This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving large-scale Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) by introducing a two-stage decomposition strategy. In the first stage, a factor-based algorithm partitions the global MDP into smaller, goal-specific sub-MDPs by leveraging domain-specific features such as goal priority, fault states, spatial layout, and energy constraints. In the second stage, a priority-based recombination algorithm solves each sub-MDP independently and integrates the results into a unified global policy using a meta-policy for conflict resolution. Importantly, we present a theoretical analysis showing that, under mild probabilistic independence assumptions, the combined policy is provably equivalent to the optimal global MDP policy. Our work advances artificial intelligence (AI) decision scalability by decomposing large MDPs into tractable subproblems with provable global equivalence. The proposed decomposition framework enhances the scalability of Markov Decision Processes, a cornerstone of sequential decision-making in artificial intelligence, enabling real-time policy updates for complex mission environments. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating orders-of-magnitude reduction in computation time without sacrificing mission reliability or policy optimality. The proposed framework establishes a practical and robust foundation for scalable decision-making in real-time UAV mission execution.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is gaining recognition as one of the key technological axes for next generation information retrieval, owing to its ability to mitigate the hallucination phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs)and effectively incorporate up-to-date information. However, specialized expertise is necessary to construct ahigh-quality retrieval system independently; moreover, RAGdemonstratesrelativelyslowerprocessing speeds compared to conventional pure retrieval systems because it involves both retrieval and generation stages. Accordingly, this study proposes SHRAG, a novel framework designed to facilitate the seamless integration of Information Retrieval and RAG while simultaneously securing precise retrieval performance. SHRAG utilizes a Large Language Model as a Query Strategist to automatically transform unstructured natural language queries into logically structured search queries, subsequently performing Boolean retrieval to emulate the search process of an expert human searcher. Furthermore, it incorporates multilingual query expansion and a multilingual embedding model, enabling it to perform efficient cross-lingual question answering within the multilingual dataset environment of the ScienceON Challenge. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, combining logical retrieval capabilities and generative reasoning, can significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of RAG systems. Furthermore, SHRAG movesbeyondconventionaldocument-centric retrieval methods, presenting the potential for a new search paradigm capable of providing direct and reliable responses to queries.

Demographic forecasting remains a fundamental challenge for policy planning in rapidly evolving nations such as India, where fertility transitions, policy interventions, and age structured dynamics interact in complex ways. In this study, we present a hybrid modelling framework that integrates policy-aware fertility functions into a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) enhanced with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to capture physical constraints and temporal dependencies in population dynamics. The model is applied to India's age structured population from 2024 to 2054 under three fertility-policy scenarios: continuation of current fertility decline, stricter population control, and relaxed fertility promotion. The governing transport-reaction partial differential equation is formulated with India-specific demographic indicators, including age-specific fertility and mortality rates. PINNs embed the core population equation and policy-driven fertility changes, while LSTM layers improve long-term forecasting across decades. Results show that fertility policies substantially shape future age distribution, dependency ratios, and workforce size. Stricter controls intensify ageing and reduce labour force participation, whereas relaxed policies support workforce growth but increase population pressure. Our findings suggest that the hybrid LSTM-PINN is an effective approach for demographic forecasting, offering accuracy with interpretability. Beyond methodological novelty, this work provides actionable insights for India's demographic policy debates, highlighting the need for balanced fertility interventions to ensure sustainable socio-economic development.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have garnered significant attention from researchers owing to their exceptional capability in addressing complex tasks. Motivated by the observed human-like behaviors in their reasoning processes, this paper introduces a comprehensive taxonomy to characterize atomic reasoning steps and probe the ``psyche'' of LRM intelligence. Specifically, it comprises five groups and seventeen categories derived from human mental processes, thereby grounding the understanding of LRMs in an interdisciplinary perspective. The taxonomy is then applied for an in-depth understanding of current LRMs, resulting in a distinct labeled dataset that comprises 277,534 atomic reasoning steps. Using this resource, we analyze contemporary LRMs and distill several actionable takeaways for improving training and post-training of reasoning models. Notably, our analysis reveals that prevailing post-answer ``double-checks'' (self-monitoring evaluations) are largely superficial and rarely yield substantive revisions. Thus, incentivizing comprehensive multi-step reflection, rather than simple self-monitoring, may offer a more effective path forward. To complement the taxonomy, an automatic annotation framework, named CAPO, is proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) for generating the taxonomy-based annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that CAPO achieves higher consistency with human experts compared to baselines, facilitating a scalable and comprehensive analysis of LRMs from a human cognitive perspective. Together, the taxonomy, CAPO, and the derived insights provide a principled, scalable path toward understanding and advancing LRM reasoning.

Isolated digit classification has served as a motivating problem for decades of machine learning research. In real settings, numbers often occur as multiple digits, all written by the same person. Examples include ZIP Codes, handwritten check amounts, and appointment times. In this work, we leverage knowledge about the writers of NIST digit images to create more realistic benchmark multi-digit writer (MDW) data sets. As expected, we find that classifiers may perform well on isolated digits yet do poorly on multi-digit number recognition. If we want to solve real number recognition problems, additional advances are needed. The MDW benchmarks come with task-specific performance metrics that go beyond typical error calculations to more closely align with real-world impact. They also create opportunities to develop methods that can leverage task-specific knowledge to improve performance well beyond that of individual digit classification methods.

Fractional-order models provide an effective means of describing intrinsically time-dependent viscoelastic dynamics with few parameters, as these models can naturally capture memory effects. However, due to the unintuitive frequency-dependent coupling between the order of the fractional element and the other parameters, determining appropriate parameters for fractional-order models that yield high perceived realism remains a significant challenge. In this study, we propose a systematic means of determining the parameters of fractional-order viscoelastic models that optimizes the perceived realism of haptic rendering across general populations. First, we demonstrate that the parameters of fractional-order models can be effectively optimized through active learning, via qualitative feedback-based human-in-the-loop (HiL) optimizations, to ensure consistently high realism ratings for each individual. Second, we propose a rigorous method to combine HiL optimization results to form an aggregate perceptual map trained on the entire dataset and demonstrate the selection of population-level optimal parameters from this representation that are broadly perceived as realistic across general populations. Finally, we provide evidence of the effectiveness of the generalized fractional-order viscoelastic model parameters by characterizing their perceived realism through human-subject experiments. Overall, generalized fractional-order viscoelastic models established through the proposed HiL optimization and aggregation approach possess the potential to significantly improve the sim-to-real transition performance of medical training simulators. Index T erms--Viscoelastic materials, fractional-order standard linear solid model, haptic rendering, human-in-the-loop optimization, perceived realism, and medical training simulators.

When solving tasks in the field of natural language processing, we sometimes need dictionary tools, such as lexicons, word form dictionaries or knowledge bases. However, the availability of dictionary data is insufficient in many languages, especially in the case of low resourced languages. In this article, we introduce a new conceptual dictionary for the Slovak language as the first linguistic tool of this kind. Since Slovak language is a language with limited linguistic resources and there are currently not available any machine-readable linguistic data sources with a sufficiently large volume of data, many tasks which require automated processing of Slovak text achieve weaker results compared to other languages and are almost impossible to solve.

Current evaluation of mathematical reasoning in language models relies primarily on answer accuracy, potentially masking fundamental failures in logical computation. We introduce a diagnostic framework that distinguishes genuine mathematical reasoning from superficial pattern matching through four complementary axes: forward-backward consistency, transitivity coverage, counterfactual sensitivity, and perturbation robustness. Through a case study applying this framework to Qwen3-0.6B on the MenatQA dataset, we reveal a striking disconnect between surface performance and reasoning fidelity--while the model achieves reasonable answer accuracy (70%+), it demonstrates poor backward consistency (15%), limited transitivity coverage (32.2%), and brittle sensitivity to perturbations. Our diagnostics expose reasoning failures invisible to traditional accuracy metrics, suggesting that this small model relies heavily on pattern matching rather than genuine logical computation. While our empirical findings are based on a single 600M-parameter model, the diagnostic framework itself is model-agnostic and generalizable. We release our evaluation protocols to enable the research community to assess reasoning fidelity across different model scales and architectures, moving beyond surface-level accuracy toward verifiable mathematical reasoning.

Active imitation learning (AIL) combats covariate shift by querying an expert during training. However, expert action labeling often dominates the cost, especially in GPU-intensive simulators, human-in-the-loop settings, and robot fleets that revisit near-duplicate states. We present Conformalized Rejection Sampling for Active Imitation Learning (CRSAIL), a querying rule that requests an expert action only when the visited state is under-represented in the expert-labeled dataset. CRSAIL scores state novelty by the distance to the $K$-th nearest expert state and sets a single global threshold via conformal prediction. This threshold is the empirical $(1-α)$ quantile of on-policy calibration scores, providing a distribution-free calibration rule that links $α$ to the expected query rate and makes $α$ a task-agnostic tuning knob. This state-space querying strategy is robust to outliers and, unlike safety-gate-based AIL, can be run without real-time expert takeovers: we roll out full trajectories (episodes) with the learner and only afterward query the expert on a subset of visited states. Evaluated on MuJoCo robotics tasks, CRSAIL matches or exceeds expert-level reward while reducing total expert queries by up to 96% vs. DAgger and up to 65% vs. prior AIL methods, with empirical robustness to $α$ and $K$, easing deployment on novel systems with unknown dynamics.

With the rapid advancement of intelligent education, Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) has attracted increasing attention by integrating educational psychology with deep learning technologies. Unlike traditional paper-and-pencil testing, CAT aims to efficiently and accurately assess examinee abilities by adaptively selecting the most suitable items during the assessment process. However, its real-time and sequential nature presents limitations in practical scenarios, particularly in large-scale assessments where interaction costs are high, or in sensitive domains such as psychological evaluations where minimizing noise and interference is essential. These challenges constrain the applicability of conventional CAT methods in time-sensitive or resourceconstrained environments. To this end, we first introduce a novel task called one-shot adaptive testing (OAT), which aims to select a fixed set of optimal items for each test-taker in a one-time selection. Meanwhile, we propose PEOAT, a Personalization-guided Evolutionary question assembly framework for One-shot Adaptive Testing from the perspective of combinatorial optimization. Specifically, we began by designing a personalization-aware initialization strategy that integrates differences between examinee ability and exercise difficulty, using multi-strategy sampling to construct a diverse and informative initial population. Building on this, we proposed a cognitive-enhanced evolutionary framework incorporating schema-preserving crossover and cognitively guided mutation to enable efficient exploration through informative signals. To maintain diversity without compromising fitness, we further introduced a diversity-aware environmental selection mechanism. The effectiveness of PEOAT is validated through extensive experiments on two datasets, complemented by case studies that uncovered valuable insights.