The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed natural language processing and broadened its impact across research and society. Yet, systematic evaluation of these models, especially for languages beyond English, remains limited. "Challenging the Abilities of LAnguage Models in ITAlian" (CALAMITA) is a large-scale collaborative benchmarking initiative for Italian, coordinated under the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics. Unlike existing efforts that focus on leaderboards, CALAMITA foregrounds methodology: it federates more than 80 contributors from academia, industry, and the public sector to design, document, and evaluate a diverse collection of tasks, covering linguistic competence, commonsense reasoning, factual consistency, fairness, summarization, translation, and code generation. Through this process, we not only assembled a benchmark of over 20 tasks and almost 100 subtasks, but also established a centralized evaluation pipeline that supports heterogeneous datasets and metrics. We report results for four open-weight LLMs, highlighting systematic strengths and weaknesses across abilities, as well as challenges in task-specific evaluation. Beyond quantitative results, CALAMITA exposes methodological lessons: the necessity of fine-grained, task-representative metrics, the importance of harmonized pipelines, and the benefits and limitations of broad community engagement. CALAMITA is conceived as a rolling benchmark, enabling continuous integration of new tasks and models. This makes it both a resource -- the most comprehensive and diverse benchmark for Italian to date -- and a framework for sustainable, community-driven evaluation. We argue that this combination offers a blueprint for other languages and communities seeking inclusive and rigorous LLM evaluation practices.

It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is not only computationally expensive but also risks degrading the model's pre-existing abilities.To address this, we introduce a lightweight component, Test-Time Steering Vectors (TTSV), which is prepended to the input while keeping the LLM's parameters entirely frozen. By optimizing the TTSV on test data to minimize the model's output entropy, we steer the model towards an internal state of higher confidence, activating its inherent abilities most relevant to the current task. TTSV is both lightweight and highly efficient to optimize, making it a true plug-and-play enhancement. Extensive experiments validate our approach's effectiveness on both base models and reasoning-enhanced models. For instance, on the MATH500 task, TTSV achieves a 45.88% relative performance gain on the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model and a 16.22% relative gain on the Qwen3-4B model. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization, with its steering vectors proving highly transferable across diverse tasks.

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) are designed to handle changes and uncertainties through a feedback loop with four core functionalities: monitoring, analyzing, planning, and execution. Recently, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially the area of large language models, has shown impressive performance in data comprehension and logical reasoning. These capabilities are highly aligned with the functionalities required in SASs, suggesting a strong potential to employ GenAI to enhance SASs. However, the specific benefits and challenges of employing GenAI in SASs remain unclear. Yet, providing a comprehensive understanding of these benefits and challenges is complex due to several reasons: limited publications in the SAS field, the technological and application diversity within SASs, and the rapid evolution of GenAI technologies. To that end, this paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners a comprehensive snapshot that outlines the potential benefits and challenges of employing GenAI's within SAS. Specifically, we gather, filter, and analyze literature from four distinct research fields and organize them into two main categories to potential benefits: (i) enhancements to the autonomy of SASs centered around the specific functions of the MAPE-K feedback loop, and (ii) improvements in the interaction between humans and SASs within human-on-the-loop settings. From our study, we outline a research roadmap that highlights the challenges of integrating GenAI into SASs. The roadmap starts with outlining key research challenges that need to be tackled to exploit the potential for applying GenAI in the field of SAS. The roadmap concludes with a practical reflection, elaborating on current shortcomings of GenAI and proposing possible mitigation strategies.

Removing specific data influence from large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, as retraining is costly and existing approximate unlearning methods are often unstable. The challenge is exacerbated when the forget set is small or imbalanced. We introduce RapidUn, an influence-driven and parameter-efficient unlearning framework. It first estimates per-sample influence through a fast estimation module, then maps these scores into adaptive update weights that guide selective parameter updates -- forgetting harmful behavior while retaining general knowledge. On Mistral-7B and Llama-3-8B across Dolly-15k and Alpaca-57k, RapidUn achieves up to 100 times higher efficiency than full retraining and consistently outperforms Fisher, GA, and LoReUn on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution forgetting. These results establish influence-guided parameter reweighting as a scalable and interpretable paradigm for LLM unlearning.

The evolution toward sixth-generation wireless systems positions intelligence as a native network capability, fundamentally transforming the design of radio access networks (RANs). Within this vision, Semantic-native communication and agentic intelligence are expected to play central roles. SemCom departs from bit-level fidelity and instead emphasizes task-oriented meaning exchange, enabling compact SC and introducing new performance measures such as semantic fidelity and task success rate. Agentic intelligence endows distributed RAN entities with goal-driven autonomy, reasoning, planning, and multi-agent collaboration, increasingly supported by foundation models and knowledge graphs. In this work, we first introduce the conceptual foundations of SemCom and agentic networking, and discuss why existing AI-driven O-RAN solutions remain largely bit-centric and task-siloed. We then present a unified taxonomy that organizes recent research along three axes: i) semantic abstraction level (symbol/feature/intent/knowledge), ii) agent autonomy and coordination granularity (single-, multi-, and hierarchical-agent), and iii) RAN control placement across PHY/MAC, near-real-time RIC, and non-real-time RIC. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically introduce enabling technologies including task-oriented semantic encoders/decoders, multi-agent reinforcement learning, foundation-model-assisted RAN agents, and knowledge-graph-based reasoning for cross-layer awareness. Representative 6G use cases, such as immersive XR, vehicular V2X, and industrial digital twins, are analyzed to illustrate the semantic-agentic convergence in practice. Finally, we identify open challenges in semantic representation standardization, scalable trustworthy agent coordination, O-RAN interoperability, and energy-efficient AI deployment, and outline research directions toward operational semantic-agentic AI-RAN.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is catalyzing a shift towards autonomous AI Agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks. However, these agents remain brittle when faced with real-world exceptions, making Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) supervision essential for mission-critical applications. In this paper, we present AgentBay, a novel sandbox service designed from the ground up for hybrid interaction. AgentBay provides secure, isolated execution environments spanning Windows, Linux, Android, Web Browsers, and Code interpreters. Its core contribution is a unified session accessible via a hybrid control interface: An AI agent can interact programmatically via mainstream interfaces (MCP, Open Source SDK), while a human operator can, at any moment, seamlessly take over full manual control. This seamless intervention is enabled by Adaptive Streaming Protocol (ASP). Unlike traditional VNC/RDP, ASP is specifically engineered for this hybrid use case, delivering an ultra-low-latency, smoother user experience that remains resilient even in weak network environments. It achieves this by dynamically blending command-based and video-based streaming, adapting its encoding strategy based on network conditions and the current controller (AI or human). Our evaluation demonstrates strong results in security, performance, and task completion rates. In a benchmark of complex tasks, the AgentBay (Agent + Human) model achieved more than 48% success rate improvement. Furthermore, our ASP protocol reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 50% compared to standard RDP, and in end-to-end latency with around 5% reduction, especially under poor network conditions. We posit that AgentBay provides a foundational primitive for building the next generation of reliable, human-supervised autonomous systems.

This review explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence into Horizon Scanning, focusing on identifying and responding to emerging threats and opportunities linked to Infectious Diseases. We examine how AI tools can enhance signal detection, data monitoring, scenario analysis, and decision support. We also address the risks associated with AI adoption and propose strategies for effective implementation and governance. The findings contribute to the growing body of Foresight literature by demonstrating the potential and limitations of AI in Public Health preparedness.

Adversarial training is an effective method to improve the machine learning (ML) model robustness. Most existing studies typically consider the Rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function and centralized training environments. In this paper, we study the ML model robustness using ten different activation functions through adversarial training in centralized environments and explore the ML model robustness in federal learning environments. In the centralized environment, we first propose an advanced adversarial training approach to improving the ML model robustness by incorporating model architecture change, soft labeling, simplified data augmentation, and varying learning rates. Then, we conduct extensive experiments on ten well-known activation functions in addition to ReLU to better understand how they impact the ML model robustness. Furthermore, we extend the proposed adversarial training approach to the federal learning environment, where both independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data settings are considered. Our proposed centralized adversarial training approach achieves a natural and robust accuracy of 77.08% and 67.96%, respectively on CIFAR-10 against the fast gradient sign attacks. Experiments on ten activation functions reveal ReLU usually performs best. In the federated learning environment, however, the robust accuracy decreases significantly, especially on non-IID data. To address the significant performance drop in the non-IID data case, we introduce data sharing and achieve the natural and robust accuracy of 70.09% and 54.79%, respectively, surpassing the CalFAT algorithm, when 40% data sharing is used. That is, a proper percentage of data sharing can significantly improve the ML model robustness, which is useful to some real-world applications.

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform education, most existing AI evaluations rely primarily on technical performance metrics such as accuracy or task efficiency while overlooking human identity, learner agency, contextual learning processes, and ethical considerations. In this paper, we present TEACH-AI (Trustworthy and Effective AI Classroom Heuristics), a domain-independent, pedagogically grounded, and stakeholder-aligned framework with measurable indicators and a practical toolkit for guiding the design, development, and evaluation of generative AI systems in educational contexts. Built on an extensive literature review and synthesis, the ten-component assessment framework and toolkit checklist provide a foundation for scalable, value-aligned AI evaluation in education. TEACH-AI rethinks "evaluation" through sociotechnical, educational, theoretical, and applied lenses, engaging designers, developers, researchers, and policymakers across AI and education. Our work invites the community to reconsider what constructs "effective" AI in education and to design model evaluation approaches that promote co-creation, inclusivity, and long-term human, social, and educational impact.

This article presents the first systematic review of unsupervised and semi-supervised computational text-based ideal point estimation (CT-IPE) algorithms, methods designed to infer latent political positions from textual data. These algorithms are widely used in political science, communication, computational social science, and computer science to estimate ideological preferences from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, and social media. Over the past two decades, their development has closely followed broader NLP trends -- beginning with word-frequency models and most recently turning to large language models (LLMs). While this trajectory has greatly expanded the methodological toolkit, it has also produced a fragmented field that lacks systematic comparison and clear guidance for applied use. To address this gap, we identified 25 CT-IPE algorithms through a systematic literature review and conducted a manual content analysis of their modeling assumptions and development contexts. To compare them meaningfully, we introduce a conceptual framework that distinguishes how algorithms generate, capture, and aggregate textual variance. On this basis, we identify four methodological families -- word-frequency, topic modeling, word embedding, and LLM-based approaches -- and critically assess their assumptions, interpretability, scalability, and limitations. Our review offers three contributions. First, it provides a structured synthesis of two decades of algorithm development, clarifying how diverse methods relate to one another. Second, it translates these insights into practical guidance for applied researchers, highlighting trade-offs in transparency, technical requirements, and validation strategies that shape algorithm choice. Third, it emphasizes that differences in estimation outcomes across algorithms are themselves informative, underscoring the need for systematic benchmarking.