Depression and suicidality affect cognitive and emotional processes, yet objective, task-evoked neural readouts of mental health remain limited. We investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of affective semantic processing using multivariate decoding of time-resolved, 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG). Participants (N=137) performed a sentence-evaluation task with emotionally salient, self-referential statements. We identified robust neural signatures of semantic processing, with peak decoding accuracy between 300-600 ms -- a window associated with rapid, stimulus-driven semantic evaluation and conflict monitoring. Relative to healthy controls, individuals with depression and suicidal ideation showed earlier onset, longer duration, and greater amplitude decoding responses, along with broader cross-temporal generalization and enhanced contributions from frontocentral and parietotemporal components. These findings suggest altered sensitivity and impaired disengagement from emotionally salient content in the clinical groups, advancing our understanding of the neurocognitive basis of mental health and establishing a compact and interpretable EEG-based index of semantic-evaluation dynamics with potential diagnostic relevance.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We propose a simple algorithm that needs only a few data samples from a single graph for learning local routing policies that generalize across a rich class of geometric random graphs in Euclidean metric spaces. We thus solve the all-pairs near-shortest path problem by training deep neural networks (DNNs) that let each graph node efficiently and scalably route (i.e., forward) packets by considering only the node's state and the state of the neighboring nodes. Our algorithm design exploits network domain knowledge in the selection of input features and design of the policy function for learning an approximately optimal policy. Domain knowledge also provides theoretical assurance that the choice of a ``seed graph'' and its node data sampling suffices for generalizable learning. Remarkably, one of these DNNs we train -- using distance-to-destination as the only input feature -- learns a policy that exactly matches the well-known Greedy Forwarding policy, which forwards packets to the neighbor with the shortest distance to the destination. We also learn a new policy, which we call GreedyTensile routing -- using both distance-to-destination and node stretch as the input features -- that almost always outperforms greedy forwarding. We demonstrate the explainability and ultra-low latency run-time operation of Greedy Tensile routing by symbolically interpreting its DNN in low-complexity terms of two linear actions.

We also use our approach for estimating covariance structure for a number of real-world datasets and show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art estimators at a fraction of the computational cost.

Next point of interest (POI) recommendation primarily predicts future activities based on users' past check-in data and current status, providing significant value to users and service providers. We observed that the popular check-in times for different POI categories vary. For example, coffee shops are crowded in the afternoon because people like to have coffee to refresh after meals, while bars are busy late at night. However, existing methods rarely explore the relationship between POI categories and time, which may result in the model being unable to fully learn users' tendencies to visit certain POI categories at different times. Additionally, existing methods for modeling time information often convert it into time embeddings or calculate the time interval and incorporate it into the model, making it difficult to capture the continuity of time. Finally, during POI prediction, various weighting information is often ignored, such as the popularity of each POI, the transition relationships between POIs, and the distances between POIs, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel next POI recommendation framework called Graph Disentangler with POI Weighted Module (GDPW). This framework aims to jointly consider POI category information and multiple POI weighting factors. Specifically, the proposed GDPW learns category and time representations through the Global Category Graph and the Global Category-Time Graph. Then, we disentangle category and time information through contrastive learning. After prediction, the final POI recommendation for users is obtained by weighting the prediction results based on the transition weights and distance relationships between POIs. We conducted experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed GDPW outperforms other existing models, improving performance by 3% to 11%.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization marked a turning point in the national debate over reproductive rights. While the ideological divide over abortion is well documented, less is known about how gender and local sociopolitical contexts interact to shape public discourse. Drawing on nearly 10 million abortion-related posts on X (formerly T witter) from users with inferred gender, ideology and location, we show that gender significantly moderates abortion attitudes and emotional expression, particularly in conservative regions, and independently of ideology. This creates a gender gap in abortion attitudes that grows more pronounced in conservative regions. The leak of the Dobbs draft opinion further intensified online engagement, disproportionately mobilizing pro-abortion women in areas where access was under threat. These findings reveal that abortion discourse is not only ideologically polarized but also deeply structured by gender and place, highlighting the central the role of identity in shaping political expression during moments of institutional disruption. 1 Long a flashpoint in cultural and political battles, abortion debates have come to symbolize broader struggles over bodily autonomy, religious freedom, and gender equality. The 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned nearly five decades of federal protections for abortion access established by Roe v. Wade, marked a seismic shift. It not only intensified existing partisan divides ( 1, 2), but also reshaped the legal and political terrain, triggering abrupt policy reversals in many states and catalyzing a realignment in the national debate over reproductive rights. A growing body of research has documented partisan cleavages in public attitudes toward reproductive rights ( 1, 3-7). However, less attention has been paid to the way in which gender and sociopolitical environment jointly shape both opinion formation and patterns of public expression. Recent surveys point to a widening gender gap in political orientation, particularly among younger voters. For example, in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, white men predominantly supported President Trump, while white women preferred Vice President Harris ( 8). Similarly, Gallup polling found a sharp increase in the share of young women identifying as politically liberal and supporting reproductive rights ( 9). While women consistently report higher support for abortion access, particularly in countries with less restrictive policy environments ( 10, 11), men, even those who identify as pro-choice, often show less engagement with the issue ( 11-13). Prior work has also documented gendered modes of engagement in online discourse around reproductive rights ( 1, 2).

We describe GNOME (Generating Novelty in Open-world Multi-agent Environments), an experimental platform that is designed to test the effectiveness of multi-agent AI systems when faced with \emph{novelty}. GNOME separates the development of AI gameplaying agents with the simulator, allowing \emph{unanticipated} novelty (in essence, novelty that is not subject to model-selection bias). Using a Web GUI, GNOME was recently demonstrated at NeurIPS 2020 using the game of Monopoly to foster an open discussion on AI robustness and the nature of novelty in real-world environments. In this article, we further detail the key elements of the demonstration, and also provide an overview of the experimental design that is being currently used in the DARPA Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-World Novelty (SAIL-ON) program to evaluate external teams developing novelty-adaptive gameplaying agents.

--Reproducibility remains a central challenge in machine learning (ML), especially in collaborative eScience projects where teams iterate over data, features, and models. Current ML workflows are often dynamic yet fragmented, relying on informal data sharing, ad hoc scripts, and loosely connected tools. This fragmentation impedes transparency, reproducibility, and the adaptability of experiments over time. This paper introduces a data-centric framework for lifecycle-aware reproducibility, centered around six structured artifacts: Dataset, Feature, Workflow, Execution, Asset, and Controlled V ocabulary. These artifacts formalize the relationships between data, code, and decisions, enabling ML experiments to be versioned, interpretable, and traceable over time. The approach is demonstrated through a clinical ML use case of glaucoma detection, illustrating how the system supports iterative exploration, improves reproducibility, and preserves the provenance of collaborative decisions across the ML lifecycle. As machine learning (ML) becomes increasingly central to scientific discovery, concerns about correctness and reproducibility have grown [1]. In eScience, ML development is typically a collaborative and iterative process involving domain experts, data engineers, and ML researchers. These teams refine models based on evolving hypotheses and new data, creating feedback loops across data curation, feature engineering, modeling, and evaluation [2]. This dynamic process frequently introduces data cascades, where early curation errors propagate downstream, compounding over time [3]. In practice, ML workflows remain fragmented: datasets are shared informally, experiments span personal and cloud environments, and data, code, and configurations are often loosely coupled [4]. While MLOps and data management tools address parts of this problem, such as code versioning, pipeline orchestration, or environment encapsulation, they often overlook the full scientific lifecycle and the socio-technical realities of collaborative ML projects [5]. In prior work, we introduced Deriva-ML [6], a socio-technical platform that extends the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) [7] across the ML developmental lifecycle.

The requirement for autonomous robots to exhibit higher-level cognitive skills by planning and adapting in an ever-changing environment is indeed a great challenge for the AI community. Progress has been made in the automated planning community on refinement and repair of an agent's symbolic knowledge to do task planning in an incomplete or changing environmental model, but these advances up to now have not been transferred to real physical robots. This paper demonstrates how a physical robot can be capable of adapting its symbolic knowledge of the environment, by using experiences in robot action execution to drive knowledge refinement and hence to improve the success rate of the task plans the robot creates. To implement more robust planning systems, we propose a method for refining domain knowledge to improve the knowledge on which intelligent robot behavior is based. This architecture has been implemented and evaluated using a NAO robot. The refined knowledge leads to the future synthesis of task plans which demonstrate decreasing rates of failure over time as faulty knowledge is removed or adjusted.

--Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed training on edge devices but faces significant challenges due to resource constraints in edge environments, impacting both communication and computational efficiency. Existing iterative pruning techniques improve communication efficiency but are limited by their centralized design, which struggles with FL's decentralized and data-imbalanced nature, resulting in suboptimal sparsity levels. T o address these issues, we propose FedPaI, a novel efficient FL framework that leverages Pruning at Initialization (PaI) to achieve extreme sparsity. FedPaI identifies optimal sparse connections at an early stage, maximizing model capacity and significantly reducing communication and computation overhead by fixing sparsity patterns at the start of training. T o adapt to diverse hardware and software environments, FedPaI supports both structured and unstructured pruning. Additionally, we introduce personalized client-side pruning mechanisms for improved learning capacity and sparsity-aware server-side aggregation for enhanced efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that FedPaI consistently outperforms existing efficient FL that applies conventional iterative pruning with significant leading in efficiency and model accuracy. For the first time, our proposed FedPaI achieves an extreme sparsity level of up to 98% without compromising the model accuracy compared to unpruned baselines, even under challenging non-IID settings. By employing our FedPaI with joint optimization of model learning capacity and sparsity, FL applications can benefit from faster convergence and accelerate the training by 6.4 to 7.9 . Federated Learning (FL) [1], [2] has emerged as a promising approach for decentralized machine learning on edge devices, which are rapidly growing in number and capability.