Overview
Hide or Highlight: Understanding the Impact of Factuality Expression on User Trust
Large language models are known to produce outputs that are plausible but factually incorrect. To prevent people from making erroneous decisions by blindly trusting AI, researchers have explored various ways of communicating factuality estimates in AI-generated outputs to end-users. However, little is known about whether revealing content estimated to be factually incorrect influences users' trust when compared to hiding it altogether. We tested four different ways of disclosing an AI-generated output with factuality assessments: transparent (highlights less factual content), attention (highlights factual content), opaque (removes less factual content), ambiguity (makes less factual content vague), and compared them with a baseline response without factuality information. We conducted a human subjects research (N = 148) using the strategies in question-answering scenarios. We found that the opaque and ambiguity strategies led to higher trust while maintaining perceived answer quality, compared to the other strategies. We discuss the efficacy of hiding presumably less factual content to build end-user trust.
MMFformer: Multimodal Fusion Transformer Network for Depression Detection
Haque, Md Rezwanul, Islam, Md. Milon, Raju, S M Taslim Uddin, Altaheri, Hamdi, Nassar, Lobna, Karray, Fakhri
--Depression is a serious mental health illness that significantly affects an individual's well-being and quality of life, making early detection crucial for adequate care and treatment. Detecting depression is often difficult, as it is based primarily on subjective evaluations during clinical interviews. Hence, the early diagnosis of depression, thanks to the content of social networks, has become a prominent research area. The extensive and diverse nature of user-generated information poses a significant challenge, limiting the accurate extraction of relevant temporal information and the effective fusion of data across multiple modalities. This paper introduces MMFformer, a multimodal depression detection network designed to retrieve depressive spatio-temporal high-level patterns from multimodal social media information. The transformer network with residual connections captures spatial features from videos, and a transformer encoder is exploited to design important temporal dynamics in audio. Moreover, the fusion architecture fused the extracted features through late and intermediate fusion strategies to find out the most relevant intermodal correlations among them. Finally, the proposed network is assessed on two large-scale depression detection datasets, and the results clearly reveal that it surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, improving the F1-Score by 13.92% for D-Vlog dataset and 7.74% for LMVD dataset. The code is made available publicly at https://github.com/rezwanh001/
Benchmarking Self-Driving Labs
Adesiji, Adedire D., Wang, Jiashuo, Kuo, Cheng-Shu, Brown, Keith A.
A key goal of modern materials science is accelerating the pace of materials discovery. Self-driving labs, or systems that select experiments using machine learning and then execute them using automation, are designed to fulfil this promise by performing experiments faster, more intelligently, more reliably, and with richer metadata than conventional means. This review summarizes progress in understanding the degree to which SDLs accelerate learning by quantifying how much they reduce the number of experiments required for a given goal. The review begins by summarizing the theory underlying two key metrics, namely acceleration factor AF and enhancement factor EF, which quantify how much faster and better an algorithm is relative to a reference strategy. Next, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature, which reveals a wide range of AFs with a median of 6, and that tends to increase with the dimensionality of the space, reflecting an interesting blessing of dimensionality. In contrast, reported EF values vary by over two orders of magnitude, although they consistently peak at 10-20 experiments per dimension. To understand these results, we perform a series of simulated Bayesian optimization campaigns that reveal how EF depends upon the statistical properties of the parameter space while AF depends on its complexity. Collectively, these results reinforce the motivation for using SDLs by revealing their value across a wide range of material parameter spaces and provide a common language for quantifying and understanding this acceleration.
From Time-series Generation, Model Selection to Transfer Learning: A Comparative Review of Pixel-wise Approaches for Large-scale Crop Mapping
Long, Judy, Liu, Tao, Woznicki, Sean Alexander, Marković, Miljana, Marko, Oskar, Sears, Molly
Crop mapping involves identifying and classifying crop types using spatial data, primarily derived from remote sensing imagery. This study presents the first comprehensive review of large-scale, pixel-wise crop mapping workflows, encompassing both conventional supervised methods and emerging transfer learning approaches. To identify the optimal time-series generation approaches and supervised crop mapping models, we conducted systematic experiments, comparing six widely adopted satellite image-based preprocessing methods, alongside eleven supervised pixel-wise classification models. Additionally, we assessed the synergistic impact of varied training sample sizes and variable combinations. Moreover, we identified optimal transfer learning techniques for different magnitudes of domain shift. The evaluation of optimal methods was conducted across five diverse agricultural sites. Landsat 8 served as the primary satellite data source. Labels come from CDL trusted pixels and field surveys. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, fine-scale interval preprocessing paired with Transformer models consistently delivered optimal performance for both supervised and transferable workflows. RF offered rapid training and competitive performance in conventional supervised learning and direct transfer to similar domains. Second, transfer learning techniques enhanced workflow adaptability, with UDA being effective for homogeneous crop classes while fine-tuning remains robust across diverse scenarios. Finally, workflow choice depends heavily on the availability of labeled samples. With a sufficient sample size, supervised training typically delivers more accurate and generalizable results. Below a certain threshold, transfer learning that matches the level of domain shift is a viable alternative to achieve crop mapping. All code is publicly available to encourage reproducibility practice.
Interactive Imitation Learning for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation: Challenges and Perspectives -- A Survey
Dexterous manipulation is a crucial yet highly complex challenge in humanoid robotics, demanding precise, adaptable, and sample-efficient learning methods. As humanoid robots are usually designed to operate in human-centric environments and interact with everyday objects, mastering dexterous manipulation is critical for real-world deployment. Traditional approaches, such as reinforcement learning and imitation learning, have made significant strides, but they often struggle due to the unique challenges of real-world dexterous manipulation, including high-dimensional control, limited training data, and covariate shift. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of these challenges and reviews existing learning-based methods for real-world dexterous manipulation, spanning imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and hybrid approaches. A promising yet underexplored direction is interactive imitation learning, where human feedback actively refines a robots behavior during training. While interactive imitation learning has shown success in various robotic tasks, its application to dexterous manipulation remains limited. To address this gap, we examine current interactive imitation learning techniques applied to other robotic tasks and discuss how these methods can be adapted to enhance dexterous manipulation. By synthesizing state-of-the-art research, this paper highlights key challenges, identifies gaps in current methodologies, and outlines potential directions for leveraging interactive imitation learning to improve dexterous robotic skills.
Is Single-View Mesh Reconstruction Ready for Robotics?
Nolte, Frederik, Geiger, Andreas, Schölkopf, Bernhard, Posner, Ingmar
This paper evaluates single-view mesh reconstruction models for their potential in enabling instant digital twin creation for real-time planning and dynamics prediction using physics simulators for robotic manipulation. Recent single-view 3D reconstruction advances offer a promising avenue toward an automated real-to-sim pipeline: directly mapping a single observation of a scene into a simulation instance by reconstructing scene objects as individual, complete, and physically plausible 3D meshes. However, their suitability for physics simulations and robotics applications under immediacy, physical fidelity, and simulation readiness remains underexplored. We establish robotics-specific benchmarking criteria for 3D reconstruction, including handling typical inputs, collision-free and stable geometry, occlusions robustness, and meeting computational constraints. Our empirical evaluation using realistic robotics datasets shows that despite success on computer vision benchmarks, existing approaches fail to meet robotics-specific requirements. We quantitively examine limitations of single-view reconstruction for practical robotics implementation, in contrast to prior work that focuses on multi-view approaches. Our findings highlight critical gaps between computer vision advances and robotics needs, guiding future research at this intersection.
Embodied intelligent industrial robotics: Concepts and techniques
Zhang, Chaoran, Zhang, Chenhao, Xu, Zhaobo, Xie, Qinghongbing, Hou, Jinliang, Feng, Pingfa, Zeng, Long
In order to work more efficiently, accurately, reliably, and safely in industrial scenarios, robots should have at least general knowledge, working-environment knowledge, and operating-object knowledge. These pose significant challenges to existing embodied intelligent robotics (EIR) techniques. Thus, this paper first briefly reviews the history of industrial robotics and analyzes the limitations of mainstream EIR frameworks. Then, a knowledge-driven technical framework of embodied intelligent industrial robotics (EIIR) is proposed for various industrial environments. It has five modules: a world model, a high-level task planner, a low-level skill controller, a simulator, and a physical system. The development of techniques related to each module are also thoroughly reviewed, and recent progress regarding their adaption to industrial applications are discussed. A case study is given to demonstrate the newly proposed EIIR framework's applicability to real-world assembly system. Finally, the key challenges that EIIR encounters in industrial scenarios are summarized and future research directions are suggested. The authors believe that EIIR technology is shaping the next generation of industrial robotics and EIIR-based industrial systems supply a new technological paradigm for intelligent manufacturing. It is expected that this review could serve as a valuable reference for scholars and engineers that are interested in industrial embodied intelligence. Together, scholars can use this research to drive their rapid advancement and application of EIIR techniques. The interested authors would continue to track and contribute new studies in the project page https://github.com/jackyzengl/EIIR.
AI-Based Crypto Tokens: The Illusion of Decentralized AI?
The convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to the emergence of AI-based tokens, which are cryptographic assets designed to power decentralized AI platforms and services. This paper provides a comprehensive review of leading AI-token projects, examining their technical architectures, token utilities, consensus mechanisms, and underlying business models. We explore how these tokens operate across various blockchain ecosystems and assess the extent to which they offer value beyond traditional centralized AI services. Based on this assessment, our analysis identifies several core limitations. From a technical perspective, many platforms depend extensively on off-chain computation, exhibit limited capabilities for on-chain intelligence, and encounter significant scalability challenges. From a business perspective, many models appear to replicate centralized AI service structures, simply adding token-based payment and governance layers without delivering truly novel value. In light of these challenges, we also examine emerging developments that may shape the next phase of decentralized AI systems. These include approaches for on-chain verification of AI outputs, blockchain-enabled federated learning, and more robust incentive frameworks. Collectively, while emerging innovations offer pathways to strengthen decentralized AI ecosystems, significant gaps remain between the promises and the realities of current AI-token implementations. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research at the intersection of AI and blockchain, highlighting the need for critical evaluation and more grounded approaches as the field continues to evolve.
Advancements in Chinese font generation since deep learning era: A survey
Chen, Weiran, Zhu, Guiqian, Li, Ying, Ji, Yi, Liu, Chunping
Chinese font generation aims to create a new Chinese font library based on some reference samples. It is a topic of great concern to many font designers and typographers. Over the past years, with the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, various new techniques have achieved flourishing and thriving progress. Nevertheless, how to improve the overall quality of generated Chinese character images remains a tough issue. In this paper, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent Chinese font generation approaches based on deep learning. To be specific, we first illustrate the research background of the task. Then, we outline our literature selection and analysis methodology, and review a series of related fundamentals, including classical deep learning architectures, font representation formats, public datasets, and frequently-used evaluation metrics. After that, relying on the number of reference samples required to generate a new font, we categorize the existing methods into two major groups: many-shot font generation and few-shot font generation methods. Within each category, representative approaches are summarized, and their strengths and limitations are also discussed in detail. Finally, we conclude our paper with the challenges and future directions, with the expectation to provide some valuable illuminations for the researchers in this field.
Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification via Function Metadata and LLM Embeddings
Tran, Ngoc N., Said, Anwar, Abbas, Waseem, Derr, Tyler, Koutsoukos, Xenofon D.
Graph-based malware classifiers can achieve over 94% accuracy on standard Android datasets, yet we find they suffer accuracy drops of up to 45% when evaluated on previously unseen malware variants from the same family-- a scenario where strong generalization would typically be expected. This highlights a key limitation in existing approaches: both the model architectures and their structure-only representations often fail to capture deeper semantic patterns. In this work, we propose a robust semantic enrichment framework that enhances function call graphs with contextual features, including function-level metadata and, when available, code embeddings derived from large language models. The framework is designed to operate under real-world constraints where feature availability is inconsistent, and supports flexible integration of semantic signals. To evaluate generalization under realistic domain and temporal shifts, we introduce two new benchmarks: MalNet-Tiny-Common and MalNet-Tiny-Distinct, constructed using malware family partitioning to simulate cross-family generalization and evolving threat behavior. Experiments across multiple graph neural network backbones show that our method improves classification performance by up to 8% under distribution shift and consistently enhances robustness when integrated with adaptation-based methods. These results offer a practical path toward building resilient malware detection systems in evolving threat environments.