Review

Matching submissions with suitable reviewers at scale is a growing challenge for major venues, yet existing approaches either rely on coarse proxy signals that conflate general relatedness with true suitability, or require expensive human annotations that are difficult to scale for training. We propose MERIT, a two-stage framework that bridges this gap by converting criterion-level expertise matching into scalable suitability supervision. In the first stage, we train a reviewer assessor via reinforcement learning to identify the expertise dimensions a paper requires, match them against the reviewer's prior work, and produce a suitability decision, with rewards provided by an LLM judge guided by paper-specific expertise rubrics. In the second stage, we distill the assessor's predictions into an embedding-based retriever for efficient large-scale assignment. Experiments show that our 4B reviewer assessor outperforms larger general-purpose LLMs on suitability classification, and the resulting retriever achieves state-of-the-art performance across LR-Bench and the CMU Gold dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Luli3220/MERIT.

Clinical trials bridge basic research and clinical application, serving as essential steps in drug development. This review examines clinical trial phases (Phase I [safety assessment], Phase II [efficacy evaluation], Phase III [large-scale validation], and Phase IV [post-marketing surveillance]), highlighting the distinct characteristics and interconnections. Major challenges are identified, including ethical compliance, participant recruitment, and ensuring diversity and representativeness in trial populations, while proposing evidence-based mitigation strategies. To address these challenges, innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and digital health tools, are transforming trial design and implementation, enhancing efficiency and data quality. Looking forward, the review explores how emerging therapies, including gene therapy and immunotherapy, are reshaping trial design requirements and emphasizes the growing importance of regulatory harmonization and global collaboration. Clinical trials remain central to advancing innovative drug development and improving patient outcomes.