This review began with the modest goal of drafting a brief commentary on how the social work profession engages with and is impacted by artificial intelligence (AI). However, it quickly became apparent that a deeper exploration was required to adequately capture the profound influence of AI, one of the most transformative and debated innovations in modern history. As a result, this review evolved into an interdisciplinary endeavour, gathering seminal texts, critical articles, and influential voices from across industries and academia. This review aims to provide a comprehensive yet accessible overview, situating AI within broader societal and academic conversations as 2025 dawns. We explore perspectives from leading tech entrepreneurs, cultural icons, CEOs, and politicians alongside the pioneering contributions of AI engineers, innovators, and academics from fields as diverse as mathematics, sociology, philosophy, economics, and more. This review also briefly analyses AI's real-world impacts, ethical challenges, and implications for social work. It presents a vision for AI-facilitated simulations that could transform social work education through Advanced Personalised Simulation Training (APST). This tool uses AI to tailor high-fidelity simulations to individual student needs, providing real-time feedback and preparing them for the complexities of their future practice environments. We maintain a critical tone throughout, balancing our awe of AI's remarkable advancements with necessary caution. As AI continues to permeate every professional realm, understanding its subtleties, challenges, and opportunities becomes essential. Those who fully grasp the intricacies of this technology will be best positioned to navigate the impending AI Era.

Ethical AI development is crucial as new technologies and concerns emerge, but objective, practical ethical guidance remains debated. This study examines LLMs in developing ethical AI systems, assessing how trustworthiness-enhancing techniques affect ethical AI output generation. Using the Design Science Research (DSR) method, we identify techniques for LLM trustworthiness: multi-agents, distinct roles, structured communication, and multiple rounds of debate. We design the multi-agent prototype LLM-BMAS, where agents engage in structured discussions on real-world ethical AI issues from the AI Incident Database. The prototype's performance is evaluated through thematic analysis, hierarchical clustering, ablation studies, and source code execution. Our system generates around 2,000 lines per run, compared to only 80 lines in the ablation study. Discussions reveal terms like bias detection, transparency, accountability, user consent, GDPR compliance, fairness evaluation, and EU AI Act compliance, showing LLM-BMAS's ability to generate thorough source code and documentation addressing often-overlooked ethical AI issues. However, practical challenges in source code integration and dependency management may limit smooth system adoption by practitioners. This study aims to shed light on enhancing trustworthiness in LLMs to support practitioners in developing ethical AI-based systems.

Obtaining well-calibrated photometric redshift probability densities for galaxies without a spectroscopic measurement remains a challenge. Deep learning discriminative models, typically fed with multi-band galaxy images, can produce outputs that mimic probability densities and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models may be affected by miscalibration that would result in discrepancies between the model outputs and the actual distributions of true redshifts. Our work develops a novel method called the Contrastive Learning and Adaptive KNN for Photometric Redshift (CLAP) that resolves this issue. It leverages supervised contrastive learning (SCL) and k-nearest neighbours (KNN) to construct and calibrate raw probability density estimates, and implements a refitting procedure to resume end-to-end discriminative models ready to produce final estimates for large-scale imaging data. The harmonic mean is adopted to combine an ensemble of estimates from multiple realisations for improving accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that CLAP takes advantage of both deep learning and KNN, outperforming benchmark methods on the calibration of probability density estimates and retaining high accuracy and computational efficiency. With reference to CLAP, we point out that miscalibration is particularly sensitive to the method-induced excessive correlations among data instances in addition to the unaccounted-for epistemic uncertainties. Reducing the uncertainties may not guarantee the removal of miscalibration due to the presence of such excessive correlations, yet this is a problem for conventional deep learning methods rather than CLAP. These discussions underscore the robustness of CLAP for obtaining photometric redshift probability densities required by astrophysical and cosmological applications. This is the first paper in our series on CLAP.

Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable reasoning and execution capabilities, attracting researchers to explore their potential in the recommendation domain. Previous studies have primarily focused on enhancing the capabilities of either recommendation agents or user agents independently, but have not considered the interaction and collaboration between recommendation agents and user agents. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework named FLOW, which achieves collaboration between the recommendation agent and the user agent by introducing a feedback loop. Specifically, the recommendation agent refines its understanding of the user's preferences by analyzing the user agent's feedback on previously suggested items, while the user agent leverages suggested items to uncover deeper insights into the user's latent interests. This iterative refinement process enhances the reasoning capabilities of both the recommendation agent and the user agent, enabling more precise recommendations and a more accurate simulation of user behavior. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the feedback loop, we evaluate both recommendation performance and user simulation performance on three widely used recommendation domain datasets. The experimental results indicate that the feedback loop can simultaneously improve the performance of both the recommendation and user agents.

Marked event data captures events by recording their continuous-valued occurrence timestamps along with their corresponding discrete-valued types. They have appeared in various real-world scenarios such as social media, financial transactions, and healthcare records, and have been effectively modeled through Marked Temporal Point Process (MTPP) models. Recently, developing generative models for these MTPP models have seen rapid development due to their powerful generative capability and less restrictive functional forms. However, existing generative MTPP models are usually challenged in jointly modeling events' timestamps and types since: (1) mainstream methods design the generative mechanisms for timestamps only and do not include event types; (2) the complex interdependence between the timestamps and event types are overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel generative MTPP model called BMTPP. Unlike existing generative MTPP models, BMTPP flexibly models marked temporal joint distributions using a parameter-based approach. Additionally, by adding joint noise to the marked temporal data space, BMTPP effectively captures and explicitly reveals the interdependence between timestamps and event types. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach over other state-of-the-art models and its ability to effectively capture marked-temporal interdependence.

Personality analysis from online short videos has gained prominence due to its applications in personalized recommendation systems, sentiment analysis, and human-computer interaction. Traditional assessment methods, such as questionnaires based on the Big Five Personality Framework, are limited by self-report biases and are impractical for large-scale or real-time analysis. Leveraging the rich, multi-modal data present in short videos offers a promising alternative for more accurate personality inference. However, integrating these diverse and asynchronous modalities poses significant challenges, particularly in aligning time-varying data and ensuring models generalize well to new domains with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal personality analysis framework that addresses these challenges by synchronizing and integrating features from multiple modalities and enhancing model generalization through domain adaptation. We introduce a timestamp-based modality alignment mechanism that synchronizes data based on spoken word timestamps, ensuring accurate correspondence across modalities and facilitating effective feature integration. To capture temporal dependencies and inter-modal interactions, we employ Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks and self-attention mechanisms, allowing the model to focus on the most informative features for personality prediction. Furthermore, we develop a gradient-based domain adaptation method that transfers knowledge from multiple source domains to improve performance in target domains with scarce labeled data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in personality prediction tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing complex behavioral cues and robustness in adapting to new domains.

Wildlife ReID involves utilizing visual technology to identify specific individuals of wild animals in different scenarios, holding significant importance for wildlife conservation, ecological research, and environmental monitoring. Existing wildlife ReID methods are predominantly tailored to specific species, exhibiting limited applicability. Although some approaches leverage extensively studied person ReID techniques, they struggle to address the unique challenges posed by wildlife. Therefore, in this paper, we present a unified, multi-species general framework for wildlife ReID. Given that high-frequency information is a consistent representation of unique features in various species, significantly aiding in identifying contours and details such as fur textures, we propose the Adaptive High-Frequency Transformer model with the goal of enhancing high-frequency information learning. To mitigate the inevitable high-frequency interference in the wilderness environment, we introduce an object-aware high-frequency selection strategy to adaptively capture more valuable high-frequency components. Notably, we unify the experimental settings of multiple wildlife datasets for ReID, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art ReID methods. In domain generalization scenarios, our approach demonstrates robust generalization to unknown species. Code is available at https://github.

Transformers and large language models~(LLMs) have seen rapid adoption in all domains. Their sizes have exploded to hundreds of billions of parameters and keep increasing. Under these circumstances, the training of transformers is very expensive and often hits a ``memory wall'', i.e., even when using 3D parallelism (pipeline, tensor, data) and aggregating the memory of many GPUs, it is still not enough to hold the necessary data structures (model parameters, optimizer state, gradients, activations) in GPU memory. To compensate, state-of-the-art approaches offload the optimizer state, at least partially, to the host memory and perform hybrid CPU-GPU computations. However, the management of the combined host-GPU memory is often suboptimal and results in poor overlapping between data movements and computations. This leads to missed opportunities to simultaneously leverage the interconnect bandwidth and computational capabilities of CPUs and GPUs. In this paper, we leverage a key observation that the interleaving of the forward, backward and update phases generate fluctuations in the GPU memory utilization, which can be exploited to dynamically move a part of the optimizer state between the host and the GPU memory at each iteration. To this end, we design and implement \proj, a novel technique to split the LLM into subgroups, whose update phase is scheduled on either the CPU or the GPU based on our proposed performance model that addresses the trade-off between data movement cost, acceleration on the GPUs vs the CPUs, and competition for shared resources. We integrate our approach with DeepSpeed and demonstrate 2.5$\times$ faster iterations over state-of-the-art approaches using extensive experiments.

Medical information retrieval (MIR) is essential for retrieving relevant medical knowledge from diverse sources, including electronic health records, scientific literature, and medical databases. However, achieving effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain poses substantial challenges due to the lack of relevance-labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Self-Learning Hypothetical Document Embeddings (SL-HyDE) to tackle this issue. SL-HyDE leverages large language models (LLMs) as generators to generate hypothetical documents based on a given query. These generated documents encapsulate key medical context, guiding a dense retriever in identifying the most relevant documents. The self-learning framework progressively refines both pseudo-document generation and retrieval, utilizing unlabeled medical corpora without requiring any relevance-labeled data. Additionally, we present the Chinese Medical Information Retrieval Benchmark (CMIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework grounded in real-world medical scenarios, encompassing five tasks and ten datasets. By benchmarking ten models on CMIRB, we establish a rigorous standard for evaluating medical information retrieval systems. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-HyDE significantly surpasses existing methods in retrieval accuracy while showcasing strong generalization and scalability across various LLM and retriever configurations. CMIRB data and evaluation code are publicly available at: https://github.com/CMIRB-benchmark/CMIRB.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to learn from their own actions in the real world. Unfortunately, RL can be prohibitively expensive, in terms of on-robot runtime, due to inefficient exploration when learning from a sparse reward signal. Designing dense reward functions is labour-intensive and requires domain expertise. In our work, we propose GCR (Goal-Contrastive Rewards), a dense reward function learning method that can be trained on passive video demonstrations. By using videos without actions, our method is easier to scale, as we can use arbitrary videos. GCR combines two loss functions, an implicit value loss function that models how the reward increases when traversing a successful trajectory, and a goal-contrastive loss that discriminates between successful and failed trajectories. We perform experiments in simulated manipulation environments across RoboMimic and MimicGen tasks, as well as in the real world using a Franka arm and a Spot quadruped. We find that GCR leads to a more-sample efficient RL, enabling model-free RL to solve about twice as many tasks as our baseline reward learning methods. We also demonstrate positive cross-embodiment transfer from videos of people and of other robots performing a task. Appendix: \url{https://tinyurl.com/gcr-appendix-2}.