This paper explores how older adults, particularly aging migrants in urban China, can engage AI-assisted co-creation to express personal narratives that are often fragmented, underrepresented, or difficult to verbalize. Through a pilot workshop combining oral storytelling and the symbolic reconstruction of Hanzi, participants shared memories of migration and recreated new character forms using Xiaozhuan glyphs, suggested by the Large Language Model (LLM), together with physical materials. Supported by human facilitation and a soft AI presence, participants transformed lived experience into visual and tactile expressions without requiring digital literacy. This approach offers new perspectives on human-AI collaboration and aging by repositioning AI not as a content producer but as a supportive mechanism, and by supporting narrative agency within sociotechnical systems.

We introduce a new hierarchical deep learning framework for recursive higher-order meta-learning that enables neural networks (NNs) to construct, solve, and generalise across hierarchies of tasks. Central to this approach is a generative mechanism that creates \emph{virtual tasks} -- synthetic problem instances designed to enable the meta-learner to learn \emph{soft constraints} and unknown generalisable rules across related tasks. Crucially, this enables the framework to generate its own informative, task-grounded datasets thereby freeing machine learning (ML) training from the limitations of relying entirely on human-generated data. By actively exploring the virtual point landscape and seeking out tasks lower-level learners find difficult, the meta-learner iteratively refines constraint regions. This enhances inductive biases, regularises the adaptation process, and produces novel, unanticipated tasks and constraints required for generalisation. Each meta-level of the hierarchy corresponds to a progressively abstracted generalisation of problems solved at lower levels, enabling a structured and interpretable learning progression. By interpreting meta-learners as category-theoretic \emph{functors} that generate and condition a hierarchy of subordinate learners, we establish a compositional structure that supports abstraction and knowledge transfer across progressively generalised tasks. The category-theoretic perspective unifies existing meta-learning models and reveals how learning processes can be transformed and compared through functorial relationships, while offering practical design principles for structuring meta-learning. We speculate this architecture may underpin the next generation of NNs capable of autonomously generating novel, instructive tasks and their solutions, thereby advancing ML towards general artificial intelligence.

Deep Reinforcement Learning can play a key role in addressing sustainable energy challenges. For instance, many grid systems are heavily congested, highlighting the urgent need to enhance operational efficiency. However, reinforcement learning approaches have traditionally been slow due to the high sample complexity and expensive simulation requirements. While recent works have effectively used GPUs to accelerate data generation by converting environments to JAX, these works have largely focussed on classical toy problems. This paper introduces Chargax, a JAX-based environment for realistic simulation of electric vehicle charging stations designed for accelerated training of RL agents. We validate our environment in a variety of scenarios based on real data, comparing reinforcement learning agents against baselines. Chargax delivers substantial computational performance improvements of over 100x-1000x over existing environments. Additionally, Chargax' modular architecture enables the representation of diverse real-world charging station configurations.

Graphs are a fundamental representation for a wide range of real-world systems, including social networks Nettleton [2013], molecular structures Trinajs-tic [2018], knowledge graphs Hogan et al. [2021], and recommender systems Wu et al. [2022], all of which naturally take the form of nodes connected by edges. Geometric learning, which generalizes deep learning to non-Euclidean domains Bronstein et al. [2017], especially on graph-structured data Xia et al. [2021], Wu et al. [2020], has emerged as a powerful paradigm for capturing relational and structural information. Graph neural network (GNN) models such as 1 graph convolutional networks (GCNs) Kipf and Welling [2017], graph attention networks (GATs) Veliˇ ckovi c et al. [2018], Brody et al. [2022], Lee et al. [2023], and GraphSAGE Hamilton et al. [2017] have demonstrated success across tasks from node classification Xiao et al. [2022] to link prediction Zhang and Chen [2018] and recommendation Lee et al. [2024]. While Nvidia's CUDA-enabled graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the de facto standard for accelerating deep learning workloads, there is a growing ecosystem of alternative processing units that offer different trade-offs in cost, power efficiency, and architectural specialization Lee et al. [2025]. Non-CUDA processing units, such as Google's tensor processing unit (TPUs) and Intel's Gaudi HPUs, are gaining traction in both industry and research. Supporting geometric learning workloads on these non-CUDA hardware platforms is essential to broaden hardware choice, optimize for diverse deployment scenarios, and leverage specialized hardware capabilities. Intel's Gaudi HPUs exemplify non-CUDA accelerators tailored for deep learning.

In this paper, we present details of the 1st W-CODA workshop, held in conjunction with the ECCV 2024. W-CODA aims to explore next-generation solutions for autonomous driving corner cases, empowered by state-of-the-art multimodal perception and comprehension techniques. 5 Speakers from both academia and industry are invited to share their latest progress and opinions. We collect research papers and hold a dual-track challenge, including both corner case scene understanding and generation. As the pioneering effort, we will continuously bridge the gap between frontier autonomous driving techniques and fully intelligent, reliable self-driving agents robust towards corner cases.

After a period of beta testing, version 120 of the Opera browser is now being rolled out to the public. The biggest piece of news in this particular update is a new built-in translation feature with support for over 40 languages, and the browser is now based on Chromium 135. To protect privacy, the new Translator feature doesn't pass any information on to third parties, and the translation itself is processed using AI (in partnership with Lingvanex) on Opera's European-based servers. Other improvements in Opera 120 include improved password management, enhancements to Split Screen mode, refinements to Tab Islands, a new Miniplayer for videos, and VPN Pro. Lastly, Opera 120 includes a fix for a serious zero-day vulnerability (labeled CVE-2025-6554) in the V8 JavaScript engine.

Optimizing high-dimensional black-box functions under black-box constraints is a pervasive task in a wide range of scientific and engineering problems. These problems are typically harder than unconstrained problems due to hard-to-find feasible regions. While Bayesian optimization (BO) methods have been developed to solve such problems, they often struggle with the curse of dimensionality. Recently, generative model-based approaches have emerged as a promising alternative for constrained optimization. However, they suffer from poor scalability and are vulnerable to mode collapse, particularly when the target distribution is highly multi-modal. In this paper, we propose a new framework to overcome these challenges. Our method iterates through two stages. First, we train flow-based models to capture the data distribution and surrogate models that predict both function values and constraint violations with uncertainty quantification. Second, we cast the candidate selection problem as a posterior inference problem to effectively search for promising candidates that have high objective values while not violating the constraints. During posterior inference, we find that the posterior distribution is highly multi-modal and has a large plateau due to constraints, especially when constraint feedback is given as binary indicators of feasibility. To mitigate this issue, we amortize the sampling from the posterior distribution in the latent space of flow-based models, which is much smoother than that in the data space. We empirically demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on various synthetic and real-world constrained black-box optimization tasks. Our code is publicly available \href{https://github.com/umkiyoung/CiBO}{here}.

Computer programming is undergoing a true transformation driven by powerful new tools for automatic source code generation based on large language models. This transformation is also manifesting in introductory programming courses at universities around the world, generating an in-depth debate about how programming content should be taught, learned, and assessed in the context of generative artificial intelligence. This article aims, on the one hand, to review the most relevant studies on this issue, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages identified in the specialized literature. On the other hand, it proposes enriching teaching and learning methodologies by focusing on code comprehension and execution rather than on mere coding or program functionality. In particular, it advocates for the use of visual representations of code and visual simulations of its execution as effective tools for teaching, learning, and assessing programming, thus fostering a deeper understanding among students. Finally, the opinions of students who took the object-oriented programming course are presented to provide preliminary context supporting the incorporation of visual simulations in Java (or other languages) as part of the training process.

The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and specifically Large Language Models (LLM), on education is continuously increasing. These models are frequently used by students, giving rise to the question whether current forms of assessment are still a valid way to evaluate student performance and comprehension. The theoretical framework developed in this paper is grounded in Constructive Alignment (CA) theory and Bloom's taxonomy for defining learning objectives. We argue that AI influences learning objectives of different Bloom levels in a different way, and assessment has to be adopted accordingly. Furthermore, in line with Bloom's vision, formative and summative assessment should be aligned on whether the use of AI is permitted or not. Although lecturers tend to agree that education and assessment need to be adapted to the presence of AI, a strong bias exists on the extent to which lecturers want to allow for AI in assessment. This bias is caused by a lecturer's familiarity with AI and specifically whether they use it themselves. To avoid this bias, we propose structured guidelines on a university or faculty level, to foster alignment among the staff. Besides that, we argue that teaching staff should be trained on the capabilities and limitations of AI tools. In this way, they are better able to adapt their assessment methods.

This paper presents a new educational framework for integrating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini into laboratory activities aimed at developing critical thinking and digital literacy among undergraduate students. Recognizing the limitations and risks of uncritical reliance on large language models (LLMs), the proposed pedagogical model reframes GenAI as a research subject and cognitive tool. Students formulate discipline-specific prompts and evaluate GenAI-generated responses in text, image, and video modalities. A pilot implementation in a general astronomy course for non-science majors demonstrated high levels of engagement and critical reflection, with many students continuing the activity after class and presenting results at a research symposium. The results highlight the importance of structured AI interactions in education and suggest that GenAI can improve learning outcomes when combined with reflective assessment methods. The study proposes a replicable model for interdisciplinary AI-integrated lab work, adaptable to scientific disciplines. See the guide to learning activities based on Generative-Ai platforms: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15555802