LoGoFair: Post-Processing for Local and Global Fairness in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has garnered considerable interest for its capability to learn from decentralized data sources. Given the increasing application of FL in decision-making scenarios, addressing fairness issues across different sensitive groups (e.g., female, male) in FL is crucial. Current research often focuses on facilitating fairness at each client's data (local fairness) or within the entire dataset across all clients (global fairness). However, existing approaches that focus exclusively on either local or global fairness fail to address two key challenges: (\textbf{CH1}) Under statistical heterogeneity, global fairness does not imply local fairness, and vice versa. (\textbf{CH2}) Achieving fairness under model-agnostic setting. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a novel post-processing framework for achieving both Local and Global Fairness in the FL context, namely LoGoFair. To address CH1, LoGoFair endeavors to seek the Bayes optimal classifier under local and global fairness constraints, which strikes the optimal accuracy-fairness balance in the probabilistic sense. To address CH2, LoGoFair employs a model-agnostic federated post-processing procedure that enables clients to collaboratively optimize global fairness while ensuring local fairness, thereby achieving the optimal fair classifier within FL. Experimental results on three real-world datasets further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed LoGoFair framework.

Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Help Mobile GUI Agent? An Empirical Study

Reasoning capabilities have significantly improved the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) in domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding, and visual question-answering. However, their impact on real-world applications remains unclear. This paper presents the first empirical study on the effectiveness of reasoning-enabled VLMs in mobile GUI agents, a domain that requires interpreting complex screen layouts, understanding user instructions, and executing multi-turn interactions. We evaluate two pairs of commercial models--Gemini 2.0 Flash and Claude 3.7 Sonnet--comparing their base and reasoning-enhanced versions across two static benchmarks (ScreenSpot and AndroidControl) and one interactive environment (AndroidWorld). We surprisingly find the Claude 3.7 Sonnet reasoning model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AndroidWorld. However, reasoning VLMs generally offer marginal improvements over non-reasoning models on static benchmarks and even degrade performance in some agent setups. Notably, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs fail on different sets of tasks, suggesting that reasoning does have an impact, but its benefits and drawbacks counterbalance each other. We attribute these inconsistencies to the limitations of benchmarks and VLMs. Based on the findings, we provide insights for further enhancing mobile GUI agents in terms of benchmarks, VLMs, and their adaptability in dynamically invoking reasoning VLMs. The experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/LlamaTouch/VLM-Reasoning-Traces.

Exploring the Reliability of Self-explanation and its Relationship with Classification in Language Model-driven Financial Analysis

Language models (LMs) have exhibited exceptional versatility in reasoning and in-depth financial analysis through their proprietary information processing capabilities. Previous research focused on evaluating classification performance while often overlooking explainability or pre-conceived that refined explanation corresponds to higher classification accuracy. Using a public dataset in finance domain, we quantitatively evaluated self-explanations by LMs, focusing on their factuality and causality. We identified the statistically significant relationship between the accuracy of classifications and the factuality or causality of self-explanations. Our study built an empirical foundation for approximating classification confidence through self-explanations and for optimizing classification via proprietary reasoning.

Evaluating Time Series Models with Knowledge Discovery

Time series data is one of the most ubiquitous data modalities existing in a diverse critical domains such as healthcare, seismology, manufacturing and energy. Recent years, there are increasing interest of the data mining community to develop time series deep learning models to pursue better performance. The models performance often evaluate by certain evaluation metrics such as RMSE, Accuracy, and F1-score. Yet time series data are often hard to interpret and are collected with unknown environmental factors, sensor configuration, latent physic mechanisms, and non-stationary evolving behavior. As a result, a model that is better on standard metric-based evaluation may not always perform better in real-world tasks. In this blue sky paper, we aim to explore the challenge that exists in the metric-based evaluation framework for time series data mining and propose a potential blue-sky idea -- developing a knowledge-discovery-based evaluation framework, which aims to effectively utilize domain-expertise knowledge to evaluate a model. We demonstrate that an evidence-seeking explanation can potentially have stronger persuasive power than metric-based evaluation and obtain better generalization ability for time series data mining tasks.

Bridging Past and Future: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Historical Prediction and Planning

End-to-end autonomous driving unifies tasks in a differentiable framework, enabling planning-oriented optimization and attracting growing attention. Current methods aggregate historical information either through dense historical bird's-eye-view (BEV) features or by querying a sparse memory bank, following paradigms inherited from detection. However, we argue that these paradigms either omit historical information in motion planning or fail to align with its multi-step nature, which requires predicting or planning multiple future time steps. In line with the philosophy of future is a continuation of past, we propose BridgeAD, which reformulates motion and planning queries as multi-step queries to differentiate the queries for each future time step. This design enables the effective use of historical prediction and planning by applying them to the appropriate parts of the end-to-end system based on the time steps, which improves both perception and motion planning. Specifically, historical queries for the current frame are combined with perception, while queries for future frames are integrated with motion planning. In this way, we bridge the gap between past and future by aggregating historical insights at every time step, enhancing the overall coherence and accuracy of the end-to-end autonomous driving pipeline. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset in both open-loop and closed-loop settings demonstrate that BridgeAD achieves state-of-the-art performance.

DynaCode: A Dynamic Complexity-Aware Code Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved their performance in code generation tasks. However, existing code benchmarks remain static, consisting of fixed datasets with predefined problems. This makes them vulnerable to memorization during training, where LLMs recall specific test cases instead of generalizing to new problems, leading to data contamination and unreliable evaluation results. To address these issues, we introduce DynaCode, a dynamic, complexity-aware benchmark that overcomes the limitations of static datasets. DynaCode evaluates LLMs systematically using a complexity-aware metric, incorporating both code complexity and call-graph structures. DynaCode achieves large-scale diversity, generating up to 189 million unique nested code problems across four distinct levels of code complexity, referred to as units, and 16 types of call graphs. Results on 12 latest LLMs show an average performance drop of 16.8% to 45.7% compared to MBPP+, a static code generation benchmark, with performance progressively decreasing as complexity increases. This demonstrates DynaCode's ability to effectively differentiate LLMs. Additionally, by leveraging call graphs, we gain insights into LLM behavior, particularly their preference for handling subfunction interactions within nested code.

AI-Driven Automated Tool for Abdominal CT Body Composition Analysis in Gastrointestinal Cancer Management

The incidence of gastrointestinal cancers remains significantly high, particularly in China, emphasizing the importance of accurate prognostic assessments and effective treatment strategies. Research shows a strong correlation between abdominal muscle and fat tissue composition and patient outcomes. However, existing manual methods for analyzing abdominal tissue composition are time-consuming and costly, limiting clinical research scalability. To address these challenges, we developed an AI-driven tool for automated analysis of abdominal CT scans to effectively identify and segment muscle, subcutaneous fat, and visceral fat. Our tool integrates a multi-view localization model and a high-precision 2D nnUNet-based segmentation model, demonstrating a localization accuracy of 90% and a Dice Score Coefficient of 0.967 for segmentation. Furthermore, it features an interactive interface that allows clinicians to refine the segmentation results, ensuring high-quality outcomes effectively. Our tool offers a standardized method for effectively extracting critical abdominal tissues, potentially enhancing the management and treatment for gastrointestinal cancers. The code is available at https://github.com/NanXinyu/AI-Tool4Abdominal-Seg.git}{https://github.com/NanXinyu/AI-Tool4Abdominal-Seg.git.

GenDR: Lightning Generative Detail Restorator

Recent research applying text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to real-world super-resolution (SR) has achieved remarkable success. However, fundamental misalignments between T2I and SR targets result in a dilemma between inference speed and detail fidelity. Specifically, T2I tasks prioritize multi-step inversion to synthesize coherent outputs aligned with textual prompts and shrink the latent space to reduce generating complexity. Contrariwise, SR tasks preserve most information from low-resolution input while solely restoring high-frequency details, thus necessitating sufficient latent space and fewer inference steps. To bridge the gap, we present a one-step diffusion model for generative detail restoration, GenDR, distilled from a tailored diffusion model with larger latent space. In detail, we train a new SD2.1-VAE16 (0.9B) via representation alignment to expand latent space without enlarging the model size. Regarding step-distillation, we propose consistent score identity distillation (CiD) that incorporates SR task-specific loss into score distillation to leverage more SR priors and align the training target. Furthermore, we extend CiD with adversarial learning and representation alignment (CiDA) to enhance perceptual quality and accelerate training. We also polish the pipeline to achieve a more efficient inference. Experimental results demonstrate that GenDR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative metrics and visual fidelity.

UAR-NVC: A Unified AutoRegressive Framework for Memory-Efficient Neural Video Compression

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have demonstrated significant potential in video compression by representing videos as neural networks. However, as the number of frames increases, the memory consumption for training and inference increases substantially, posing challenges in resource-constrained scenarios. Inspired by the success of traditional video compression frameworks, which process video frame by frame and can efficiently compress long videos, we adopt this modeling strategy for INRs to decrease memory consumption, while aiming to unify the frameworks from the perspective of timeline-based autoregressive modeling. In this work, we present a novel understanding of INR models from an autoregressive (AR) perspective and introduce a Unified AutoRegressive Framework for memory-efficient Neural Video Compression (UAR-NVC). UAR-NVC integrates timeline-based and INR-based neural video compression under a unified autoregressive paradigm. It partitions videos into several clips and processes each clip using a different INR model instance, leveraging the advantages of both compression frameworks while allowing seamless adaptation to either in form. To further reduce temporal redundancy between clips, we design two modules to optimize the initialization, training, and compression of these model parameters. UAR-NVC supports adjustable latencies by varying the clip length. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UAR-NVC, with its flexible video clip setting, can adapt to resource-constrained environments and significantly improve performance compared to different baseline models.

Time-Varying Coronary Artery Deformation: A Dynamic Skinning Framework for Surgical Training

Purpose: This study proposes a novel anatomically-driven dynamic modeling framework for coronary arteries using skeletal skinning weights computation, aiming to achieve precise control over vessel deformation while maintaining real-time performance for surgical simulation applications. Methods: We developed a computational framework based on biharmonic energy minimization for skinning weight calculation, incorporating volumetric discretization through tetrahedral mesh generation. The method implements temporal sampling and interpolation for continuous vessel deformation throughout the cardiac cycle, with mechanical constraints and volume conservation enforcement. The framework was validated using clinical datasets from 5 patients, comparing interpolated deformation results against ground truth data obtained from frame-by-frame segmentation across cardiac phases. Results: The proposed framework effectively handled interactive vessel manipulation. Geometric accuracy evaluation showed mean Hausdorff distance of 4.96 +- 1.78 mm and mean surface distance of 1.78 +- 0.75 mm between interpolated meshes and ground truth models. The Branch Completeness Ratio achieved 1.82 +- 0.46, while Branch Continuity Score maintained 0.84 +- 0.06 (scale 0-1) across all datasets. The system demonstrated capability in supporting real-time guidewire-vessel collision detection and contrast medium flow simulation throughout the complete coronary tree structure. Conclusion: Our skinning weight-based methodology enhances model interactivity and applicability while maintaining geometric accuracy. The framework provides a more flexible technical foundation for virtual surgical training systems, demonstrating promising potential for both clinical practice and medical education applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ipoirot/DynamicArtery.