Research into explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) for data analysis tasks suffer from a large number of contradictions and lack of concrete design recommendations stemming from gaps in understanding the tasks that require AI assistance. In this paper, we drew on multiple fields such as visual analytics, cognition, and dashboard design to propose a method for categorising and comparing XAI studies under three dimensions: what, why, and who. We identified the main problems as: inadequate descriptions of tasks, context-free studies, and insufficient testing with target users. We propose that studies should specifically report on their users' domain, AI, and data analysis expertise to illustrate the generalisability of their findings. We also propose study guidelines for designing and reporting XAI tasks to improve the XAI community's ability to parse the rapidly growing field. We hope that our contribution can help researchers and designers better identify which studies are most relevant to their work, what gaps exist in the research, and how to handle contradictory results regarding XAI design.

As AI systems become increasingly capable and ubiquitous, ensuring the safety of these systems is critical. However, existing safety tools often target different aspects of model safety and cannot provide full assurance in isolation, highlighting a need for integrated and composite methodologies. This paper introduces BlueGlass, a framework designed to facilitate composite AI safety workflows by providing a unified infrastructure enabling the integration and composition of diverse safety tools that operate across model internals and outputs. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this framework, we present three safety-oriented analyses on vision-language models for the task of object detection: (1) distributional evaluation, revealing performance trade-offs and potential failure modes across distributions; (2) probe-based analysis of layer dynamics highlighting shared hierarchical learning via phase transition; and (3) sparse autoencoders identifying interpretable concepts. More broadly, this work contributes foundational infrastructure and findings for building more robust and reliable AI systems.

This paper investigates whether state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically translate SPARQL between popular Knowledge Graph (KG) schemas. We focus on translations between the DBpedia and Wikidata KG, and later on DBLP and OpenAlex KG. This study addresses a notable gap in KG interoperability research by rigorously evaluating LLM performance on SPARQL-to-SPARQL translation. Two benchmarks are assembled, where the first align 100 DBpedia-Wikidata queries from QALD-9-Plus; the second contains 100 DBLP queries aligned to OpenAlex, testing generalizability beyond encyclopaedic KGs. Three open LLMs: Llama-3-8B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, and Mistral-Large-Instruct-2407 are selected based on their sizes and architectures and tested with zero-shot, few-shot, and two chain-of-thought variants. Outputs were compared with gold answers, and resulting errors were categorized. We find that the performance varies markedly across models and prompting strategies, and that translations for Wikidata to DBpedia work far better than translations for DBpedia to Wikidata.

Touch is recognized as a vital sense for humans and an equally important modality for robots, especially for dexterous manipulation, material identification, and scenarios involving visual occlusion. Building upon very recent work in touch foundation models, this demonstration will feature Octopi-1.5, our latest visual-tactile-language model. Compared to its predecessor, Octopi-1.5 introduces the ability to process tactile signals from multiple object parts and employs a simple retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module to improve performance on tasks and potentially learn new objects on-the-fly. The system can be experienced live through a new handheld tactile-enabled interface, the TMI, equipped with GelSight and TAC-02 tactile sensors. This convenient and accessible setup allows users to interact with Octopi-1.5 without requiring a robot. During the demonstration, we will showcase Octopi-1.5 solving tactile inference tasks by leveraging tactile inputs and commonsense knowledge. For example, in a Guessing Game, Octopi-1.5 will identify objects being grasped and respond to follow-up queries about how to handle it (e.g., recommending careful handling for soft fruits). We also plan to demonstrate Octopi-1.5's RAG capabilities by teaching it new items. With live interactions, this demonstration aims to highlight both the progress and limitations of VTLMs such as Octopi-1.5 and to foster further interest in this exciting field. Code for Octopi-1.5 and design files for the TMI gripper are available at https://github.com/clear-nus/octopi-1.5.

Visually-Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) has emerged as a critical field, driven by the need to automatically process documents containing complex visual, textual, and layout information. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable potential in this domain, leveraging both Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-dependent and OCR-free frameworks to extract and interpret information in document images. This survey reviews recent advancements in MLLM-based VRDU, highlighting three core components: (1) methods for encoding and fusing textual, visual, and layout features; (2) training paradigms, including pretraining strategies, instruction-response tuning, and the trainability of different model modules; and (3) datasets utilized for pretraining, instruction-tuning, and supervised fine-tuning. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in this evolving field and propose future directions to advance the efficiency, generalizability, and robustness of VRDU systems.

Accurate estimation of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) and State of Health (SOH) is essential for Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) across a wide range of industrial applications. We propose a novel framework -- Reinforced Graph-Based Physics-Informed Neural Networks Enhanced with Dynamic Weights (RGPD) -- that combines physics-based supervision with advanced spatio-temporal learning. Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks (GCRNs) embed graph-convolutional filters within recurrent units to capture how node representations evolve over time. Graph Attention Convolution (GATConv) leverages a self-attention mechanism to compute learnable, edge-wise attention coefficients, dynamically weighting neighbor contributions for adaptive spatial aggregation. A Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) module is positioned between the Temporal Attention Unit (TAU) and GCRN to further improve the spatio-temporal learning. This module improves attention and prediction accuracy by dynamically scaling hidden representations to minimize noise and highlight informative features. To identify the most relevant physical constraints in each area, Q-learning agents dynamically assign weights to physics-informed loss terms, improving generalization across real-time industrial systems and reducing the need for manual tuning. In both RUL and SOH estimation tasks, the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating strong robustness and predictive accuracy across varied degradation patterns across three diverse industrial benchmark datasets.

Curriculum learning is a widely adopted training strategy in natural language processing (NLP), where models are exposed to examples organized by increasing difficulty to enhance learning efficiency and performance. However, most existing approaches rely on manually defined difficulty metrics -- such as text length -- which may not accurately reflect the model's own perspective. To overcome this limitation, we present a self-adaptive curriculum learning paradigm that prioritizes fine-tuning examples based on difficulty scores predicted by pre-trained language models (PLMs) themselves. Building on these scores, we explore various training strategies that differ in the ordering of examples for the fine-tuning: from easy-to-hard, hard-to-easy, to mixed sampling. We evaluate our method on four natural language understanding (NLU) datasets covering both binary and multi-class classification tasks. Experimental results show that our approach leads to faster convergence and improved performance compared to standard random sampling.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 have demonstrated impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics and programming with long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning sequences (slow-thinking), compared with traditional large language models (fast-thinking). However, these reasoning models also face a huge challenge that generating unnecessarily lengthy and redundant reasoning chains even for trivial questions. This phenomenon leads to a significant waste of inference resources, increases the response time for simple queries, and hinders the practical application of LRMs in real-world products. To this end, it is crucial to shorten lengthy reasoning chains and learn adaptive reasoning between fast and slow thinking based on input difficulty. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent progress in concise and adaptive thinking for efficient reasoning of LRMs, including methodologies, benchmarks, and challenges for future exploration. We hope this survey can help researchers quickly understand the landscape of this field and inspire novel adaptive thinking ideas to facilitate better usage of LRMs.

Driving trajectory data remains vulnerable to privacy breaches despite existing mitigation measures. Traditional methods for detecting driving trajectories typically rely on map-matching the path using Global Positioning System (GPS) data, which is susceptible to GPS data outage. This paper introduces CAN-Trace, a novel privacy attack mechanism that leverages Controller Area Network (CAN) messages to uncover driving trajectories, posing a significant risk to drivers' long-term privacy. A new trajectory reconstruction algorithm is proposed to transform the CAN messages, specifically vehicle speed and accelerator pedal position, into weighted graphs accommodating various driving statuses. CAN-Trace identifies driving trajectories using graph-matching algorithms applied to the created graphs in comparison to road networks. We also design a new metric to evaluate matched candidates, which allows for potential data gaps and matching inaccuracies. Empirical validation under various real-world conditions, encompassing different vehicles and driving regions, demonstrates the efficacy of CAN-Trace: it achieves an attack success rate of up to 90.59% in the urban region, and 99.41% in the suburban region.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized image segmentation through its innovative prompt-based approach, yet the critical role of prompt engineering in its success remains underexplored. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey focusing specifically on prompt engineering techniques for SAM and its variants. We systematically organize and analyze the rapidly growing body of work in this emerging field, covering fundamental methodologies, practical applications, and key challenges. Our review reveals how prompt engineering has evolved from simple geometric inputs to sophisticated multimodal approaches, enabling SAM's adaptation across diverse domains including medical imaging and remote sensing. We identify unique challenges in prompt optimization and discuss promising research directions. This survey fills an important gap in the literature by providing a structured framework for understanding and advancing prompt engineering in foundation models for segmentation.