Adaptation, Comparison and Practical Implementation of Fairness Schemes in Kidney Exchange Programs
In Kidney Exchange Programs (KEPs), each participating patient is registered together with an incompatible donor. Donors without an incompat… (voir plus)ible patient can also register. Then, KEPs typically maximize overall patient benefit through donor exchanges. This aggregation of benefits calls into question potential individual patient disparities in terms of access to transplantation in KEPs. Considering solely this utilitarian objective may become an issue in the case where multiple exchange plans are optimal or near-optimal. In fact, current KEP policies are all-or-nothing, meaning that only one exchange plan is determined. Each patient is either selected or not as part of that unique solution. In this work, we seek instead to find a policy that contemplates the probability of patients of being in a solution. To guide the determination of our policy, we adapt popular fairness schemes to KEPs to balance the usual approach of maximizing the utilitarian objective. Different combinations of fairness and utilitarian objectives are modelled as conic programs with an exponential number of variables. We propose a column generation approach to solve them effectively in practice. Finally, we make an extensive comparison of the different schemes in terms of the balance of utility and fairness score, and validate the scalability of our methodology for benchmark instances from the literature.
Clarifying a working definition for ‘precision communication’: a scoping review of medical literature on communication
Bao-Lam Pham
Brigitte N. Durieux
Amanda Bianco
Corinne Cécyre-Chartrand
Elena Guadagno
Amalia M. Issa
Policy context and digital development: a comparative study of trajectories in 4 Canadian academic health centers over 30 years
Aude Motulsky
Susan Usher
Pascale Lehoux
Trish Reay
Paul Hebert
Lise Gauvin
Alain Biron
G Ross Baker
Marie-Pierre Moreault
Johanne Préval
Jean-Louis Denis
Galaxy cluster characterization with machine learning techniques
M. Sadikov
J. Hlavacek-Larrondo
C. L. Rhea
M. McDonald
M. Ntampaka
J. ZuHone
We present an analysis of the X-ray properties of the galaxy cluster population in the z=0 snapshot of the IllustrisTNG simulations, utilizi… (voir plus)ng machine learning techniques to perform clustering and regression tasks. We examine five properties of the hot gas (the central cooling time, the central electron density, the central entropy excess, the concentration parameter, and the cuspiness) which are commonly used as classification metrics to identify cool core (CC), weak cool core (WCC) and non cool core (NCC) clusters of galaxies. Using mock Chandra X-ray images as inputs, we first explore an unsupervised clustering scheme to see how the resulting groups correlate with the CC/WCC/NCC classification based on the different criteria. We observe that the groups replicate almost exactly the separation of the galaxy cluster images when classifying them based on the concentration parameter. We then move on to a regression task, utilizing a ResNet model to predict the value of all five properties. The network is able to achieve a mean percentage error of 1.8% for the central cooling time, and a balanced accuracy of 0.83 on the concentration parameter, making them the best-performing metrics. Finally, we use simulation-based inference (SBI) to extract posterior distributions for the network predictions. Our neural network simultaneously predicts all five classification metrics using only mock Chandra X-ray images. This study demonstrates that machine learning is a viable approach for analyzing and classifying the large galaxy cluster datasets that will soon become available through current and upcoming X-ray surveys, such as eROSITA.
It's the Thought that Counts: Evaluating the Attempts of Frontier LLMs to Persuade on Harmful Topics
Matthew Kowal
Jasper Timm
Thomas H Costello
Antonio A. Arechar
Gordon Pennycook
David Rand
Adam Gleave
Kellin Pelrine
Persuasion is a powerful capability of large language models (LLMs) that both enables beneficial applications (e.g. helping people quit smok… (voir plus)ing) and raises significant risks (e.g. large-scale, targeted political manipulation). Prior work has found models possess a significant and growing persuasive capability, measured by belief changes in simulated or real users. However, these benchmarks overlook a crucial risk factor: the propensity of a model to attempt to persuade in harmful contexts. Understanding whether a model will blindly ``follow orders'' to persuade on harmful topics (e.g. glorifying joining a terrorist group) is key to understanding the efficacy of safety guardrails. Moreover, understanding if and when a model will engage in persuasive behavior in pursuit of some goal is essential to understanding the risks from agentic AI systems. We propose the Attempt to Persuade Eval (APE) benchmark, that shifts the focus from persuasion success to persuasion attempts, operationalized as a model's willingness to generate content aimed at shaping beliefs or behavior. Our evaluation framework probes frontier LLMs using a multi-turn conversational setup between simulated persuader and persuadee agents. APE explores a diverse spectrum of topics including conspiracies, controversial issues, and non-controversially harmful content. We introduce an automated evaluator model to identify willingness to persuade and measure the frequency and context of persuasive attempts. We find that many open and closed-weight models are frequently willing to attempt persuasion on harmful topics and that jailbreaking can increase willingness to engage in such behavior. Our results highlight gaps in current safety guardrails and underscore the importance of evaluating willingness to persuade as a key dimension of LLM risk. APE is available at github.com/AlignmentResearch/AttemptPersuadeEval
NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT
Lola Le Breton
Quentin Fournier
Mariam El Mezouar
Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of … (voir plus)large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
The Impact of On-Policy Parallelized Data Collection on Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks
Walter Mayor
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
The use of parallel actors for data collection has been an effective technique used in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The manner in… (voir plus) which data is collected in these algorithms, controlled via the number of parallel environments and the rollout length, induces a form of bias-variance trade-off; the number of training passes over the collected data, on the other hand, must strike a balance between sample efficiency and overfitting. We conduct an empirical analysis of these trade-offs on PPO, one of the most popular RL algorithms that uses parallel actors, and establish connections to network plasticity and, more generally, optimization stability. We examine its impact on network architectures, as well as the hyper-parameter sensitivity when scaling data. Our analyses indicate that larger dataset sizes can increase final performance across a variety of settings, and that scaling parallel environments is more effective than increasing rollout lengths. These findings highlight the critical role of data collection strategies in improving agent performance.
Weak Supervision for Real World Graphs
Pratheeksha Nair
Unpacking Softmax: How Temperature Drives Representation Collapse, Compression, and Generalization
Wojciech Masarczyk
Mateusz Ostaszewski
Tin Sum Cheng
Tomasz Trzci'nski
Aurélien Lucchi
The softmax function is a fundamental building block of deep neural networks, commonly used to define output distributions in classification… (voir plus) tasks or attention weights in transformer architectures. Despite its widespread use and proven effectiveness, its influence on learning dynamics and learned representations remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to optimize model behavior. In this paper, we study the pivotal role of the softmax function in shaping the model's representation. We introduce the concept of rank deficit bias - a phenomenon in which softmax-based deep networks find solutions of rank much lower than the number of classes. This bias depends on the softmax function's logits norm, which is implicitly influenced by hyperparameters or directly modified by softmax temperature. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to exploit the softmax dynamics to learn compressed representations or to enhance their performance on out-of-distribution data. We validate our findings across diverse architectures and real-world datasets, highlighting the broad applicability of temperature tuning in improving model performance. Our work provides new insights into the mechanisms of softmax, enabling better control over representation learning in deep neural networks.
FORT: Forward-Only Regression Training of Normalizing Flows
Danyal Rehman
Oscar Davis
Jiarui Lu
Michael M. Bronstein
Alexander Tong
Simulation-free training frameworks have been at the forefront of the generative modelling revolution in continuous spaces, leading to neura… (voir plus)l dynamical systems that encompass modern large-scale diffusion and flow matching models. Despite the scalability of training, the generation of high-quality samples and their corresponding likelihood under the model requires expensive numerical simulation -- inhibiting adoption in numerous scientific applications such as equilibrium sampling of molecular systems. In this paper, we revisit classical normalizing flows as one-step generative models with exact likelihoods and propose a novel, scalable training objective that does not require computing the expensive change of variable formula used in conventional maximum likelihood training. We propose Forward-Only Regression Training (FORT), a simple
GNN-based Decentralized Perception in Multirobot Systems for Predicting Worker Actions
Ali Imran
David St-Onge
In industrial environments, predicting human actions is essential for ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and robots. T… (voir plus)his paper introduces a perception framework that enables mobile robots to understand and share information about human actions in a decentralized way. The framework first allows each robot to build a spatial graph representing its surroundings, which it then shares with other robots. This shared spatial data is combined with temporal information to track human behavior over time. A swarm-inspired decision-making process is used to ensure all robots agree on a unified interpretation of the human's actions. Results show that adding more robots and incorporating longer time sequences improve prediction accuracy. Additionally, the consensus mechanism increases system resilience, making the multi-robot setup more reliable in dynamic industrial settings.
Impact de l'antibiothérapie par Daptomycine dans le traitement des bactériémies à Enterococcus faecium en réanimation : l'étude rétrospective multicentrique ENTERODAPTO.
S. Herbel
L. Chantelot
J. Massol
Q. Moyon
J. Ricard
E. Azoulay
C. Hauw-Berlemont
E. Maury
T. Urbina