Autonomous systems must sustain justified confidence in their correctness and safety across their operational lifecycle-from design and deployment through post-deployment evolution. Traditional assurance methods often separate development-time assurance from runtime assurance, yielding fragmented arguments that cannot adapt to runtime changes or system updates - a significant challenge for assured autonomy. Towards addressing this, we propose a unified Continuous Assurance Framework that integrates design-time, runtime, and evolution-time assurance within a traceable, model-driven workflow as a step towards assured autonomy. In this paper, we specifically instantiate the design-time phase of the framework using two formal verification methods: RoboChart for functional correctness and PRISM for probabilistic risk analysis. We also propose a model-driven transformation pipeline, implemented as an Eclipse plugin, that automatically regenerates structured assurance arguments whenever formal specifications or their verification results change, thereby ensuring traceability. We demonstrate our approach on a nuclear inspection robot scenario, and discuss its alignment with the Trilateral AI Principles, reflecting regulator-endorsed best practices.

Large, sparse linear systems are pervasive in modern science and engineering, and Krylov subspace solvers are an established means of solving them. Yet convergence can be slow for ill-conditioned matrices, so practical deployments usually require preconditioners. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based matrix inversion can generate such preconditioners and accelerate Krylov iterations, but its effectiveness depends on parameters whose optima vary across matrices; manual or grid search is costly. We present an AI-driven framework recommending MCMC parameters for a given linear system. A graph neural surrogate predicts preconditioning speed from $A$ and MCMC parameters. A Bayesian acquisition function then chooses the parameter sets most likely to minimise iterations. On a previously unseen ill-conditioned system, the framework achieves better preconditioning with 50\% of the search budget of conventional methods, yielding about a 10\% reduction in iterations to convergence. These results suggest a route for incorporating MCMC-based preconditioners into large-scale systems.

We introduce a new generation of small reasoning models for RAG, search, and source summarization. Pleias-RAG-350m and Pleias-RAG-1B are mid-trained on a large synthetic dataset emulating the retrieval of a wide variety of multilingual open sources from the Common Corpus. They provide native support for citation and grounding with literal quotes and reintegrate multiple features associated with RAG workflows, such as query routing, query reformulation, and source reranking. Pleias-RAG-350m and Pleias-RAG-1B outperform SLMs below 4 billion parameters on standardized RAG benchmarks (HotPotQA, 2wiki) and are competitive with popular larger models, including Qwen-2.5-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Gemma-3-4B. They are the only SLMs to date maintaining consistent RAG performance across leading European languages and ensuring systematic reference grounding for statements. Due to their size and ease of deployment on constrained infrastructure and higher factuality by design, the models unlock a range of new use cases for generative AI.

Childhood vaccination is a cornerstone of public health, yet disparities in vaccination coverage persist across England. These disparities are shaped by complex interactions among various factors, including geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural (GDSC) factors. Previous studies mostly rely on cross-sectional data and traditional statistical approaches that assess individual or limited sets of variables in isolation. Such methods may fall short in capturing the dynamic and multivariate nature of vaccine uptake. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal machine learning analysis of childhood vaccination coverage across 150 districts in England from 2021 to 2024. Using vaccination data from NHS records, we applied hierarchical clustering to group districts by vaccination coverage into low- and high-coverage clusters. A CatBoost classifier was then trained to predict districts' vaccination clusters using their GDSC data. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was used to interpret the predictors' importance. The classifier achieved high accuracies of 92.1, 90.6, and 86.3 in predicting districts' vaccination clusters for the years 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024, respectively. SHAP revealed that geographic, cultural, and demographic variables, particularly rurality, English language proficiency, the percentage of foreign-born residents, and ethnic composition, were the most influential predictors of vaccination coverage, whereas socioeconomic variables, such as deprivation and employment, consistently showed lower importance, especially in 2023-2024. Surprisingly, rural districts were significantly more likely to have higher vaccination rates. Additionally, districts with lower vaccination coverage had higher populations whose first language was not English, who were born outside the UK, or who were from ethnic minority groups.

This report provides an overview of the workshop titled Autonomy and Safety Assurance in the Early Development of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, hosted by the Centre for Robotic Autonomy in Demanding and Long-Lasting Environments (CRADLE) on September 2, 2024, at The University of Manchester, UK. The event brought together representatives from six regulatory and assurance bodies across diverse sectors to discuss challenges and evidence for ensuring the safety of autonomous and robotic systems, particularly autonomous inspection robots (AIR). The workshop featured six invited talks by the regulatory and assurance bodies. CRADLE aims to make assurance an integral part of engineering reliable, transparent, and trustworthy autonomous systems. Key discussions revolved around three research questions: (i) challenges in assuring safety for AIR; (ii) evidence for safety assurance; and (iii) how assurance cases need to differ for autonomous systems. Following the invited talks, the breakout groups further discussed the research questions using case studies from ground (rail), nuclear, underwater, and drone-based AIR. This workshop offered a valuable opportunity for representatives from industry, academia, and regulatory bodies to discuss challenges related to assured autonomy. Feedback from participants indicated a strong willingness to adopt a design-for-assurance process to ensure that robots are developed and verified to meet regulatory expectations.

For drivers who endure Britain's crumbling roads daily, there's no doubt we're stuck in an escalating'pothole crisis'. These dangerous holes can injure and even kill cyclists and motorists, and are popping up quicker than they can be filled. Now, interactive graphics reveal the shocking extent of the problem - and scientists think climate change is to blame. Climate organisation Round our Way reveals 952,064 potholes were reported in Britain between January and November last year, marking a five-year high. MailOnline's interactive map, based on the new data, reveals the local authorities with the most pothole reports during the period.

AI chatbots impersonating Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have been found on the controversial site Character.ai. Brianna Ghey was murdered by two teenagers in 2023 while Molly Russell took her own life at the age of 14 after viewing self-harm-related content on social media. In an act described as'sickening', the site's users employed the girl's names, pictures, and biographical details to create dozens of automated bots. Despite violating the site's terms of service, these imitation avatars posing as the two girls were allowed to amass thousands of chats. One impersonating Molly Russell even claimed to be an'expert on the final years of Molly's life'.

Given unstructured text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are adept at answering simple (single-hop) questions. However, as the complexity of the questions increase, the performance of LLMs degrade. We believe this is due to the overhead associated with understanding the complex question followed by filtering and aggregating unstructured information in the raw text. Recent methods try to reduce this burden by integrating structured knowledge triples into the raw text, aiming to provide a structured overview that simplifies information processing. However, this simplistic approach is query-agnostic and the extracted facts are ambiguous as they lack context. To address these drawbacks and to enable LLMs to answer complex (multi-hop) questions with ease, we propose to use a knowledge graph (KG) that is context-aware and is distilled to contain query-relevant information. The use of our compressed distilled KG as input to the LLM results in our method utilizing up to $67\%$ fewer tokens to represent the query relevant information present in the supporting documents, compared to the state-of-the-art (SoTA) method. Our experiments show consistent improvements over the SoTA across several metrics (EM, F1, BERTScore, and Human Eval) on two popular benchmark datasets (HotpotQA and MuSiQue).

Primal-dual methods have a natural application in Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL), posed as a constrained policy optimization problem. In practice however, applying primal-dual methods to SRL is challenging, due to the inter-dependency of the learning rate (LR) and Lagrangian multipliers (dual variables) each time an embedded unconstrained RL problem is solved. In this paper, we propose, analyze and evaluate adaptive primal-dual (APD) methods for SRL, where two adaptive LRs are adjusted to the Lagrangian multipliers so as to optimize the policy in each iteration. We theoretically establish the convergence, optimality and feasibility of the APD algorithm. Finally, we conduct numerical evaluation of the practical APD algorithm with four well-known environments in Bullet-Safey-Gym employing two state-of-the-art SRL algorithms: PPO-Lagrangian and DDPG-Lagrangian. All experiments show that the practical APD algorithm outperforms (or achieves comparable performance) and attains more stable training than the constant LR cases. Additionally, we substantiate the robustness of selecting the two adaptive LRs by empirical evidence.

Geospatial observations combined with computational models have become key to understanding the physical systems of our environment and enable the design of best practices to reduce societal harm. Cloud-based deployments help to scale up these modeling and AI workflows. Yet, for practitioners to make robust conclusions, model tuning and testing is crucial, a resource intensive process which involves the variation of model input variables. We have developed the Variational Exploration Module which facilitates the optimization and validation of modeling workflows deployed in the cloud by orchestrating workflow executions and using Bayesian and machine learning-based methods to analyze model behavior. User configurations allow the combination of diverse sampling strategies in multi-agent environments. The flexibility and robustness of the model-agnostic module is demonstrated using real-world applications.