Reaching consensus and convergence to equilibrium are two major challenges of multi-agent systems. Although each has attracted significant attention, relatively few studies address both challenges at the same time. This paper examines the connection between the notions of consensus and equilibrium in a multi-agent system where multiple interacting sub-populations coexist. We argue that consensus can be seen as an intricate component of intra-population stability, whereas equilibrium can be seen as encoding inter-population stability. We show that smooth fictitious play, a well-known learning model in game theory, can achieve both consensus and convergence to equilibrium in diverse multi-agent settings. Moreover, we show that the consensus formation process plays a crucial role in the seminal thorny problem of equilibrium selection in multi-agent learning.

Trustworthiness has become a key requirement for the deployment of artificial intelligence systems in safety-critical applications. Conventional evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and precision, fail to appropriately capture uncertainty or the reliability of model predictions, particularly under adversarial or degraded conditions. This paper introduces the Parallel Trust Assessment System (PaTAS), a framework for modeling and propagating trust in neural networks using Subjective Logic (SL). PaTAS operates in parallel with standard neural computation through Trust Nodes and Trust Functions that propagate input, parameter, and activation trust across the network. The framework defines a Parameter Trust Update mechanism to refine parameter reliability during training and an Inference-Path Trust Assessment (IPTA) method to compute instance-specific trust at inference. Experiments on real-world and adversarial datasets demonstrate that PaTAS produces interpretable, symmetric, and convergent trust estimates that complement accuracy and expose reliability gaps in poisoned, biased, or uncertain data scenarios. The results show that PaTAS effectively distinguishes between benign and adversarial inputs and identifies cases where model confidence diverges from actual reliability. By enabling transparent and quantifiable trust reasoning within neural architectures, PaTAS provides a foundation for evaluating model reliability across the AI lifecycle.

This study presents QuanvNeXt, an end-to-end fully quanvolutional model for EEG-based depression diagnosis. QuanvNeXt incorporates a novel Cross Residual block, which reduces feature homogeneity and strengthens cross-feature relationships while retaining parameter efficiency. We evaluated QuanvNeXt on two open-source datasets, where it achieved an average accuracy of 93.1% and an average AUC-ROC of 97.2%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines such as InceptionTime (91.7% accuracy, 95.9% AUC-ROC). An uncertainty analysis across Gaussian noise levels demonstrated well-calibrated predictions, with ECE scores remaining low (0.0436, Dataset 1) to moderate (0.1159, Dataset 2) even at the highest perturbation (ε = 0.1). Additionally, a post-hoc explainable AI analysis confirmed that QuanvNeXt effectively identifies and learns spectrotemporal patterns that distinguish between healthy controls and major depressive disorder. Overall, QuanvNeXt establishes an efficient and reliable approach for EEG-based depression diagnosis.

World models have been recently proposed as sandbox environments in which AI agents can be trained and evaluated before deployment. Although realistic world models often have high computational demands, efficient modelling is usually possible by exploiting the fact that real-world scenarios tend to involve subcomponents that interact in a modular manner. In this paper, we explore this idea by developing a framework for decomposing complex world models represented by transducers, a class of models gen-eralising POMDPs. Whereas the composition of transducers is well understood, our results clarify how to invert this process deriving sub-transducers operating on distinct input-output subspaces, enabling parallelizable and interpretable alternatives to monolithic world modelling that can support distributed inference. Overall, these results lay a groundwork for bridging the structural transparency demanded by AI safety and the computational efficiency required for real-world inference.

Discrete fuzzy numbers, and in particular those defined over a finite chain $L_n = \{0, \ldots, n\}$, have been effectively employed to represent linguistic information within the framework of fuzzy systems. Research on total (admissible) orderings of such types of fuzzy subsets, and specifically those belonging to the set $\mathcal{D}_1^{L_n\rightarrow Y_m}$ consisting of discrete fuzzy numbers $A$ whose support is a closed subinterval of the finite chain $L_n = \{0, 1, \ldots, n\}$ and whose membership values $A(x)$, for $x \in L_n$, belong to the set $Y_m = \{ 0 = y_1 < y_2 < \cdots < y_{m-1} < y_m = 1 \}$, has facilitated the development of new methods for constructing logical connectives, based on a bijective function, called $\textit{pos function}$, that determines the position of each $A \in \mathcal{D}_1^{L_n\rightarrow Y_m}$. For this reason, in this work we revisit the problem by introducing algorithms that exploit the combinatorial structure of total (admissible) orders to compute the $\textit{pos}$ function and its inverse with exactness. The proposed approach achieves a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n^{2} m \log n)$, which is quadratic in the size of the underlying chain ($n$) and linear in the number of membership levels ($m$). The key point is that the dominant factor is $m$, ensuring scalability with respect to the granularity of membership values. The results demonstrate that this formulation substantially reduces computational cost and enables the efficient implementation of algebraic operations -- such as aggregation and implication -- on the set of discrete fuzzy numbers.

For example, in the Pandemic Response Challenge experiment, the context consisted of data about the geographic region for which the predictions were made, e.g., historical data of COVID-19 cases and intervention policies; actions were future schedules of intervention policies for the region; and outcomes were predicted future cases of COVID-19 along with the stringency

To address issues of group-level fairness in machine learning, it is natural to adjust model parameters based on specific fairness objectives over a sensitive-attributed validation set.

Steganography and steganalysis are strongly related subjects of information security. Over the past decade, many powerful and efficient artificial intelligence (AI) - driven techniques have been designed and presented during research into steganography as well as steganalysis. This study presents a scientometric analysis of AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques using a thematic modelling approach. A total of 654 articles within the time span of 2017 to 2023 have been considered. Experimental evaluation of the study reveals that 69% of published articles are from Asian countries. The China is on top (TP:312), followed by India (TP-114). The study mainly identifies seven thematic clusters: steganographic image data hiding, deep image steganalysis, neural watermark robustness, linguistic steganography models, speech steganalysis algorithms, covert communication networks, and video steganography techniques. The proposed study also assesses the scope of AI-steganography under the purview of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to present the interdisciplinary reciprocity between them. It has been observed that only 18 of the 654 articles are aligned with one of the SDGs, which shows that limited studies conducted in alignment with SDG goals. SDG9 which is Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure is leading among 18 SDGs mapped articles. To the top of our insight, this study is the unique one to present a scientometric study on AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques. In the context of descriptive statistics, the study breaks down the underlying causes of observed trends, including the influence of DL developments, trends in East Asia and maturity of foundational methods. The work also stresses upon the critical gaps in societal alignment, particularly the SDGs, ultimately working on unveiling the field's global impact on AI security challenges.

The growing popularity of group activities increased the need to develop methods for providing recommendations to a group of users based on the collective preferences of the group members. Several group recommender systems have been proposed, but these methods often struggle due to sparsity and high-dimensionality of the available data, common in many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a group recommender system called Group Soft-Impute SVD, which leverages soft-impute singular value decomposition to enhance group recommendations. This approach addresses the challenge of sparse high-dimensional data using low-rank matrix completion. We compared the performance of Group Soft-Impute SVD with Group MF based approaches and found that our method outperforms the baselines in recall for small user groups while achieving comparable results across all group sizes when tasked on Goodbooks, Movielens, and Synthetic datasets. Furthermore, our method recovers lower matrix ranks than the baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling high-dimensional data.

It involves a complex multidimensional trade-off.