❌

Normal view

Embedding Enhancement via Fine-Tuned Language Models for Learner-Item Cognitive Modeling

arXiv:2604.04088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learner-item cognitive modeling plays a central role in the web-based online intelligent education system by enabling cognitive diagnosis (CD) across diverse online educational scenarios. Although ID embedding remains the mainstream approach in cognitive modeling due to its effectiveness and flexibility, recent advances in language models (LMs) have introduced new possibilities for incorporating rich semantic representations to enhance CD performance. This highlights the need for a comprehensive analysis of how LMs enhance embeddings through semantic integration across mainstream CD tasks. This paper identifies two key challenges in fully leveraging LMs in existing work: Misalignment between the training objectives of LMs and CD models creates a distribution gap in feature spaces; A unified framework is essential for integrating textual embeddings across varied CD tasks while preserving the strengths of existing cognitive modeling paradigms to ensure the robustness of embedding enhancement. To address these challenges, this paper introduces EduEmbed, a unified embedding enhancement framework that leverages fine-tuned LMs to enrich learner-item cognitive modeling across diverse CD tasks. EduEmbed operates in two stages. In the first stage, we fine-tune LMs based on role-specific representations and an interaction diagnoser to bridge the semantic gap of CD models. In the second stage, we employ a textual adapter to extract task-relevant semantics and integrate them with existing modeling paradigms to improve generalization. We evaluate the proposed framework on four CD tasks and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) task, achieving robust performance. Further analysis reveals the impact of semantic information across diverse tasks, offering key insights for future research on the application of LMs in CD for online intelligent education systems.

RAE-AR: Taming Autoregressive Models with Representation Autoencoders

arXiv:2604.01545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The latent space of generative modeling is long dominated by the VAE encoder. The latents from the pretrained representation encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP, MAE) are previously considered inappropriate for generative modeling. Recently, RAE method lights the hope and reveals that the representation autoencoder can also achieve competitive performance as the VAE encoder. However, the integration of representation autoencoder into continuous autoregressive (AR) models, remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the challenges of employing high-dimensional representation autoencoders within the AR paradigm, denoted as \textit{RAE-AR}. We focus on the unique properties of AR models and identify two primary hurdles: complex token-wise distribution modeling and the high-dimensionality amplified training-inference gap (exposure bias). To address these, we introduce token simplification via distribution normalization to ease modeling difficulty and improve convergence. Furthermore, we enhance prediction robustness by incorporating Gaussian noise injection during training to mitigate exposure bias. Our empirical results demonstrate that these modifications substantially bridge the performance gap, enabling representation autoencoder to achieve results comparable to traditional VAEs on AR models. This work paves the way for a more unified architecture across visual understanding and generative modeling.

Leptomeningeal metastatic cancer cells induce a permissive choroid plexus vasculature through extracellular-vesicle-derived 5-HIAA signaling

Nature Cancer, Published online: 03 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s43018-026-01145-y

Huang, Hou, Yang et al. demonstrate that leptomeningeal metastatic cells favor the formation of a premetastatic niche by remodeling the choroid plexus vasculature through the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, which signals into endothelial cells through the aryl hydrocarbon receptor.

Low-dose intestinal irradiation enhances the efficacy and prognosis of PD-1 blockade in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer

Clin Cancer Res. 2026 Mar 18. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-25-4153. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Intestinal low-dose irradiation (ILDR) may enhance immunotherapy efficacy by modulating the gut microbiota and metabolism; however, its role in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (mNSCLC), particularly in the first-line setting, remains unclear.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: This multicenter retrospective and prospective study included mNSCLC patients receiving first- and second-line programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitors along with abdominopelvic radiotherapy between 2018 and 2025. Patients were stratified by the mean intestinal radiation dose into <1 Gy, 1-3 Gy, and >3 Gy groups and treatment outcomes were compared. The blood and fecal samples were subjected to multi-omics profiling.

RESULTS: g>309 patients were included in the retrospective analysis. Optimal efficacy was observed with a small intestinal mean radiation dose (SIMRD) of 1-3 Gy, showing longer progression-free survival (PFS, 10.2 months) and overall survival (OS, 22.8 months) (P < 0.01), which was consistent across subgroups. Compared with 1-3 Gy, SIMRD >3 Gy (Hazard ratio [HR] = 4.87, P < 0.001) and <1 Gy (HR = 1.85, P < 0.001) independently predicted worse OS. Prospective results confirmed the best disease control rate (P = 0.041) and PFS (P = 0.046) with SIMRD of 1-3 Gy. Responders were enriched in Bacillota, Clostridia, and indole derivatives, particularly indole-3-carboxylic acid. Moreover, the 1-3 Gy group exhibited increased circulating macrophage inflammatory protein-3α and reduced circulating α4β7+ regulatory T cells.

CONCLUSIONS: ILDR influences the efficacy of PD-1 blockade in patients with mNSCLC, particularly when SIMRD is maintained within the 1-3 Gy range, likely through modulation of the gut microbiota-metabolite-immune axis.

PMID:41849236 | DOI:10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-25-4153

FedMomentum: Preserving LoRA Training Momentum in Federated Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2603.08014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving solution for task-specific adaptation. Naive aggregation of LoRA modules introduces noise due to mathematical incorrectness when averaging the downsampling and upsampling matrices independently. However, existing noise-free aggregation strategies inevitably compromise the structural expressiveness of LoRA, limiting its ability to retain client-specific adaptations by either improperly reconstructing the low-rank structure or excluding partially trainable components. We identify this problem as loss of training momentum, where LoRA updates fail to accumulate effectively across rounds, resulting in slower convergence and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose FedMomentum, a novel framework that enables structured and momentum-preserving LoRA aggregation via singular value decomposition (SVD). Specifically, after aggregating low-rank updates in a mathematically correct manner, FedMomentum applies SVD to extract the dominant components that capture the main update directions. These components are used to reconstruct the LoRA modules with the same rank, while residual components can be retained and later merged into the backbone to preserve semantic information and ensure robustness. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that FedMomentum consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in convergence speed and final accuracy.

Exploring Diffusion Models' Corruption Stage in Few-Shot Fine-tuning and Mitigating with Bayesian Neural Networks

arXiv:2405.19931v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Few-shot fine-tuning of Diffusion Models (DMs) is a key advancement, significantly reducing training costs and enabling personalized AI applications. However, we explore the training dynamics of DMs and observe an unanticipated phenomenon: during the training process, image fidelity initially improves, then unexpectedly deteriorates with the emergence of noisy patterns, only to recover later with severe overfitting. We term the stage with generated noisy patterns as corruption stage. To understand this corruption stage, we begin by theoretically modeling the one-shot fine-tuning scenario, and then extend this modeling to more general cases. Through this modeling, we identify the primary cause of this corruption stage: a narrowed learning distribution inherent in the nature of few-shot fine-tuning. To tackle this, we apply Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) on DMs with variational inference to implicitly broaden the learned distribution, and present that the learning target of the BNNs can be naturally regarded as an expectation of the diffusion loss and a further regularization with the pretrained DMs. This approach is highly compatible with current few-shot fine-tuning methods in DMs and does not introduce any extra inference costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates corruption, and improves the fidelity, quality and diversity of the generated images in both object-driven and subject-driven generation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/BNN-Finetuning-DMs.

CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment

arXiv:2603.02557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models like CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in cross-modal representation learning, yet suffer from systematic misclassifications among visually and semantically similar categories. We observe that such confusion patterns are not random but persistently occur between specific category pairs, revealing the model's intrinsic bias and limited fine-grained discriminative ability. To address this, we propose CAPT, a Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning framework that enables models to learn from their own misalignment. Specifically, we construct a Confusion Bank to explicitly model stable confusion relationships across categories and misclassified samples. On this basis, we introduce a Semantic Confusion Miner (SEM) to capture global inter-class confusion through semantic difference and commonality prompts, and a Sample Confusion Miner (SAM) to retrieve representative misclassified instances from the bank and capture sample-level cues through a Diff-Manner Adapter that integrates global and local contexts. To further unify confusion information across different granularities, a Multi-Granularity Difference Expert (MGDE) module is designed to jointly leverage semantic- and sample-level experts for more robust confusion-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces confusion-induced errors while enhancing the discriminability and generalization of both base and novel classes, successfully resolving 50.72 percent of confusable sample pairs. Code will be released at https://github.com/greatest-gourmet/CAPT.

pFedNavi: Structure-Aware Personalized Federated Vision-Language Navigation for Embodied AI

arXiv:2602.14401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation VLN requires large-scale trajectory instruction data from private indoor environments, raising significant privacy concerns. Federated Learning FL mitigates this by keeping data on-device, but vanilla FL struggles under VLNs' extreme cross-client heterogeneity in environments and instruction styles, making a single global model suboptimal. This paper proposes pFedNavi, a structure-aware and dynamically adaptive personalized federated learning framework tailored for VLN. Our key idea is to personalize where it matters: pFedNavi adaptively identifies client-specific layers via layer-wise mixing coefficients, and performs fine-grained parameter fusion on the selected components (e.g., the encoder-decoder projection and environment-sensitive decoder layers) to balance global knowledge sharing with local specialization. We evaluate pFedNavi on two standard VLN benchmarks, R2R and RxR, using both ResNet and CLIP visual representations. Across all metrics, pFedNavi consistently outperforms the FedAvg-based VLN baseline, achieving up to 7.5% improvement in navigation success rate and up to 7.8% gain in trajectory fidelity, while converging 1.38x faster under non-IID conditions.
❌