In the era of big data, data mining has become indispensable for uncovering hidden patterns and insights from vast and complex datasets. The integration of multimodal data sources further enhances its potential. Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) is a distributed approach that enhances the efficiency and quality of multimodal learning, ensuring collaborative work and privacy protection. However, missing modalities pose a significant challenge in MFL, often due to data quality issues or privacy policies across the clients. In this work, we present MMiC, a framework for Mitigating Modality incompleteness in MFL within the Clusters. MMiC replaces partial parameters within client models inside clusters to mitigate the impact of missing modalities. Furthermore, it leverages the Banzhaf Power Index to optimize client selection under these conditions. Finally, MMiC employs an innovative approach to dynamically control global aggregation by utilizing Markovitz Portfolio Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMiC consistently outperforms existing federated learning architectures in both global and personalized performance on multimodal datasets with missing modalities, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Our code is available at https://github.com/gotobcn8/MMiC.

Embodied navigation (EN) advances traditional navigation by enabling robots to perform complex egocentric tasks through sensing, social, and motion intelligence. In contrast to classic methodologies that rely on explicit localization and pre-defined maps, EN leverages egocentric perception and human-like interaction strategies. This survey introduces a comprehensive EN formulation structured into five stages: Transition, Observation, Fusion, Reward-policy construction, and Action (TOFRA). The TOFRA framework serves to synthesize the current state of the art, provide a critical review of relevant platforms and evaluation metrics, and identify critical open research challenges. A list of studies is available at https://github.com/Franky-X/Awesome-Embodied-Navigation.

--Despite significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (L VLMs), current models still face substantial challenges in handling complex, multi-turn, and visually-grounded tasks that demand deep reasoning, sustained contextual understanding, entity tracking, and multi-step instruction following. Existing benchmarks often fall short in capturing the dynamism and intricacies of real-world multi-modal interactions, leading to issues such as context loss and visual hallucinations. T o address these limitations, we introduce MMDR-Bench (Multi-Modal Dialogue Reasoning Benchmark), a novel dataset comprising 300 meticulously designed complex multi-turn dialogue scenarios, each averaging 5-7 turns and evaluated across six core dimensions including visual entity tracking and reasoning depth. Our extensive experiments on MMDR-Bench demonstrate that CoL VLM Agent consistently achieves superior performance, attaining an average human evaluation score of 4.03, notably surpassing state-of-the-art commercial models like GPT -4o (3.92) and Gemini 1.5 Pro (3.85). The framework exhibits significant advantages in reasoning depth, instruction adherence, and error suppression, and maintains robust performance over extended dialogue turns, validating the effectiveness of its modular design and iterative approach for complex multi-modal interactions. The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) [1], [2] and Large Vision-Language Models (L VLMs) [3] have revolutionized our ability to understand and generate text and images, respectively. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide spectrum of tasks, from natural language understanding to complex image captioning and visual question answering. As these models become increasingly sophisticated, there is a growing demand for intelligent systems that can engage in more dynamic, nuanced, and context-aware interactions, mirroring human cognitive processes in real-world scenarios. This necessitates models that can not only comprehend textual instructions but also seamlessly integrate visual information, perform deep reasoning within evolving dialogue contexts, track entities, understand spatial relationships, and ultimately execute multi-step complex instructions [4], [5].

In this work, we highlight the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI, in the insurance sector. We consider and emphasize the unique opportunities, challenges, and potential pathways in insurance amid rapid performance improvements, increased open-source access, decreasing deployment costs, and the complexity of LLM or agentic AI frameworks. To bring it closer to home, we identify critical gaps in the African insurance market and highlight key local efforts, players, and partnership opportunities. Finally, we call upon actuaries, insurers, regulators, and tech leaders to a collaborative effort aimed at creating inclusive, sustainable, and equitable AI strategies and solutions: by and for Africans.

Labor shortages have severely affected the meat processing sector. Automated technology has the potential to support the meat industry, assist workers, and enhance job quality. However, existing automation in meat processing is highly specialized, inflexible, and cost intensive. Instead of forcing manufacturers to buy a separate device for each step of the process, our objective is to develop general-purpose robotic systems that work alongside humans to perform multiple meat processing tasks. Through a recently conducted survey of industry experts, we identified two main challenges associated with integrating these collaborative robots alongside human workers. First, there must be measures to ensure the safety of human coworkers; second, the coworkers need to understand what the robot is doing. This paper addresses both challenges by introducing a safety and transparency framework for general-purpose meat processing robots. For safety, we implement a hand-detection system that continuously monitors nearby humans. This system can halt the robot in situations where the human comes into close proximity of the operating robot. We also develop an instrumented knife equipped with a force sensor that can differentiate contact between objects such as meat, bone, or fixtures. For transparency, we introduce a method that detects the robot's uncertainty about its performance and uses an LED interface to communicate that uncertainty to the human. Additionally, we design a graphical interface that displays the robot's plans and allows the human to provide feedback on the planned cut. Overall, our framework can ensure safe operation while keeping human workers in-the-loop about the robot's actions which we validate through a user study.

This report provides practical guidance to teams designing or developing AI-enabled systems for how to promote trustworthiness during the data curation phase of development. In this report, the authors first define data, the data curation phase, and trustworthiness. We then describe a series of steps that the development team, especially data scientists, can take to build a trustworthy AI-enabled system. We enumerate the sequence of core steps and trace parallel paths where alternatives exist. The descriptions of these steps include strengths, weaknesses, preconditions, outcomes, and relevant open-source software tool implementations. In total, this report is a synthesis of data curation tools and approaches from relevant academic literature, and our goal is to equip readers with a diverse yet coherent set of practices for improving AI trustworthiness.

This paper studies the interplay between learning algorithms and graph structure for graph neural networks (GNNs). Existing theoretical studies on the learning dynamics of GNNs primarily focus on the convergence rates of learning algorithms under the interpolation regime (noise-free) and offer only a crude connection between these dynamics and the actual graph structure (e.g., maximum degree). This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the excessive risk (generalization performance) of learning algorithms in GNNs within the generalization regime (with noise). Specifically, we extend the conventional settings from the learning theory literature to the context of GNNs and examine how graph structure influences the performance of learning algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Ridge regression. Our study makes several key contributions toward understanding the interplay between graph structure and learning in GNNs. First, we derive the excess risk profiles of SGD and Ridge regression in GNNs and connect these profiles to the graph structure through spectral graph theory. With this established framework, we further explore how different graph structures (regular vs. power-law) impact the performance of these algorithms through comparative analysis. Additionally, we extend our analysis to multi-layer linear GNNs, revealing an increasing non-isotropic effect on the excess risk profile, thereby offering new insights into the over-smoothing issue in GNNs from the perspective of learning algorithms. Our empirical results align with our theoretical predictions, \emph{collectively showcasing a coupling relation among graph structure, GNNs and learning algorithms, and providing insights on GNN algorithm design and selection in practice.}

Survey papers play a critical role in scientific communication by consolidating progress across a field. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution by automating key steps in the survey-generation pipeline, such as retrieval, structuring, and summarization. However, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle with maintaining coherence across long, multi-section surveys and providing comprehensive citation coverage. To address these limitations, we introduce SurveyGen-I, an automatic survey generation framework that combines coarse-to-fine retrieval, adaptive planning, and memory-guided generation. SurveyGen-I first performs survey-level retrieval to construct the initial outline and writing plan, and then dynamically refines both during generation through a memory mechanism that stores previously written content and terminology, ensuring coherence across subsections. When the system detects insufficient context, it triggers fine-grained subsection-level retrieval. During generation, SurveyGen-I leverages this memory mechanism to maintain coherence across subsections. Experiments across four scientific domains demonstrate that SurveyGen-I consistently outperforms previous works in content quality, consistency, and citation coverage.

--Recent advances in image classification have been significantly propelled by the integration of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), offering a novel paradigm for handling complex data structures. This study introduces an innovative framework that employs GCNs in conjunction with V oronoi diagrams to peform image classification, leveraging their exceptional capability to model relational data. Unlike conventional convolutional neural networks, our approach utilizes a graph-based representation of images, where pixels or regions are treated as vertices of a graph, which are then simplified in the form of the corresponding Delaunay triangulations. Our model yields significant improvement in pre-processing time and classification accuracy on several benchmark datasets, surpassing existing state-of-the-art models, especially in scenarios that involve complex scenes and fine-grained categories. The experimental results, validated via cross-validation, underscore the potential of integrating GCNs with V oronoi diagrams in advancing image classification tasks. This research contributes to the field by introducing a novel approach to image classification, while opening new avenues for developing graph-based learning paradigms in other domains of computer vision and non-structured data. In particular, we have proposed a new version of the GCN in this paper, namely normalized V oronoi Graph Convolution Network (NVGCN), which is faster than the regular GCN. The domain of image classification has witnessed a paradigm shift with the advent of deep learning techniques, particularly Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs), which have revolutionized how we approach complex tasks on image data. GCNs, by their nature, are adept at handling data represented in a graph format, making them an ideal choice for tasks where relational context and structural information are pivotal. This introduction outlines recent advancements in image classification using GCNs, focusing on the use of superpixels and wavelet techniques. GCNs have emerged as a powerful paradigm in image classification, primarily due to their ability to capture and process the non-Euclidean structure of the data. Zhou, et al. provided a comprehensive overview of the applications of GCNs in various fields, emphasizing their efficacy in image classification tasks [1].

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.