This review presents a comprehensive survey and benchmark of pulse shape discrimination (PSD) algorithms for radiation detection, classifying nearly sixty methods into statistical (time-domain, frequency-domain, neural network-based) and prior-knowledge (machine learning, deep learning) paradigms. We implement and evaluate all algorithms on two standardized datasets: an unlabeled set from a 241Am-9Be source and a time-of-flight labeled set from a 238Pu-9Be source, using metrics including Figure of Merit (FOM), F1-score, ROC-AUC, and inter-method correlations. Our analysis reveals that deep learning models, particularly Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) and hybrid approaches combining statistical features with neural regression, often outperform traditional methods. We discuss architectural suitabilities, the limitations of FOM, alternative evaluation metrics, and performance across energy thresholds. Accompanying this work, we release an open-source toolbox in Python and MATLAB, along with the datasets, to promote reproducibility and advance PSD research.

Emotional and mental well-being are vital components of quality of life, and with the rise of smart devices like smartphones, wearables, and artificial intelligence (AI), new opportunities for monitoring emotions in everyday settings have emerged. However, for AI algorithms to be effective, they require high-quality data and accurate annotations. As the focus shifts towards collecting emotion data in real-world environments to capture more authentic emotional experiences, the process of gathering emotion annotations has become increasingly complex. This work explores the challenges of everyday emotion data collection from the perspectives of key stakeholders. We collected 75 survey responses, performed 32 interviews with the public, and 3 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 12 mental health professionals. The insights gained from a total of 119 stakeholders informed the development of our framework, AnnoSense, designed to support everyday emotion data collection for AI. This framework was then evaluated by 25 emotion AI experts for its clarity, usefulness, and adaptability. Lastly, we discuss the potential next steps and implications of AnnoSense for future research in emotion AI, highlighting its potential to enhance the collection and analysis of emotion data in real-world contexts.

Using diffusion priors to solve inverse problems in imaging have significantly matured over the years. In this chapter, we review the various different approaches that were proposed over the years. We categorize the approaches into the more classic explicit approximation approaches and others, which include variational inference, sequential monte carlo, and decoupled data consistency. We cover the extension to more challenging situations, including blind cases, high-dimensional data, and problems under data scarcity and distribution mismatch. More recent approaches that aim to leverage multimodal information through texts are covered. Through this chapter, we aim to (i) distill the common mathematical threads that connect these algorithms, (ii) systematically contrast their assumptions and performance trade-offs across representative inverse problems, and (iii) spotlight the open theoretical and practical challenges by clarifying the landscape of diffusion model based inverse problem solvers.

We develop a central limit theorem (CLT) for the non-parametric estimator of the transition matrices in controlled Markov chains (CMCs) with finite state-action spaces. Our results establish precise conditions on the logging policy under which the estimator is asymptotically normal, and reveal settings in which no CLT can exist. We then build upon it to derive CLTs for the value, Q-, and advantage functions of any stationary stochastic policy, including the optimal policy recovered from the estimated model. Goodness-of-fit tests are derived as a corollary, which enable us to test whether the logged data is stochastic. These results provide new statistical tools for offline policy evaluation and optimal policy recovery, and enable hypothesis tests for transition probabilities.

Standard transformer-based language models, while powerful for general text, often struggle with the fine-grained syntax and entity relationships in complex technical, engineering documents. To address this, we propose the Contextual Graph Transformer (CGT), a hybrid neural architecture that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers for domain-specific question answering. CGT constructs a dynamic graph over input tokens using sequential, skip-gram, and semantic similarity edges, which is processed by GATv2Conv layers for local structure learning. These enriched embeddings are then passed to a Transformer encoder to capture global dependencies. Unlike generic large models, technical domains often require specialized language models with stronger contextualization and structure awareness. CGT offers a parameter-efficient solution for such use cases. Integrated into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, CGT outperforms baselines like GPT-2 and BERT, achieving 24.7% higher accuracy than GPT-2 with 62.4% fewer parameters. This gain stems from CGTs ability to jointly model structural token interactions and long-range semantic coherence. The model is trained from scratch using a two-phase approach: pretraining on general text followed by fine-tuning on domain-specific manuals. This highlights CGTs adaptability to technical language, enabling better grounding, entity tracking, and retrieval-augmented responses in real-world applications.

Composable AI offers a scalable and effective paradigm for tackling complex AI tasks by decomposing them into sub-tasks and solving each sub-task using ready-to-use well-trained models. However, systematically evaluating methods under this setting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CABENCH, the first public benchmark comprising 70 realistic composable AI tasks, along with a curated pool of 700 models across multiple modalities and domains. We also propose an evaluation framework to enable end-to-end assessment of composable AI solutions. To establish initial baselines, we provide human-designed reference solutions and compare their performance with two LLM-based approaches. Our results illustrate the promise of composable AI in addressing complex real-world problems while highlighting the need for methods that can fully unlock its potential by automatically generating effective execution pipelines.

Data representation remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when adapting sequence-based architectures like Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) for structured tabular data. Existing methods often fail to cohesively encode the mix of numerical and categorical features or preserve the inherent structure of tables. This paper introduces a novel, hybrid tokenisation methodology designed to convert tabular data into a unified, sequential format suitable for LLM training. Our approach combines predefined fixed tokens to represent structural elements and low-cardinality categorical features, with a learned subword vocabulary using Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) for high-cardinality and continuous values. We demonstrate the efficacy of this technique by applying it to a large-scale NetFlow dataset (CIDDS-001), preparing a corpus for a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) foundation model. The evaluation shows that our method is highly efficient, processing over 31 million network flows in under five hours and achieving a significant data compression ratio of 6.18:1. This process resulted in a computationally manageable corpus of over one billion tokens, establishing a viable and generalisable pathway for training foundation models on structured data.

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in recent years has catalyzed transformative advances in wireless communications and networks. Among the members of the GenAI family, Diffusion Models (DMs) have risen to prominence as a powerful option, capable of handling complex, high-dimensional data distribution, as well as consistent, noise-robust performance. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundations and practical applications of DMs across future communication systems. We first provide an extensive tutorial of DMs and demonstrate how they can be applied to enhance optimizers, reinforcement learning and incentive mechanisms, which are popular approaches for problems in wireless networks. Then, we review and discuss the DM-based methods proposed for emerging issues in future networks and communications, including channel modeling and estimation, signal detection and data reconstruction, integrated sensing and communication, resource management in edge computing networks, semantic communications and other notable issues. We conclude the survey with highlighting technical limitations of DMs and their applications, as well as discussing future research directions.

Data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data and thus boosts downstream data-driven tasks. Traditional methods often face challenges in capturing the intricate relationships within tables and adapting to the tasks involved. Recent advances in Language Models (LMs), especially in Large Language Models (LLMs), offer new opportunities to automate and support tabular data preparation. However, why LMs suit tabular data preparation (i.e., how their capabilities match task demands) and how to use them effectively across phases still remain to be systematically explored. In this survey, we systematically analyze the role of LMs in enhancing tabular data preparation processes, focusing on four core phases: data acquisition, integration, cleaning, and transformation. For each phase, we present an integrated analysis of how LMs can be combined with other components for different preparation tasks, highlight key advancements, and outline prospective pipelines.

Imbalanced regression arises when the target distribution is skewed, causing models to focus on dense regions and struggle with underrepresented (minority) samples. Despite its relevance across many applications, few methods have been designed specifically for this challenge. Existing approaches often rely on fixed, ad hoc thresholds to label samples as rare or common, overlooking the continuous complexity of the joint feature-target space and fail to represent the true underlying rare regions. To address these limitations, we propose a fully data-driven GAN-based augmentation framework that uses Mahalanobis-Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) to automatically identify minority samples and employs deterministic nearest-neighbour matching to enrich sparse regions. Rather than preset thresholds, our method lets the data determine which observations are truly rare. Evaluation on 32 benchmark imbalanced regression datasets demonstrates that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation methods.