Automated drug discovery offers significant potential for accelerating the development of novel therapeutics by substituting labor-intensive human workflows with machine-driven processes. However, molecules generated by artificial intelligence may unintentionally infringe on existing patents, posing legal and financial risks that impede the full automation of drug discovery pipelines. This paper introduces PatentFinder, a novel multi-agent and tool-enhanced intelligence system that can accurately and comprehensively evaluate small molecules for patent infringement. PatentFinder features five specialized agents that collaboratively analyze patent claims and molecular structures with heuristic and model-based tools, generating interpretable infringement reports. To support systematic evaluation, we curate MolPatent-240, a benchmark dataset tailored for patent infringement assessment algorithms. On this benchmark, PatentFinder outperforms baseline methods that rely solely on large language models or specialized chemical tools, achieving a 13.8% improvement in F1-score and a 12% increase in accuracy. Additionally, PatentFinder autonomously generates detailed and interpretable patent infringement reports, showcasing enhanced accuracy and improved interpretability. The high accuracy and interpretability of PatentFinder make it a valuable and reliable tool for automating patent infringement assessments, offering a practical solution for integrating patent protection analysis into the drug discovery pipeline.

Mental health disorders pose a growing public health concern in the Arab world, emphasizing the need for accessible diagnostic and intervention tools. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach, but their application in Arabic contexts faces challenges including limited labeled datasets, linguistic complexity, and translation biases. This study comprehensively evaluates 8 LLMs, including general multi-lingual models, as well as bi-lingual ones, on diverse mental health datasets (such as AraDepSu, Dreaddit, MedMCQA), investigating the impact of prompt design, language configuration (native Arabic vs. translated English, and vice versa), and few-shot prompting on diagnostic performance. We find that prompt engineering significantly influences LLM scores mainly due to reduced instruction following, with our structured prompt outperforming a less structured variant on multi-class datasets, with an average difference of 14.5\%. While language influence on performance was modest, model selection proved crucial: Phi-3.5 MoE excelled in balanced accuracy, particularly for binary classification, while Mistral NeMo showed superior performance in mean absolute error for severity prediction tasks. Few-shot prompting consistently improved performance, with particularly substantial gains observed for GPT-4o Mini on multi-class classification, boosting accuracy by an average factor of 1.58. These findings underscore the importance of prompt optimization, multilingual analysis, and few-shot learning for developing culturally sensitive and effective LLM-based mental health tools for Arabic-speaking populations.

As a former military intelligence officer, serving in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), I tracked foreign threats to the U.S. homeland, identifying adversaries' plans, intentions and capabilities that could harm Americans. I predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than a year before it took place. In March, in my Fox News Digital article titled "Ignore FBI director's urgent warning about terrorist threats at our own peril," I predicted terrorist attacks striking inside the U.S. homeland, the kind that took place on New Year's Day in New Orleans and in Las Vegas. Here are the top three reasons why we will likely face more terrorism in America this year. This time, it will be something we haven't seen before.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks, yet they face significant limitations in handling complex, long-context programming challenges and demonstrating complex compositional reasoning abilities. This paper introduces a novel agentic framework for ``guided code generation'' that tries to address these limitations through a deliberately structured, fine-grained approach to code generation tasks. Our framework leverages LLMs' strengths as fuzzy searchers and approximate information retrievers while mitigating their weaknesses in long sequential reasoning and long-context understanding. Empirical evaluation using OpenAI's HumanEval benchmark with Meta's Llama 3.1 8B model (int4 precision) demonstrates a 23.79\% improvement in solution accuracy compared to direct one-shot generation. Our results indicate that structured, guided approaches to code generation can significantly enhance the practical utility of LLMs in software development while overcoming their inherent limitations in compositional reasoning and context handling.

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of prior child-speech ASR strategies to determine which is best suited to this unique setting. Using Whisper and only 5 minutes of transcribed in-domain child speech, we find that additional in-domain adult data (adult speech matching the story domain) provides the biggest improvement, especially when coupled with voice conversion. Semi-supervised learning also helps for both languages, while parameter-efficient fine-tuning helps on Afrikaans but not on isiXhosa (which is under-represented in the Whisper model). Few child-speech studies look at non-English data, and even fewer at the preschool ages of 4 and 5. Our work therefore represents a unique validation of a wide range of previous child-speech ASR strategies in an under-explored setting.

Leukemia, a severe form of blood cancer, claims thousands of lives each year. This study focuses on the detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) using advanced image processing and deep learning techniques. By leveraging recent advancements in artificial intelligence, the research evaluates the reliability of these methods in practical, real-world scenarios. Specifically, it examines the performance of state-of-the-art YOLO models, including YOLOv8 and YOLOv11, to distinguish between malignant and benign white blood cells and accurately identify different stages of ALL, including early stages. Moreover, the models demonstrate the ability to detect hematogones, which are frequently misclassified as ALL. With accuracy rates reaching 98.8%, this study highlights the potential of these algorithms to provide robust and precise leukemia detection across diverse datasets and conditions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are a key driver of climate change. We asked Erica about her work, and her experience at the AfriClimate AI workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba, where her research won an award. I am Erica Kimei, a PhD candidate at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania (NM-AIST), and an assistant lecturer at the National Institute of Transport. My research focuses on leveraging machine learning and remote sensing technology to monitor and forecast greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant livestock. This work aims to contribute to sustainable agricultural practices by enabling better management of emissions and addressing the climate impacts of livestock farming.

Data augmentation is a crucial step in the development of robust supervised learning models, especially when dealing with limited datasets. This study explores interpolation techniques for the augmentation of geo-referenced data, with the aim of predicting the presence of Commelina benghalensis L. in sugarcane plots in La R\'eunion. Given the spatial nature of the data and the high cost of data collection, we evaluated two interpolation approaches: Gaussian processes (GPs) with different kernels and kriging with various variograms. The objectives of this work are threefold: (i) to identify which interpolation methods offer the best predictive performance for various regression algorithms, (ii) to analyze the evolution of performance as a function of the number of observations added, and (iii) to assess the spatial consistency of augmented datasets. The results show that GP-based methods, in particular with combined kernels (GP-COMB), significantly improve the performance of regression algorithms while requiring less additional data. Although kriging shows slightly lower performance, it is distinguished by a more homogeneous spatial coverage, a potential advantage in certain contexts.

Pretrained language models (LMs) can generalize to implications of facts that they are finetuned on. For example, if finetuned on ``John Doe lives in Tokyo," LMs can correctly answer ``What language do the people in John Doe's city speak?'' with ``Japanese''. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable this generalization or how they are learned during pretraining. We introduce extractive structures as a framework for describing how components in LMs (e.g., MLPs or attention heads) coordinate to enable this generalization. The structures consist of informative components that store training facts as weight changes, and upstream and downstream extractive components that query and process the stored information to produce the correct implication. We hypothesize that extractive structures are learned during pretraining when encountering implications of previously known facts. This yields two predictions: a data ordering effect where extractive structures can be learned only if facts precede their implications, and a weight grafting effect where extractive structures can be transferred to predict counterfactual implications. We empirically demonstrate these phenomena in the OLMo-7b, Llama 3-8b, Gemma 2-9b, and Qwen 2-7b models. Of independent interest, our results also indicate that fact learning can occur at both early and late layers, which lead to different forms of generalization.

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) have been highly successful in optimizing sequential resource allocation across many domains. However, in many practical settings with highly scarce resources, where each agent can only receive at most one resource, such as healthcare intervention programs, the standard RMAB framework falls short. To tackle such scenarios, we introduce Finite-Horizon Single-Pull RMABs (SPRMABs), a novel variant in which each arm can only be pulled once. This single-pull constraint introduces additional complexity, rendering many existing RMAB solutions suboptimal or ineffective. %To address this, we propose using dummy states to duplicate the system, ensuring that once an arm is activated, it transitions exclusively within the dummy states. To address this shortcoming, we propose using \textit{dummy states} that expand the system and enforce the one-pull constraint. We then design a lightweight index policy for this expanded system. For the first time, we demonstrate that our index policy achieves a sub-linearly decaying average optimality gap of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\frac{1}{\rho^{1/2}}\right)$ for a finite number of arms, where $\rho$ is the scaling factor for each arm cluster. Extensive simulations validate the proposed method, showing robust performance across various domains compared to existing benchmarks.