This article presents a systematic review of relation extraction (RE) research since the advent of Transformer-based models. Using an automated framework to collect and annotate publications, we analyze 34 surveys, 64 datasets, and 104 models published between 2019 and 2024. The review highlights methodological advances, benchmark resources, and the integration of semantic web technologies. By consolidating results across multiple dimensions, the study identifies current trends, limitations, and open challenges, offering researchers and practitioners a comprehensive reference for understanding the evolution and future directions of RE.

The evaluation of academic theses is a cornerstone of higher education, ensuring rigor and integrity. Traditional methods, though effective, are time-consuming and subject to evaluator variability. This paper presents RubiSCoT, an AI-supported framework designed to enhance thesis evaluation from proposal to final submission. Using advanced natural language processing techniques, including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and structured chain-of-thought prompting, RubiSCoT offers a consistent, scalable solution. The framework includes preliminary assessments, multidimensional assessments, content extraction, rubric-based scoring, and detailed reporting. We present the design and implementation of RubiSCoT, discussing its potential to optimize academic assessment processes through consistent, scalable, and transparent evaluation.

Peer review serves as the gatekeeper of science, yet the surge in submissions and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scholarly evaluation present unprecedented challenges. While recent work has focused on using LLMs to improve review efficiency, unchecked deficient reviews from both human experts and AI systems threaten to systematically undermine academic integrity. To address this issue, we introduce ReviewGuard, an automated system for detecting and categorizing deficient reviews through a four-stage LLM-driven framework: data collection from ICLR and NeurIPS on OpenReview, GPT-4.1 annotation with human validation, synthetic data augmentation yielding 6,634 papers with 24,657 real and 46,438 synthetic reviews, and fine-tuning of encoder-based models and open-source LLMs. Feature analysis reveals that deficient reviews exhibit lower rating scores, higher self-reported confidence, reduced structural complexity, and more negative sentiment than sufficient reviews. AI-generated text detection shows dramatic increases in AI-authored reviews since ChatGPT's emergence. Mixed training with synthetic and real data substantially improves detection performance - for example, Qwen 3-8B achieves recall of 0.6653 and F1 of 0.7073, up from 0.5499 and 0.5606 respectively. This study presents the first LLM-driven system for detecting deficient peer reviews, providing evidence to inform AI governance in peer review. Code, prompts, and data are available at https://github.com/haoxuan-unt2024/ReviewGuard

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Virtual Reality (VR) games marks a paradigm shift in the design of immersive, adaptive, and intelligent digital experiences. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent research at the intersection of LLMs and VR, examining how these models are transforming narrative generation, non-player character (NPC) interactions, accessibility, personalization, and game mastering. Drawing from an analysis of 62 peer reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2025, we identify key application domains ranging from emotionally intelligent NPCs and procedurally generated storytelling to AI-driven adaptive systems and inclusive gameplay interfaces. We also address the major challenges facing this convergence, including real-time performance constraints, memory limitations, ethical risks, and scalability barriers. Our findings highlight that while LLMs significantly enhance realism, creativity, and user engagement in VR environments, their effective deployment requires robust design strategies that integrate multimodal interaction, hybrid AI architectures, and ethical safeguards. The paper concludes by outlining future research directions in multimodal AI, affective computing, reinforcement learning, and open-source development, aiming to guide the responsible advancement of intelligent and inclusive VR systems.

We examined how online hate is motivated by receiving social approval via Walther's (2024) social approval theory of online hate, which argues (H1a) more signals of social approval on hate messages predicts more subsequent hate messages, and (H1b) as social approval increases, hate speech becomes more extreme. Using 110 million messages from Parler (2018-2021), we observed the number of upvotes received on a hate speech post was unassociated with hate speech in one's next post and during the next month, three-months, and six-months. The number of upvotes received on (extreme) hate speech comments, however, was positively associated with (extreme) hate speech during the next week, month, three-months, and six-months. Between-person effects revealed an average positive relationship between social approval and hate speech production at all time intervals. For comments, social approval linked more strongly to online hate than social disapproval. Social approval is a critical mechanism facilitating online hate propagation.

This paper studies the problem of learning a low-dimensional Euclidean metric from comparative judgments.

Asynchronous parallel optimization received substantial successes and extensive attention recently. One of core theoretical questions is how much speedup (or benefit) the asynchronous parallelization can bring to us. This paper provides a comprehensive and generic analysis to study the speedup property for a broad range of asynchronous parallel stochastic algorithms from the zeroth order to the first order methods. Our result recovers or improves existing analysis on special cases, provides more insights for understanding the asynchronous parallel behaviors, and suggests a novel asynchronous parallel zeroth order method for the first time. Our experiments provide novel applications of the proposed asynchronous parallel zeroth order method on hyper parameter tuning and model blending problems.

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence.

Quantum machine learning (QML) is a computational paradigm that seeks to apply quantum-mechanical resources to solve learning problems. As such, the goal of this framework is to leverage quantum processors to tackle optimization, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and generative modeling-among other tasks-more efficiently than classical models. Here we offer a high level overview of QML, focusing on settings where the quantum device is the primary learning or data generating unit. We outline the field's tensions between practicality and guarantees, access models and speedups, and classical baselines and claimed quantum advantages-flagging where evidence is strong, where it is conditional or still lacking, and where open questions remain. By shedding light on these nuances and debates, we aim to provide a friendly map of the QML landscape so that the reader can judge when-and under what assumptions-quantum approaches may offer real benefits.

Severe class imbalance is common in real-world tabular learning, where rare but important minority classes are essential for reliable prediction. Existing generative oversampling methods such as GANs, VAEs, and diffusion models can improve minority-class performance, but they often struggle with tabular heterogeneity, training stability, and privacy concerns. We propose a family of latent-space, tree-driven diffusion methods for minority oversampling that use conditional flow matching with gradient-boosted trees as the vector-field learner. The models operate in compact latent spaces to preserve tabular structure and reduce computation. We introduce three variants: PCAForest, which uses linear PCA embedding; EmbedForest, which uses a learned nonlinear embedding; and AttentionForest, which uses an attention-augmented embedding. Each method couples a GBT-based flow with a decoder back to the original feature space. Across 11 datasets from healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, AttentionForest achieves the best average minority recall while maintaining competitive precision, calibration, and distributional similarity. PCAForest and EmbedForest reach similar utility with much faster generation, offering favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. Privacy evaluated with nearest-neighbor distance ratio and distance-to-closest-record is comparable to or better than the ForestDiffusion baseline. Ablation studies show that smaller embeddings tend to improve minority recall, while aggressive learning rates harm stability. Overall, latent-space, tree-driven diffusion provides an efficient and privacy-aware approach to high-fidelity tabular data augmentation under severe class imbalance.