RadJEPA: Radiology Encoder for Chest X-Rays via Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture

Recent advances in medical vision language models guide the learning of visual representations; however, this form of supervision is constrained by the availability of paired image text data, raising the question of whether robust radiology encoders can be learned without relying on language supervision. In this work, we introduce RadJEPA, a self-supervised framework built on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture that learns without language supervision. Pre-trained solely on unlabeled chest X-ray images, the model learns to predict latent representations of masked image regions. This predictive objective differs fundamentally from both image text pre-training and DINO-style self-distillation: rather than aligning global representations across views or modalities, RadJEPA explicitly models latent-space prediction. We evaluate the learned encoder on disease classification, semantic segmentation, and report generation tasks. Across benchmarks, RadJEPA achieves performance exceeding state-of-the-art approaches, including Rad-DINO.

TwoHead-SwinFPN: A Unified DL Architecture for Synthetic Manipulation, Detection and Localization in Identity Documents

The proliferation of sophisticated generative AI models has significantly escalated the threat of synthetic manipulations in identity documents, particularly through face swapping and text inpainting attacks. This paper presents TwoHead-SwinFPN, a unified deep learning architecture that simultaneously performs binary classification and precise localization of manipulated regions in ID documents. Our approach integrates a Swin Transformer backbone with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and UNet-style decoder, enhanced with Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for improved feature representation. The model employs a dual-head architecture for joint optimization of detection and segmentation tasks, utilizing uncertainty-weighted multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on the FantasyIDiap dataset demonstrate superior performance with 84.31\% accuracy, 90.78\% AUC for classification, and 57.24\% mean Dice score for localization. The proposed method achieves an F1-score of 88.61\% for binary classification while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for real-world deployment through FastAPI implementation. Our comprehensive evaluation includes ablation studies, cross-device generalization analysis, and detailed performance assessment across 10 languages and 3 acquisition devices.

Status Hierarchies in Language Models

From school playgrounds to corporate boardrooms, status hierarchies -- rank orderings based on respect and perceived competence -- are universal features of human social organization. Language models trained on human-generated text inevitably encounter these hierarchical patterns embedded in language, raising the question of whether they might reproduce such dynamics in multi-agent settings. This thesis investigates when and how language models form status hierarchies by adapting Berger et al.'s (1972) expectation states framework. I create multi-agent scenarios where separate language model instances complete sentiment classification tasks, are introduced with varying status characteristics (e.g., credentials, expertise), then have opportunities to revise their initial judgments after observing their partner's responses. The dependent variable is deference, the rate at which models shift their ratings toward their partner's position based on status cues rather than task information. Results show that language models form significant status hierarchies when capability is equal (35 percentage point asymmetry, p < .001), but capability differences dominate status cues, with the most striking effect being that high-status assignments reduce higher-capability models' deference rather than increasing lower-capability models' deference. The implications for AI safety are significant: status-seeking behavior could introduce deceptive strategies, amplify discriminatory biases, and scale across distributed deployments far faster than human hierarchies form organically. This work identifies emergent social behaviors in AI systems and highlights a previously underexplored dimension of the alignment challenge.

Towards Effective Negation Modeling in Joint Audio-Text Models for Music

Joint audio-text models are widely used for music retrieval, yet they struggle with semantic phenomena such as negation. Negation is fundamental for distinguishing the absence (or presence) of musical elements (e.g., "with vocals" vs. "without vocals"), but current systems fail to represent this reliably. In this work, we investigate and mitigate this limitation by training CLAP models from scratch on the Million Song Dataset with LP-MusicCaps-MSD captions. We introduce negation through text augmentation and a dissimilarity-based contrastive loss, designed to explicitly separate original and negated captions in the joint embedding space. To evaluate progress, we propose two protocols that frame negation modeling as retrieval and binary classification tasks. Experiments demonstrate that both methods, individually and combined, improve negation handling while largely preserving retrieval performance.

Does medical specialization of VLMs enhance discriminative power?: A comprehensive investigation through feature distribution analysis

This study investigates the feature representations produced by publicly available open source medical vision-language models (VLMs). While medical VLMs are expected to capture diagnostically relevant features, their learned representations remain underexplored, and standard evaluations like classification accuracy do not fully reveal if they acquire truly discriminative, lesion-specific features. Understanding these representations is crucial for revealing medical image structures and improving downstream tasks in medical image analysis. This study aims to investigate the feature distributions learned by medical VLMs and evaluate the impact of medical specialization. We analyze the feature distribution of multiple image modalities extracted by some representative medical VLMs across lesion classification datasets on multiple modalities. These distributions were compared them with non-medical VLMs to assess the domain-specific medical training. Our experiments showed that medical VLMs can extract discriminative features that are effective for medical classification tasks. Moreover, it was found that non-medical VLMs with recent improvement with contextual enrichment such as LLM2CLIP produce more refined feature representations. Our results imply that enhancing text encoder is more crucial than training intensively on medical images when developing medical VLMs. Notably, non-medical models are particularly vulnerable to biases introduced by overlaied text strings on images. These findings underscore the need for careful consideration on model selection according to downstream tasks besides potential risks in inference due to background biases such as textual information in images.

Overcoming In-Memory Bottlenecks in Graph Foundation Models via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a frontier in graph learning, which are expected to deliver transferable representations across diverse tasks. However, GFMs remain constrained by in-memory bottlenecks: they attempt to encode knowledge into model parameters, which limits semantic capacity, introduces heavy lossy compression with conflicts, and entangles graph representation with the knowledge in ways that hinder efficient adaptation, undermining scalability and interpretability. In this work,we propose RAG-GFM, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation aided Graph Foundation Model that offloads knowledge from parameters and complements parameterized learning. To externalize graph knowledge, we build a dual-modal unified retrieval module, where a semantic store from prefix-structured text and a structural store from centrality-based motif. To preserve heterogeneous information, we design a dual-view alignment objective that contrasts both modalities to capture both content and relational patterns. To enable efficient downstream adaptation, we perform in-context augmentation to enrich supporting instances with retrieved texts and motifs as contextual evidence. Extensive experiments on five benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that RAG-GFM consistently outperforms 13 state-of-the-art baselines in both cross-domain node and graph classification, achieving superior effectiveness and efficiency.

Semi-supervised Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models on Text-Attributed Graphs

The emergent reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a transformative paradigm for analyzing text-attributed graphs. While instruction tuning is the prevailing method for adapting pre-trained LLMs to graph learning tasks like node classification, it requires a substantial volume of annotated (INSTRUCTION, OUTPUT) pairs deriving from labeled nodes. This requirement is particularly prohibitive in the social domain, where obtaining expert labels for sensitive or evolving content is costly and slow. Furthermore, standard graph instruction tuning fails to exploit the vast amount of unlabeled nodes, which contain latent correlations due to edge connections that are beneficial for downstream predictions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Instruction Tuning pipeline for Graph Learning, named SIT-Graph. Notably, SIT-Graph is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into any graph instruction tuning method that utilizes LLMs as the predictor. SIT-Graph operates via an iterative self-training process. Initially, the model is fine-tuned using instruction pairs constructed solely from the labeled nodes. Then it generates confidence-filtered pseudo-responses for unlabeled nodes to strategically augment the dataset for the next round of fine-tuning. Finally, this iterative refinement progressively aligns the LLM with the underlying node correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that when incorporated into state-of-the-art graph instruction tuning methods, SIT-Graph significantly enhances their performance on text-attributed graph benchmarks, achieving over 20% improvement under the low label ratio settings.

AGSP-DSA: An Adaptive Graph Signal Processing Framework for Robust Multimodal Fusion with Dynamic Semantic Alignment

In this paper, we introduce an Adaptive Graph Signal Processing with Dynamic Semantic Alignment (AGSP DSA) framework to perform robust multimodal data fusion over heterogeneous sources, including text, audio, and images. The requested approach uses a dual-graph construction to learn both intra-modal and inter-modal relations, spectral graph filtering to boost the informative signals, and effective node embedding with Multi-scale Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). Semantic aware attention mechanism: each modality may dynamically contribute to the context with respect to contextual relevance. The experimental outcomes on three benchmark datasets, including CMU-MOSEI, AVE, and MM-IMDB, show that AGSP-DSA performs as the state of the art. More precisely, it achieves 95.3% accuracy, 0.936 F1-score, and 0.924 mAP on CMU-MOSEI, improving MM-GNN by 2.6 percent in accuracy. It gets 93.4% accuracy and 0.911 F1-score on AVE and 91.8% accuracy and 0.886 F1-score on MM-IMDB, which demonstrate good generalization and robustness in the missing modality setting. These findings verify the efficiency of AGSP-DSA in promoting multimodal learning in sentiment analysis, event recognition and multimedia classification.

Profiling German Text Simplification with Interpretable Model-Fingerprints

While Large Language Models (LLMs) produce highly nuanced text simplifications, developers currently lack tools for a holistic, efficient, and reproducible diagnosis of their behavior. This paper introduces the Simplification Profiler, a diagnostic toolkit that generates a multidimensional, interpretable fingerprint of simplified texts. Multiple aggregated simplifications of a model result in a model's fingerprint. This novel evaluation paradigm is particularly vital for languages, where the data scarcity problem is magnified when creating flexible models for diverse target groups rather than a single, fixed simplification style. We propose that measuring a model's unique behavioral signature is more relevant in this context as an alternative to correlating metrics with human preferences. We operationalize this with a practical meta-evaluation of our fingerprints' descriptive power, which bypasses the need for large, human-rated datasets. This test measures if a simple linear classifier can reliably identify various model configurations by their created simplifications, confirming that our metrics are sensitive to a model's specific characteristics. The Profiler can distinguish high-level behavioral variations between prompting strategies and fine-grained changes from prompt engineering, including few-shot examples. Our complete feature set achieves classification F1-scores up to 71.9 %, improving upon simple baselines by over 48 percentage points. The Simplification Profiler thus offers developers a granular, actionable analysis to build more effective and truly adaptive text simplification systems.

RECAP: Resistance Capture in Text-based Mental Health Counseling with Large Language Models

Recognizing and navigating client resistance is critical for effective mental health counseling, yet detecting such behaviors is particularly challenging in text-based interactions. Existing NLP approaches oversimplify resistance categories, ignore the sequential dynamics of therapeutic interventions, and offer limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose PsyFIRE, a theoretically grounded framework capturing 13 fine-grained resistance behaviors alongside collaborative interactions. Based on PsyFIRE, we construct the ClientResistance corpus with 23,930 annotated utterances from real-world Chinese text-based counseling, each supported by context-specific rationales. Leveraging this dataset, we develop RECAP, a two-stage framework that detects resistance and fine-grained resistance types with explanations. RECAP achieves 91.25% F1 for distinguishing collaboration and resistance and 66.58% macro-F1 for fine-grained resistance categories classification, outperforming leading prompt-based LLM baselines by over 20 points. Applied to a separate counseling dataset and a pilot study with 62 counselors, RECAP reveals the prevalence of resistance, its negative impact on therapeutic relationships and demonstrates its potential to improve counselors' understanding and intervention strategies.