Indonesia's government has filed multiple lawsuits seeking more than $200m in damages against six firms, after deadly floods wreaked havoc across Sumatra, killing more than 1,000 people last year, although environmentalists criticised the moves as inadequate. Environmentalists, experts and the government pointed the finger at deforestation for its role in last year's disaster that washed torrents of mud and wooden logs into villages across the northwestern part of the island. The sum represents both fines for damage and the proposed monetary value of recovery efforts. The suits were filed to courts on Thursday in Jakarta and North Sumatra's Medan, the ministry added. "We firmly uphold the principle of polluter pays," Environment Minister Hanif Faisol Nurofiq said in a statement.

Villages areas hold significant importance in the study of human-land relationships. However, with the advancement of urbanization, the gradual disappearance of spatial characteristics and the homogenization of landscapes have emerged as prominent issues. Existing studies primarily adopt a single-disciplinary perspective to analyze villages spatial morphology and its influencing factors, relying heavily on qualitative analysis methods. These efforts are often constrained by the lack of digital infrastructure and insufficient data. To address the current research limitations, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (HGNN) model that integrates multi-source data to conduct an in-depth analysis of villages spatial morphology. The framework includes two types of nodes-input nodes and communication nodes-and two types of edges-static input edges and dynamic communication edges. By combining Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Graph Attention Networks (GAT), the proposed model efficiently integrates multimodal features under a two-stage feature update mechanism. Additionally, based on existing principles for classifying villages spatial morphology, the paper introduces a relational pooling mechanism and implements a joint training strategy across 17 subtypes. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves significant performance improvements over existing approaches in multimodal fusion and classification tasks. Additionally, the proposed joint optimization of all sub-types lifts mean accuracy/F1 from 0.71/0.83 (independent models) to 0.82/0.90, driven by a 6% gain for parcel tasks. Our method provides scientific evidence for exploring villages spatial patterns and generative logic.

To serve global users safely and productively, LLMs need culture-specific knowledge that might not be learned during pre-training. How do we find such knowledge that is (1) salient to in-group users, but (2) unknown to LLMs? The most common solutions are single-initiative: either researchers define challenging questions that users passively answer (traditional annotation), or users actively produce data that researchers structure as benchmarks (knowledge extraction). The process would benefit from mixed-initiative collaboration, where users guide the process to meaningfully reflect their cultures, and LLMs steer the process towards more challenging questions that meet the researcher's goals. We propose a mixed-initiative methodology called CultureCartography. Here, an LLM initializes annotation with questions for which it has low-confidence answers, making explicit both its prior knowledge and the gaps therein. This allows a human respondent to fill these gaps and steer the model towards salient topics through direct edits. We implement this methodology as a tool called CultureExplorer. Compared to a baseline where humans answer LLM-proposed questions, we find that CultureExplorer more effectively produces knowledge that leading models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-4o are missing, even with web search. Fine-tuning on this data boosts the accuracy of Llama-3.1-8B by up to 19.2% on related culture benchmarks.

Despite rapid progress in vision-language and large language models (VLMs and LLMs), their effectiveness for AI-driven educational assessment in real-world, underrepresented classrooms remains largely unexplored. We evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs on over 14K handwritten answers from grade-4 classrooms in Indonesia, covering Mathematics and English aligned with the local national curriculum. Unlike prior work on clean digital text, our dataset features naturally curly, diverse handwriting from real classrooms, posing realistic visual and linguistic challenges. Assessment tasks include grading and generating personalized Indonesian feedback guided by rubric-based evaluation. Results show that the VLM struggles with handwriting recognition, causing error propagation in LLM grading, yet LLM feedback remains pedagogically useful despite imperfect visual inputs, revealing limits in personalization and contextual relevance.

As one of the world's most populous countries, with 700 languages spoken, Indonesia is behind in terms of NLP progress. We introduce LoraxBench, a benchmark that focuses on low-resource languages of Indonesia and covers 6 diverse tasks: reading comprehension, open-domain QA, language inference, causal reasoning, translation, and cultural QA. Our dataset covers 20 languages, with the addition of two formality registers for three languages. We evaluate a diverse set of multilingual and region-focused LLMs and found that this benchmark is challenging. We note a visible discrepancy between performance in Indonesian and other languages, especially the low-resource ones. There is no clear lead when using a region-specific model as opposed to the general multilingual model. Lastly, we show that a change in register affects model performance, especially with registers not commonly found in social media, such as high-level politeness `Krama' Javanese.

This work presents P2P-Insole, a low-cost approach for estimating and visualizing 3D human skeletal data using insole-type sensors integrated with IMUs. Each insole, fabricated with e-textile garment techniques, costs under USD 1, making it significantly cheaper than commercial alternatives and ideal for large-scale production. Our approach uses foot pressure distribution, acceleration, and rotation data to overcome limitations, providing a lightweight, minimally intrusive, and privacy-aware solution. The system employs a Transformer model for efficient temporal feature extraction, enriched by first and second derivatives in the input stream. Including multimodal information, such as accelerometers and rotational measurements, improves the accuracy of complex motion pattern recognition. These facts are demonstrated experimentally, while error metrics show the robustness of the approach in various posture estimation tasks. This work could be the foundation for a low-cost, practical application in rehabilitation, injury prevention, and health monitoring while enabling further development through sensor optimization and expanded datasets.

Generative AI significantly enhances player agency in interactive narratives (IN) by enabling just-in-time content generation that adapts to player actions. While delegating generation to AI makes IN more interactive, it becomes challenging for authors to control the space of possible narratives - within which the final story experienced by the player emerges from their interaction with AI. In this paper, we present WhatELSE, an AI-bridged IN authoring system that creates narrative possibility spaces from example stories. WhatELSE provides three views (narrative pivot, outline, and variants) to help authors understand the narrative space and corresponding tools leveraging linguistic abstraction to control the boundaries of the narrative space. Taking innovative LLM-based narrative planning approaches, WhatELSE further unfolds the narrative space into executable game events. Through a user study (N=12) and technical evaluations, we found that WhatELSE enables authors to perceive and edit the narrative space and generates engaging interactive narratives at play-time.

Adapting named entity recognition (NER) methods to new domains poses significant challenges. We introduce RapidNER, a framework designed for the rapid deployment of NER systems through efficient dataset construction. RapidNER operates through three key steps: (1) extracting domain-specific sub-graphs and triples from a general knowledge graph, (2) collecting and leveraging texts from various sources to build the NERsocial dataset, which focuses on entities typical in human-robot interaction, and (3) implementing an annotation scheme using Elasticsearch (ES) to enhance efficiency. NERsocial, validated by human annotators, includes six entity types, 153K tokens, and 99.4K sentences, demonstrating RapidNER's capability to expedite dataset creation.