Zihao Yi, Zhenqing Ling, Delong Zeng, Haohao Luo, Zhe Xu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Wanxia Cao, Ying Shen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The effective integration of artificial intelligence into clinical workflows requires models that go beyond simple prediction to generate comprehensive, explainable, and actionable disease trajectories. Addressing the limitations of opaque deep learning architectures and the noise inherent in electronic health records, we introduce the sequential pattern transformer (SPT), a novel framework that synergizes sequential pattern mining with generative transformer modeling. Using four years of inpatient data from 258,460 type 2 diabetes patients, we applied the PrefixSpan algorithm to distill noisy diagnostic histories into a curated vocabulary of 95,630 statistically validated disease progression patterns. A decoder-only transformer was trained exclusively on these evidence-based sequences to learn the temporal dynamics of disease evolution. This pattern-guided approach shifts the modeling paradigm from classification to probabilistic trajectory generation. The model achieved a robust 85.78% Top-5 accuracy, significantly outperforming a standard LSTM baseline (71.47%). Beyond predictive accuracy, the framework constructs a dynamic Disease Atlas, a branching tree structure that visualizes likely future pathways, augmented by multi-level explainable AI (XAI) including learned clinical clusters, SHAP-based feature attribution, and counterfactual simulations. Crucially, this methodology is domain-agnostic and capable of efficient fine-tuning, making it a transferable solution for adapting to diverse clinical conditions and local hospital settings. SPT thus offers a transparent, robust, and scalable framework for mapping the complex temporal dynamics of disease, bridging the gap between high-performance AI and interpretable clinical application.

As data and computational resources continue to expand, incorporating a variety of knowledge during the pre-training phase enhances large models, providing them with strong zero-shot capabilities. Due to the alignment of modal features by visual language models, zero-shot image captioning no longer necessitates pre-training on paired image-text labeled data, enabling accurate text description generation for images not encountered before. While recent research focuses on methods utilizing entity retrieval as anchors to bridge the gap between different modalities, these approaches often fall short of thoroughly analyzing the impact of entity retrieval recall on the zero-shot generation capabilities. To address this issue, we propose MERCap, a zero-shot image captioning method employing Multi-type Entity representation Retrieval. More specifically, we first approximate image representation using the CLIP representation of text and Gaussian noise to address the modality gap. Then, we train a GPT-2 decoder to reconstruct text using entities as hard prompts and CLIP representations as soft prompts. Additionally, we construct a domain-specific entity set, assigning multiple representations to each entity and refining their representation vectors through contrastive learning. During inference, we retrieve entities and input them into the decoder to generate corresponding captions. Extensive experiments validate that our approach is efficient, achieving a new state-of-the-art level in cross-domain captioning and demonstrating strong competitiveness in in-domain captioning compared to existing methods.

Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays an essential role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, user’s input may contain implicit information, posing significant challenges for DST tasks. Additionally, DST data includes complex information, which not only contains a large amount of noise unrelated to the current turn, but also makes constructing DST datasets expensive. To address these challenges, we introduce Intent-driven In-context Learning for Few-shot DST (IDIC-DST). By extracting user’s intent, we propose an Intent-driven Dialogue Information Augmentation module to augment the dialogue information, which can track dialogue states more effectively. Moreover, we mask noisy information from DST data and rewrite user’s input in the Intent-driven Examples Retrieval module, where we retrieve similar examples. We then utilize a pre-trained large language model to update the dialogue state using the augmented dialogue information and examples. Experimental results demonstrate that IDIC-DST achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot settings on MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOZ 2.4 datasets.

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems are pivotal in providing empathetic interactions, aiding users through negative emotional states by understanding and addressing their unique experiences. In this paper, we tackle two key challenges in ESC: enhancing contextually relevant and empathetic response generation through dynamic demonstration retrieval, and advancing cognitive understanding to grasp implicit mental states comprehensively. We introduce Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive-Aspect Situation Understanding (D2RCU), a novel approach that synergizes these elements to improve the quality of support provided in ESCs. By leveraging in-context learning and persona information, we introduce an innovative retrieval mechanism that selects informative and personalized demonstration pairs. We also propose a cognitive understanding module that utilizes four cognitive relationships from the ATOMIC knowledge source to deepen situational awareness of help-seekers' mental states. Our supportive decoder integrates information from diverse knowledge sources, underpinning response generation that is both empathetic and cognitively aware. The effectiveness of D2RCU is demonstrated through extensive automatic and human evaluations, revealing substantial improvements over numerous state-of-the-art models, with up to 13.79% enhancement in overall performance of ten metrics. Our codes are available for public access to facilitate further research and development.