Magical: Medical Lay Language Generation via Semantic Invariance and Layperson-tailored Adaptation

Medical Lay Language Generation (MLLG) plays a vital role in improving the accessibility of complex scientific content for broader audiences. Recent literature to MLLG commonly employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using paired expert-lay language datasets. However, LoRA struggles with the challenges posed by multi-source heterogeneous MLLG datasets. Specifically, through a series of exploratory experiments, we reveal that standard LoRA fail to meet the requirement for semantic fidelity and diverse lay-style generation in MLLG task. To address these limitations, we propose Magical, an asymmetric LoRA architecture tailored for MLLG under heterogeneous data scenarios. Magical employs a shared matrix $A$ for abstractive summarization, along with multiple isolated matrices $B$ for diverse lay-style generation. To preserve semantic fidelity during the lay language generation process, Magical introduces a Semantic Invariance Constraint to mitigate semantic subspace shifts on matrix $A$. Furthermore, to better adapt to diverse lay-style generation, Magical incorporates the Recommendation-guided Switch, an externally interface to prompt the LLM to switch between different matrices $B$. Experimental results on three real-world lay language generation datasets demonstrate that Magical consistently outperforms prompt-based methods, vanilla LoRA, and its recent variants, while also reducing trainable parameters by 31.66%.

UrzaGPT: LoRA-Tuned Large Language Models for Card Selection in Collectible Card Games

Collectible card games (CCGs) are a difficult genre for AI due to their partial observability, long-term decision-making, and evolving card sets. Due to this, current AI models perform vastly worse than human players at CCG tasks such as deckbuilding and gameplay. In this work, we introduce UrzaGPT, a domain-adapted large language model that recommends real-time drafting decisions in Magic: The Gathering. Starting from an open-weight LLM, we use Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning on a dataset of annotated draft logs. With this, we leverage the language modeling capabilities of LLM, and can quickly adapt to different expansions of the game. We benchmark UrzaGPT in comparison to zero-shot LLMs and the state-of-the-art domain-specific model. Untuned, small LLMs like Llama-3-8B are completely unable to draft, but the larger GPT-4o achieves a zero-shot performance of 43%. Using UrzaGPT to fine-tune smaller models, we achieve an accuracy of 66.2% using only 10,000 steps. Despite this not reaching the capability of domain-specific models, we show that solely using LLMs to draft is possible and conclude that using LLMs can enable performant, general, and update-friendly drafting AIs in the future.

Will You Be Aware? Eye Tracking-Based Modeling of Situational Awareness in Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) systems, while enhancing task performance through real-time guidance, pose risks of inducing cognitive tunneling-a hyperfocus on virtual content that compromises situational awareness (SA) in safety-critical scenarios. This paper investigates SA in AR-guided cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), where responders must balance effective compressions with vigilance to unpredictable hazards (e.g., patient vomiting). We developed an AR app on a Magic Leap 2 that overlays real-time CPR feedback (compression depth and rate) and conducted a user study with simulated unexpected incidents (e.g., bleeding) to evaluate SA, in which SA metrics were collected via observation and questionnaires administered during freeze-probe events. Eye tracking analysis revealed that higher SA levels were associated with greater saccadic amplitude and velocity, and with reduced proportion and frequency of fixations on virtual content. To predict SA, we propose FixGraphPool, a graph neural network that structures gaze events (fixations, saccades) into spatiotemporal graphs, effectively capturing dynamic attentional patterns. Our model achieved 83.0% accuracy (F1=81.0%), outperforming feature-based machine learning and state-of-the-art time-series models by leveraging domain knowledge and spatial-temporal information encoded in ET data. These findings demonstrate the potential of eye tracking for SA modeling in AR and highlight its utility in designing AR systems that ensure user safety and situational awareness.

What's Behind the Magic? Audiences Seek Artistic Value in Generative AI's Contributions to a Live Dance Performance

With the development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools to create art, stakeholders cannot come to an agreement on the value of these works. In this study we uncovered the mixed opinions surrounding art made by AI. We developed two versions of a dance performance augmented by technology either with or without GenAI. For each version we informed audiences of the performance's development either before or after a survey on their perceptions of the performance. There were thirty-nine participants (13 males, 26 female) divided between the four performances. Results demonstrated that individuals were more inclined to attribute artistic merit to works made by GenAI when they were unaware of its use. We present this case study as a call to address the importance of utilizing the social context and the users' interpretations of GenAI in shaping a technical explanation, leading to a greater discussion that can bridge gaps in understanding.

MagiC: Evaluating Multimodal Cognition Toward Grounded Visual Reasoning

Recent advances in large vision-language models have led to impressive performance in visual question answering and multimodal reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely perform grounded visual reasoning or rely on superficial patterns and dataset biases. In this work, we introduce MagiC, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate grounded multimodal cognition, assessing not only answer accuracy but also the quality of step-by-step reasoning and its alignment with relevant visual evidence. Our benchmark includes approximately 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human-curated examples with fine-grained annotations, including answers, rationales, and bounding box groundings. We evaluate 15 vision-language models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters across four dimensions: final answer correctness, reasoning validity, grounding fidelity, and self-correction ability. MagiC further includes diagnostic settings to probe model robustness under adversarial visual cues and assess their capacity for introspective error correction. We introduce new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and provide comprehensive analyses that reveal key limitations and opportunities in current approaches to grounded visual reasoning.

MAGIC: Mask-Guided Diffusion Inpainting with Multi-Level Perturbations and Context-Aware Alignment for Few-Shot Anomaly Generation

Few-shot anomaly generation is emerging as a practical solution for augmenting the scarce anomaly data in industrial quality control settings. An ideal generator would meet three demands at once, namely (i) keep the normal background intact, (ii) inpaint anomalous regions to tightly overlap with the corresponding anomaly masks, and (iii) generate anomalous regions in a semantically valid location, while still producing realistic, diverse appearances from only a handful of real examples. Existing diffusion-based methods usually satisfy at most two of these requirements: global anomaly generators corrupt the background, whereas mask-guided ones often falter when the mask is imprecise or misplaced. We propose MAGIC--Mask-guided inpainting with multi-level perturbations and Context-aware alignment--to resolve all three issues. At its core, MAGIC fine-tunes a Stable Diffusion inpainting backbone that preserves normal regions and ensures strict adherence of the synthesized anomaly to the supplied mask, directly addressing background corruption and misalignment. To offset the diversity loss that fine-tuning can cause, MAGIC adds two complementary perturbation strategies: (i) Gaussian prompt-level perturbation applied during fine-tuning and inference that broadens the global appearance of anomalies while avoiding low-fidelity textual appearances, and (ii) mask-guided spatial noise injection that enriches local texture variations. Additionally, the context-aware mask alignment module forms semantic correspondences and relocates masks so that every anomaly remains plausibly contained within the host object, eliminating out-of-boundary artifacts. Under a consistent identical evaluation protocol on the MVTec-AD dataset, MAGIC outperforms previous state-of-the-arts in downstream anomaly tasks.

Rare dense solutions clusters in asymmetric binary perceptrons -- local entropy via fully lifted RDT

We study classical asymmetric binary perceptron (ABP) and associated \emph{local entropy} (LE) as potential source of its algorithmic hardness. Isolation of \emph{typical} ABP solutions in SAT phase seemingly suggests a universal algorithmic hardness. Paradoxically, efficient algorithms do exist even for constraint densities $\alpha$ fairly close but at a finite distance (\emph{computational gap}) from the capacity. In recent years, existence of rare large dense clusters and magical ability of fast algorithms to find them have been posited as the conceptual resolution of this paradox. Monotonicity or breakdown of the LEs associated with such \emph{atypical} clusters are predicated to play a key role in their thinning-out or even complete defragmentation. Invention of fully lifted random duality theory (fl RDT) [90,93,94] allows studying random structures \emph{typical} features. A large deviation upgrade, sfl LD RDT [96,97], moves things further and enables \emph{atypical} features characterizations as well. Utilizing the machinery of [96,97] we here develop a generic framework to study LE as an ABP's atypical feature. Already on the second level of lifting we discover that the LE results are closely matching those obtained through replica methods. For classical zero threshold ABP, we obtain that LE breaks down for $\alpha$ in $(0.77,0.78)$ interval which basically matches $\alpha\sim 0.75-0.77$ range that currently best ABP solvers can handle and effectively indicates that LE's behavior might indeed be among key reflections of the ABP's computational gaps presumable existence.

MAGIC: Multi-Agent Argumentation and Grammar Integrated Critiquer

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) and Automatic Essay Feedback (AEF) systems aim to reduce the workload of human raters in educational assessment. However, most existing systems prioritize numeric scoring accuracy over the quality of feedback. This paper presents Multi-Agent Argumentation and Grammar Integrated Critiquer (MAGIC), a framework that uses multiple specialized agents to evaluate distinct writing aspects to both predict holistic scores and produce detailed, rubric-aligned feedback. To support evaluation, we curated a novel dataset of past GRE practice test essays with expert-evaluated scores and feedback. MAGIC outperforms baseline models in both essay scoring , as measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK). We find that despite the improvement in QWK, there are opportunities for future work in aligning LLM-generated feedback to human preferences.

Doctor Approved: Generating Medically Accurate Skin Disease Images through AI-Expert Feedback

Paucity of medical data severely limits the generalizability of diagnostic ML models, as the full spectrum of disease variability can not be represented by a small clinical dataset. To address this, diffusion models (DMs) have been considered as a promising avenue for synthetic image generation and augmentation. However, they frequently produce medically inaccurate images, deteriorating the model performance. Expert domain knowledge is critical for synthesizing images that correctly encode clinical information, especially when data is scarce and quality outweighs quantity. Existing approaches for incorporating human feedback, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on robust reward functions or demand labor-intensive expert evaluations. Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) reveals their strong visual reasoning capabilities, making them adept candidates as evaluators. In this work, we propose a novel framework, coined MAGIC (Medically Accurate Generation of Images through AI-Expert Collaboration), that synthesizes clinically accurate skin disease images for data augmentation. Our method creatively translates expert-defined criteria into actionable feedback for image synthesis of DMs, significantly improving clinical accuracy while reducing the direct human workload. Experiments demonstrate that our method greatly improves the clinical quality of synthesized skin disease images, with outputs aligning with dermatologist assessments. Additionally, augmenting training data with these synthesized images improves diagnostic accuracy by +9.02% on a challenging 20-condition skin disease classification task, and by +13.89% in the few-shot setting.

CreatiPoster: Towards Editable and Controllable Multi-Layer Graphic Design Generation

Graphic design plays a crucial role in both commercial and personal contexts, yet creating high-quality, editable, and aesthetically pleasing graphic compositions remains a time-consuming and skill-intensive task, especially for beginners. Current AI tools automate parts of the workflow, but struggle to accurately incorporate user-supplied assets, maintain editability, and achieve professional visual appeal. Commercial systems, like Canva Magic Design, rely on vast template libraries, which are impractical for replicate. In this paper, we introduce CreatiPoster, a framework that generates editable, multi-layer compositions from optional natural-language instructions or assets. A protocol model, an RGBA large multimodal model, first produces a JSON specification detailing every layer (text or asset) with precise layout, hierarchy, content and style, plus a concise background prompt. A conditional background model then synthesizes a coherent background conditioned on this rendered foreground layers. We construct a benchmark with automated metrics for graphic-design generation and show that CreatiPoster surpasses leading open-source approaches and proprietary commercial systems. To catalyze further research, we release a copyright-free corpus of 100,000 multi-layer designs. CreatiPoster supports diverse applications such as canvas editing, text overlay, responsive resizing, multilingual adaptation, and animated posters, advancing the democratization of AI-assisted graphic design. Project homepage: https://github.com/graphic-design-ai/creatiposter