Modern recommender systems rely on generative retrieval techniques to predict the next item either as discrete codes or as a continuous vector. On the one hand, Semantic IDs (SIDs) give discrete models shared parameters and pretrained semantic structure, but discretizing items into hard codes discards some information from the original content embeddings. On the other hand, continuous models avoid quantization, yet typically use flat item lookup tables with no explicit parameter tying across items. We ask whether a continuous recommender can introduce shared structure without making it a discrete bottleneck. We propose CAP-Mix, a flow recommender that represents each item as a soft mixture of shared prototypes plus an item-specific vector. The assignments, prototypes, and item vectors are trained jointly, and the soft representation is retained at inference. Pretrained information is optional: SID responsibilities can serve as a prior over assignments, while a full content embedding can initialize the item-specific vector without changing the initial flat table. In matched comparisons on three datasets, CAP-Mix improves over a flat table on the two sparse Amazon datasets and yields a small gain on Steam when trained without pretrained information. Given only an offline SID, it outperforms a hard table built from the same tokenizer by 4.45-14.90% in HR@5. Given the full content embedding, it matches or improves a strong flat table while hard assignments regress on the sparse Amazon datasets. Overall, averaged across six benchmarks, CAP-Mix improves HR@5 and NDCG@5 by 6.9% and 13.6% relative to the best evaluated baseline for each dataset and metric, while delivering 1.4-161x the inference throughput of the discrete baselines in our experiments.
Xuanren Chen, Chongyang Tao, Wenpeng Hu, Yong Wang, Bo Deng, Xinlei Zheng, Shuai Ma
Long-horizon tasks require large language model (LLM) agents to coordinate interdependent actions, a capability central to automating complex workflows. Stepwise group-based reinforcement learning provides finer credit than trajectory-level supervision, but reliable comparisons must account for differences in interaction history. Enforcing this consistency within the limited rollouts of each task can leave insufficient support for estimating action preferences. We propose Beyond-Local Policy Optimization (BLPO), which estimates task-progress advantages from experience shared across tasks and training updates. We summarize trajectory prefixes into task-progress states and abstract actions by their function, allowing corresponding decisions from different tasks to contribute to shared estimates. To control bias and noise from heterogeneous tasks, we accumulate context-relative returns in a global memory with balanced aggregation and reliability weighting. These global advantages complement local comparisons over normalized actions and trajectory-level credit without a learned critic or additional rollouts. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop with 1.5B and 7B policies show improved task success over the evaluated baselines under matched training budgets. Further analyses show faster learning and shorter trajectories with little computational overhead.
Tracheal auscultation is recommended by clinical practice guidelines, and required by some U.S. state regulations, for monitoring ventilation during procedural sedation and monitored anesthesia care. However, continuous auscultation with a conventional stethoscope is impractical, susceptible to ambient noise, and difficult to interpret. We developed the Artificial Intelligence Respiratory MOnitoring Device (Airmod), an FDA-cleared software as a medical device (510(k) K242798) that continuously monitors tracheal sounds and estimates breath-to-breath respiratory rate in real time. In this paper, we describe its software architecture and key processing modules. Ambient noise is suppressed by active noise control, using a normalized least-mean-square adaptive filter with a dual-microphone electronic stethoscope. A multiclass convolutional bidirectional gated recurrent unit (CNN-BiGRU) model detects inhalations and exhalations in 15-s inference windows. It was trained on HF_Tracheal_V2, a new database of 373 continuous tracheal sound recordings (8,521 min; 107,644 labeled inhalations) from 369 subjects under sedation. To handle continuous acoustic streaming, Airmod runs inference on overlapping 15-s windows. It refines the detected inhalations by removing incomplete events, low-energy false positives, and double counts, concatenates them into a history list, and estimates respiratory rate from the mean period of the last three breaths. On the test set, at the default 2-s prediction interval with refinement enabled, inhalation detection achieved a sensitivity of 0.828, a positive predictive value of 0.832, and an F1-score of 0.830. Airmod also broadcasts the noise-cancelled tracheal sound and displays a real-time spectrogram to help clinicians recognize respiratory abnormalities.
Xuanren Chen Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Chongyang Tao Beihang University, Tao Shen Oracle, Shuai Ma Beihang University
Patient–trial retrieval is a challenging problem that requires nuanced clinical reasoning beyond surface-level semantic similarity. However, scarce and costly relevance annotations force existing approaches to rely on very limited supervision or zero-shot transfer, reducing the task to generic semantic matching and failing to capture multi-factor eligibility reasoning. To this end, we propose FACTrial, a factorized contrastive training framework that leverages LLMs to synthesize diagnosis-aware supervision for scalable patient–trial retrieval. FACTrial decomposes each patient note into a primary diagnosis and a set of concomitant, eligibility-triggering conditions, and constructs complementary contrastive signals through structured trial augmentation. Specifically, we generate primary-target and concomitant-target positives, together with clinically confusable near-miss negatives, to enforce diagnostic specificity under contrastive learning. Two specialized bi-encoder experts are trained to balance primary-diagnosis prioritization and concomitant-driven recall, and fused into a single deployable retriever. Experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that FACTrial achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving both top-ranked quality and high-recall coverage.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表