This survey offers a comprehensive overview of Large Language Models (LLMs) designed for Arabic language and its dialects. It covers key architectures, including encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, along with the datasets used for pre-training, spanning Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Dialectal Arabic. The study also explores monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual LLMs, analyzing their architectures and performance across downstream tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and question answering. Furthermore, it assesses the openness of Arabic LLMs based on factors, such as source code availability, training data, model weights, and documentation. The survey highlights the need for more diverse dialectal datasets and attributes the importance of openness for research reproducibility and transparency. It concludes by identifying key challenges and opportunities for future research and stressing the need for more inclusive and representative models.

Analyzing and finding anomalies in multi-dimensional datasets is a cumbersome but vital task across different domains. In the context of financial fraud detection, analysts must quickly identify suspicious activity among transactional data. This is an iterative process made of complex exploratory tasks such as recognizing patterns, grouping, and comparing. To mitigate the information overload inherent to these steps, we present a tool combining automated information highlights, Large Language Model generated textual insights, and visual analytics, facilitating exploration at different levels of detail. We perform a segmentation of the data per analysis area and visually represent each one, making use of automated visual cues to signal which require more attention. Upon user selection of an area, our system provides textual and graphical summaries. The text, acting as a link between the high-level and detailed views of the chosen segment, allows for a quick understanding of relevant details. A thorough exploration of the data comprising the selection can be done through graphical representations. The feedback gathered in a study performed with seven domain experts suggests our tool effectively supports and guides exploratory analysis, easing the identification of suspicious information.

In recent years, the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked interest in their potential for application within the military domain. However, the current generation of LLMs demonstrate sub-optimal performance on Army use cases, due to the prevalence of domain-specific vocabulary and jargon. In order to fully leverage LLMs in-domain, many organizations have turned to fine-tuning to circumvent the prohibitive costs involved in training new LLMs from scratch. In light of this trend, we explore the viability of adapting open-source LLMs for usage in the Army domain in order to address their existing lack of domain-specificity. Our investigations have resulted in the creation of three distinct generations of TRACLM, a family of LLMs fine-tuned by The Research and Analysis Center (TRAC), Army Futures Command (AFC). Through continuous refinement of our training pipeline, each successive iteration of TRACLM displayed improved capabilities when applied to Army tasks and use cases. Furthermore, throughout our fine-tuning experiments, we recognized the need for an evaluation framework that objectively quantifies the Army domain-specific knowledge of LLMs. To address this, we developed MilBench, an extensible software framework that efficiently evaluates the Army knowledge of a given LLM using tasks derived from doctrine and assessments. We share preliminary results, models, methods, and recommendations on the creation of TRACLM and MilBench. Our work significantly informs the development of LLM technology across the DoD and augments senior leader decisions with respect to artificial intelligence integration.

Neural Fields have emerged as a transformative approach for 3D scene representation in computer vision and robotics, enabling accurate inference of geometry, 3D semantics, and dynamics from posed 2D data. Leveraging differentiable rendering, Neural Fields encompass both continuous implicit and explicit neural representations enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction, integration of multi-modal sensor data, and generation of novel viewpoints. This survey explores their applications in robotics, emphasizing their potential to enhance perception, planning, and control. Their compactness, memory efficiency, and differentiability, along with seamless integration with foundation and generative models, make them ideal for real-time applications, improving robot adaptability and decision-making. This paper provides a thorough review of Neural Fields in robotics, categorizing applications across various domains and evaluating their strengths and limitations, based on over 200 papers. First, we present four key Neural Fields frameworks: Occupancy Networks, Signed Distance Fields, Neural Radiance Fields, and Gaussian Splatting. Second, we detail Neural Fields' applications in five major robotics domains: pose estimation, manipulation, navigation, physics, and autonomous driving, highlighting key works and discussing takeaways and open challenges. Finally, we outline the current limitations of Neural Fields in robotics and propose promising directions for future research. Project page: https://robonerf.github.io

Training in unsupervised time series anomaly detection is constantly plagued by the discrimination between harmful `anomaly contaminations' and beneficial `hard normal samples'. These two samples exhibit analogous loss behavior that conventional loss-based methodologies struggle to differentiate. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach that supplements traditional loss behavior with `parameter behavior', enabling a more granular characterization of anomalous patterns. Parameter behavior is formalized by measuring the parametric response to minute perturbations in input samples. Leveraging the complementary nature of parameter and loss behaviors, we further propose a dual Parameter-Loss Data Augmentation method (termed PLDA), implemented within the reinforcement learning paradigm. During the training phase of anomaly detection, PLDA dynamically augments the training data through an iterative process that simultaneously mitigates anomaly contaminations while amplifying informative hard normal samples. PLDA demonstrates remarkable versatility, which can serve as an additional component that seamlessly integrated with existing anomaly detectors to enhance their detection performance. Extensive experiments on ten datasets show that PLDA significantly improves the performance of four distinct detectors by up to 8\%, outperforming three state-of-the-art data augmentation methods.

Recent research has shown that pre-trained vision-language models are effective at identifying out-of-distribution (OOD) samples by using negative labels as guidance. However, employing consistent negative labels across different OOD datasets often results in semantic misalignments, as these text labels may not accurately reflect the actual space of OOD images. To overcome this issue, we introduce \textit{adaptive negative proxies}, which are dynamically generated during testing by exploring actual OOD images, to align more closely with the underlying OOD label space and enhance the efficacy of negative proxy guidance. Specifically, our approach utilizes a feature memory bank to selectively cache discriminative features from test images, representing the targeted OOD distribution. This facilitates the creation of proxies that can better align with specific OOD datasets. While task-adaptive proxies average features to reflect the unique characteristics of each dataset, the sample-adaptive proxies weight features based on their similarity to individual test samples, exploring detailed sample-level nuances. The final score for identifying OOD samples integrates static negative labels with our proposed adaptive proxies, effectively combining textual and visual knowledge for enhanced performance. Our method is training-free and annotation-free, and it maintains fast testing speed. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, abbreviated as AdaNeg. Notably, on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, our AdaNeg significantly outperforms existing methods, with a 2.45\% increase in AUROC and a 6.48\% reduction in FPR95. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/OpenOOD-VLM}.

Iran, endowed with abundant hydrocarbon resources, plays a crucial role in the global energy landscape. Gasoline, as a critical fuel, significantly supports the nation's transportation sector. Accurate forecasting of gasoline consumption is essential for strategic resource management and environmental planning. This research introduces a novel approach to predicting monthly gasoline consumption using a hybrid Transformer-LSTM-CNN model, which integrates the strengths of Transformer networks, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This advanced architecture offers a superior alternative to conventional methods such as artificial neural networks and regression models by capturing both short- and long-term dependencies in time series data. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism of Transformers, the temporal memory of LSTMs, and the local pattern detection of CNNs, our hybrid model delivers improved prediction accuracy. Implemented using Python, the model provides precise future gasoline consumption forecasts and evaluates the environmental impact through the analysis of greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines gasoline consumption trends from 2007 to 2021, which rose from 64.5 million liters per day in 2007 to 99.80 million liters per day in 2021. Our proposed model forecasts consumption levels up to 2031, offering a valuable tool for policymakers and energy analysts. The results highlight the superiority of this hybrid model in improving the accuracy of gasoline consumption forecasts, reinforcing the need for advanced machine learning techniques to optimize resource management and mitigate environmental risks in the energy sector.

The aim of this work is to learn models of population dynamics of physical systems that feature stochastic and mean-field effects and that depend on physics parameters. The learned models can act as surrogates of classical numerical models to efficiently predict the system behavior over the physics parameters. Building on the Benamou-Brenier formula from optimal transport and action matching, we use a variational problem to infer parameter- and time-dependent gradient fields that represent approximations of the population dynamics. The inferred gradient fields can then be used to rapidly generate sample trajectories that mimic the dynamics of the physical system on a population level over varying physics parameters. We show that combining Monte Carlo sampling with higher-order quadrature rules is critical for accurately estimating the training objective from sample data and for stabilizing the training process. We demonstrate on Vlasov-Poisson instabilities as well as on high-dimensional particle and chaotic systems that our approach accurately predicts population dynamics over a wide range of parameters and outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion-based and flow-based modeling that simply condition on time and physics parameters.

Large Language Models have introduced novel opportunities for text comprehension and generation. Yet, they are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations and data poisoning attacks, particularly in tasks like text classification and translation. However, the adversarial robustness of abstractive text summarization models remains less explored. In this work, we unveil a novel approach by exploiting the inherent lead bias in summarization models, to perform adversarial perturbations. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative application of influence functions, to execute data poisoning, which compromises the model's integrity. This approach not only shows a skew in the models behavior to produce desired outcomes but also shows a new behavioral change, where models under attack tend to generate extractive summaries rather than abstractive summaries.

This review began with the modest goal of drafting a brief commentary on how the social work profession engages with and is impacted by artificial intelligence (AI). However, it quickly became apparent that a deeper exploration was required to adequately capture the profound influence of AI, one of the most transformative and debated innovations in modern history. As a result, this review evolved into an interdisciplinary endeavour, gathering seminal texts, critical articles, and influential voices from across industries and academia. This review aims to provide a comprehensive yet accessible overview, situating AI within broader societal and academic conversations as 2025 dawns. We explore perspectives from leading tech entrepreneurs, cultural icons, CEOs, and politicians alongside the pioneering contributions of AI engineers, innovators, and academics from fields as diverse as mathematics, sociology, philosophy, economics, and more. This review also briefly analyses AI's real-world impacts, ethical challenges, and implications for social work. It presents a vision for AI-facilitated simulations that could transform social work education through Advanced Personalised Simulation Training (APST). This tool uses AI to tailor high-fidelity simulations to individual student needs, providing real-time feedback and preparing them for the complexities of their future practice environments. We maintain a critical tone throughout, balancing our awe of AI's remarkable advancements with necessary caution. As AI continues to permeate every professional realm, understanding its subtleties, challenges, and opportunities becomes essential. Those who fully grasp the intricacies of this technology will be best positioned to navigate the impending AI Era.