Synthetic data can improve statistical inference when real data are scarce, but naively treating synthetic samples as real data can introduce bias and lead to unreliable inference. We develop a general framework for synthetic-augmented inference across a population of related tasks. It characterizes synthetic augmentation by the number of synthetic observations and their weight. Central to our framework is a size-weight frontier that specifies, for each weight, the largest synthetic sample size for which all smaller sizes attain the target task-marginal coverage. We estimate this frontier from historical tasks, and establish a finite-sample coverage guarantee simultaneously for all size-weight configurations on or below the estimated frontier. In experiments using large language model responses to augment opinion survey data, our procedure achieves target coverage and substantially narrows confidence intervals.
Contrastive vision-language learning uses paired chest CT volumes and radiology reports to learn abnormality classifiers without manually annotated labels. However, two characteristics of chest CT challenge conventional global contrastive learning. First, many critical abnormalities are small or anatomically localized, and pooling an en- tire volume into a single embedding may dilute their visual evidence. Second, the standard contrastive objective treats every other scan in a batch as a negative. Because many chest CTs share abnormalities, this objective incorrectly pushes co-positive pairs apart. We propose Anatomy-Routed Contrastive Learning for 3D Chest CT (ARC-CT), a region-aware framework that addresses these limitations using only la- bels extracted from reports by an LLM, with no manual annotations or bounding boxes. ARC-CT combines three components: (1) an Anato- myQFormer localizing evidence via queries constrained by automatically generated organ masks; (2) a label-Jaccard soft InfoNCE objective in- tegrating the standard one-hot target with the label-set overlap of each pair, which reduces false-negative penalties between studies that share clinical findings; and (3) an organ-level alignment loss connecting mask- pooled visual features to organ-specific report text extracted offline with a large language model. ARC-CT achieves a 0.86 mask-free macro AUC across 18 abnormalities using a compact 3D ResNet-18 backbone. Over- all, ARC-CT outperforms both comparable efficient baselines and sev- eral larger transformer models. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/arc-ct/arc-ct.
Huseyin Umut Isik, Mehmet Alp Ozaydin, Sila Kurugol et al.· 0 citations
Users often ask large language models (LLMs) to report how confident they are, but it is unclear whether such linguistic confidence tracks the model's internal confidence. We study this question across 8 classification tasks, 2 generation tasks and 30 models from three families. For classification, we compare linguistic confidence with logits-based confidence along three axes: association, magnitude agreement and calibration. For generation, we test whether linguistic confidence tracks semantic-entropy-based uncertainty. The axes frequently diverge. Instance-level association is weak on average, although it improves on easier items and for stronger base models. Instruction-tuned models often report higher confidence and sometimes show higher association, but they also have larger confidence gaps and worse calibration. Prompt design mostly changes the distribution of reported confidence. Attitude cues inflate confidence without improving alignment, while score exemplars can preserve rank-order signal when they avoid collapsed confidence values. Regression analyses show that distributional properties of confidence scores explain much of the observed alignment pattern, with model metadata playing a smaller role after controls. These results support a lossy-channel view of linguistic confidence. A more dispersed verbal confidence distribution can carry useful rank information, but it does not make the scores calibrated. Linguistic confidence should therefore be evaluated with multi-axis diagnostics before being used in downstream reliability pipelines.
Hefan Zhang, Bingquan Zhang, Ming Cheng et al.· 0 citations
It is suggested that imitating full trajectories helps with playability, while turn-level and teacher-guided training usually improve decision-making and increase the overall score, and small models are performant simply by using careful curation strategies rather than aggressive changes.
Syed Mahbubul Huq, P. Madhyastha· 0 citations
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On a 740-instance healthcare API routing task with a 1.5B Qwen student and a 20B teacher, eight KD variants are compared against supervised cross-entropy, finding single-seed evaluation is unable to detect central failure modes in small-model KD.
Dipto Sumit, Sakib Ul Haque, Farig Sadeque· 0 citations
DAMP uses both quantization-error energy and decay-based persistence to identify high-risk channels during offline calibration and stores these channels at higher precision and the remainder in INT8, the first to study post-training quantization of recurrent states in GDN and KDA based language models.
Tao Zhang, Jianchao Tan, Pingwei Sun et al.· 0 citations
It is found that cue-based prompting can influence multilingual sentence-level Easy-to-Read simplification, but its benefits are modest, metric-dependent, and language-dependent.
Mehrzad Tareh, Horacio Saggion, Stefan Bott· 0 citations
It is shown that AI generation leaves a consistent ``stylometric footprint'': a small subset of features, primarily entropy and lexical diversity, consistently separates AI-generated text from human writing across 8 LLMs and 5 domains, while the remaining features depend heavily on the domain and generator.
Zhengyang Shan, Yuk-Yung Lee, Sophie Hao· 0 citations
It is found that the speculative-decoding module in recent LLMs can be repurposed for efficient high-quality classification by appending a trained soft prompt at the end of the target sequence, which can repurpose the speculative-decoding module into a sequence classifier.
STITCH is presented, a training-free method that divides a video into semantically meaningful temporal chunks that are computed once per video and reused across tasks, suggesting that reusable temporal abstraction is a promising direction for general video understanding.
Etienne Casanova, S. Brodjian, Pietro Perona· 0 citations
The Confidence-Weighted Numeric Precision Score (\cwnps), which aggregates three calibrated detectors and discounts uncertain proposals, is proposed for scalable evaluation and developed a process model in which requested instances compete for a finite set of resolvable image regions.
Sandeep Wadhwa, M. Vatsa, Richa Singh et al.· 0 citations
The results support the common principle that explicit regulation of neuron utilization and effective connectivity can improve the emergence of generalizable internal computation and motivate broader investigation of biologically inspired activity regulation and adaptive sparsification, including in large language models.
What if pathology foundation models could do more with less? GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash cut computational demands while maintaining strong performance, opening the door to larger studies and broader exploration. The post GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 31, 2026
With millions of users across the world, Julia has been used to conduct cutting-edge research and to design new drugs, jet engines, heat pumps, and more.