The potential of tree planting as a natural climate solution is often undermined by inadequate monitoring of tree planting projects. Current monitoring methods involve measuring trees by hand for each species, requiring extensive cost, time, and labour. Advances in drone remote sensing and computer vision offer great potential for mapping and characterizing trees from aerial imagery, and large pre-trained vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), may be a particularly compelling choice given limited labeled data. In this work, we compare SAM methods for the task of automatic tree crown instance segmentation in high resolution drone imagery of young tree plantations. We explore the potential of SAM for this task, and find that methods using SAM out-of-the-box do not outperform a custom Mask R-CNN, even with well-designed prompts, but that there is potential for methods which tune SAM further. We also show that predictions can be improved by adding Digital Surface Model (DSM) information as an input.

The question of how to make decisions that maximise the well-being of all persons is very relevant to design language models that are beneficial to humanity and free from harm. We introduce the Greatest Good Benchmark to evaluate the moral judgments of LLMs using utilitarian dilemmas. Our analysis across 15 diverse LLMs reveals consistently encoded moral preferences that diverge from established moral theories and lay population moral standards. Most LLMs have a marked preference for impartial beneficence and rejection of instrumental harm. These findings showcase the 'artificial moral compass' of LLMs, offering insights into their moral alignment.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot Question Answering (QA), they tend to expose biases in their internal knowledge when faced with socially sensitive questions, leading to a degradation in performance. Existing zero-shot methods are efficient but fail to consider context and prevent bias propagation in the answers. To address this, we propose DeCAP, a method for debiasing LLMs using Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation. DeCAP leverages a Question Ambiguity Detection to take appropriate debiasing actions based on the context and a Neutral Answer Guidance Generation to suppress the LLMs make objective judgments about the context, minimizing the propagation of bias from their internal knowledge. Our various experiments across eight LLMs show that DeCAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot debiased QA performance. This demonstrates DeCAP's efficacy in enhancing the fairness and accuracy of LLMs in diverse QA settings.

Accurate 3D pose estimation of grasped objects is an important prerequisite for robots to perform assembly or in-hand manipulation tasks, but object occlusion by the robot's own hand greatly increases the difficulty of this perceptual task. Here, we propose that combining visual information and proprioception with binary, low-resolution tactile contact measurements from across the interior surface of an articulated robotic hand can mitigate this issue. The visuo-tactile object-pose-estimation problem is formulated probabilistically in a factor graph. The pose of the object is optimized to align with the three kinds of measurements using a robust cost function to reduce the influence of visual or tactile outlier readings. The advantages of the proposed approach are first demonstrated in simulation: a custom 15-DoF robot hand with one binary tactile sensor per link grasps 17 YCB objects while observed by an RGB-D camera. This low-resolution in-hand tactile sensing significantly improves object-pose estimates under high occlusion and also high visual noise. We also show these benefits through grasping tests with a preliminary real version of our tactile hand, obtaining reasonable visuo-tactile estimates of object pose at approximately 13.3 Hz on average.

Reactive mobile robot navigation in unstructured environments is challenging when robots encounter unexpected obstacles that invalidate previously planned trajectories. Model predictive path integral control (MPPI) enables reactive planning, but still suffers from limited prediction horizons that lead to local minima traps near obstacles. Current solutions rely on heuristic cost design or scenario-specific pre-training, which often limits their adaptability to new environments. We introduce dynamic repulsive potential augmented MPPI (DRPA-MPPI), which dynamically detects potential entrapments on the predicted trajectories. Upon detecting local minima, DRPA-MPPI automatically switches between standard goal-oriented optimization and a modified cost function that generates repulsive forces away from local minima. Comprehensive testing in simulated obstacle-rich environments confirms DRPA-MPPI's superior navigation performance and safety compared to conventional methods with less computational burden.

This paper presents our findings for SemEval 2025 Task 2, a shared task on entity-aware machine translation (EA-MT). The goal of this task is to develop translation models that can accurately translate English sentences into target languages, with a particular focus on handling named entities, which often pose challenges for MT systems. The task covers 10 target languages with English as the source. In this paper, we describe the different systems we employed, detail our results, and discuss insights gained from our experiments.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing integration into human life. With the transition from mere tools to human-like assistants, understanding their psychological aspects-such as emotional tendencies and personalities-becomes essential for ensuring their trustworthiness. However, current psychological evaluations of LLMs, often based on human psychological assessments like the BFI, face significant limitations. The results from these approaches often lack reliability and have limited validity when predicting LLM behavior in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation instrument specifically designed for LLMs, called Core Sentiment Inventory (CSI). CSI is a bilingual tool, covering both English and Chinese, that implicitly evaluates models' sentiment tendencies, providing an insightful psychological portrait of LLM across three dimensions: optimism, pessimism, and neutrality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that: 1) CSI effectively captures nuanced emotional patterns, revealing significant variation in LLMs across languages and contexts; 2) Compared to current approaches, CSI significantly improves reliability, yielding more consistent results; and 3) The correlation between CSI scores and the sentiment of LLM's real-world outputs exceeds 0.85, demonstrating its strong validity in predicting LLM behavior. We make CSI public available via: https://github.com/dependentsign/CSI.

Falls among elderly residents in assisted living homes pose significant health risks, often leading to injuries and a decreased quality of life. Current fall detection solutions typically rely on sensor-based systems that require dedicated hardware, or on video-based models that demand high computational resources and GPUs for real-time processing. In contrast, this paper presents a robust fall detection system that does not require any additional sensors or high-powered hardware. The system uses pose estimation techniques, combined with threshold-based analysis and a voting mechanism, to effectively distinguish between fall and non-fall activities. For pose detection, we leverage MediaPipe, a lightweight and efficient framework that enables real-time processing on standard CPUs with minimal computational overhead. By analyzing motion, body position, and key pose points, the system processes pose features with a 20-frame buffer, minimizing false positives and maintaining high accuracy even in real-world settings. This unobtrusive, resource-efficient approach provides a practical solution for enhancing resident safety in old age homes, without the need for expensive sensors or high-end computational resources.

Study Region: Goslar and G\"ottingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Study Focus: In July 2017, the cities of Goslar and G\"ottingen experienced severe flood events characterized by short warning time of only 20 minutes, resulting in extensive regional flooding and significant damage. This highlights the critical need for a more reliable and timely flood forecasting system. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the impact of radar-based precipitation data on forecasting river water levels in Goslar. Additionally, the study examines how precipitation influences water level forecasts in G\"ottingen. The analysis integrates radar-derived spatiotemporal precipitation patterns with hydrological sensor data obtained from ground stations to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in improving flood prediction capabilities. New Hydrological Insights for the Region: A key innovation in this paper is the use of residual-based modeling to address the non-linearity between precipitation images and water levels, leading to a Spatiotemporal Radar-based Precipitation Model with residuals (STRPMr). Unlike traditional hydrological models, our approach does not rely on upstream data, making it independent of additional hydrological inputs. This independence enhances its adaptability and allows for broader applicability in other regions with RADOLAN precipitation. The deep learning architecture integrates (2+1)D convolutional neural networks for spatial and temporal feature extraction with LSTM for timeseries forecasting. The results demonstrate the potential of the STRPMr for capturing extreme events and more accurate flood forecasting.

Generative retrieval is an emerging approach in information retrieval that generates identifiers (IDs) of target data based on a query, providing an efficient alternative to traditional embedding-based retrieval methods. However, existing models are task-specific and fall short of embedding-based retrieval in performance. This paper proposes GENIUS, a universal generative retrieval framework supporting diverse tasks across multiple modalities and domains. At its core, GENIUS introduces modality-decoupled semantic quantization, transforming multimodal data into discrete IDs encoding both modality and semantics. Moreover, to enhance generalization, we propose a query augmentation that interpolates between a query and its target, allowing GENIUS to adapt to varied query forms. Evaluated on the M-BEIR benchmark, it surpasses prior generative methods by a clear margin. Unlike embedding-based retrieval, GENIUS consistently maintains high retrieval speed across database size, with competitive performance across multiple benchmarks. With additional re-ranking, GENIUS often achieves results close to those of embedding-based methods while preserving efficiency.