Formal, Distributional, and Grounded theories of computational semantics each have their uses and their drawbacks. There has been a shift to ground models of language by adding visual knowledge, and there has been a call to enrich models of language with symbolic methods to gain the benefits from formal, distributional, and grounded theories. In this paper, we attempt to make the case that one potential path forward in unifying all three semantic fields is paved with the words-as-classifier model, a model of word-level grounded semantics that has been incorporated into formalisms and distributional language models in the literature, and it has been well-tested within interactive dialogue settings. We review that literature, motivate the words-as-classifiers model with an appeal to recent work in cognitive science, and describe a small experiment. Finally, we sketch a model of semantics unified through words-as-classifiers.

Offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems play a crucial role in applications such as historical document digitization, automatic form processing, and biometric authentication. However, their performance is often hindered by the limited availability of annotated training data, particularly for low-resource languages and complex scripts. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of offline handwritten data augmentation and generation techniques designed to improve the accuracy and robustness of HTR systems. We systematically examine traditional augmentation methods alongside recent advances in deep learning, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and transformer-based approaches. Furthermore, we explore the challenges associated with generating diverse and realistic handwriting samples, particularly in preserving script authenticity and addressing data scarcity. This survey follows the PRISMA methodology, ensuring a structured and rigorous selection process. Our analysis began with 1,302 primary studies, which were filtered down to 848 after removing duplicates, drawing from key academic sources such as IEEE Digital Library, Springer Link, Science Direct, and ACM Digital Library. By evaluating existing datasets, assessment metrics, and state-of-the-art methodologies, this survey identifies key research gaps and proposes future directions to advance the field of handwritten text generation across diverse linguistic and stylistic landscapes.

Motion generation, the task of synthesizing realistic motion sequences from various conditioning inputs, has become a central problem in computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics, with applications ranging from animation and virtual agents to human-robot interaction. As the field has rapidly progressed with the introduction of diverse modeling paradigms including GANs, autoencoders, autoregressive models, and diffusion-based techniques, each approach brings its own advantages and limitations. This growing diversity has created a need for a comprehensive and structured review that specifically examines recent developments from the perspective of the generative approach employed. In this survey, we provide an in-depth categorization of motion generation methods based on their underlying generative strategies. Our main focus is on papers published in top-tier venues since 2023, reflecting the most recent advancements in the field. In addition, we analyze architectural principles, conditioning mechanisms, and generation settings, and compile a detailed overview of the evaluation metrics and datasets used across the literature. Our objective is to enable clearer comparisons and identify open challenges, thereby offering a timely and foundational reference for researchers and practitioners navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of motion generation.

LLM-powered applications are highly susceptible to the quality of user prompts, and crafting high-quality prompts can often be challenging especially for domain-specific applications. This paper presents a novel dynamic context-aware prompt recommendation system for domain-specific AI applications. Our solution combines contextual query analysis, retrieval-augmented knowledge grounding, hierarchical skill organization, and adaptive skill ranking to generate relevant and actionable prompt suggestions. The system leverages behavioral telemetry and a two-stage hierarchical reasoning process to dynamically select and rank relevant skills, and synthesizes prompts using both predefined and adaptive templates enhanced with few-shot learning. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves high usefulness and relevance, as validated by both automated and expert evaluations.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable utility across diverse applications, and their growing complexity has made Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) a viable platform for scalable deployment. However, this accessibility also exposes GNN to serious security threats, most notably model extraction attacks (MEAs), in which adversaries strategically query a deployed model to construct a high-fidelity replica. In this work, we evaluate the vulnerability of GNNs to MEAs and explore their potential for cost-effective model acquisition in non-adversarial research settings. Importantly, adaptive node querying strategies can also serve a critical role in research, particularly when labeling data is expensive or time-consuming. By selectively sampling informative nodes, researchers can train high-performing GNNs with minimal supervision, which is particularly valuable in domains such as biomedicine, where annotations often require expert input. To address this, we propose a node querying strategy tailored to a highly practical yet underexplored scenario, where bulk queries are prohibited, and only a limited set of initial nodes is available. Our approach iteratively refines the node selection mechanism over multiple learning cycles, leveraging historical feedback to improve extraction efficiency. Extensive experiments on benchmark graph datasets demonstrate our superiority over comparable baselines on accuracy, fidelity, and F1 score under strict query-size constraints. These results highlight both the susceptibility of deployed GNNs to extraction attacks and the promise of ethical, efficient GNN acquisition methods to support low-resource research environments.

Dataless neural networks represent a paradigm shift in applying neural architectures to combinatorial optimization problems, eliminating the need for training datasets by encoding problem instances directly into network parameters. Despite the pioneering work of Alkhouri et al. (2022) demonstrating the viability of dataless approaches for the Maximum Independent Set problem, our comprehensive literature review reveals that no published work has extended these methods to the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). This paper addresses this gap by presenting the first dataless neural network approach for RCPSP, providing a complete mathematical framework that transforms discrete scheduling constraints into differentiable objectives suitable for gradient-based optimization. Our approach leverages smooth relaxations and automatic differentiation to unlock GPU parallelization for project scheduling, traditionally a domain of sequential algorithms. We detail the mathematical formulation for both precedence and renewable resource constraints, including a memory-efficient dense time-grid representation. Implementation and comprehensive experiments on PSPLIB benchmark instances (J30, J60, and J120) are currently underway, with empirical results to be reported in an updated version of this paper.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to be increasingly applied across various domains, their widespread adoption necessitates rigorous monitoring to prevent unintended negative consequences and ensure robustness. Furthermore, LLMs must be designed to align with human values, like preventing harmful content and ensuring responsible usage. The current automated systems and solutions for monitoring LLMs in production are primarily centered on LLM-specific concerns like hallucination etc, with little consideration given to the requirements of specific use-cases and user preferences. This paper introduces GAF-Guard, a novel agentic framework for LLM governance that places the user, the use-case, and the model itself at the center. The framework is designed to detect and monitor risks associated with the deployment of LLM based applications. The approach models autonomous agents that identify risks, activate risk detection tools, within specific use-cases and facilitate continuous monitoring and reporting to enhance AI safety, and user expectations. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/risk-atlas-nexus-demos/tree/main/gaf-guard.

Generative language modelling has surged in popularity with the emergence of services such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. While these models have demonstrated transformative potential in productivity and communication, they overwhelmingly cater to high-resource languages like English. This has amplified concerns over linguistic inequality in natural language processing (NLP). This paper presents the first systematic review focused specifically on strategies to address data scarcity in generative language modelling for low-resource languages (LRL). Drawing from 54 studies, we identify, categorise and evaluate technical approaches, including monolingual data augmentation, back-translation, multilingual training, and prompt engineering, across generative tasks. We also analyse trends in architecture choices, language family representation, and evaluation methods. Our findings highlight a strong reliance on transformer-based models, a concentration on a small subset of LRLs, and a lack of consistent evaluation across studies. We conclude with recommendations for extending these methods to a wider range of LRLs and outline open challenges in building equitable generative language systems. Ultimately, this review aims to support researchers and developers in building inclusive AI tools for underrepresented languages, a necessary step toward empowering LRL speakers and the preservation of linguistic diversity in a world increasingly shaped by large-scale language technologies.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a compelling methodology for the management of distributed data, marked by significant advancements in recent years. In this paper, we propose an efficient FL approach that capitalizes on additional downlink bandwidth resources to ensure timely update dissemination. Initially, we implement this strategy within an asynchronous framework, introducing the Asynchronous Staleness-aware Model Update (FedASMU), which integrates both server-side and device-side methodologies. On the server side, we present an asynchronous FL system model that employs a dynamic model aggregation technique, which harmonizes local model updates with the global model to enhance both accuracy and efficiency. Concurrently, on the device side, we propose an adaptive model adjustment mechanism that integrates the latest global model with local models during training to further elevate accuracy. Subsequently, we extend this approach to a synchronous context, referred to as FedSSMU. Theoretical analyses substantiate the convergence of our proposed methodologies. Extensive experiments, encompassing six models and five public datasets, demonstrate that FedASMU and FedSSMU significantly surpass baseline methods in terms of both accuracy (up to 145.87%) and efficiency (up to 97.59%).

--While AI systems have equaled or surpassed human performance in a wide variety of games such as Chess, Go, or Dota 2, describing these systems as truly "human-like" remains far-fetched. Despite their success, they fail to replicate the pattern-based, intuitive decision-making processes observed in human cognition. This paper presents an overview of findings from cognitive psychology and previous efforts to model humanlike behavior in artificial agents, discusses their applicability to General Game Playing (GGP) and introduces our work-in-progress model based on these observations: CogniPlay. Although AI systems have surpassed human performance in games such as Chess [5], Go [14], and competitive games like Dota 2 [2], describing them as "human-like" would be an overstatement. Despite their exceptional performance, these systems fail to accurately replicate the selective, pattern-based decision-making that characterizes human cognition [8], [12].