Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in enhancing the capabilities of defense systems, revolutionizing strategic decision-making, and shaping the future landscape of military operations. Neuro-Symbolic AI is an emerging approach that leverages and augments the strengths of neural networks and symbolic reasoning. These systems have the potential to be more impactful and flexible than traditional AI systems, making them well-suited for military applications. This paper comprehensively explores the diverse dimensions and capabilities of Neuro-Symbolic AI, aiming to shed light on its potential applications in military contexts. We investigate its capacity to improve decision-making, automate complex intelligence analysis, and strengthen autonomous systems. We further explore its potential to solve complex tasks in various domains, in addition to its applications in military contexts. Through this exploration, we address ethical, strategic, and technical considerations crucial to the development and deployment of Neuro-Symbolic AI in military and civilian applications. Contributing to the growing body of research, this study represents a comprehensive exploration of the extensive possibilities offered by Neuro-Symbolic AI.

Characterizing materials with electron micrographs is a crucial task in fields such as semiconductors and quantum materials. The complex hierarchical structure of micrographs often poses challenges for traditional classification methods. In this study, we propose an innovative backbone architecture for analyzing electron micrographs. We create multi-modal representations of the micrographs by tokenizing them into patch sequences and, additionally, representing them as vision graphs, commonly referred to as patch attributed graphs. We introduce the Hierarchical Network Fusion (HNF), a multi-layered network structure architecture that facilitates information exchange between the multi-modal representations and knowledge integration across different patch resolutions. Furthermore, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate detailed technical descriptions of nanomaterials as auxiliary information to assist in the downstream task. We utilize a cross-modal attention mechanism for knowledge fusion across cross-domain representations(both image-based and linguistic insights) to predict the nanomaterial category. This multi-faceted approach promises a more comprehensive and accurate representation and classification of micrographs for nanomaterial identification. Our framework outperforms traditional methods, overcoming challenges posed by distributional shifts, and facilitating high-throughput screening.

In today's rapidly evolving military landscape, advancing artificial intelligence (AI) in support of wargaming becomes essential. Despite reinforcement learning (RL) showing promise for developing intelligent agents, conventional RL faces limitations in handling the complexity inherent in combat simulations. This dissertation proposes a comprehensive approach, including targeted observation abstractions, multi-model integration, a hybrid AI framework, and an overarching hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework. Our localized observation abstraction using piecewise linear spatial decay simplifies the RL problem, enhancing computational efficiency and demonstrating superior efficacy over traditional global observation methods. Our multi-model framework combines various AI methodologies, optimizing performance while still enabling the use of diverse, specialized individual behavior models. Our hybrid AI framework synergizes RL with scripted agents, leveraging RL for high-level decisions and scripted agents for lower-level tasks, enhancing adaptability, reliability, and performance. Our HRL architecture and training framework decomposes complex problems into manageable subproblems, aligning with military decision-making structures. Although initial tests did not show improved performance, insights were gained to improve future iterations. This study underscores AI's potential to revolutionize wargaming, emphasizing the need for continued research in this domain.

Deep learning techniques have revolutionized image classification by mimicking human cognition and automating complex decision-making processes. However, the deployment of AI systems in the wild, especially in high-security domains such as defence, is curbed by the lack of explainability of the model. To this end, eXplainable AI (XAI) is an emerging area of research that is intended to explore the unexplained hidden black box nature of deep neural networks. This paper explores the application of the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tool to interpret the underwater image classification results, one of the first works in the domain to the best of our knowledge. Our study delves into the realm of SONAR image classification using a custom dataset derived from diverse sources, including the Seabed Objects KLSG dataset, the camera SONAR dataset, the mine SONAR images dataset, and the SCTD dataset. An extensive analysis of transfer learning techniques for image classification using benchmark Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures such as VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, etc. is carried out. On top of this classification model, a post-hoc XAI technique, viz. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) are incorporated to provide transparent justifications for the model's decisions by perturbing input data locally to see how predictions change. Furthermore, Submodular Picks LIME (SP-LIME) a version of LIME particular to images, that perturbs the image based on the submodular picks is also extensively studied. To this end, two submodular optimization algorithms i.e. Quickshift and Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) are leveraged towards submodular picks. The extensive analysis of XAI techniques highlights interpretability of the results in a more human-compliant way, thus boosting our confidence and reliability.

Research on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is being conducted in various sectors, from analyzing building materials and components to comprehensive evaluations of entire structures. However, reviews of the existing literature have been unable to provide a comprehensive overview of research in this field, leaving scholars without a definitive guideline for future investigations. This paper aims to fill this gap, mapping more than twenty years of research. Using an innovative methodology that combines social network analysis and text mining, the paper examined 8024 scientific abstracts. The authors identified seven key thematic groups, building and sustainability clusters (BSCs). To assess their significance in the broader discourse on building and sustainability, the semantic brand score (SBS) indicator was applied. Additionally, building and sustainability trends were tracked, focusing on the LCA concept. The major research topics mainly relate to building materials and energy efficiency. In addition to presenting an innovative approach to reviewing extensive literature domains, the article also provides insights into emerging and underdeveloped themes, outlining crucial future research directions.

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a new era of Natural Language Processing (NLP), introducing unprecedented capabilities that are revolutionizing various domains. This paper explores the current state of these cutting-edge technologies, demonstrating their remarkable advancements and wide-ranging applications. Our paper contributes to providing a holistic perspective on the technical foundations, practical applications, and emerging challenges within the evolving landscape of Generative AI and LLMs. We believe that understanding the generative capabilities of AI systems and the specific context of LLMs is crucial for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to collaboratively shape the responsible and ethical integration of these technologies into various domains. Furthermore, we identify and address main research gaps, providing valuable insights to guide future research endeavors within the AI research community.

Classical reactive synthesis approaches aim to synthesize a reactive system that always satisfies a given specifications. These approaches often reduce to playing a two-player zero-sum game where the goal is to synthesize a winning strategy. However, in many pragmatic domains, such as robotics, a winning strategy does not always exist, yet it is desirable for the system to make an effort to satisfy its requirements instead of "giving up". To this end, this paper investigates the notion of admissible strategies, which formalize "doing-your-best", in quantitative reachability games. We show that, unlike the qualitative case, quantitative admissible strategies are history-dependent even for finite payoff functions, making synthesis a challenging task. In addition, we prove that admissible strategies always exist but may produce undesirable optimistic behaviors. To mitigate this, we propose admissible winning strategies, which enforce the best possible outcome while being admissible. We show that both strategies always exist but are not memoryless. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of both strategies and propose synthesis algorithms. Finally, we illustrate the strategies on gridworld and robot manipulator domains.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has constantly reshaped the field of intelligent healthcare and medicine. As a vital technology, multimodal learning has increasingly garnered interest due to data complementarity, comprehensive modeling form, and great application potential. Currently, numerous researchers are dedicating their attention to this field, conducting extensive studies and constructing abundant intelligent systems. Naturally, an open question arises that has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? To answer the question, we adopt three unique viewpoints for a holistic analysis. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current progress of medical multimodal learning from the perspectives of datasets, task-oriented methods, and universal foundation models. Based on them, we further discuss the proposed question from five issues to explore the real impacts of advanced techniques in healthcare, from data and technologies to performance and ethics. The answer is that current technologies have NOT achieved universal intelligence and there remains a significant journey to undertake. Finally, in light of the above reviews and discussions, we point out ten potential directions for exploration towards the goal of universal intelligence in healthcare.

Mathematical analysis of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) led to the development of a mathematical function, usually called the inconsistency index, which has the center role in measuring the inconsistency of the judgements in AHP. Inconsistency index is a mathematical function which maps every pairwise comparison matrix (PCM) into a real number. An inconsistency index can be considered more trustworthy when it satisfies a set of suitable properties. Therefore, the research community has been trying to postulate a set of desirable rules (axioms, properties) for inconsistency indices. Subsequently, many axiomatic frameworks for these functions have been suggested independently, however, the literature on the topic is fragmented and missing a broader framework. Therefore, the objective of this article is twofold. Firstly, we provide a comprehensive review of the advancements in the axiomatization of inconsistency indices' properties during the last decade. Secondly, we provide a comparison and discussion of the aforementioned axiomatic structures along with directions of the future research.

Existing vehicle detectors are usually obtained by training a typical detector (e.g., YOLO, RCNN, DETR series) on vehicle images based on a pre-trained backbone (e.g., ResNet, ViT). Some researchers also exploit and enhance the detection performance using pre-trained large foundation models. However, we think these detectors may only get sub-optimal results because the large models they use are not specifically designed for vehicles. In addition, their results heavily rely on visual features, and seldom of they consider the alignment between the vehicle's semantic information and visual representations. In this work, we propose a new vehicle detection paradigm based on a pre-trained foundation vehicle model (VehicleMAE) and a large language model (T5), termed VFM-Det. It follows the region proposal-based detection framework and the features of each proposal can be enhanced using VehicleMAE. More importantly, we propose a new VAtt2Vec module that predicts the vehicle semantic attributes of these proposals and transforms them into feature vectors to enhance the vision features via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on three vehicle detection benchmark datasets thoroughly proved the effectiveness of our vehicle detector. Specifically, our model improves the baseline approach by $+5.1\%$, $+6.2\%$ on the $AP_{0.5}$, $AP_{0.75}$ metrics, respectively, on the Cityscapes dataset.The source code of this work will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VFM-Det.