Democratic societies need reliable information. Misinformation in popular media, such as news articles or videos, threatens to impair civic discourse. Citizens are, unfortunately, not equipped to verify the flood of content consumed daily at increasing rates. This work aims to quantify the scientific accuracy of online media semi-automatically. We investigate the state of the art of climate-related ground truth knowledge representation. By semantifying media content of unknown veracity, their statements can be compared against these ground truth knowledge graphs. We implemented a workflow using LLM-based statement extraction and knowledge graph analysis. Our implementation can streamline content processing towards state-of-the-art knowledge representation and veracity quantification. Developed and evaluated with the help of 27 experts and detailed interviews with 10, the tool evidently provides a beneficial veracity indication. These findings are supported by 43 anonymous participants from a parallel user survey. This initial step, however, is unable to annotate public media at the required granularity and scale. Additionally, the identified state of climate change knowledge graphs is vastly insufficient to support this neurosymbolic fact-checking approach. Further work towards a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ground truth and complementary metrics is required to support civic discourse scientifically.

We consider binary classification restricted to a class of continuous piecewise linear functions whose decision boundaries are (possibly nonconvex) starshaped polyhedral sets, supported on a fixed polyhedral simplicial fan. We investigate the expressivity of these function classes and describe the combinatorial and geometric structure of the loss landscape, most prominently the sublevel sets, for two loss-functions: the 0/1-loss (discrete loss) and a log-likelihood loss function. In particular, we give explicit bounds on the VC dimension of this model, and concretely describe the sublevel sets of the discrete loss as chambers in a hyperplane arrangement. For the log-likelihood loss, we give sufficient conditions for the optimum to be unique, and describe the geometry of the optimum when varying the rate parameter of the underlying exponential probability distribution.

Recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks by generating extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. While longer reasoning helps with thorough exploration of solution paths for complex problems, it also often leads to inefficient and redundant outputs--a phenomenon commonly described as overthinking. In this paper, we propose ShorterBetter, a simple yet effective reinforcement learning method that enables reasoning models to learn their own optimal CoT lengths without manual supervision. We define the Sample Optimal Length (SOL) as the length of the shortest correct response among multiple generations, which serves as a dynamic reward signal to guide the model toward efficient reasoning. Applied to DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B as base models, ShorterBetter achieves 50%-80% reduction in output lengths in both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks while maintaining accuracy. Our reasoning trace analysis shows that ShorterBetter refines the structure of the reasoning traces by reducing unnecessary repetition, excessive self-verification, and over-exploration of alternatives.

We propose a tightly-coupled LiDAR/Polarization Vision/Inertial/Magnetometer/Optical Flow Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping (LPVIMO-SAM) framework, which integrates LiDAR, polarization vision, inertial measurement unit, magnetometer, and optical flow in a tightly-coupled fusion. This framework enables high-precision and highly robust real-time state estimation and map construction in challenging environments, such as LiDAR-degraded, low-texture regions, and feature-scarce areas. The LPVIMO-SAM comprises two subsystems: a Polarized Vision-Inertial System and a LiDAR/Inertial/Magnetometer/Optical Flow System. The polarized vision enhances the robustness of the Visual/Inertial odometry in low-feature and low-texture scenarios by extracting the polarization information of the scene. The magnetometer acquires the heading angle, and the optical flow obtains the speed and height to reduce the accumulated error. A magnetometer heading prior factor, an optical flow speed observation factor, and a height observation factor are designed to eliminate the cumulative errors of the LiDAR/Inertial odometry through factor graph optimization. Meanwhile, the LPVIMO-SAM can maintain stable positioning even when one of the two subsystems fails, further expanding its applicability in LiDAR-degraded, low-texture, and low-feature environments. Code is available on https://github.com/junxiaofanchen/LPVIMO-SAM.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are known to be vulnerable to oversmoothing due to their implicit homophily assumption. We mitigate this problem with a novel scheme that regulates the aggregation of messages, modulating the type and extent of message passing locally thereby preserving both the low and high-frequency components of information. Our approach relies solely on learnt embeddings, obviating the need for auxiliary labels, thus extending the benefits of heterophily-aware embeddings to broader applications, e.g., generative modelling. Our experiments, conducted across various data sets and GNN architectures, demonstrate performance enhancements and reveal heterophily patterns across standard classification benchmarks. Furthermore, application to molecular generation showcases notable performance improvements on chemoinformatics benchmarks.

--We train and deploy a quantized 1D convolutional neural network model to conduct speech recognition on a highly resource-constrained IoT edge device. This can be useful in various Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as smart homes and ambient assisted living for the elderly and people with disabilities, just to name a few examples. In this paper, we first create a new dataset with over one hour of audio data that enables our research and will be useful to future studies in this field. Second, we utilize the technologies provided by Edge Impulse to enhance our model's performance and achieve a high Accuracy of up to 97% on our dataset. For the validation, we implement our prototype using the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense microcontroller board. This microcontroller board is specifically designed for IoT and AI applications, making it an ideal choice for our target use case scenarios. While most existing research focuses on a limited set of keywords, our model can process 23 different keywords, enabling complex commands. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Recognition are crucial domains in Artificial Intelligence (AI). While NLP deals with enabling computers to analyze, understand, reason on, and generate human language in textual form, speech recognition is concerned with that in spoken form.

Despite significant advancements in AI-driven educational systems and ongoing calls for responsible AI for education, several critical issues remain unresolved -- acting as the elephant in the room within AI in education, learning analytics, educational data mining, learning sciences, and educational psychology communities. This critical analysis identifies and examines nine persistent challenges that continue to undermine the fairness, transparency, and effectiveness of current AI methods and applications in education. These include: (1) the lack of clarity around what AI for education truly means -- often ignoring the distinct purposes, strengths, and limitations of different AI families -- and the trend of equating it with domain-agnostic, company-driven large language models; (2) the widespread neglect of essential learning processes such as motivation, emotion, and (meta)cognition in AI-driven learner modelling and their contextual nature; (3) limited integration of domain knowledge and lack of stakeholder involvement in AI design and development; (4) continued use of non-sequential machine learning models on temporal educational data; (5) misuse of non-sequential metrics to evaluate sequential models; (6) use of unreliable explainable AI methods to provide explanations for black-box models; (7) ignoring ethical guidelines in addressing data inconsistencies during model training; (8) use of mainstream AI methods for pattern discovery and learning analytics without systematic benchmarking; and (9) overemphasis on global prescriptions while overlooking localised, student-specific recommendations. Supported by theoretical and empirical research, we demonstrate how hybrid AI methods -- specifically neural-symbolic AI -- can address the elephant in the room and serve as the foundation for responsible, trustworthy AI systems in education.

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron issues and offers no adaptivity to input statistics. Smooth alternatives such as Swish and GELU improve gradient propagation but still apply a fixed transformation regardless of the activation distribution. In this paper, we propose VeLU, a Variance-enhanced Learning Unit that introduces variance-aware and distributionally aligned nonlinearity through a principled combination of ArcTan-ArcSin transformations, adaptive scaling, and Wasserstein-2 regularization (Optimal Transport). This design enables VeLU to modulate its response based on local activation variance, mitigate internal covariate shift at the activation level, and improve training stability without adding learnable parameters or architectural overhead. Extensive experiments across six deep neural networks show that VeLU outperforms ReLU, ReLU6, Swish, and GELU on 12 vision benchmarks. The implementation of VeLU is publicly available in GitHub.

Many users and contributors of large open-source projects report software defects or enhancement requests (known as bug reports) to the issue-tracking systems. However, they sometimes report issues that have already been reported. First, they may not have time to do sufficient research on existing bug reports. Second, they may not possess the right expertise in that specific area to realize that an existing bug report is essentially elaborating on the same matter, perhaps with a different wording. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on machine learning methods that can automatically detect duplicate bug reports in an open bug repository based on the textual data in the reports. We present six alternative methods: Topic modeling, Gaussian Naive Bayes, deep learning, time-based organization, clustering, and summarization using a generative pre-trained transformer large language model. Additionally, we introduce a novel threshold-based approach for duplicate identification, in contrast to the conventional top-k selection method that has been widely used in the literature. Our approach demonstrates promising results across all the proposed methods, achieving accuracy rates ranging from the high 70%'s to the low 90%'s. We evaluated our methods on a public dataset of issues belonging to an Eclipse open-source project.

This paper examines the market for AI models in which firms compete to provide accurate model predictions and consumers exhibit heterogeneous preferences for model accuracy. We develop a consumer-firm duopoly model to analyze how competition affects firms' incentives to improve model accuracy. Each firm aims to minimize its model's error, but this choice can often be suboptimal. Counterintuitively, we find that in a competitive market, firms that improve overall accuracy do not necessarily improve their profits. Rather, each firm's optimal decision is to invest further on the error dimension where it has a competitive advantage. By decomposing model errors into false positive and false negative rates, firms can reduce errors in each dimension through investments. Firms are strictly better off investing on their superior dimension and strictly worse off with investments on their inferior dimension. Profitable investments adversely affect consumers but increase overall welfare.