The emergence of multi-modal foundation models has markedly transformed the technology for autonomous driving, shifting away from conventional and mostly hand-crafted design choices towards unified, foundation-model-based approaches, capable of directly inferring motion trajectories from raw sensory inputs. This new class of methods can also incorporate natural language as an additional modality, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models serving as a representative example. In this review, we provide a comprehensive examination of such methods through a unifying taxonomy to critically evaluate their architectural design choices, methodological strengths, and their inherent capabilities and limitations. Our survey covers 37 recently proposed approaches that span the landscape of trajectory planning with foundation models. Furthermore, we assess these approaches with respect to the openness of their source code and datasets, offering valuable information to practitioners and researchers. We provide an accompanying webpage that catalogs the methods based on our taxonomy, available at: https://github.com/fiveai/FMs-for-driving-trajectories

Such models are integral to the development of context-aware surgical training systems and process monitoring platforms [11], [19] as well as for encoding adaptive robotic control policies in teleoperated environments [13], [20], [78]. However, their limited capacity to capture continuous biophysical dynamics can constrain their utility in applications where physiological fidelity is essential. Recognizing the limitations inherent in purely continuous or discrete approaches, hybrid modeling strategies have emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for surgical digital twins. These frameworks integrate continuous dynamic models with discrete state machines, enabling the simultaneous tracking of physiological changes and procedural events [8], [7], [19], [37]. For example, hybrid automata have been deployed to synchronize real-time updates of tissue deformation with the sequencing of surgical tool actions [7], [19]. This integration allows digital twins to provide context-sensitive support, adapting to abrupt workflow transitions and physiological perturbations alike--a critical requirement in both routine and emergent surgical scenarios [8], [11], [7]. B. Mutual Information and Information-Theoretic Approaches With the proliferation of multi-modal surgical data, information-theoretic concepts have become indispensable for quantifying uncertainty, relevance, and redundancy across heterogeneous information streams. Mutual information I(X; Y) has been adopted as a rigorous metric for selecting the most informative sensors, imaging modalities, or clinical parameters, thereby enhancing the efficiency and robustness of digital twin-enabled decision support [2], [3], [13], [34], [11], [51], [48], [26], [29]. This is formally captured as Eq.

Safe and trustworthy Human Robot Interaction (HRI) requires robots not only to complete tasks but also to regulate impedance and speed according to scene context and human proximity. We present SafeHumanoid, an egocentric vision pipeline that links Vision Language Models (VLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to schedule impedance and velocity parameters for a humanoid robot. Egocentric frames are processed by a structured VLM prompt, embedded and matched against a curated database of validated scenarios, and mapped to joint-level impedance commands via inverse kinematics. We evaluate the system on tabletop manipulation tasks with and without human presence, including wiping, object handovers, and liquid pouring. The results show that the pipeline adapts stiffness, damping, and speed profiles in a context-aware manner, maintaining task success while improving safety. Although current inference latency (up to 1.4 s) limits responsiveness in highly dynamic settings, SafeHumanoid demonstrates that semantic grounding of impedance control is a viable path toward safer, standard-compliant humanoid collaboration.

Standard Occupational Classifiers (SOC) are systems used to categorize and classify different types of jobs and occupations based on their similarities in terms of job duties, skills, and qualifications. Integrating these facets with Big Data from job advertisement offers the prospect to investigate labour demand that is specific to various occupations. This project investigates the use of recent developments in natural language processing to construct a classifier capable of assigning an occupation code to a given job advertisement. We develop various classifiers for both UK ONS SOC and US O*NET SOC, using different Language Models. We find that an ensemble model, which combines Google BERT and a Neural Network classifier while considering job title, description, and skills, achieved the highest prediction accuracy. Specifically, the ensemble model exhibited a classification accuracy of up to 61% for the lower (or fourth) tier of SOC, and 72% for the third tier of SOC. This model could provide up to date, accurate information on the evolution of the labour market using job advertisements.

Graph autoencoders have gained attention in nonlinear reduced-order modeling of parameterized partial differential equations defined on unstructured grids. Despite they provide a geometrically consistent way of treating complex domains, applying such architectures to parame-terized dynamical systems for temporal prediction beyond the training data, i.e. the extrapolation regime, is still a challenging task due to the simultaneous need of temporal causality and general-izability in the parametric space. In this work, we explore the integration of graph convolutional autoencoders (GCAs) with tensor train (TT) decomposition and Operator Inference (OpInf) to develop a time-consistent reduced-order model. In particular, high-fidelity snapshots are represented as a combination of parametric, spatial, and temporal cores via TT decomposition, while OpInf is used to learn the evolution of the latter. Moreover, we enhance the generalization performance by developing a multi-fidelity two-stages approach in the framework of Deep Operator Networks (DeepONet), treating the spatial and temporal cores as the trunk networks, and the parametric core as the branch network. Numerical results, including heat-conduction, advection-diffusion and vortex-shedding phenomena, demonstrate great performance in effectively learning the dynamic in the extrapolation regime for complex geometries, also in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches e.g.

Every day we share our personal information through digital systems which are constantly exposed to threats. For this reason, security-oriented disciplines of signal processing have received increasing attention in the last decades: multimedia forensics, digital watermarking, biometrics, network monitoring, steganography and steganalysis are just a few examples. Even though each of these fields has its own peculiarities, they all have to deal with a common problem: the presence of one or more adversaries aiming at making the system fail. Adversarial Signal Processing lays the basis of a general theory that takes into account the impact that the presence of an adversary has on the design of effective signal processing tools. By focusing on the application side of Adversarial Signal Processing, namely adversarial information fusion in distributed sensor networks, and adopting a game-theoretic approach, this thesis contributes to the above mission by addressing four issues. First, we address decision fusion in distributed sensor networks by developing a novel soft isolation defense scheme that protect the network from adversaries, specifically, Byzantines. Second, we develop an optimum decision fusion strategy in the presence of Byzantines. In the next step, we propose a technique to reduce the complexity of the optimum fusion by relying on a novel near-optimum message passing algorithm based on factor graphs. Finally, we introduce a defense mechanism to protect decentralized networks running consensus algorithm against data falsification attacks.

Numerous graph neural network (GNN)-based algorithms have been proposed to solve graph-based combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), but methods to explain their predictions remain largely undeveloped. We introduce ARM-Explainer, a post-hoc, model-level explainer based on association rule mining, and demonstrate it on the predictions of the hybrid geometric scattering (HGS) GNN for the maximum clique problem (MCP), a canonical NP-hard graph-based COP. The eight most explanatory association rules discovered by ARM-Explainer achieve high median lift and confidence values of 2.42 and 0.49, respectively, on test instances from the TWITTER and BHOSLIB-DIMACS benchmark datasets. ARM-Explainer identifies the most important node features, together with their value ranges, that influence the GNN's predictions on these datasets. Furthermore, augmenting the GNN with informative node features substantially improves its performance on the MCP, increasing the median largest-found clique size by 22% (from 29.5 to 36) on large graphs from the BHOSLIB-DIMACS dataset.

Understanding structure-property relationships in materials is fundamental in condensed matter physics and materials science. Over the past few years, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool for advancing this understanding and accelerating materials discovery. Early ML approaches primarily focused on constructing and screening large material spaces to identify promising candidates for various applications. More recently, research efforts have increasingly shifted toward generating crystal structures using end-to-end generative models. This review analyzes the current state of generative modeling for crystal structure prediction and \textit{de novo} generation. It examines crystal representations, outlines the generative models used to design crystal structures, and evaluates their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, the review highlights experimental considerations for evaluating generated structures and provides recommendations for suitable existing software tools. Emerging topics, such as modeling disorder and defects, integration in advanced characterization, and incorporating synthetic feasibility constraints, are explored. Ultimately, this work aims to inform both experimental scientists looking to adapt suitable ML models to their specific circumstances and ML specialists seeking to understand the unique challenges related to inverse materials design and discovery.

The integration of IoT and AI has unlocked innovation across industries, but growing privacy concerns and data isolation hinder progress. Traditional centralized ML struggles to overcome these challenges, which has led to the rise of Federated Learning (FL), a decentralized paradigm that enables collaborative model training without sharing local raw data. FL ensures data privacy, reduces communication overhead, and supports scalability, yet its heterogeneity adds complexity compared to centralized approaches. This survey focuses on three main FL research directions: personalization, optimization, and robustness, offering a structured classification through a hybrid methodology that combines bibliometric analysis with systematic review to identify the most influential works. We examine challenges and techniques related to heterogeneity, efficiency, security, and privacy, and provide a comprehensive overview of aggregation strategies, including architectures, synchronization methods, and diverse federation objectives. To complement this, we discuss practical evaluation approaches and present experiments comparing aggregation methods under IID and non-IID data distributions. Finally, we outline promising research directions to advance FL, aiming to guide future innovation in this rapidly evolving field.

While the increased integration of AI technologies into interactive systems enables them to solve an increasing number of tasks, the black-box problem of AI models continues to spread throughout the interactive system as a whole. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques can make AI models more accessible by employing post-hoc methods or transitioning to inherently interpretable models. While this makes individual AI models clearer, the overarching system architecture remains opaque. This challenge not only pertains to standard XAI techniques but also to human examination and conversational XAI approaches that need access to model internals to interpret them correctly and completely. To this end, we propose conceptually representing such interactive systems as sequences of structural building blocks. These include the AI models themselves, as well as control mechanisms grounded in literature. The structural building blocks can then be explained through complementary explanatory building blocks, such as established XAI techniques like LIME and SHAP. The flow and APIs of the structural building blocks form an unambiguous overview of the underlying system, serving as a communication basis for both human and automated agents, thus aligning human and machine interpretability of the embedded AI models. In this paper, we present our flow-based approach and a selection of building blocks as MATCH: a framework for engineering Multi-Agent Transparent and Controllable Human-centered systems. This research contributes to the field of (conversational) XAI by facilitating the integration of interpretability into existing interactive systems.