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Avoiding common failures in AI for health and medicine

17 September 2026 at 08:00
Salaudeen et al. review common reliability failures in predictive and generative AI for healthcare, including erroneous model outputs, clinically unjustified performance differences, and deployment-time degradation. They examine why existing technical solutions fall short and argue for lifecycle-aware evaluation, continuous monitoring, and institutional governance.

Online Learning for Multi-Layer Hierarchical Inference under Partial and Policy-Dependent Feedback

arXiv:2603.04247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical inference systems route tasks across multiple computational layers, where each node may either finalize a prediction locally or offload the task to a node in the next layer for further processing. Learning optimal routing policies in such systems is challenging: inference loss is defined recursively across layers, while feedback on prediction error is revealed only at a terminal oracle layer. This induces a partial, policy-dependent feedback structure in which observability probabilities decay with depth, causing importance-weighted estimators to suffer from amplified variance. We study online routing for multi-layer hierarchical inference under long-term resource constraints and terminal-only feedback. We formalize the recursive loss structure and show that naive importance-weighted contextual bandit methods become unstable as feedback probability decays along the hierarchy. To address this, we develop a variance-reduced EXP4-based algorithm integrated with Lyapunov optimization, yielding unbiased loss estimation and stable learning under sparse and policy-dependent feedback. We provide regret guarantees relative to the best fixed routing policy in hindsight and establish near-optimality under stochastic arrivals and resource constraints. Experiments on large-scale multi-task workloads demonstrate improved stability and performance compared to standard importance-weighted approaches.

Social-JEPA: Emergent Geometric Isomorphism

arXiv:2603.02263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models compress rich sensory streams into compact latent codes that anticipate future observations. We let separate agents acquire such models from distinct viewpoints of the same environment without any parameter sharing or coordination. After training, their internal representations exhibit a striking emergent property: the two latent spaces are related by an approximate linear isometry, enabling transparent translation between them. This geometric consensus survives large viewpoint shifts and scant overlap in raw pixels. Leveraging the learned alignment, a classifier trained on one agent can be ported to the other with no additional gradient steps, while distillation-like migration accelerates later learning and markedly reduces total compute. The findings reveal that predictive learning objectives impose strong regularities on representation geometry, suggesting a lightweight path to interoperability among decentralized vision systems. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Social-JEPA-5C57.

Batch Speculative Decoding Done Right

arXiv:2510.22876v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding must produce outputs distribution identical to standard autoregressive generation-this output equivalence is not an optimization target but the defining criterion of valid speculative decoding. We demonstrate that all existing batch speculative decoding implementations violate this fundamental requirement, producing corrupted outputs ranging from repetitive tokens to gibberish. These failures stem from the ragged tensor problem: sequences in the same batch accept different numbers of draft tokens, desynchronizing position IDs, attention masks, and KV-cache state. We present the first authentic batch speculative decoding framework. We (1) formalize the synchronization invariants that valid batch speculative decoding must satisfy, (2) present EQSPEC, the first algorithm that guarantees output equivalence, and analyze its cost structure to show that alignment overhead grows superlinearly and consumes up to 40\% of computation, and (3) introduce EXSPEC, which reduces this overhead through cross-batch scheduling that dynamically groups same-length sequences. On SpecBench across Vicuna-7B/68M, Qwen3-8B/0.6B, and GLM-4-9B/0.6B pairs, our methods achieve up to 3x throughput improvement at batch size 8 while maintaining algorithmic correctness. Our methods achieve 95\% decoding-equivalence, with residual divergence attributable to floating-point non-determinism in GPU inference, not the synchronization failures that cause near-zero equivalence of prior methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/eBay/spec_dec.
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