Cast-R1: Learning Tool-Augmented Sequential Decision Policies for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting has long been dominated by model-centric approaches that formulate prediction as a single-pass mapping from historical observations to future values. Despite recent progress, such formulations often struggle in complex and evolving settings, largely because most forecasting models lack the ability to autonomously acquire informative evidence, reason about potential future changes, or revise predictions through iterative decision processes. In this work, we propose Cast-R1, a learned time series forecasting framework that reformulates forecasting as a sequential decision-making problem. Cast-R1 introduces a memory-based state management mechanism that maintains decision-relevant information across interaction steps, enabling the accumulation of contextual evidence to support long-horizon reasoning. Building on this formulation, forecasting is carried out through a tool-augmented agentic workflow, in which the agent autonomously interacts with a modular toolkit to extract statistical features, invoke lightweight forecasting models for decision support, perform reasoning-based prediction, and iteratively refine forecasts through self-reflection. To train Cast-R1, we adopt a two-stage learning strategy that combines supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning, together with a curriculum learning scheme that progressively increases task difficulty to improve policy learning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Cast-R1. We hope this work provides a practical step towards further exploration of agentic paradigms for time series modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/Cast-R1-TS.

Represent Micro-Doppler Signature in Orders

Non-line-of-sight sensing of human activities in complex environments is enabled by multiple-input multiple-output through-the-wall radar (TWR). However, the distinctiveness of micro-Doppler signature between similar indoor human activities such as gun carrying and normal walking is minimal, while the large scale of input images required for effective identification utilizing time-frequency spectrograms creates challenges for model training and inference efficiency. To address this issue, the Chebyshev-time map is proposed in this paper, which is a method characterizing micro-Doppler signature using polynomial orders. The parametric kinematic models for human motion and the TWR echo model are first established. Then, a time-frequency feature representation method based on orthogonal Chebyshev polynomial decomposition is proposed. The kinematic envelopes of the torso and limbs are extracted, and the time-frequency spectrum slices are mapped into a robust Chebyshev-time coefficient space, preserving the multi-order morphological detail information of time-frequency spectrum. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, which demonstrates the capability to characterize armed and unarmed indoor human activities while effectively compressing the scale of the time-frequency spectrum to achieve a balance between recognition accuracy and input data dimensions. The open-source code of this paper can be found in: https://github.com/JoeyBGOfficial/Represent-Micro-Doppler-Signature-in-Orders.

How Do Language Models Understand Tables? A Mechanistic Analysis of Cell Location

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for table-related tasks, the internal mechanisms enabling them to process linearized two-dimensional structured tables remain opaque. In this work, we investigate the process of table understanding by dissecting the atomic task of cell location. Through activation patching and complementary interpretability techniques, we delineate the table understanding mechanism into a sequential three-stage pipeline: Semantic Binding, Coordinate Localization, and Information Extraction. We demonstrate that models locate the target cell via an ordinal mechanism that counts discrete delimiters to resolve coordinates. Furthermore, column indices are encoded within a linear subspace that allows for precise steering of model focus through vector arithmetic. Finally, we reveal that models generalize to multi-cell location tasks by multiplexing the identical attention heads identified during atomic location. Our findings provide a comprehensive explanation of table understanding within Transformer architectures.

Self-Supervised Image Super-Resolution Quality Assessment based on Content-Free Multi-Model Oriented Representation Learning

Super-resolution (SR) applied to real-world low-resolution (LR) images often results in complex, irregular degradations that stem from the inherent complexity of natural scene acquisition. In contrast to SR artifacts arising from synthetic LR images created under well-defined scenarios, those distortions are highly unpredictable and vary significantly across different real-life contexts. Consequently, assessing the quality of SR images (SR-IQA) obtained from realistic LR, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. In this work, we introduce a no-reference SR-IQA approach tailored for such highly ill-posed realistic settings. The proposed method enables domain-adaptive IQA for real-world SR applications, particularly in data-scarce domains. We hypothesize that degradations in super-resolved images are strongly dependent on the underlying SR algorithms, rather than being solely determined by image content. To this end, we introduce a self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy that first pretrains multiple SR model oriented representations in a pretext stage. Our contrastive learning framework forms positive pairs from images produced by the same SR model and negative pairs from those generated by different methods, independent of image content. The proposed approach S3 RIQA, further incorporates targeted preprocessing to extract complementary quality information and an auxiliary task to better handle the various degradation profiles associated with different SR scaling factors. To this end, we constructed a new dataset, SRMORSS, to support unsupervised pretext training; it includes a wide range of SR algorithms applied to numerous real LR images, which addresses a gap in existing datasets. Experiments on real SR-IQA benchmarks demonstrate that S3 RIQA consistently outperforms most state-of-the-art relevant metrics.

Knowledge Augmented Entity and Relation Extraction for Legal Documents with Hypergraph Neural Network

With the continuous progress of digitization in Chinese judicial institutions, a substantial amount of electronic legal document information has been accumulated. To unlock its potential value, entity and relation extraction for legal documents has emerged as a crucial task. However, existing methods often lack domain-specific knowledge and fail to account for the unique characteristics of the judicial domain. In this paper, we propose an entity and relation extraction algorithm based on hypergraph neural network (Legal-KAHRE) for drug-related judgment documents. Firstly, we design a candidate span generator based on neighbor-oriented packing strategy and biaffine mechanism, which identifies spans likely to contain entities. Secondly, we construct a legal dictionary with judicial domain knowledge and integrate it into text encoding representation using multi-head attention. Additionally, we incorporate domain-specific cases like joint crimes and combined punishment for multiple crimes into the hypergraph structure design. Finally, we employ a hypergraph neural network for higher-order inference via message passing. Experimental results on the CAIL2022 information extraction dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baseline models.

Exploring a New Competency Modeling Process with Large Language Models

Competency modeling is widely used in human resource management to select, develop, and evaluate talent. However, traditional expert-driven approaches rely heavily on manual analysis of large volumes of interview transcripts, making them costly and prone to randomness, ambiguity, and limited reproducibility. This study proposes a new competency modeling process built on large language models (LLMs). Instead of merely automating isolated steps, we reconstruct the workflow by decomposing expert practices into structured computational components. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to extract behavioral and psychological descriptions from raw textual data and map them to predefined competency libraries through embedding-based similarity. We further introduce a learnable parameter that adaptively integrates different information sources, enabling the model to determine the relative importance of behavioral and psychological signals. To address the long-standing challenge of validation, we develop an offline evaluation procedure that allows systematic model selection without requiring additional large-scale data collection. Empirical results from a real-world implementation in a software outsourcing company demonstrate strong predictive validity, cross-library consistency, and structural robustness. Overall, our framework transforms competency modeling from a largely qualitative and expert-dependent practice into a transparent, data-driven, and evaluable analytical process.

A Hybrid Deterministic Framework for Named Entity Extraction in Broadcast News Video

The growing volume of video-based news content has heightened the need for transparent and reliable methods to extract on-screen information. Yet the variability of graphical layouts, typographic conventions, and platform-specific design patterns renders manual indexing impractical. This work presents a comprehensive framework for automatically detecting and extracting personal names from broadcast and social-media-native news videos. It introduces a curated and balanced corpus of annotated frames capturing the diversity of contemporary news graphics and proposes an interpretable, modular extraction pipeline designed to operate under deterministic and auditable conditions. The pipeline is evaluated against a contrasting class of generative multimodal methods, revealing a clear trade-off between deterministic auditability and stochastic inference. The underlying detector achieves 95.8% mAP@0.5, demonstrating operationally robust performance for graphical element localisation. While generative systems achieve marginally higher raw accuracy (F1: 84.18% vs 77.08%), they lack the transparent data lineage required for journalistic and analytical contexts. The proposed pipeline delivers balanced precision (79.9%) and recall (74.4%), avoids hallucination, and provides full traceability across each processing stage. Complementary user findings indicate that 59% of respondents report difficulty reading on-screen names in fast-paced broadcasts, underscoring the practical relevance of the task. The results establish a methodologically rigorous and interpretable baseline for hybrid multimodal information extraction in modern news media.

Dual-Phase Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for CMR-Guided ECG Representations for Cardiovascular Disease Assessment

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) offers detailed evaluation of cardiac structure and function, but its limited accessibility restricts use to selected patient populations. In contrast, the electrocardiogram (ECG) is ubiquitous and inexpensive, and provides rich information on cardiac electrical activity and rhythm, yet offers limited insight into underlying cardiac structure and mechanical function. To address this, we introduce a contrastive learning framework that improves the extraction of clinically relevant cardiac phenotypes from ECG by learning from paired ECG-CMR data. Our approach aligns ECG representations with 3D CMR volumes at end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES), with a dual-phase contrastive loss to anchor each ECG jointly with both cardiac phases in a shared latent space. Unlike prior methods limited to 2D CMR representations with or without a temporal component, our framework models 3D anatomy at both ED and ES phases as distinct latent representations, enabling flexible disentanglement of structural and functional cardiac properties. Using over 34,000 ECG-CMR pairs from the UK Biobank, we demonstrate improved extraction of image-derived phenotypes from ECG, particularly for functional parameters ($\uparrow$ 9.2\%), while improvements in clinical outcome prediction remained modest ($\uparrow$ 0.7\%). This strategy could enable scalable and cost-effective extraction of image-derived traits from ECG. The code for this research is publicly available.

WaveFormer: Wavelet Embedding Transformer for Biomedical Signals

Biomedical signal classification presents unique challenges due to long sequences, complex temporal dynamics, and multi-scale frequency patterns that are poorly captured by standard transformer architectures. We propose WaveFormer, a transformer architecture that integrates wavelet decomposition at two critical stages: embedding construction, where multi-channel Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) extracts frequency features to create tokens containing both time-domain and frequency-domain information, and positional encoding, where Dynamic Wavelet Positional Encoding (DyWPE) adapts position embeddings to signal-specific temporal structure through mono-channel DWT analysis. We evaluate WaveFormer on eight diverse datasets spanning human activity recognition and brain signal analysis, with sequence lengths ranging from 50 to 3000 timesteps and channel counts from 1 to 144. Experimental results demonstrate that WaveFormer achieves competitive performance through comprehensive frequency-aware processing. Our approach provides a principled framework for incorporating frequency-domain knowledge into transformer-based time series classification.

ResWorld: Temporal Residual World Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The comprehensive understanding capabilities of world models for driving scenarios have significantly improved the planning accuracy of end-to-end autonomous driving frameworks. However, the redundant modeling of static regions and the lack of deep interaction with trajectories hinder world models from exerting their full effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Temporal Residual World Model (TR-World), which focuses on dynamic object modeling. By calculating the temporal residuals of scene representations, the information of dynamic objects can be extracted without relying on detection and tracking. TR-World takes only temporal residuals as input, thus predicting the future spatial distribution of dynamic objects more precisely. By combining the prediction with the static object information contained in the current BEV features, accurate future BEV features can be obtained. Furthermore, we propose Future-Guided Trajectory Refinement (FGTR) module, which conducts interaction between prior trajectories (predicted from the current scene representation) and the future BEV features. This module can not only utilize future road conditions to refine trajectories, but also provides sparse spatial-temporal supervision on future BEV features to prevent world model collapse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets demonstrate that our method, namely ResWorld, achieves state-of-the-art planning performance. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtan00/ResWorld.git.