At the intersection of the cutting-edge technologies and privacy concerns, Federated Learning (FL) with its distributed architecture, stands at the forefront in a bid to facilitate collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy. However, the applicability of FL systems is hindered by fairness concerns arising from numerous sources of heterogeneity that can result in biases and undermine a system's effectiveness, with skewed predictions, reduced accuracy, and inefficient model convergence. This survey thus explores the diverse sources of bias, including but not limited to, data, client, and model biases, and thoroughly discusses the strengths and limitations inherited within the array of the state-of-the-art techniques utilized in the literature to mitigate such disparities in the FL training process. We delineate a comprehensive overview of the several notions, theoretical underpinnings, and technical aspects associated with fairness and their adoption in FL-based multidisciplinary environments. Furthermore, we examine salient evaluation metrics leveraged to measure fairness quantitatively. Finally, we envisage exciting open research directions that have the potential to drive future advancements in achieving fairer FL frameworks, in turn, offering a strong foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

Effective Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) relies upon accurately structured and semantically enriched information extracted from cybersecurity system logs. However, current methodologies often struggle to identify and interpret malicious events reliably and transparently, particularly in cases involving unstructured or ambiguous log entries. In this work, we propose a novel methodology that combines ontology-driven structured outputs with Large Language Models (LLMs), to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that improves the accuracy and explainability of information extraction from cybersecurity logs. Central to our approach is the integration of domain ontologies and SHACL-based constraints to guide the language model's output structure and enforce semantic validity over the resulting graph. Extracted information is organized into an ontology-enriched graph database, enabling future semantic analysis and querying. The design of our methodology is motivated by the analytical requirements associated with honeypot log data, which typically comprises predominantly malicious activity. While our case study illustrates the relevance of this scenario, the experimental evaluation is conducted using publicly available datasets. Results demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy in information extraction compared to traditional prompt-only approaches, with a deliberate focus on extraction quality rather than processing speed.

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, the digital asset marketplace becomes increasingly significant. Understanding social media signals offers valuable insights into investor sentiment and market dynamics. Prior research has predominantly focused on text-based platforms such as Twitter. However, video content remains underexplored, despite potentially containing richer emotional and contextual sentiment that is not fully captured by text alone. In this study, we present a multimodal analysis comparing TikTok and Twitter sentiment, using large language models to extract insights from both video and text data. We investigate the dynamic dependencies and spillover effects between social media sentiment and cryptocurrency market indicators. Our results reveal that TikTok's video-based sentiment significantly influences speculative assets and short-term market trends, while Twitter's text-based sentiment aligns more closely with long-term dynamics. Notably, the integration of cross-platform sentiment signals improves forecasting accuracy by up to 20%.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized data sources while preserving data privacy. However, the growing size of Machine Learning (ML) models poses communication and computation challenges in FL. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has recently been introduced into FL as an efficient fine-tuning method, reducing communication overhead by updating only a small number of trainable parameters. Despite its effectiveness, how to aggregate LoRA-updated local models on the server remains a critical and understudied problem. In this paper, we provide a unified convergence analysis for LoRA-based FL. We first categories the current aggregation method into two major type: Sum-Product (SP) and Product-Sum (PS). Then we formally define the Aggregation-Broadcast Operator (ABO) and derive both weak and strong convergence condition under mild assumptions. Furthermore, we present both weak and strong convergence condition that guarantee convergence of the local model and the global model respectively. These theoretical analyze offer a principled understanding of various aggregation strategies. Notably, we prove that the SP and PS aggregation methods satisfy the weak and strong convergence condition respectively, but differ in their ability to achieve the optimal convergence rate. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks validate our theoretical findings.

Parents could be alerted if their teenagers show acute distress while talking with ChatGPT, amid child safety concerns as more young people turn to AI chatbots for support and advice. The alerts are part of new protections for children using ChatGPT to be rolled out in the next month by OpenAI, which was last week sued by the family of a boy who took his own life after allegedly receiving "months of encouragement" from the system. Other new safeguards will include parents being able to link their accounts to those of their teenagers and controlling how the AI model responds to their child with "age-appropriate model behaviour rules". But internet safety campaigners said the steps did not go far enough and AI chatbots should not be on the market before they are deemed safe for young people. Adam Raine, 16, from California, killed himself in April after discussing a method of suicide with ChatGPT.

Australia has announced plans to ban apps used for stalking and creating deepfake nudes. Tech platforms will be responsible for preventing access to "nudify" and undetectable online stalking tools under the reforms announced on Tuesday by the Australian government. Minister for Communications Anika Wells said Australia would work with firms to stamp out "abhorrent technologies" while ensuring "legitimate and consent-based" artificial intelligence (AI) and online tracking services were not adversely affected. "Abusive technologies are widely and easily accessible and are causing real and irreparable damage now," Wells said in a statement. "These new, evolving, technologies require a new, proactive, approach to harm prevention – and we'll work closely with industry to achieve this." "While this move won't eliminate the problem of abusive technology in one fell swoop, alongside existing laws and our world-leading online safety reforms, it will make a real difference in protecting Australians," she added.

At a time when capitalist forces are driving much of the advancement in artificial intelligence, Alex Proyas sees the use of AI in film-making as a source of artistic liberation. While many in the film sector see the emergence of artificial intelligence as a threat to their careers, livelihoods and even likenesses, the Australian film-maker behind The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot, believes the technology will make it much easier and cheaper to get projects off the ground. "The model for film-makers, who are the only people I really care about at the end of the day, is broken … and it's not AI that's causing that," Proyas tells the Guardian. He says residuals that film-makers used to rely on between projects are drying up in the streaming era, and the budgets for projects becoming smaller. "We need to rebuild it from the ground up. I believe AI can help us do that, because as it lowers the cost threshold to produce stuff, and as every month goes by, it's lowering it and lowering it, we can do more for less, and we can hopefully retain more ownership of those projects," he says.

One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide basins (regions around a local minimum where the loss increases gradually) promote better generalization by offering greater stability to small changes in input data or model parameters. In contrast, sharp minima are typically more sensitive and less stable. Motivated by two key empirical observations - the inherent heavy-tailed distribution of gradient noise in stochastic gradient descent and the Edge of Stability phenomenon during neural network training, in which curvature grows before settling at a plateau, we introduce Adaptive Heavy Tailed Stochastic Gradient Descent (AHTSGD). The algorithm injects heavier-tailed noise into the optimizer during the early stages of training to enhance exploration and gradually transitions to lighter-tailed noise as sharpness stabilizes. By dynamically adapting to the sharpness of the loss landscape throughout training, AHTSGD promotes accelerated convergence to wide basins. AHTSGD is the first algorithm to adjust the nature of injected noise into an optimizer based on the Edge of Stability phenomenon. AHTSGD consistently outperforms SGD and other noise-based methods on benchmarks like MNIST and CIFAR-10, with marked gains on noisy datasets such as SVHN. It ultimately accelerates early training from poor initializations and improves generalization across clean and noisy settings, remaining robust to learning rate choices.

Fairness in recommender systems (RSs) is commonly categorised into group fairness and individual fairness. However, there is no established scientific understanding of the relationship between the two fairness types, as prior work on both types has used different evaluation measures or evaluation objectives for each fairness type, thereby not allowing for a proper comparison of the two. As a result, it is currently not known how increasing one type of fairness may affect the other. To fill this gap, we study the relationship of group and individual fairness through a comprehensive comparison of evaluation measures that can be used for both fairness types. Our experiments with 8 runs across 3 datasets show that recommendations that are highly fair for groups can be very unfair for individuals. Our finding is novel and useful for RS practitioners aiming to improve the fairness of their systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/theresiavr/stairway-to-fairness.

The Deep Space Network (DSN) is NASA's largest network of antenna facilities that generate a large volume of multivariate time - series data. These facilities, situated at Canberra - Australia, Madrid - Spain, and Goldstone - California, contain DSN antennas and transmitters that undergo degradation over long periods of time, which may cause costly disruptions to the data flow and threaten the earth - connection of dozens of spacecraft that rely on the Deep Space Network for their lifeline. The purpose of this study was to experiment with different methods and tools that would be able to assist JPL engineers with directly pinpointing anomalies and DSN equipment degradation through collected data, and continue conducting maintenance and operations of the DSN for future space missions around our universe. As such, we have researched various machine learning techniques and architectures that can fully reconstruct data through predictive analysis, and determine anomalous data entries within real - time datasets through statistical computations and thresholds . On top of the fully trained and tested machine learning models, we have also integrated the use of a reinforcement learning subsystem that classifies identified anomalies based on severity level and a Large Language Model that labels an explanation for each anomalous data entry, all of which can be improved and fine - tuned over time through human feedback /input. Specifically, for the DSN transmitters, we have also implemented a full data pipeline system that connects the data extraction, parsing, and pro ces sing workflow all together as there was no coherent program or script for performing these tasks before. Using this data pipeline system, we were able to then also connect the models trained from DSN an tenna data, completing the data workflow for DSN anomaly detection . This was all wrapped around and further connected by an agentic AI system, where complex reasoning was utilized to determine the classifications and predictions of anomalous data .