Hedonic Games (HGs) are a classical framework modeling coalition formation of strategic agents guided by their individual preferences.

By modeling robustness in terms of the condition number of the neural network, we argue that this loss of robustness is due to the exploding singular values of the low-rank weight matrices.

Background: Text-to-image generation models are widely used across numerous domains. Among these models, Stable Diffusion (SD) - an open-source text-to-image generation model - has become the most popular, producing over 12 billion images annually. However, the widespread use of these models raises concerns regarding their social and environmental sustainability. Aims: To reduce the harm that SD models may have on society and the environment, we introduce SustainDiffusion, a search-based approach designed to enhance the social and environmental sustainability of SD models. Method: SustainDiffusion searches the optimal combination of hyperparameters and prompt structures that can reduce gender and ethnic bias in generated images while also lowering the energy consumption required for image generation. Importantly, SustainDiffusion maintains image quality comparable to that of the original SD model. Results: We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of SustainDiffusion, testing it against six different baselines using 56 different prompts. Our results demonstrate that SustainDiffusion can reduce gender bias in SD3 by 68%, ethnic bias by 59%, and energy consumption (calculated as the sum of CPU and GPU energy) by 48%. Additionally, the outcomes produced by SustainDiffusion are consistent across multiple runs and can be generalised to various prompts. Conclusions: With SustainDiffusion, we demonstrate how enhancing the social and environmental sustainability of text-to-image generation models is possible without fine-tuning or changing the model's architecture.

Reducing parameter redundancies in neural network architectures is crucial for achieving feasible computational and memory requirements during training and inference phases.

This work addresses the challenge of enabling practitioners without quantum expertise to transition from classical to hybrid quantum-classical machine learning workflows. We propose a three-stage framework: starting with a classical self-training model, then introducing a minimal hybrid quantum variant, and finally applying diagnostic feedback via QMetric to refine the hybrid architecture. In experiments on the Iris dataset, the refined hybrid model improved accuracy from 0.31 in the classical approach to 0.87 in the quantum approach. These results suggest that even modest quantum components, when guided by proper diagnostics, can enhance class separation and representation capacity in hybrid learning, offering a practical pathway for classical machine learning practitioners to leverage quantum-enhanced methods.

We propose a structure to represent the social fabric of a group. We call it the `cohesion network' of the group. It can be seen as a graph whose vertices are strict subgroups and whose edges indicate a prescribed `pro-social behaviour' from one subgroup towards another. In social psychology, pro-social behaviours are building blocks of full-blown cooperation, which we assimilate here with `group cohesiveness'. We then define a formal framework to study cohesive group agency. To do so, we simply instantiate pro-social behaviour with the more specific relation of `successful assistance' between acting entities in a group. The relations of assistance within a group at the moment of agency constitute the social fabric of the cohesive group agency. We build our logical theory upon the logic of agency "bringing-it-about". We obtain a family of logics of cohesive group agency, one for every class of cohesion networks.

The presence of autonomous systems is growing at a fast pace and it is impacting many aspects of our lives. Designed to learn and act independently, these systems operate and perform decision-making without human intervention. However, they lack the ability to incorporate users' ethical preferences, which are unique for each individual in society and are required to personalize the decision-making processes. This reduces user trust and prevents autonomous systems from behaving according to the moral beliefs of their end-users. When multiple systems interact with differing ethical preferences, they must negotiate to reach an agreement that satisfies the ethical beliefs of all the parties involved and adjust their behavior consequently. To address this challenge, this paper proposes RobEthiChor, an approach that enables autonomous systems to incorporate user ethical preferences and contextual factors into their decision-making through ethics-based negotiation. RobEthiChor features a domain-agnostic reference architecture for designing autonomous systems capable of ethic-based negotiating. The paper also presents RobEthiChor-Ros, an implementation of RobEthiChor within the Robot Operating System (ROS), which can be deployed on robots to provide them with ethics-based negotiation capabilities. To evaluate our approach, we deployed RobEthiChor-Ros on real robots and ran scenarios where a pair of robots negotiate upon resource contention. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the system in realizing ethics-based negotiation. RobEthiChor allowed robots to reach an agreement in more than 73% of the scenarios with an acceptable negotiation time (0.67s on average). Experiments also demonstrate that the negotiation approach implemented in RobEthiChor is scalable.

The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic assumptions of the Swadesh approach are often unrealistic due to various contamination phenomena and misjudgments (horizontal transfers, variations over time and space of the replacement rate, incorrect assessments of cognacy relationships, presence of synonyms, and so on). All of this means that the results cannot be completely correct. More importantly, even in the unrealistic case that all basic assumptions are satisfied, simple mathematics places limits on the accuracy of estimating the temporal separation between two languages. These limits, which are purely probabilistic in nature and which are often neglected in lexicostatistical studies, are analyzed in detail in this article. Furthermore, in this work we highlight that the evolution of a language's lexicon is also driven by another stochastic process: gradual lexical modification of words. We show that this process equally also represents a major contribution to the reshaping of the vocabulary of languages over the centuries and we also show, from a purely probabilistic perspective, that taking into account this second random process significantly increases the precision in determining the temporal separation between two languages.

Natural disasters always have several effects on human lives. It is challenging for governments to tackle these incidents and to rebuild the economic, social and physical infrastructures and facilities with the available resources (mainly budget and time). Governments always define plans and policies according to the law and political strategies that should maximise social benefits. The severity of damage and the vast resources needed to bring life back to normality make such reconstruction a challenge. This article is the extension of our previously published work by conducting comprehensive comparative analysis by integrating additional deep learning models plus random agent which is used as a baseline. Our prior research introduced a decision support system by using the Deep Reinforcement Learning technique for the planning of post-disaster city reconstruction, maximizing the social benefit of the reconstruction process, considering available resources, meeting the needs of the broad community stakeholders (like citizens' social benefits and politicians' priorities) and keeping in consideration city's structural constraints (like dependencies among roads and buildings). The proposed approach, named post disaster REbuilding plAn ProvIdeR (REPAIR) is generic. It can determine a set of alternative plans for local administrators who select the ideal one to implement, and it can be applied to areas of any extension. We show the application of REPAIR in a real use case, i.e., to the L'Aquila reconstruction process, damaged in 2009 by a major earthquake.