Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a vital role in intelligent education by offering structured representations of educational content. However, constructing multimodal educational knowledge graphs (EKGs) from diverse open educational resources remains a challenge due to the reliance on costly manual annotations and the lack of multimodal integration. In this work, we propose an automated framework that harnesses the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to construct multimodal EKGs from open courses efficiently. In our framework, an Extraction-Verification-Integration-Augmentation pipeline is designed to incrementally extract and refine disciplinary concepts from learning resources. Texts, images, videos and audios are aligned with their corresponding concepts. To ensure semantic consistency across modalities, we propose a cross-modal alignment method based on shared structural and semantic features. Using our framework, we build SciMKG, a large-scale multimodal EKG for Chinese K12 education in sciences (biology, physics, and chemistry), encompassing 1,356 knowledge points, 34,630 multimodal concepts, and 403,400 relational triples. Experimental results show that our method improves concept extraction F1 score by 9 % over state-of-the-art baselines; both automatic and human evaluations confirm the robustness of our multimodal alignment method. SciMKG and our construction toolkit will be publicly released to support further research and applications in AI-driven education.

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a pivotal role in location-based services by guiding users to discover new and relevant places. While graph-based methods have shown promising results, effectively modeling the diversity and dynamics of user preferences remains a key challenge. Addressing this requires richer representations of both POIs and user interests, as well as more adaptive learning strategies. In this work, we propose TMHKG, a Task-aware Meta-learning framework with a Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph for POI recommendation. To enhance representation learning, TMHKG constructs a dual-view POI knowledge graph that integrates geographical proximity and user-aware category transitions, and models users' evolving interests from sequential visit histories. On top of enriched features, TMHKG adopts a task-aware meta-learning paradigm, treating each user's recommendation task as a separate meta-task. A generalizable recommendation policy is first learned from diverse training tasks and then quickly adapted to each user's unique behavior, enabling highly personalized predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that TMHKG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing complex user-POI interactions.

Research on learned cardinality estimation has made significant progress in recent years. However, existing methods still face distinct challenges that hinder their practical deployment in production environments. We define these challenges as the “Trilemma of Cardinality Estimation”, where learned cardinality estimation methods struggle to balance generality, accuracy, and updatability. To address these challenges, we introduce DistJoin, a join cardinality estimator based on efficient distribution prediction using multi-autoregressive models. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We propose a method to estimate join cardinality by leveraging the probability distributions of individual tables in a decoupled manner. (2) To meet the re quirements of efficiency for DistJoin, we develop Adaptive Neural Predicate Modulation (ANPM), a high-throughput distribution estimation model. (3) We demonstrate that an existing similar approach suffers from variance accumulation issues by formal variance analysis. To mitigate this problem, DistJoin employs a selectivity-based approach to infer join cardinality, effectively reducing variance. In summary, DistJoin not only represents the first data-driven method to support both equi and non-equi joins simultaneously but also demonstrates superior accuracy while enabling fast and flexible updates. The experimental results demonstrate that DistJoin achieves the highest accuracy, robustness to data updates, generality, and comparable update and inference speed relative to existing methods.

MOTIVATION: Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status identification enables physicians to assess the prognosis risk and determine the treatment schedule for patients. In clinical practice, pathological slides serve as the gold standard, offering morphological information on cellular structure and tumoral regions. Computational analysis of pathological images has the potential to discover morphological patterns associated with HER2 molecular targets and achieve precise status prediction. However, pathological images are typically equipped with high-resolution attributes, and HER2 expression in breast cancer (BC) images often manifests the intratumoral heterogeneity. RESULTS: We present a phenotype-informed weakly supervised multiple instance learning architecture (PhiHER2) for the prediction of the HER2 status from pathological images of BC. Specifically, a hierarchical prototype clustering module is designed to identify representative phenotypes across whole slide images. These phenotype embeddings are then integrated into a cross-attention module, enhancing feature interaction and aggregation on instances. This yields a phenotype-based feature space that leverages the intratumoral morphological heterogeneity for HER2 status prediction. Extensive results demonstrate that PhiHER2 captures a better WSI-level representation by the typical phenotype guidance and significantly outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets. Additionally, interpretability analyses of both phenotypes and WSIs provide explicit insights into the heterogeneity of morphological patterns associated with molecular HER2 status. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Our model is available at https://github.com/lyotvincent/PhiHER2.