Efficiently navigating and understanding academic papers is crucial for scientific progress. Traditional linear formats like PDF and HTML can cause cognitive overload and obscure a paper's hierarchical structure, making it difficult to locate key information. While LLM-based chatbots offer summarization, they often lack nuanced understanding of specific sections, may produce unreliable information, and typically discard the document's navigational structure. Drawing insights from a formative study on academic reading practices, we introduce TreeReader, a novel language model-augmented paper reader. TreeReader decomposes papers into an interactive tree structure where each section is initially represented by an LLM-generated concise summary, with underlying details accessible on demand. This design allows users to quickly grasp core ideas, selectively explore sections of interest, and verify summaries against the source text. A user study was conducted to evaluate TreeReader's impact on reading efficiency and comprehension. TreeReader provides a more focused and efficient way to navigate and understand complex academic literature by bridging hierarchical summarization with interactive exploration.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a major advancement in natural language processing (NLP), combining large language models (LLMs) with information retrieval systems to enhance factual grounding, accuracy, and contextual relevance. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of RAG, tracing its evolution from early developments in open domain question answering to recent state-of-the-art implementations across diverse applications. The review begins by outlining the motivations behind RAG, particularly its ability to mitigate hallucinations and outdated knowledge in parametric models. Core technical components-retrieval mechanisms, sequence-to-sequence generation models, and fusion strategies are examined in detail. A year-by-year analysis highlights key milestones and research trends, providing insight into RAG's rapid growth. The paper further explores the deployment of RAG in enterprise systems, addressing practical challenges related to retrieval of proprietary data, security, and scalability. A comparative evaluation of RAG implementations is conducted, benchmarking performance on retrieval accuracy, generation fluency, latency, and computational efficiency. Persistent challenges such as retrieval quality, privacy concerns, and integration overhead are critically assessed. Finally, the review highlights emerging solutions, including hybrid retrieval approaches, privacy-preserving techniques, optimized fusion strategies, and agentic RAG architectures. These innovations point toward a future of more reliable, efficient, and context-aware knowledge-intensive NLP systems.

AI-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have significant potential to transform teaching and learning. As efforts continue to design, develop, and integrate ITS into educational contexts, mixed results about their effectiveness have emerged. This paper provides a comprehensive review to understand how ITS operate in real educational settings and to identify the associated challenges in their application and evaluation. We use a systematic literature review method to analyze numerous qualified studies published from 2010 to 2025, examining domains such as pedagogical strategies, NLP, adaptive learning, student modeling, and domain-specific applications of ITS. The results reveal a complex landscape regarding the effectiveness of ITS, highlighting both advancements and persistent challenges. The study also identifies a need for greater scientific rigor in experimental design and data analysis. Based on these findings, suggestions for future research and practical implications are proposed.

Aim: With the advent of LLMs, sophisticated agentic program repair has become viable at large organizations with large codebases. In this work, we develop an Engineering Agent that fixes the source code based on test failures at scale across diverse software offerings internally. Method: Using Llama as the base, we employ the ReAct harness to develop an agent. We start with a test failure that was triaged by a rule-based test failure bot. We then set up an agentic harness and allow the agent to reason and run a set of 15 actions from reading a file to generating a patch. We provide feedback to the agent through static analysis and test failures so it can refine its solution. We leverage an LLM-as-a-Judge to ensure that the patch conforms to the standards followed by a human review to land fixes. Benchmark Findings: We curated offline benchmarks for our patch generator, the Engineering Agent loop, and the LLM-as-a-Judge. In offline evaluations we found that a specialized 70B model is highly competitive with the much larger but vanilla Llama-405B. In an ablation study, we found that the ReAct harness (neural model) benefited from the symbolic information from static analysis tools and test execution traces. A model that strikes a balance between the solve rate and error rate vs the cost and latency has a benchmark solve rate of 42.3% using an average 11.8 feedback iterations. Production Findings: In a three month period, 80% of the generated fixes were reviewed, of which 31.5% were landed (25.5% of the total number of generated fixes). Feedback from Engineers: We used open coding to extract qualitative themes from engineers' feedback. We saw positive feedback in the form of quick approvals, gratitude, and surprise. We also found mixed feedback when the Engineering Agent's solution was partially correct and it served as a good starting point.

Fair and dynamic energy allocation in community microgrids remains a critical challenge, particularly when serving socio-economically diverse participants. Static optimization and cost-sharing methods often fail to adapt to evolving inequities, leading to participant dissatisfaction and unsustainable cooperation. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), cooperative game theory, and a dynamic equity-adjustment mechanism driven by reinforcement learning (RL). At its core, the framework utilizes a bi-level optimization model grounded in Equity-regarding Welfare Maximization (EqWM) principles, which incorporate Rawlsian fairness to prioritize the welfare of the least advantaged participants. We introduce a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent that dynamically adjusts socio-economic weights in the optimization objective based on observed inequities in cost and renewable energy access. This RL-powered feedback loop enables the system to learn and adapt, continuously striving for a more equitable state. To ensure transparency, Explainable AI (XAI) is used to interpret the benefit allocations derived from a weighted Shapley value. Validated across six realistic scenarios, the framework demonstrates peak demand reductions of up to 72.6%, and significant cooperative gains. The adaptive RL mechanism further reduces the Gini coefficient over time, showcasing a pathway to truly sustainable and fair energy communities.

This thesis presents the results of a comprehensive research project focused on applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to the problem of market making in financial markets. Market makers (MMs) play a fundamental role in providing liquidity, yet face significant challenges arising from inventory risk, competition, and non-stationary market dynamics. This research explores how RL, particularly Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), can be employed to develop autonomous, adaptive, and profitable market making strategies. The study begins by formulating the MM task as a reinforcement learning problem, designing agents capable of operating in both single-agent and multi-agent settings within a simulated financial environment. It then addresses the complex issue of inventory management using two complementary approaches: reward engineering and Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL). While the former uses dynamic reward shaping to guide behavior, the latter leverages Pareto front optimization to explicitly balance competing objectives. To address the problem of non-stationarity, the research introduces POW-dTS, a novel policy weighting algorithm based on Discounted Thompson Sampling. This method allows agents to dynamically select and combine pretrained policies, enabling continual adaptation to shifting market conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RL-based approaches significantly outperform traditional and baseline algorithmic strategies across various performance metrics. Overall, this research thesis contributes new methodologies and insights for the design of robust, efficient, and adaptive market making agents, reinforcing the potential of RL to transform algorithmic trading in complex financial systems.

Wikipedia serves as a globally accessible knowledge source with content in over 300 languages. Despite covering the same topics, the different versions of Wikipedia are written and updated independently. This leads to factual inconsistencies that can impact the neutrality and reliability of the encyclopedia and AI systems, which often rely on Wikipedia as a main training source. This study investigates cross-lingual inconsistencies in Wikipedia's structured content, with a focus on tabular data. We developed a methodology to collect, align, and analyze tables from Wikipedia multilingual articles, defining categories of inconsistency. We apply various quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess multilingual alignment using a sample dataset. These insights have implications for factual verification, multilingual knowledge interaction, and design for reliable AI systems leveraging Wikipedia content.

The volatility and unpredictability of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), generate significant uncertainty, which is widely discussed on social media. This study examines anticipatory discourse surrounding technological futures by analysing 1.5 million posts from 400 key opinion leaders (KOLs) published on the X platform (from 2021 to 2023). Using advanced text mining techniques, including BERTopic modelling, sentiment, emotion, and attitude analyses, the research identifies 100 distinct topics reflecting anticipated tech-driven futures. Our findings emphasize the dual role of KOLs in framing \textit{present futures} -- optimistic visions of transformative technologies like AI and IoT -- and influencing \textit{future presents}, where these projections shape contemporary societal and geopolitical debates. Positive emotions such as Hope dominate, outweighing Anxiety, particularly in topics like ``Machine Learning, Data Science, and Deep Learning,'' while discussions around ``Climate Change'' and ``War, Ukraine, and Trump People'' elicit \textit{Anxiety}. By framing technologies as solutions to societal challenges, KOLs act as mediators of societal narratives, bridging imagined futures and current realities. These insights underscore their pivotal role in directing public attention with emerging technologies during periods of heightened uncertainty, advancing our understanding of anticipatory discourse in technology-mediated contexts.

Information security is facing increasingly severe challenges, and traditional protection means are difficult to cope with complex and changing threats. In recent years, as an emerging intelligent technology, large language models (LLMs) have shown a broad application prospect in the field of information security. In this paper, we focus on the key role of LLM in information security, systematically review its application progress in malicious behavior prediction, network threat analysis, system vulnerability detection, malicious code identification, and cryptographic algorithm optimization, and explore its potential in enhancing security protection performance. Based on neural networks and Transformer architecture, this paper analyzes the technical basis of large language models and their advantages in natural language processing tasks. It is shown that the introduction of large language modeling helps to improve the detection accuracy and reduce the false alarm rate of security systems. Finally, this paper summarizes the current application results and points out that it still faces challenges in model transparency, interpretability, and scene adaptability, among other issues. It is necessary to explore further the optimization of the model structure and the improvement of the generalization ability to realize a more intelligent and accurate information security protection system.

The growing need for intelligent, adaptive, and energy-efficient autonomous systems across fields such as robotics, mobile agents (e.g., UAVs), and self-driving vehicles is driving interest in neuromorphic computing. By drawing inspiration from biological neural systems, neuromorphic approaches offer promising pathways to enhance the perception, decision-making, and responsiveness of autonomous platforms. This paper surveys recent progress in neuromorphic algorithms, specialized hardware, and cross-layer optimization strategies, with a focus on their deployment in real-world autonomous scenarios. Special attention is given to event-based dynamic vision sensors and their role in enabling fast, efficient perception. The discussion highlights new methods that improve energy efficiency, robustness, adaptability, and reliability through the integration of spiking neural networks into autonomous system architectures. We integrate perspectives from machine learning, robotics, neuroscience, and neuromorphic engineering to offer a comprehensive view of the state of the field. Finally, emerging trends and open challenges are explored, particularly in the areas of real-time decision-making, continual learning, and the development of secure, resilient autonomous systems.