arXiv:2609.09425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational data filters have become a practical way to improve language-model pre-training, but most filters treat educational value as a single scalar property. This may be too broad for some applications, especially if the data set already features a high density of educational material. Useful learning material needs to be accurate, engaging, well structured, and appropriate for the intended audience and application (e.g. learner- vs teacher-facing). Following QuRating (Wettig et al. 2024), we introduce Edu-QuRating: a pipeline for multi-dimensional educational data scoring and curation. Edu-QuRating defines education-specific rubrics, uses an LLM judge to label sampled document pairs and distills those pairwise preferences into reusable Edu-QuRaters, which can score individual text chunks on a set of educational criteria. Across two sequence-classification base models and six educational criteria, the best Edu-QuRater recovers held-out GPT-4.1-mini pairwise judgements with mean accuracy 0.917. We then apply the resulting scorers in two applications. First, we investigate the potential of Edu-QuRaters for corpus filtering to improve pretraining of small language models. We scored 322.25M FineWeb-Edu-Fortified documents to obtain a filtered pre-training mixture. In matched single-run pre-training comparisons, models trained with Edu-QuRating-based mixtures reached higher observed aggregate accuracy across nine benchmarks than the FineWeb-Edu baseline, with gains concentrated in particular tasks. Second, we used Edu-QuRater scores as reward terms for GRPO post-training. In held-out pairwise judge evaluations, combining Edu-QuRater and answer-structure rewards produced responses preferred to the Qwen3-4B base model on both pedagogical quality and instruction following.

arXiv:2505.03380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate delineation of tumors and surrounding organs-at-risk is essential for radiotherapy, surgery and treatment response assessment, yet remains time-consuming and expertise-intensive. Existing artificial intelligence systems often require manual spatial prompts or task-specific retraining, while generic class labels provide limited semantic grounding for heterogeneous disease targets. Here we present SyRe, a promptable segmentation foundation model based on Synergistic vision-language Reinforcement. SyRe strengthens bidirectional interaction between visual and linguistic representations to improve semantically grounded spatial understanding. To support large-scale training, we introduce the Color Region Description strategy and construct SyReData, comprising 20 million image-mask-description triplets across 9 modalities and 229 segmentation tasks. Training with diversified prompt forms further enables open-ended prompting, invalid-prompt rejection and flexible switching between single- and multi-target analysis. SyRe achieves accurate text-prompted segmentation across diverse clinical scenarios, with particularly strong performance on disease-related targets. Across 28 unseen external datasets, including 20 cancer types and multinational in-house cohorts, SyRe generalizes robustly under real-world distribution shifts. SyRe-generated masks also preserve clinically relevant quantitative information in pathology and yield radiomics features that stratify survival and improve prognostic modeling across five retrospective CT and MRI tumor cohorts. Finally, clinician-in-the-loop refinement enables efficient case-level correction when greater precision is required. These results establish SyRe as a generalizable foundation for scalable quantitative oncology and clinician-guided segmentation refinement.