Physiological Information Reliability: Cross-Layer Adaptive Resource Allocation for Cardiovascular Sensing

Cardiovascular sensing systems must preserve clinically useful information despite signal degradation, wireless losses, energy constraints, and edge-computation latency. We introduce Physiological Information Reliability (PIR), a cross-layer framework that represents physiological information value jointly with wireless, energy, and computation states and uses a contextual bandit to adapt sensing and communication decisions. We integrate multimodal ECG/PPG signal-quality estimation with physiological information value and an adaptive network-coding layer under burst-erasure conditions. Across controlled multiseed experiments, PIR-LinUCB demonstrates a promising low-energy operating point while maintaining medical latency constraints and competitive physiological estimation performance relative to fixed and heuristic policies. We analyze the resulting accuracy-energy-latency trade-offs and identify limitations of proxy PIV estimation and simulated communication dynamics. These results provide an initial computational demonstration of physiological-information-aware resource allocation and motivate future clinical and real-channel validation.

Constrained Hebbian Learning Supports Efficient Representational Allocation under Structural Constraints

Introduction: Biological systems face anatomical and metabolic constraints, including costly synaptic maintenance and limited connectivity. These constraints favor neural codes that compress behaviorally relevant information into low-redundancy patterns. We test whether an excitatory competitive Hebbian rule can support synaptic resource allocation under such constraints and whether the resulting representations occupy a more favorable cost-performance regime than reference learning rules. Methods: Representational cost is quantified using mutual-information-based measures derived from the Variational Information Bottleneck. Experiments use fixed audiovisual embeddings from three audiovisual benchmarks (AVE, Kinetics-Sounds, VGGSound100) to isolate downstream associative plasticity. Hebbian learning is compared with Dense Difference Target Propagation (DDTP) and backpropagation (BP) under matched sparsity and architectural constraints. Results: Hebbian learning achieves lower task-information cost (CTI) than sparse BP and DDTP in the main compressed comparisons, while reaching CTI values comparable to shallow BP with nonnegative weights. Rather than uniformly improving classification performance, Hebbian learning shifts the trade-off between task-relevant information and representational cost, yielding lower CTI at comparable functional performance in several settings. Discussion: The results indicate a cost-performance trade-off rather than uniform accuracy gains. For a given level of task-relevant information, Hebbian representations retain less input information while preserving functional performance, although accuracy is slightly reduced on some datasets. These findings support interpreting Hebbian learning as a mechanism for synaptic resource allocation rather than as a general strategy for maximizing audiovisual classification accuracy.

Improving Access to Essential Medicines via Decision-Aware Machine Learning

A critical challenge in healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce resources, particularly essential medicines. This problem is complicated by limited high-quality data, which restricts the applicability of traditional data-driven techniques. We propose a novel decision-aware machine learning framework for essential medicines allocation, which additionally leverages multi-task learning to ensure sample efficiency and catalytic priors to ensure equitable allocation. In collaboration with the Sierra Leone national government, we performed a staggered, nationwide deployment of our system as a decision support tool. Our econometric evaluation finds an estimated 19% increase in consumption of allocated products in treated districts, demonstrating its efficacy at improving access to essential medicines. Our tool was subsequently scaled nationwide, covering an estimated 2 million women and children under five. Our work demonstrates how machine learning methods can improve efficiency at very low cost in resource-constrained global health settings.