There are currently two main approaches for running online user studies: experimenters can use commercial survey tools, which are easy to use but can be costly, hamper reproducibility, and have limitations for complex stimuli; or they can build custom software to run and instrument a study, which is a laborious and complex task. In this tutorial, we introduce participants to a new, open-source alternative: the reVISit study platform. Many studies quickly reach a burdensome level of complexity, necessitating design of stimuli and experimental tasks as well as the study UI, data hosting, participant recruiting, randomization, etc. ReVISit ameliorates these problems and allows study designers to focus more on the research questions and stimulus design. ReVISit removes the tedium of study design by providing built-in components that most studies will need. ReVISit provides a domain-specific language and a notebook-oriented library that enables study designers to quickly create studies and deploy them as publicly accessible websites. This tutorial will introduce reVISit to the visualization community and allow community members to get hands-on experience with it through a series of practical examples. Participants will improve on a study until they have developed and deployed a study of an interactive, fully instrumented data visualization.

Visualization literacy is a multifaceted construct encompassing skills and competencies, such as decoding data, constructing charts, and identifying design flaws. Yet, assessments of these competencies has been primarily constrained to multiple choice assessments that target lower-order skills, such as chart comprehension. As a result, they often exhibit ceiling effects (i.e., even modestly skilled individuals commonly score near the top of the scale), and do not provide enough information about an individual's higher-order skills (e.g., applying external knowledge, formulating critiques, and designing visualizations). To close these gaps, we develop and investigate two web-based qualitative assessments for testing the critique and design aspects of visualization literacy through online think-aloud critique and sketching of visualization designs based on data and a prompt. We compare performance on our assessments to two established visualization literacy assessments, CALVI and Mini-VLAT, by administering them to three groups that represent three experience levels: crowdworkers, students who have taken a relevant course, and researchers. We find that our critique and sketching assessments capture skills distinct from existing measures and that they differentiate between experienced individuals better than multiple choice-based alternatives. Although administering and grading qualitative assessments can be challenging, our findings suggest qualitative, multimodal assessments are a promising complement to existing visualization literacy assessments, in particular when high visualization skills need to be distinguished.

Proper decoding of human emotions based on physiological electroencephalography (EEG) signals significantly contributes to the development of human-computer interface related applications. Current major challenges hindering the recognition performance include the following: 1) the high variance and unknown noise that exist in the EEG recordings; 2) the size of EEG datasets are relatively small given the acquisition effort and annotation cost. It is worthwhile to explore approaches to improve decoding robustness under low data resource scenarios. Previous works utilized data augmentation techniques to tackle this problem using manually designed augmentation operations, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this study, we propose a principled framework to perform dynamic evolution on signal data and improve robustness in the occurrence of unknown corruptions or variances. The framework is formed with bi-level distributionally robust optimization (DRO), and improves robustness by simultaneously optimizing on a family of evolved distributions instead of the single training data distribution. We transform the formed gradient flow system into different types of concrete evolution instantiations based on Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian dynamics, with tailored divergence measures serving as distance constraint. We performed extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on datasets covering different types of affective states, with model robustness tested on different types of corruptions and adversarial examples. The model outperforms competitive baselines by a significant margin on these challenging emotion recognition benchmarks, especially for low data resource scenarios.

Objective Varus ankle malalignment is observed in most ankle osteoarthritis patients with approximately half of these patients presenting with peritalar compensation, where the subtalar joint is aligned valgus to compensate for a varus tibiotalar joint. This study developed a 3D weight-bearing computed tomography–based multi-bone statistical shape model to quantify morphologic and alignment differences between compensated and non-compensated presentations of advanced varus ankle osteoarthritis. Materials and methods Our assessment included 70 individuals, 44 diagnosed with advanced varus ankle osteoarthritis, and 26 asymptomatic controls. Each participant underwent weight-bearing computed tomography. Semi-automatic segmentations produced patient-specific 3D bone reconstructions of the distal tibia, distal fibula, talus, calcaneus, navicular, and cuboid. A multi-bone statistical shape model was created using each of the 3D bone reconstructions. Joint space distance, coverage area, and congruence index were measured at equivalent anatomic locations within articular coverage obtained from the statistical shape model. Results Eleven principal component analysis modes retained 85.8% variance. Significant differences existed in mode 1 (medial malleolus and talar dome morphology, fibular positioning; 26.6% variance, p 

Scientific machine learning is increasingly used to build surrogate models, yet most models are trained under a restrictive assumption in which future data follow the same distribution as the training set. In practice, new experimental conditions or simulation regimes may differ significantly, requiring extrapolation and model updates without re-access to prior data. This creates a need for continual learning (CL) frameworks that can adapt to distribution shifts while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Such challenges are pronounced in fluid dynamics, where changes in geometry, boundary conditions, or flow regimes induce non-trivial changes to the solution. Here, we introduce a new architecture-based approach (SLE-FNO) combining a Single-Layer Extension (SLE) with the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to support efficient CL. SLE-FNO was compared with a range of established CL methods, including Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), Learning without Forgetting (LwF), replay-based approaches, Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD), Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM), PiggyBack, and Low-Rank Approximation (LoRA), within an image-to-image regression setting. The models were trained to map transient concentration fields to time-averaged wall shear stress (TAWSS) in pulsatile aneurysmal blood flow. Tasks were derived from 230 computational fluid dynamics simulations grouped into four sequential and out-of-distribution configurations. Results show that replay-based methods and architecture-based approaches (PiggyBack, LoRA, and SLE-FNO) achieve the best retention, with SLE-FNO providing the strongest overall balance between plasticity and stability, achieving accuracy with zero forgetting and minimal additional parameters. Our findings highlight key differences between CL algorithms and introduce SLE-FNO as a promising strategy for adapting baseline models when extrapolation is required. 

Wall shear stress (WSS) governs near-wall transport dynamics and is a key hemodynamic indicator in cardiovascular flows, yet remains difficult to infer accurately due to the need for precise computation of near-wall velocity gradients. Passive scalar fields, such as concentration or temperature, are advected by the same underlying velocity field and have the potential to uncover hidden flow physics metrics such as WSS. In this work, we demonstrate such reconstruction from spatially limited passive scalar observations using two fundamentally different inverse frameworks: a differentiable physics framework based on discrete adjoint, PDE-constrained optimization, which enforces the governing equations as hard constraints, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which treat them as soft constraints. Benchmark problems include a 2D canonical backward-facing step (2D-BFS) and a 3D patient-specific stenotic coronary artery. For the 2D-BFS case, evaluated under three measurement scenarios (near-wall, far-field, and combined), PINN achieves high accuracy when near-wall data are available but fails when restricted to far-field measurements, whereas the differentiable physics approach recovers accurate WSS across all scenarios. In the 3D patient-specific case, the differentiable physics framework outperforms PINNs, yielding accurate WSS reconstruction. These results establish that measurement location and inverse formulation jointly determine reconstruction fidelity in scalar-based near-wall flow inference. The proposed framework opens a path toward estimation of near-wall hemodynamics from scalar transport data, with broader applicability to fluid flow problems where passive scalars can be observed.

Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version. 

Shallow water equations (SWE) are fundamental models in fluid dynamics that are essential for studying a wide range of geophysical and engineering phenomena. In many practical applications, uncertainties arising from initial conditions and bottom topography must be taken into account, motivating the development of stable and accurate numerical methods for stochastic SWE. Building on the hyperbolicity-preserving stochastic Galerkin formulation for SWE [Dai, Epshteyn, Narayan, 2021 SISC] and a stochastic extension of the entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin methods for skew-symmetric SWE [Fu, 2022 JSC], we develop a structure-preserving, entropy conservative, and entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin--stochastic Galerkin method for the stochastic shallow water system, with the well-balanced property. We demonstrate the accuracy, applicability, and robustness of the proposed structure-preserving algorithms through several numerical experiments.

Symbolic discovery of governing equations is a long-standing goal in scientific machine learning, yet a fundamental trade-off persists between interpretability and scalable learning. Classical symbolic regression methods yield explicit analytic expressions but rely on combinatorial search, whereas neural networks scale efficiently with data and dimensionality but produce opaque representations. In this work, we introduce Symbolic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (Symbolic-KANs), a neural architecture that bridges this gap by embedding discrete symbolic structure directly within a trainable deep network. Symbolic-KANs represent multivariate functions as compositions of learned univariate primitives applied to learned scalar projections, guided by a library of analytic primitives, hierarchical gating, and symbolic regularization that progressively sharpens continuous mixtures into one-hot selections. After gated training and discretization, each active unit selects a single primitive and projection direction, yielding compact closed-form expressions without post-hoc symbolic fitting. Symbolic-KANs further act as scalable primitive discovery mechanisms, identifying the most relevant analytic components that can subsequently inform candidate libraries for sparse equation-learning methods. We demonstrate that Symbolic-KAN reliably recovers correct primitive terms and governing structures in data-driven regression and inverse dynamical systems. Moreover, the framework extends to forward and inverse physics-informed learning of partial differential equations, producing accurate solutions directly from governing constraints while constructing compact symbolic representations whose selected primitives reflect the true analytical structure of the underlying equations. These results position Symbolic-KAN as a step toward scalable, interpretable, and mechanistically grounded learning of governing laws.

Generative counterfactuals offer a promising avenue for explainable AI in medical imaging, yet ensuring these synthesized images are both anatomically faithful and clinically effective remains a significant challenge. This work presents a domain-specific diffusion framework for generating ”healthy” counterfactuals from chest X-rays with cardiomegaly, underpinned by a systematic metric-guided inference strategy. In contrast to methods relying on static sampling parameters, our approach iteratively explores the inference hyperparameter space to maximize our composite selection criterion, CF Score, that integrates our novel Faithfulness-Effectiveness Trade-off (F ET ) metric.

We extend the evaluation of counterfactual utility beyond simple classification shifts by conducting the simultaneous validation against radiologist annotations and eye-tracking data. Using the REFLACX dataset, we demonstrate that difference maps derived from our counterfactuals exhibit strong spatial alignment with expert visual attention and annotation. Quantified by Normalized Cross-Correlation, Hit Rate, pixel-wise ROC-AUC, and AUC-IoU, our results confirm that metric-guided counterfactuals provide dense and clinically relevant localizations of pathology that closely mirror human diagnostic reasoning.

High-Dimensional Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular domains (e.g., omics) are characterized by n ≪ m, where n = number of samples, and m = number of features. Such domains often exhibit strong local correlation groups, sparse cross-group dependencies, heavy-tailed non-Gaussian marginals, heteroscedastic noise, and structured missingness, making direct density learning in Rm ill-conditioned since n ≪ m. We propose BSTabDiff, a block-subunit generative framework that partitions the m observed features into M latent blocks (M ≪ m) and generates each block via a shared low-dimensional subunit variable, concentrating global dependence learning in the compact block-latent space RM while decoding to the full feature space with copula-driven dependence, flexible per-feature marginals, and explicit missingness mechanisms. BSTabDiff supports modern deep priors on block latents, including diffusion and normalizing flows, enabling stable synthesis and controllable benchmark generation in the HDLSS regime. Empirically, BSTabDiff produces more realistic and stable high-dimensional synthetic data when compared with unstructured tabular generators on HDLSS data.

High-dimensional tabular data lacks a natural feature order, limiting the applicability of permutation-sensitive deep learning models. We propose DynaTab, a dynamic feature ordering-enabled architecture inspired by neural rewiring. We introduce a lightweight criterion that predicts when feature permutation will benefit a dataset by quantifying its intrinsic complexity. DynaTab dynamically reorders features via a neural rewiring algorithm and processes them through a compact, dynamic order-aware combination of separate learned positional embedding, importance-based gating, and masked attention layers, compatible with any sequence-sensitive backbone. Trained end-to-end with bespoke dynamic feature ordering (DFO) and dispersion losses, DynaTab achieves statistically significant gains, particularly on high-dimensional datasets, where it is benchmarked against 45 state-of-the-art baselines across 36 different real-world tabular datasets. Our results position DynaTab as a compelling new paradigm for high-dimensional tabular deep learning.

We investigate how to make small tabular foundation models effective for High-Dimensional, Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular prediction without retraining large backbones. We introduce Graph-guided Ordering with Local Refinement (GO-LR), show its equivalence to weighted Minimum Linear Arrangement, and interpret the practical solver as a TSP-path-style surrogate. We propose GOTabPFN,which builds on GO-LR, and a Neuro-Inspired Subunit Compression (NSC) unit to pool locally adjacent ordered features into meta-features, yielding a compact representation that makes TabPFN-style prediction practical in HDLSS regimes. Across tabular benchmarks, GOTabPFN improves stability and accuracy under tight token budgets.

High-Dimensional Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular domains (e.g., omics) are characterized by nrong local correlation groups, sparse cross-group dependencies, heavy-tailed non-Gaussian marginals, heteroscedastic noise, and structured missingness, making direct density learning in Rm ill-conditioned since nrating global dependence learning in the compact block-latent space Rm while decoding to the full feature space with copula-driven dependence, flexible per-feature marginals, and explicit missingness mechanisms. BSTabDiff supports modern deep priors on block latents, including diffusion and normalizing flows, enabling stable synthesis and controllable benchmark generation in the HDLSS regime. Empirically, BSTabDiff produces more realistic and stable high-dimensional synthetic data when compared with unstructured tabular generators on HDLSS data.

Multimodal learning of images and tabular data is often impaired by ineffective representations, resulting in redundancy, dispersion, and generalization problems. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Graph-Enhanced Descriptor Sequencing (GEDS), a structured feature sequencing algorithm grounded in principles from the Column Permutation Problem (CPP). GEDS refines statistical descriptors of the features through similarity graph-based computations, systematically determining an effective feature sequencing. We incorporate GEDS within an order-aware efficient transformer framework, utilizing order-aware memory tokens that explicitly adhere to the derived feature sequencing via a dedicated loss function. Experimental results across multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that iStructTab effectively minimizes feature dispersion, improving predictive performance and robustness, and highlighting the significance of structured feature sequencing in multimodal learning.

Interpersonal communication in data science can yield sought-after insights, but presentation environments are often not conducive for live analysis, forcing the process to move offline. Through a formative survey with 16 participants, we identified both technical (e.g., complexity of tools) and psychological (e.g., pressure of programming during presentation) factors constraining live data analysis. To enable live analysis, we present SlideSAVR, a data-driven presentation assistant that leverages sketching and voice inputs in live discussion to support collaborative data analysis during presentations. Powered by an agentic framework that flexibly defines augmentation rules, updates slide content dynamically to match the live context, and automates backend computations, SlideSAVR enables fluid audience-presenter interaction and reduces the need for offline reanalysis and follow-up communication. We demonstrate SlideSAVR’s ability to support a range of tasks through nine representative use cases. We further evaluate the system’s accuracy and computation time across different settings, showing that SlideSAVR can reliably perform diverse tasks when provided with both sketch and voice inputs.

What makes a Gantt chart? This question proved unexpectedly difficult to answer when we set out to build a design space for Gantt charts. Existing definitions, each shaped by their respective research goals, made different scope choices that we could not directly reconcile. We reasoned about what should and should not count as a Gantt chart, developing concepts and tools along the way. We distinguish features that are essential to a chart type's identity from those that can vary, and use these distinctions to map how chart types relate through what they share and lack. Applying these ideas to Gantt charts, radar charts, and table cartograms, we produce key insights on what boundary work reveals: definitions diverge for functional reasons, drawing boundaries exposes hidden structure in descriptive vocabulary such as feature entanglements, and scope choices shape how far findings can generalize. We came to understand that there is not a definitive answer, but that working through the question produced a functional definition that guided the design space we originally set out to build. Additionally, we present vocabulary and tools for reasoning about chart type boundaries and surfacing these boundary decisions, alongside a documented Gantt chart design space. Our broader reflection is that scope choices in chart-type-centered research---which determine what design spaces include, what grammars generate, and what perceptual studies measure---are research decisions worth making visible.

Time series forecasting is a fundamental tool with wide ranging applications, yet recent debates question whether complex nonlinear architectures truly outperform simple linear models. Prior claims of dominance of the linear model often stem from benchmarks that lack diverse temporal dynamics and employ biased evaluation protocols. We revisit this debate through TimeSynth, a structured framework that emulates key properties of real world time series,including non-stationarity, periodicity, trends, and phase modulation by creating synthesized signals whose parameters are derived from real-world time series. Evaluating four model families Linear, Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLP), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Transformers, we find a systematic bias in linear models: they collapse to simple oscillation regardless of signal complexity. Nonlinear models avoid this collapse and gain clear advantages as signal complexity increases. Notably, Transformers and CNN based models exhibit slightly greater adaptability to complex modulated signals compared to MLPs. Beyond clean forecasting, the framework highlights robustness differences under distribution and noise shifts and removes biases of prior benchmarks by using independent instances for train, test, and validation for each signal family. Collectively, TimeSynth provides a principled foundation for understanding when different forecasting approaches succeed or fail, moving beyond oversimplified claims of model equivalence. 

While medical Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on tasks such as tumor or organ segmentation and diagnosis prediction, their opaque latent representations limit clinical trust and the ability to explain predictions. Interpretability of these multimodal representations are therefore essential for the trustworthy clinical deployment of pretrained medical VLMs. However, current interpretability methods, such as gradient- or attention-based visualizations, are often limited to specific tasks such as classification. Moreover, they do not provide concept-level explanations derived from shared pretrained representations that can be reused across downstream tasks. We introduce MedConcept, a framework that uncovers latent medical concepts in a fully unsupervised manner and grounds them in clinically verifiable textual semantics. MedConcept identifies sparse neuron-level concept activations from pretrained VLM representations and translates them into pseudo-report-style summaries, enabling physician-level inspection of internal model reasoning. To address the lack of quantitative evaluation in concept-based interpretability, we introduce a quantitative semantic verification protocol that leverages an independent pretrained medical LLM as a frozen external evaluator to assess concept alignment with radiology reports. We define three concept scores, Aligned, Unaligned, and Uncertain, to quantify semantic support, contradiction, or ambiguity relative to radiology reports and use them exclusively for post hoc evaluation. These scores provide a quantitative baseline for assessing interpretability in medical VLMs.