Data filtering strategies are a crucial component to develop safe Large Language Models (LLM), since they support the removal of harmful contents from pretraining datasets. There is a lack of research on the actual impact of these strategies on vulnerable groups to discrimination, though, and their effectiveness has not been yet systematically addressed. In this paper we present a benchmark study of data filtering strategies for harm reduction aimed at providing a systematic overview on these approaches. We survey 55 technical reports of English LMs and LLMs to identify the existing filtering strategies in literature and implement an experimental setting to test their impact against vulnerable groups. Our results show that the positive impact that strategies have in reducing harmful contents from documents has the side effect of increasing the underrepresentation of vulnerable groups to discrimination in datasets.

Canceling is a morally-driven phenomenon that hinders the development of safe social media platforms and contributes to ideological polarization. To address this issue we present the Canceling Attitudes Detection (CADE) dataset, an annotated corpus of canceling incidents aimed at exploring the factors of disagreements in evaluating people canceling attitudes on social media. Specifically, we study the impact of annotators' morality in their perception of canceling, showing that morality is an independent axis for the explanation of disagreement on this phenomenon. Annotator's judgments heavily depend on the type of controversial events and involved celebrities. This shows the need to develop more event-centric datasets to better understand how harms are perpetrated in social media and to develop more aware technologies for their detection.

With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, smartphones, and wearables have become integral to daily life, powering smart applications in home automation, healthcare, and intelligent transportation. However, these advancements face significant challenges due to latency and bandwidth constraints imposed by traditional cloud based machine learning (ML) frameworks. The need for innovative solutions is evident as cloud computing struggles with increased latency and network congestion. Previous attempts to offload parts of the ML pipeline to edge and cloud layers have yet to fully resolve these issues, often worsening system response times and network congestion due to the computational limitations of edge devices. In response to these challenges, this study introduces the InTec (Integrated Things Edge Computing) framework, a groundbreaking innovation in IoT architecture. Unlike existing methods, InTec fully leverages the potential of a three tier architecture by strategically distributing ML tasks across the Things, Edge, and Cloud layers. This comprehensive approach enables real time data processing at the point of data generation, significantly reducing latency, optimizing network traffic, and enhancing system reliability. InTec effectiveness is validated through empirical evaluation using the MHEALTH dataset for human motion detection in smart homes, demonstrating notable improvements in key metrics: an 81.56 percent reduction in response time, a 10.92 percent decrease in network traffic, a 9.82 percent improvement in throughput, a 21.86 percent reduction in edge energy consumption, and a 25.83 percent reduction in cloud energy consumption. These advancements establish InTec as a new benchmark for scalable, responsive, and energy efficient IoT applications, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize how the ML pipeline is integrated into Edge AI (EI) systems.

We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large Language Model (LLM) agents competing to influence a population, with penalties imposed for generating messages that propagate or counter misinformation. This framework integrates resource optimisation into the agents' decision-making process. Our findings demonstrate that while higher confirmation bias strengthens opinion alignment within groups, it also exacerbates overall polarisation. Conversely, lower confirmation bias leads to fragmented opinions and limited shifts in individual beliefs. Investing heavily in a high-resource debunking strategy can initially align the population with the debunking agent, but risks rapid resource depletion and diminished long-term influence.

Molecular representation learning is pivotal in predicting molecular properties and advancing drug design. Traditional methodologies, which predominantly rely on homogeneous graph encoding, are limited by their inability to integrate external knowledge and represent molecular structures across different levels of granularity. To address these limitations, we propose a paradigm shift by encoding molecular graphs into heterogeneous structures, introducing a novel framework: Knowledge-aware Contrastive Heterogeneous Molecular Graph Learning (KCHML). This approach leverages contrastive learning to enrich molecular representations with embedded external knowledge. KCHML conceptualizes molecules through three distinct graph views--molecular, elemental, and pharmacological--enhanced by heterogeneous molecular graphs and a dual message-passing mechanism. This design offers a comprehensive representation for property prediction, as well as for downstream tasks such as drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates KCHML's superiority over state-of-the-art molecular property prediction models, underscoring its ability to capture intricate molecular features.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as conversational agents, exploiting their capabilities in various sectors such as education, law, medicine, and more. However, LLMs are often subjected to context-shifting behaviour, resulting in a lack of consistent and interpretable personality-aligned interactions. Adherence to psychological traits lacks comprehensive analysis, especially in the case of dyadic (pairwise) conversations. We examine this challenge from two viewpoints, initially using two conversation agents to generate a discourse on a certain topic with an assigned personality from the OCEAN framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) as High/Low for each trait. This is followed by using multiple judge agents to infer the original traits assigned to explore prediction consistency, inter-model agreement, and alignment with the assigned personality. Our findings indicate that while LLMs can be guided toward personality-driven dialogue, their ability to maintain personality traits varies significantly depending on the combination of models and discourse settings. These inconsistencies emphasise the challenges in achieving stable and interpretable personality-aligned interactions in LLMs.

This paper presents multi-vision-based localisation strategies for harvesting robots. Identifying picking points accurately is essential for robotic harvesting because insecure grasping can lead to economic loss through fruit damage and dropping. In this study, two multi-vision-based localisation methods, namely the analytical approach and model-based algorithms, were employed. The actual geometric centre points of fruits were collected using a motion capture system (mocap), and two different surface points Cfix and Ceih were extracted using two Red-Green-Blue-Depth (RGB-D) cameras. First, the picking points of the target fruit were detected using analytical methods. Second, various primary and ensemble learning methods were employed to predict the geometric centre of target fruits by taking surface points as input. Adaboost regression, the most successful model-based localisation algorithm, achieved 88.8% harvesting accuracy with a Mean Euclidean Distance (MED) of 4.40 mm, while the analytical approach reached 81.4% picking success with a MED of 14.25 mm, both demonstrating better performance than the single-camera, which had a picking success rate of 77.7% with a MED of 24.02 mm. To evaluate the effect of picking point accuracy in collecting fruits, a series of robotic harvesting experiments were performed utilising a collaborative robot (cobot). It is shown that multi-vision systems can improve picking point localisation, resulting in higher success rates of picking in robotic harvesting.

Four students killed in a car crash were honoured at a university as basketball matches resumed for the first time since the incident. Makyle Bayley, 22, Eva Darold-Tchikaya, 21, Anthony "TJ" Hibbert, 24 and Daljang Wol, 22, died when a car crashed into a building on Magdalen Street, Colchester on 1 February. Mr Hibbert and Mr Wol played for the Essex Rebels, who dedicated Saturday's fixtures to the victims and held an applause in their memory. University of Essex director of sport Dave Parry said: "We've lost four really loved members of our university and sporting community, who gave so much to their friends and others." Mr Bayley was a member of the British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) basketball team, while Ms Darold-Tchikaya was a member of the Essex Blades dance club and other societies.Dawid Wojtowicz/BBCSaturday's basketball fixtures at the University of Essex were dedicated to the victimsDawid Wojtowicz/BBCIt was the first time matches had been played there since the incident Last week, more than 1,000 people including students, staff and relatives of the victims attended a gathering.

Solving complex tasks in a single attempt is challenging for large language models (LLMs). Iterative interaction with the environment and feedback is often required to achieve success, making effective feedback utilization a critical topic. Existing approaches either struggle with length generalization or rely on naive retries without leveraging prior information. In this paper, we introduce FTTT, a novel paradigm that formulates feedback utilization as an optimization problem at test time. Additionally, we propose a learnable test-time optimizer, OpTune, to effectively exploit feedback. Experiments on two LLMs across four reasoning datasets demonstrate that FTTT and OpTune achieve superior scalability and performance.

-- Collaborative 3D object detection holds significant importance in the field of autonomous driving, as it greatly enhances the perception capabilities of each individual agent by facilitating information exchange among multiple agents. However, in practice, due to pose estimation errors and time delays, the fusion of information across agents often results in feature representations with spatial and temporal noise, leading to detection errors. Diffusion models naturally have the ability to denoise noisy samples to the ideal data, which motivates us to explore the use of diffusion models to address the noise problem between multi-agent systems. In this work, we propose CoDiff, a novel robust collaborative perception framework that leverages the potential of diffusion models to generate more comprehensive and clearer feature representations. T o the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply diffusion models to multi-agent collaborative perception. Specifically, we project high-dimensional feature map into the latent space of a powerful pre-trained autoencoder . Within this space, individual agent information serves as a condition to guide the diffusion model's sampling. Experimental study on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed framework CoDiff consistently outperforms existing relevant methods in terms of the collaborative object detection performance, and exhibits highly desired robustness when the pose and delay information of agents is with high-level noise.