Xiaojing Chen, Jingqi Cheng, Xu Zhao, Wan Jiang, Jingjing Wu
Deep learning-based Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) detection using Electroencephalography (EEG) is fundamentally constrained by the "small-sample dilemma." Prevailing generative data augmentation methods not only incur heavy computational overhead but also risk introducing synthetic noise, thereby blurring classification boundaries. To challenge the traditional "data quantity first" convention, we propose a novel framework "Beyond Augmentation": Score-Guided Classification (SGC). SGC does not synthesize pseudo-samples; instead, it utilizes an unsupervised generative network architecture to model the structural and statistical anomaly degrees of samples, serving as the core "Pathological Prior". This prior, after robust normalization, is explicitly fused with deep feature representations, thereby precisely guiding the classifier's decision boundary. Furthermore, to dynamically adapt to varying channel configurations, we propose a Cross-Channel Spatial Adaptation module, utilizing a spatial mapping mechanism to effectively resolve the hardware heterogeneity of mismatched channels in multi-center datasets. Extensive experiments on the Mumtaz2016 and high-density MODMA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and exceptional generalizability of our method under the challenging "zero data augmentation" setting and at "zero sample synthesis cost". Keywords: Electroencephalography (EEG), Depression Detection, Anomaly Score, Diffusion Models, Few-Shot Learning
Simulated students offer a scalable way to test learning platforms and AI tutors before deployment with real students and to augment scarce data for studying learning at scale. Existing LLM-based simulators primarily target short, language-centered interactions. In open-ended learning environments, however, student behavior emerges from patterns across long-horizon interaction trajectories, where turn-level prompting can drift from an assigned behavior profile. We introduce ALPS (Align Long-term by Planning Short-term), a hierarchical simulated student conditioned on observable, environment-specific behavior profiles. Rather than selecting every action independently, ALPS alternates between planning profile-aligned task segments and generating the corresponding actions. We evaluate ALPS in both data-sufficient and data-scarce settings, where supervision comes either from real student trajectories or from a teacher LLM. Across both settings, we compare in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reward-ranked fine-tuning (RAFT), and their sequential combination (SFT followed by RAFT). Experiments in an inquiry-based physics game and a pharmacy simulation evaluate behavioral density and coverage against held-out real data, and profile consistency using a human-aligned LLM judge. Across both settings, ALPS consistently outperforms turn-level generation, achieving comparable density and judge pass rates under scarce supervision, although coverage remains lower. These results show that hierarchical planning enables faithful, profile-aligned simulation over long interaction horizons, even with limited real student data.
Wan Jiang, Jingqi Cheng, Hui Zhang, Xu Zhao, Xiaojing Chen, Shengeng Tang, Jingjing Wu, Richang Hong
Web-enabled digital health services are expanding access to physiological monitoring and mental health screening. However, electroencephalography (EEG)-based major depressive disorder (MDD) detection remains challenging across heterogeneous data sources, where individual variability and acquisition differences may affect disease-related representations. In this work, we investigate the use of healthy normative references for EEG-based MDD detection. Specifically, structural and distributional reference models are independently trained using healthy control (HC) recordings to characterize departures from healthy EEG patterns. We develop two diagnostic approaches that incorporate normative deviations at different representation levels. Scalar-level Normative Deviation-guided Diagnosis (S-NDD) summarizes structural and distributional deviations into scalar scores and integrates them with deep EEG representations. Feature-level Normative Deviation-guided Diagnosis (F-NDD) retains dimension-wise residuals and combines them with deep EEG representations through attention-based aggregation and auxiliary supervision. We also employ target HC-assisted score calibration for cross-source evaluation without updating the trained models. Experiments on two public EEG datasets examine both approaches under subject-independent within-source and bidirectional cross-source settings. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of normative deviation-guided diagnosis across different evaluation settings.
Open-vocabulary 3D occupancy prediction represents scene geometry and semantics in a unified voxel grid, enabling recognition beyond predefined categories. One approach reconstructs scenes with 3D Gaussians and converts them into voxel occupancy. However, Gaussian scale inflation and excessive overlap can distort voxel occupancy predictions, while semantic mixing can arise within Gaussians spanning multiple categories and during 3D--2D semantic feature alignment. We propose GCSR-OCC, which combines geometry calibration and multi-mode query-conditioned semantic routing for indoor occupancy prediction from a single RGB image. The Evidence-Conserving Gaussian-to-Occupancy operator (EC-G2O) uses kernel mass normalization, $p$-norm aggregation, and a learnable gain to suppress scale inflation and excessive local evidence accumulation while calibrating occupancy responses. Multi-mode Query-First Gaussian Semantic Routing (MM-QGSR) matches multiple semantic modes per Gaussian to text queries and aggregates query-specific evidence into voxels through a learnable text-conditioned router. Fine-grained subclass queries and smoothed semantic aggregation further refine voxel-level predictions. Without 3D semantic annotations, GCSR-OCC achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary occupancy prediction on Occ-ScanNet, with 63.31% geometric IoU and 27.44% semantic mIoU. It also reduces geometric aggregation latency from 19.76 ms to 12.88 ms. Our code will be made publicly available.
Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao, Shang Wu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Lu, Han Liu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.
Yangyi Li Iowa State University, Chenxu Zhao, Mengdi Huai Iowa State University
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated significant improvements in complex reasoning. While quantifying generation uncertainty in LRMs is crucial, traditional methods are often insufficient because they do not provide finite-sample guarantees for reasoning-answer generation. Conformal prediction (CP) stands out as a model-agnostic methodology that constructs statistically rigorous uncertainty sets. However, existing CP methods ignore the logical connection between the reasoning trace and the final answer. Additionally, prior studies fail to interpret the origins of uncertainty coverage for LRMs as they typically overlook the specific training factors driving valid reasoning. Notably, it is challenging to disentangle reasoning quality from answer correctness, while simultaneously establishing theoretical guarantees for computationally efficient explanation methods. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel methodology that provides the uncertainty of the reasoning-answer structure with statistical guarantees. Subsequently, we develop a unified example-to-step explanation framework using Shapley values that identifies a provably sufficient subset of training data and their specific reasoning steps sufficient to achieve coverage. We also provide the theoretical analysis for our proposed methods. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuming Yang Fudan University, Mingyoung Lai University of Toronto, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao 等 16 位作者
Long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories provide rich supervision signals for distilling reasoning from teacher to student LLMs. However, both prior work and our experiments show that trajectories from stronger teachers do not necessarily yield better students, highlighting the importance of data-student suitability in distillation. Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. Addressing this, we propose Rank–Surprisal Ratio (RSR), a simple metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. RSR is motivated by the observation that effective trajectories typically balance learning signal strength and behavioral alignment by combining low absolute probability with relatively high-ranked tokens under the student model.Concretely, RSR is defined as the ratio of a trajectory’s average token-wise rank to its average negative log-likelihood, and is straightforward to compute and interpret. Across five student models and reasoning trajectories from 11 diverse teachers, RSR strongly correlates with post-training reasoning performance (average Spearman 0.86), consistently outperforming existing metrics. We further demonstrate its practical utility in both trajectory selection and teacher selection.
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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