However, evaluating these models remains a significant challenge. Existing benchmarks exhibit critical limitations: 1) insufficient diversity and comprehensiveness in subject images, 2) inadequate granularity in assessing model performance across different subject difficulty levels and prompt scenarios, and 3) a profound lack of actionable insights and diagnostic guidance for subsequent model refinement. To address these limitations, we propose DSH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that enables systematic multi-perspective analysis of subject-driven T2I models through four principal innovations: 1) a hierarchical taxonomy sampling mechanism ensuring comprehensive subject representation across 58 fine-grained categories, 2) an innovative classification scheme categorizing both subject difficulty level and prompt scenario for granular capability assessment, 3) a novel Subject Identity Consistency Score (SICS) metric demonstrating a 9.4\% higher correlation with human evaluation compared to existing measures in quantifying subject preservation, and 4) a comprehensive set of diagnostic insights derived from the benchmark, offering critical guidance for optimizing future model training paradigms and data construction strategies. Through an extensive empirical evaluation of 19 leading models, DSH-Bench uncovers previously obscured limitations in current approaches, establishing concrete directions for future research and development.

Dual-Solver: A Generalized ODE Solver for Diffusion Models with Dual Prediction

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art image quality. However, sampling is costly at inference time because it requires a large number of function evaluations (NFEs). To reduce NFEs, classical ODE numerical methods have been adopted. Yet, the choice of prediction type and integration domain leads to different sampling behaviors. To address these issues, we introduce Dual-Solver, which generalizes multistep samplers through learnable parameters that continuously (i) interpolate among prediction types, (ii) select the integration domain, and (iii) adjust the residual terms. It retains the standard predictor-corrector structure while preserving second-order local accuracy. These parameters are learned via a classification-based objective using a frozen pretrained classifier (e.g., MobileNet or CLIP). For ImageNet class-conditional generation (DiT, GM-DiT) and text-to-image generation (SANA, PixArt-$α$), Dual-Solver improves FID and CLIP scores in the low-NFE regime ($3 \le$ NFE $\le 9$) across backbones.

Natural Language Processing Models for Robust Document Categorization

This article presents an evaluation of several machine learning methods applied to automated text classification, alongside the design of a demonstrative system for unbalanced document categorization and distribution. The study focuses on balancing classification accuracy with computational efficiency, a key consideration when integrating AI into real world automation pipelines. Three models of varying complexity were examined: a Naive Bayes classifier, a bidirectional LSTM network, and a fine tuned transformer based BERT model. The experiments reveal substantial differences in performance. BERT achieved the highest accuracy, consistently exceeding 99\%, but required significantly longer training times and greater computational resources. The BiLSTM model provided a strong compromise, reaching approximately 98.56\% accuracy while maintaining moderate training costs and offering robust contextual understanding. Naive Bayes proved to be the fastest to train, on the order of milliseconds, yet delivered the lowest accuracy, averaging around 94.5\%. Class imbalance influenced all methods, particularly in the recognition of minority categories. A fully functional demonstrative system was implemented to validate practical applicability, enabling automated routing of technical requests with throughput unattainable through manual processing. The study concludes that BiLSTM offers the most balanced solution for the examined scenario, while also outlining opportunities for future improvements and further exploration of transformer architectures.

Goal-Oriented Influence-Maximizing Data Acquisition for Learning and Optimization

Active data acquisition is central to many learning and optimization tasks in deep neural networks, yet remains challenging because most approaches rely on predictive uncertainty estimates that are difficult to obtain reliably. To this end, we propose Goal-Oriented Influence- Maximizing Data Acquisition (GOIMDA), an active acquisition algorithm that avoids explicit posterior inference while remaining uncertainty-aware through inverse curvature. GOIMDA selects inputs by maximizing their expected influence on a user-specified goal functional, such as test loss, predictive entropy, or the value of an optimizer-recommended design. Leveraging first-order influence functions, we derive a tractable acquisition rule that combines the goal gradient, training-loss curvature, and candidate sensitivity to model parameters. We show theoretically that, for generalized linear models, GOIMDA approximates predictive-entropy minimization up to a correction term accounting for goal alignment and prediction bias, thereby, yielding uncertainty-aware behavior without maintaining a Bayesian posterior. Empirically, across learning tasks (including image and text classification) and optimization tasks (including noisy global optimization benchmarks and neural-network hyperparameter tuning), GOIMDA consistently reaches target performance with substantially fewer labeled samples or function evaluations than uncertainty-based active learning and Gaussian-process Bayesian optimization baselines.

JUCAL: Jointly Calibrating Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Classification Tasks

We study post-calibration uncertainty for trained ensembles of classifiers. Specifically, we consider both aleatoric (label noise) and epistemic (model) uncertainty. Among the most popular and widely used calibration methods in classification are temperature scaling (i.e., pool-then-calibrate) and conformal methods. However, the main shortcoming of these calibration methods is that they do not balance the proportion of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Not balancing these uncertainties can severely misrepresent predictive uncertainty, leading to overconfident predictions in some input regions while being underconfident in others. To address this shortcoming, we present a simple but powerful calibration algorithm Joint Uncertainty Calibration (JUCAL) that jointly calibrates aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. JUCAL jointly calibrates two constants to weight and scale epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties by optimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) on the validation/calibration dataset. JUCAL can be applied to any trained ensemble of classifiers (e.g., transformers, CNNs, or tree-based methods), with minimal computational overhead, without requiring access to the models' internal parameters. We experimentally evaluate JUCAL on various text classification tasks, for ensembles of varying sizes and with different ensembling strategies. Our experiments show that JUCAL significantly outperforms SOTA calibration methods across all considered classification tasks, reducing NLL and predictive set size by up to 15% and 20%, respectively. Interestingly, even applying JUCAL to an ensemble of size 5 can outperform temperature-scaled ensembles of size up to 50 in terms of NLL and predictive set size, resulting in up to 10 times smaller inference costs. Thus, we propose JUCAL as a new go-to method for calibrating ensembles in classification.

Improving Neural Argumentative Stance Classification in Controversial Topics with Emotion-Lexicon Features

Argumentation mining comprises several subtasks, among which stance classification focuses on identifying the standpoint expressed in an argumentative text toward a specific target topic. While arguments-especially about controversial topics-often appeal to emotions, most prior work has not systematically incorporated explicit, fine-grained emotion analysis to improve performance on this task. In particular, prior research on stance classification has predominantly utilized non-argumentative texts and has been restricted to specific domains or topics, limiting generalizability. We work on five datasets from diverse domains encompassing a range of controversial topics and present an approach for expanding the Bias-Corrected NRC Emotion Lexicon using DistilBERT embeddings, which we feed into a Neural Argumentative Stance Classification model. Our method systematically expands the emotion lexicon through contextualized embeddings to identify emotionally charged terms not previously captured in the lexicon. Our expanded NRC lexicon (eNRC) improves over the baseline across all five datasets (up to +6.2 percentage points in F1 score), outperforms the original NRC on four datasets (up to +3.0), and surpasses the LLM-based approach on nearly all corpora. We provide all resources-including eNRC, the adapted corpora, and model architecture-to enable other researchers to build upon our work.

Inter-Speaker Relative Cues for Two-Stage Text-Guided Target Speech Extraction

This paper investigates the use of relative cues for text-based target speech extraction (TSE). We first provide a theoretical justification for relative cues from the perspectives of human perception and label quantization, showing that relative cues preserve fine-grained distinctions often lost in absolute categorical representations. Building on this analysis, we propose a two-stage TSE framework, in which a speech separation model generates candidate sources, followed by a text-guided classifier that selects the target speaker based on embedding similarity. Using this framework, we train two separate classification models to evaluate the advantages of relative cues over independent cues in terms of both classification accuracy and TSE performance. Experimental results demonstrate that (i) relative cues achieve higher overall classification accuracy and improved TSE performance compared with independent cues, (ii) the two-stage framework substantially outperforms single-stage text-conditioned extraction methods on both signal-level and objective perceptual metrics, and (iii) certain relative cues (language, gender, loudness, distance, temporal order, speaking duration, random cue and all cue) can surpass the performance of an audio-based TSE system. Further analysis reveals notable differences in discriminative power across cue types, providing insights into the effectiveness of different relative cues for TSE.

Scaling In, Not Up? Testing Thick Citation Context Analysis with GPT-5 and Fragile Prompts

This paper tests whether large language models (LLMs) can support interpretative citation context analysis (CCA) by scaling in thick, text-grounded readings of a single hard case rather than scaling up typological labels. It foregrounds prompt-sensitivity analysis as a methodological issue by varying prompt scaffolding and framing in a balanced 2x3 design. Using footnote 6 in Chubin and Moitra (1975) and Gilbert's (1977) reconstruction as a probe, I implement a two-stage GPT-5 pipeline: a citation-text-only surface classification and expectation pass, followed by cross-document interpretative reconstruction using the citing and cited full texts. Across 90 reconstructions, the model produces 450 distinct hypotheses. Close reading and inductive coding identify 21 recurring interpretative moves, and linear probability models estimate how prompt choices shift their frequencies and lexical repertoire. GPT-5's surface pass is highly stable, consistently classifying the citation as "supplementary". In reconstruction, the model generates a structured space of plausible alternatives, but scaffolding and examples redistribute attention and vocabulary, sometimes toward strained readings. Relative to Gilbert, GPT-5 detects the same textual hinges yet more often resolves them as lineage and positioning than as admonishment. The study outlines opportunities and risks of using LLMs as guided co-analysts for inspectable, contestable interpretative CCA, and it shows that prompt scaffolding and framing systematically tilt which plausible readings and vocabularies the model foregrounds.

PathMoE: Interpretable Multimodal Interaction Experts for Pediatric Brain Tumor Classification

Accurate classification of pediatric central nervous system tumors remains challenging due to histological complexity and limited training data. While pathology foundation models have advanced whole-slide image (WSI) analysis, they often fail to leverage the rich, complementary information found in clinical text and tissue microarchitecture. To this end, we propose PathMoE, an interpretable multimodal framework that integrates H\&E slides, pathology reports, and nuclei-level cell graphs via an interaction-aware mixture-of-experts architecture built on state-of-the-art foundation models for each modality. By training specialized experts to capture modality uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy, PathMoE employs an input-dependent gating mechanism that dynamically weights these interactions, providing sample-level interpretability. We evaluate our framework on two dataset-specific classification tasks on an internal pediatric brain tumor dataset (PBT) and external TCGA datasets. PathMoE improves macro-F1 from 0.762 to 0.799 (+0.037) on PBT when integrating WSI, text, and graph modalities; on TCGA, augmenting WSI with graph knowledge improves macro-F1 from 0.668 to 0.709 (+0.041). These results demonstrate significant performance gains over state-of-the-art image-only baselines while revealing the specific modality interactions driving individual predictions. This interpretability is particularly critical for rare tumor subtypes, where transparent model reasoning is essential for clinical trust and diagnostic validation.