IJCCI 2025 (17th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence) received 146 paper submissions from 41 countries. To evaluate each submission, a double-blind paper review was performed by the Program Committee. After a stringent selection process, 36 papers were published and presented as full papers, i.e. completed work (12 pages/25' oral presentation), 83 papers were accepted as short papers (58 as oral presentation). The organizing committee included the IJCCI Conference Chair: Joaquim Filipe, Polytechnic Institute of Setubal, Portugal, and the IJCCI 2025 Program Chairs: Francesco Marcelloni, University of Pisa, Italy, Kurosh Madani, University of Paris-EST Créteil (UPEC), France, and Niki van Stein, Leiden University, Netherlands. At the closing session, the conference acknowledged a few papers that were considered excellent in their class, presenting a "Best Paper Award", "Best Student Paper Award", and "Best Poster Award" for each of the co-located conferences.

Online continual learning (OCL) methods adapt to changing environments without forgetting past knowledge. Similarly, online time series forecasting (OTSF) is a real-world problem where data evolve in time and success depends on both rapid adaptation and long-term memory. Indeed, time-varying and regime-switching forecasting models have been extensively studied, offering a strong justification for the use of OCL in these settings. Building on recent work that applies OCL to OTSF, this paper aims to strengthen the theoretical and practical connections between time series methods and OCL. First, we reframe neural network optimization as a parameter filtering problem, showing that natural gradient descent is a score-driven method and proving its information-theoretic optimality. Then, we show that using a Student's t likelihood in addition to natural gradient induces a bounded update, which improves robustness to outliers. Finally, we introduce Natural Score-driven Replay (NatSR), which combines our robust optimizer with a replay buffer and a dynamic scale heuristic that improves fast adaptation at regime drifts. Empirical results demonstrate that NatSR achieves stronger forecasting performance than more complex state-of-the-art methods.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for solving differential equations and modeling physical systems by embedding physical laws into the learning process. However, rigorously quantifying how well a PINN captures the complete dynamical behavior of the system, beyond simple trajectory prediction, remains a challenge. This paper proposes a novel experimental framework to address this by employing Fisher information for differentiable dynamical systems, denoted $g_F^C$. This Fisher information, distinct from its statistical counterpart, measures inherent uncertainties in deterministic systems, such as sensitivity to initial conditions, and is related to the phase space curvature and the net stretching action of the state space evolution. We hypothesize that if a PINN accurately learns the underlying dynamics of a physical system, then the Fisher information landscape derived from the PINN's learned equations of motion will closely match that of the original analytical model. This match would signify that the PINN has achieved comprehensive fidelity capturing not only the state evolution but also crucial geometric and stability properties. We outline an experimental methodology using the dynamical model of a car to compute and compare $g_F^C$ for both the analytical model and a trained PINN. The comparison, based on the Jacobians of the respective system dynamics, provides a quantitative measure of the PINN's fidelity in representing the system's intricate dynamical characteristics.

Dense Associative Memory (DAM) models generalize the classical Hopfield model by incorporating n-body or exponential interactions that greatly enhance storage capacity. While the criticality of DAM models has been largely investigated, mainly within a statistical equilibrium picture, little attention has been devoted to the temporal self-organizing behavior induced by learning. In this work, we investigate the behavior of a stochastic exponential DAM (SEDAM) model through the lens of Temporal Complexity (TC), a framework that characterizes complex systems by intermittent transition events between order and disorder and by scale-free temporal statistics. Transition events associated with birth-death of neural avalanche structures are exploited for the TC analyses and compared with analogous transition events based on coincidence structures. We systematically explore how TC indicators depend on control parameters, i.e., noise intensity and memory load. Our results reveal that the SEDAM model exhibits regimes of complex intermittency characterized by nontrivial temporal correlations and scale-free behavior, indicating the spontaneous emergence of self-organizing dynamics. These regimes emerge in small intervals of noise intensity values, which, in agreement with the extended criticality concept, never shrink to a single critical point. Further, the noise intensity range needed to reach the critical region, where self-organizing behavior emerges, slightly decreases as the memory load increases. This study highlights the relevance of TC as a complementary framework for understanding learning and information processing in artificial and biological neural systems, revealing the link between the memory load and the self-organizing capacity of the network.

Seeking advice is a core human behavior that the Internet has reinvented twice: first through forums and Q\&A communities that crowdsource public guidance, and now through large language models (LLMs) that deliver private, on-demand counsel at scale. Yet the quality of this synthesized LLM advice remains unclear. How does it compare, not only against arbitrary human comments, but against the wisdom of the online crowd? We conducted two studies (N = 210) in which experts compared top-voted Reddit advice with LLM-generated advice. LLMs ranked significantly higher overall and on effectiveness, warmth, and willingness to seek advice again. GPT-4o beat GPT-5 on all metrics except sycophancy, suggesting that benchmark gains need not improve advice-giving. In our second study, we examined how human and algorithmic advice could be combined, and found that human advice can be unobtrusively polished to compete with AI-generated comments. Finally, to surface user expectations, we ran an exploratory survey with undergraduates (N=148) that revealed heterogeneous, persona-dependent preferences for agent qualities (e.g., coach-like: goal-focused structure; friend-like: warmth and humor). We conclude with design implications for advice-giving agents and ecosystems blending AI, crowd input, and expert oversight.

According to the European Union's Habitat Directive, habitat monitoring plays a critical role in response to the escalating problems posed by biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Scree habitats, hosting unique and often endangered species, face severe threats from climate change due to their high-altitude nature. Traditionally, their monitoring has required highly skilled scientists to conduct extensive fieldwork in remote, potentially hazardous locations, making the process resource-intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel approach for scree habitat monitoring using a legged robot to assist botanists in data collection and species identification. Specifically, we deployed the ANYmal C robot in the Italian Alpine bio-region in two field campaigns spanning two years and leveraged deep learning to detect and classify key plant species of interest. Our results demonstrate that agile legged robots can navigate challenging terrains and increase the frequency and efficiency of scree monitoring. When paired with traditional phytosociological surveys performed by botanists, this robotics-assisted protocol not only streamlines field operations but also enhances data acquisition, storage, and usage. The outcomes of this research contribute to the evolving landscape of robotics in environmental science, paving the way for a more comprehensive and sustainable approach to habitat monitoring and preservation.

The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a unique opportunity to reinvigorate research on Knowledge Engineering (KE) automation. This trend is already evident in recent efforts developing LLM-based methods and tools for the automatic generation of Competency Questions (CQs), natural language questions used by ontology engineers to define the functional requirements of an ontology. However, the evaluation of these tools lacks standardization. This undermines the methodological rigor and hinders the replication and comparison of results. To address this gap, we introduce Bench4KE, an extensible API-based benchmarking system for KE automation. The presented release focuses on evaluating tools that generate CQs automatically. Bench4KE provides a curated gold standard consisting of CQ datasets from 17 real-world ontology engineering projects and uses a suite of similarity metrics to assess the quality of the CQs generated. We present a comparative analysis of 6 recent CQ generation systems, which are based on LLMs, establishing a baseline for future research. Bench4KE is also designed to accommodate additional KE automation tasks, such as SPARQL query generation, ontology testing and drafting. Code and datasets are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license.