Abstract--Accurate material recognition is critical for safe and effective laser cutting, as misidentification can lead to poor cut quality, machine damage, or the release of hazardous fumes. Laser speckle sensing has recently emerged as a low-cost and non-destructive modality for material classification; however, prior work has either relied on computationally expensive backbone networks or addressed only limited subsets of materials. In this study, A lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) tailored for speckle patterns is proposed, designed to minimize parameters while maintaining high discriminative power . Using the complete SensiCut dataset of 59 material classes spanning woods, acrylics, composites, textiles, metals, and paper-based products, the proposed model achieves 95.05% test accuracy, with macro and weighted F1-scores of 0.951. The network contains only 341k trainable parameters ( 1.3 MB)--over 70 fewer than ResNet-50--and achieves an inference speed of 295 images per second, enabling deployment on Raspberry Pi and Jetson-class devices. Furthermore, when materials are regrouped into nine and five practical families, recall exceeds 98% and approaches 100%, directly supporting power and speed preset selection in laser cutters. These results demonstrate that compact, domain-specific CNNs can outperform large backbones for speckle-based material classification, advancing the feasibility of material-aware, edge-deployable laser cutting systems.

Wide-angle tail (WAT) and narrow-angle tail (NAT) radio active galactic nuclei (RAGNs) are key tracers of dense environments in galaxy groups and clusters, yet no machine-learning classifier of bent RAGNs has been trained using both unlabeled data and purely visually inspected labels. We release the RGC Python package, which includes two newly preprocessed labeled datasets of 639 WATs and NATs derived from a publicly available catalog of visually inspected sources, along with a semi-supervised RGC model that leverages 20,000 unlabeled RAGNs. The two labeled datasets in RGC were preprocessed using PyBDSF which retains spurious sources, and Photutils which removes them. The RGC model integrates the self-supervised framework BYOL (Bootstrap YOur Latent) with the supervised E2CNN (E2-equivariant Convolutional Neural Network) to form a semi-supervised binary classifier. The RGC model, when trained and evaluated on a dataset devoid of spurious sources, reaches peak performance, attaining an accuracy of 88.88% along with F1-scores of 0.90 for WATs and 0.85 for NATs. The model's attention patterns amid class imbalance suggest that this work can serve as a stepping stone toward developing physics-informed foundation models capable of identifying a broad range of AGN physical properties.

We present the AgriCruiser, an open-source over-the-row agricultural robot developed for low-cost deployment and rapid adaptation across diverse crops and row layouts. The chassis provides an adjustable track width of 1.42 m to 1.57 m, along with a ground clearance of 0.94 m. The AgriCruiser achieves compact pivot turns with radii of 0.71 m to 0.79 m, enabling efficient headland maneuvers. The platform is designed for the integration of the other subsystems, and in this study, a precision spraying system was implemented to assess its effectiveness in weed management. In twelve flax plots, a single robotic spray pass reduced total weed populations (pigweed and Venice mallow) by 24- to 42-fold compared to manual weeding in four flax plots, while also causing less crop damage. Mobility experiments conducted on concrete, asphalt, gravel, grass, and both wet and dry soil confirmed reliable traversal consistent with torque sizing. The complete chassis can be constructed from commodity T-slot extrusion with minimal machining, resulting in a bill of materials costing approximately $5,000 - $6,000, which enables replication and customization. The mentioned results demonstrate that low-cost, reconfigurable over-the-row robots can achieve effective weed management with reduced crop damage and labor requirements, while providing a versatile foundation for phenotyping, sensing, and other agriculture applications. Design files and implementation details are released to accelerate research and adoption of modular agricultural robotics.

This research investigates the integration of emotional diversity into Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance collective intelligence. Inspired by the human wisdom of crowds phenomenon, where group decisions often outperform individual judgments, we fine-tuned the DarkIdol-Llama-3.1-8B model using Google's GoEmotions dataset and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to simulate emotionally diverse responses. Evaluating the model on a distance estimation task between Fargo, ND, and Seattle, WA, across 15,064 unique persona configurations, we analyzed how emotional states and social attributes influence decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that emotional integration shapes response patterns while maintaining acceptable prediction accuracy, revealing its potential to enhance artificial collective intelligence. This study provides valuable insights into the interplay of emotional diversity and decision-making in LLMs, suggesting pathways for creating emotionally aware AI systems that balance emotional depth with analytical precision.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative development in artificial intelligence (AI), drawing significant attention from industry and academia. Trained on vast datasets, these sophisticated AI systems exhibit impressive natural language processing and content generation capabilities. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to address key challenges in personal finance, focusing on the United States. We evaluate several leading LLMs, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's Llama, to assess their effectiveness in providing accurate financial advice on topics such as mortgages, taxes, loans, and investments. Our findings show that while these models achieve an average accuracy rate of approximately 70%, they also display notable limitations in certain areas. Specifically, LLMs struggle to provide accurate responses for complex financial queries, with performance varying significantly across different topics. Despite these limitations, the analysis reveals notable improvements in newer versions of these models, highlighting their growing utility for individuals and financial advisors. As these AI systems continue to evolve, their potential for advancing AI-driven applications in personal finance becomes increasingly promising.

This work presents a novel architecture for building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to improve Question Answering (QA) tasks from a target corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the analyzing and generation of human-like text. These models rely on pre-trained data and lack real-time updates unless integrated with live data tools. RAG enhances LLMs by integrating online resources and databases to generate contextually appropriate responses. However, traditional RAG still encounters challenges like information dilution and hallucinations when handling vast amounts of data. Our approach addresses these challenges by converting corpora into a domain-specific dataset and RAG architecture is constructed to generate responses from the target document. We introduce QuIM-RAG (Question-to-question Inverted Index Matching), a novel approach for the retrieval mechanism in our system. This strategy generates potential questions from document chunks and matches these with user queries to identify the most relevant text chunks for generating accurate answers. We have implemented our RAG system on top of the open-source Meta-LLaMA3-8B-instruct model by Meta Inc. that is available on Hugging Face. We constructed a custom corpus of 500+ pages from a high-traffic website accessed thousands of times daily for answering complex questions, along with manually prepared ground truth QA for evaluation. We compared our approach with traditional RAG models using BERT-Score and RAGAS, state-of-the-art metrics for evaluating LLM applications. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach outperforms traditional RAG architectures on both metrics.

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.

During a virus's evolution,various regions of the genome are subjected to distinct levels of functional constraints.Combined with factors like codon bias and DNA repair efficiency,these constraints contribute to unique mutation patterns within the genome or a specific gene. In this project, we harnessed the power of Large Language Models(LLMs) to predict the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. By treating the mutation process from one generation to the next as a translation task, we trained a transformer model, called VirusT5, to capture the mutation patterns underlying SARS-CoV-2 evolution. We evaluated the VirusT5's ability to detect these mutation patterns including its ability to identify mutation hotspots and explored the potential of using VirusT5 to predict future virus variants. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using a large language model to model viral evolution as a translation process. This study establishes the groundbreaking concept of "mutation-as-translation," paving the way for new methodologies and tools for combating virus threats

The software for operations and network attack results review (SONARR) and the autonomous penetration testing system (APTS) use facts and common properties in digital twin networks to represent real-world entities. However, in some cases fact values will change regularly, making it difficult for objects in SONARR and APTS to consistently and accurately represent their real-world counterparts. This paper proposes and evaluates the addition of verifiers, which check real-world conditions and update network facts, to SONARR. This inclusion allows SONARR to retrieve fact values from its executing environment and update its network, providing a consistent method of ensuring that the operations and, therefore, the results align with the real-world systems being assessed. Verifiers allow arbitrary scripts and dynamic arguments to be added to normal SONARR operations. This provides a layer of flexibility and consistency that results in more reliable output from the software.

Computer system creativity is a key step on the pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI). It is elusive, however, due to the fact that human creativity is not fully understood and, thus, it is difficult to develop this capability in software. Large language models (LLMs) provide a facsimile of creativity and the appearance of sentience, while not actually being either creative or sentient. While LLMs have created bona fide new content, in some cases - such as with harmful hallucinations - inadvertently, their deliberate creativity is seen by some to not match that of humans. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a technique for enhancing LLM output creativity via an iterative process of concept injection and refinement. Initial work on the development of the Creative Artificial Intelligence through Recurring Developments and Determinations (CAIRDD) system is presented and the efficacy of key system components is evaluated.