Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental disorders, with significant impacts on many daily activities and quality of life. It stands as one of the most common mental disorders globally and ranks as the second leading cause of disability. The current diagnostic approach for MDD primarily relies on clinical observations and patient-reported symptoms, overlooking the diverse underlying causes and pathophysiological factors contributing to depression. Therefore, scientific researchers and clinicians must gain a deeper understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in MDD. There is growing evidence in neuroscience that depression is a brain network disorder, and the use of neuroimaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), plays a significant role in identifying and treating MDD. Rest-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is among the most popular neuroimaging techniques used to study MDD. Deep learning techniques have been widely applied to neuroimaging data to help with early mental health disorder detection. Recent years have seen a rise in interest in graph neural networks (GNNs), which are deep neural architectures specifically designed to handle graph-structured data like rs-fMRI. This research aimed to develop an ensemble-based GNN model capable of detecting discriminative features from rs-fMRI images for the purpose of diagnosing MDD. Specifically, we constructed an ensemble model by combining features from multiple brain region segmentation atlases to capture brain complexity and detect distinct features more accurately than single atlas-based models. Further, the effectiveness of our model is demonstrated by assessing its performance on a large multi-site MDD dataset. The best performing model among all folds achieved an accuracy of 75.80%, a sensitivity of 88.89%, a specificity of 61.84%, a precision of 71.29%, and an F1-score of 79.12%.

Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) aims to enable search across various modalities using a unified model, where queries and candidates can consist of pure text, images, or a combination of both. Previous work has attempted to adopt multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to realize UMR using only text data. However, our preliminary experiments demonstrate that more diverse multimodal training data can further unlock the potential of MLLMs. Despite its effectiveness, the existing multimodal training data is highly imbalanced in terms of modality, which motivates us to develop a training data synthesis pipeline and construct a large-scale, high-quality fused-modal training dataset. Based on the synthetic training data, we develop the General Multimodal Embedder (GME), an MLLM-based dense retriever designed for UMR. Furthermore, we construct a comprehensive UMR Benchmark (UMRB) to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing UMR methods. Last, we provide in-depth analyses of model scaling, training strategies, and perform ablation studies on both the model and synthetic data.

Accurate and timely prediction of heavy rainfall events is crucial for effective flood risk management and disaster preparedness. By monitoring, analysing, and evaluating rainfall data at a local level, it is not only possible to take effective actions to prevent any severe climate variation but also to improve the planning of surface and underground hydrological resources. However, developing countries often lack the weather stations to collect data continuously due to the high cost of installation and maintenance. In light of this, the contribution of the present paper is twofold: first, we propose a low-cost IoT system for automatic recording, monitoring, and prediction of rainfall in rural regions. Second, we propose a novel approach to regional heavy rainfall prediction by implementing graph neural networks (GNNs), which are particularly well-suited for capturing the complex spatial dependencies inherent in rainfall patterns. The proposed approach was tested using a historical dataset spanning 72 months, with daily measurements, and experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in predicting heavy rainfall events, making this approach particularly attractive for regions with limited resources or where traditional weather radar or station coverage is sparse.

Reasoning about the causes behind observations is crucial to the formalization of rationality. While extensive research has been conducted on root cause analysis, most studies have predominantly focused on deterministic settings. In this paper, we investigate causation in more realistic nondeterministic domains, where the agent does not have any control on and may not know the choices that are made by the environment. We build on recent preliminary work on actual causation in the nondeterministic situation calculus to formalize more sophisticated forms of reasoning about actual causes in such domains. We investigate the notions of ``Certainly Causes'' and ``Possibly Causes'' that enable the representation of actual cause for agent actions in these domains. We then show how regression in the situation calculus can be extended to reason about such notions of actual causes.

Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning, simulation, and experimentation, we still lack integrated AI systems capable of performing autonomous long-term scientific research and discovery. This paper examines the current state of AI for scientific discovery, highlighting recent progress in large language models and other AI techniques applied to scientific tasks. We then outline key challenges and promising research directions toward developing more comprehensive AI systems for scientific discovery, including the need for science-focused AI agents, improved benchmarks and evaluation metrics, multimodal scientific representations, and unified frameworks combining reasoning, theorem proving, and data-driven modeling. Addressing these challenges could lead to transformative AI tools to accelerate progress across disciplines towards scientific discovery.

Novel applications demand high throughput, low latency, and high reliability connectivity and still pose significant challenges to slicing orchestration architectures. The literature explores network slicing techniques that employ canonical methods, artificial intelligence, and combinatorial optimization to address errors and ensure throughput for network slice data plane. This paper introduces the Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB)-Agent as a new approach that uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a vertical application to enhance network slicing throughput to fit Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). The eMBB-Agent analyzes application transmission variables and proposes actions within a discrete space to adjust the reception window using a Deep Q-Network (DQN). This paper also presents experimental results that examine the impact of factors such as the channel error rate, DQN model layers, and learning rate on model convergence and achieved throughput, providing insights on embedding intelligence in network slicing.

We introduce KALL-E, a novel autoregressive (AR) language modeling approach with next-distribution prediction for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Unlike existing methods, KALL-E directly models and predicts the continuous speech distribution conditioned on text without relying on VAE- or diffusion-based components. Specifically, we use WaveVAE to extract continuous speech distributions from waveforms instead of using discrete speech tokens. A single AR language model predicts these continuous speech distributions from text, with a Kullback-Leibler divergence loss as the constraint. Experimental results show that KALL-E outperforms open-source implementations of YourTTS, VALL-E, NaturalSpeech 2, and CosyVoice in terms of naturalness and speaker similarity in zero-shot TTS scenarios. Moreover, KALL-E demonstrates exceptional zero-shot capabilities in emotion and accent cloning. Importantly, KALL-E presents a more straightforward and effective paradigm for using continuous speech representations in TTS. Audio samples are available at: \url{https://zxf-icpc.github.io/kalle/}.

In recent years, the application of deep networks has revolutionized the field of machine learning, particularly in tasks involving complex data such as images and natural language. These models, typically trained using stochastic gradient descent, have demonstrated remarkable performance on various benchmarks, raising questions about the underlying mechanisms that contribute to their success. Despite their practical efficacy, the theoretical understanding of these models remains relatively limited, creating a pressing need for deeper insights into their generalization abilities. The classical theory shows that the latter is a consequence of regularization, which is the way to impose a priori knowledge into the model and to favour "simple" solutions. While usually regularization is achieved either by choosing simple models or explicitly adding a penalty term to the empirical risk during training, this is not the case for deep neural networks, which are trained simply by minimizing the empirical risk. A new perspective has then emerged in the recent literature, which relates regularization directly to the optimization procedure (gradient based methods). The main idea is to show that the training dynamics themselves exhibit self regularizing properties, by inducing an implicit regularization (bias) which prefers generalizing solutions (see [Vardi, 2023] for an extended review of the importance of implicit bias in machine learning). In this context, a common approach is to study simplified models that approximate the networks used in practice. Analyzing the implicit bias of optimization algorithms for such networks is facilitated but still might give some insights on the good performance of neural networks in various scenarios.

A rainfrog, an amphibious mouse, and a "blob-headed" fish are only some of the 27 new species discovered deep Peru's Amazon rainforest. During a survey in 2022, a team from Conservation International recorded 2,046 total species living in this lush and heavily forested landscape, many of whom are endangered. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The creatures were all found in the Alto Mayo Landscape which spans the Andes mountains to the Amazon River and includes the Alto Mayo Protected Forest.

Visual-based human action recognition can be found in various application fields, e.g., surveillance systems, sports analytics, medical assistive technologies, or human-robot interaction frameworks, and it concerns the identification and classification of individuals' activities within a video. Since actions typically occur over a sequence of consecutive images, it is particularly challenging due to the inclusion of temporal analysis, which introduces an extra layer of complexity. However, although multiple approaches try to handle temporal analysis, there are still difficulties because of their computational cost and lack of adaptability. Therefore, different types of vision data, containing transition information between consecutive images, provided by next-generation hardware sensors will guide the robotics community in tackling the problem of human action recognition. On the other hand, while there is a plethora of still-image datasets, that researchers can adopt to train new artificial intelligence models, videos representing human activities are of limited capabilities, e.g., small and unbalanced datasets or selected without control from multiple sources. To this end, generating new and realistic synthetic videos is possible since labeling is performed throughout the data creation process, while reinforcement learning techniques can permit the avoidance of considerable dataset dependence. At the same time, human factors' involvement raises ethical issues for the research community, as doubts and concerns about new technologies already exist.