ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of three end-to-end models developed for the NOCASA 2025 Challenge, aimed at automatic word-level pronunciation assessment for children learning Norwegian as a second language. Our models include an encoder-decoder Siamese architecture (E2E-R), a prefix-tuned direct classification model leveraging pretrained wav2vec2.0 We introduce a weighted ordinal cross-entropy loss tailored for optimizing metrics such as unweighted average recall and mean absolute error. Among the explored methods, our GOP-CTC-based model achieved the highest performance, substantially surpassing challenge baselines and attaining top leaderboard scores. Index T erms-- Speech assessment, GOP, NOCASA 1. INTRODUCTION The task of speech pronunciation assessment focuses on automatically evaluating a language learner's pronunciation of phonemes, words, or complete utterances. Such systems can be used to provide feedback in computer-aided language learning applications.

--Robust and efficient deep LiDAR odometry models are crucial for accurate localization and 3D reconstruction, but typically require extensive and diverse training data to adapt to diverse environments, leading to inefficiencies. T o tackle this, we introduce an active training framework designed to selectively extract training data from diverse environments, thereby reducing the training load and enhancing model generalization. Our framework is based on two key strategies: Initial Training Set Selection (ITSS) and Active Incremental Selection (AIS). ITSS begins by breaking down motion sequences from general weather into nodes and edges for detailed trajectory analysis, prioritizing diverse sequences to form a rich initial training dataset for training the base model. For complex sequences that are difficult to analyze, especially under challenging snowy weather conditions, AIS uses scene reconstruction and prediction inconsistency to iteratively select training samples, refining the model to handle a wide range of real-world scenarios. Notably, our method matches the performance of full-dataset training with just 52% of the sequence volume, demonstrating the training efficiency and robustness of our active training paradigm. By optimizing the training process, our approach sets the stage for more agile and reliable LiDAR odometry systems, capable of navigating diverse environmental conditions with greater precision. Index T erms --LiDAR odometry, inefficiencies, initial training set selection, active incremental selection. IDAR odometry (LO) is a foundational technique for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) [1]- [3], which is widely used in the field of autonomous driving.

The quasi-repetitive nature of construction work and the resulting lack of generalizability in programming construction robots presents persistent challenges to the broad adoption of robots in the construction industry. Robots cannot achieve generalist capabilities as skills learnt from one domain cannot readily transfer to another work domain or be directly used to perform a different set of tasks. Human workers have to arduously reprogram their scene-understanding, path-planning, and manipulation components to enable the robots to perform alternate work tasks. The methods presented in this paper resolve a significant proportion of such reprogramming workload by proposing a generalizable learning architecture that directly teaches robots versatile task-performance skills through crowdsourced online natural language instructions. A Large Language Model (LLM), a standardized and modularized hierarchical modeling approach, and Building Information Modeling-Robot sematic data pipeline are developed to address the multi-task skill transfer problem. The proposed skill standardization scheme and LLM-based hierarchical skill learning framework were tested with a long-horizon drywall installation experiment using a full-scale industrial robotic manipulator. The resulting robot task learning scheme achieves multi-task reprogramming with minimal effort and high quality.

Class imbalance remains a critical challenge in machine learning (ML), particularly in the medical domain, where underrepresented minority classes lead to biased models and reduced predictive performance. This study introduces Quantum-Inspired SMOTE (QI-SMOTE), a novel data augmentation technique that enhances the performance of ML classifiers, including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Neural Networks, by leveraging quantum principles such as quantum evolution and layered entanglement. Unlike conventional oversampling methods, QI-SMOTE generates synthetic instances that preserve complex data structures, improving model generalization and classification accuracy. We validate QI-SMOTE on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets, using mortality detection as a benchmark task due to their clinical significance and inherent class imbalance. We compare our method against traditional oversampling techniques, including Borderline-SMOTE, ADASYN, SMOTE-ENN, SMOTE-TOMEK, and SVM-SMOTE, using key performance metrics such as Accuracy, F1-score, G-Mean, and AUC-ROC. The results demonstrate that QI-SMOTE significantly improves the effectiveness of ensemble methods (RF, GB, ADA), kernel-based models (SVM), and deep learning approaches by producing more informative and balanced training data. By integrating quantum-inspired transformations into the ML pipeline, QI-SMOTE not only mitigates class imbalance but also enhances the robustness and reliability of predictive models in medical diagnostics and decision-making. This study highlights the potential of quantum-inspired resampling techniques in advancing state-of-the-art ML methodologies.

Existing approaches to predictive uncertainty rely either on multi-hypothesis prediction, which promotes diversity but lacks principled aggregation, or on ensemble learning, which improves accuracy but rarely captures the structured ambiguity. This implicitly means that a unified framework consistent with the loss geometry remains absent. The Structured Basis Function Network addresses this gap by linking multi-hypothesis prediction and ensembling through centroidal aggregation induced by Bregman divergences. The formulation applies across regression and classification by aligning predictions with the geometry of the loss, and supports both a closed-form least-squares estimator and a gradient-based procedure for general objectives. A tunable diversity mechanism provides parametric control of the bias-variance-diversity trade-off, connecting multi-hypothesis generalisation with loss-aware ensemble aggregation. Experiments validate this relation and use the mechanism to study the complexity-capacity-diversity trade-off across datasets of increasing difficulty with deep-learning predictors.

The paper presents an experiment on the effects of adaptive emotional alignment between agents, considered a prerequisite for empathic communication, in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Using the NAO robot, we investigate the impact of an emotionally aligned, empathic, dialogue on these aspects: (i) the robot's persuasive effectiveness, (ii) the user's communication style, and (iii) the attribution of mental states and empathy to the robot. In an experiment with 42 participants, two conditions were compared: one with neutral communication and another where the robot provided responses adapted to the emotions expressed by the users. The results show that emotional alignment does not influence users' communication styles or have a persuasive effect. However, it significantly influences attribution of mental states to the robot and its perceived empathy

Recent studies indicate that robotic coaches can play a crucial role in promoting wellbeing. However, the real-world deployment of wellbeing robots raises numerous ethical and socio-technical questions and concerns. To explore these questions, we undertake a community-centered investigation to examine three different communities' perspectives on using robotic wellbeing coaches in real-world environments. We frame our work as an anticipatory ethical investigation, which we undertake to better inform the development of robotic technologies with communities' opinions, with the ultimate goal of aligning robot development with public interest. We conducted workshops with three communities who are under-represented in robotics development: 1) members of the public at a science festival, 2) women computer scientists at a conference, and 3) humanities researchers interested in history and philosophy of science. In the workshops, we collected qualitative data using the Social Robot Co-Design Canvas on Ethics. We analysed the collected qualitative data with Thematic Analysis, informed by notes taken during workshops. Through our analysis, we identify four themes regarding key ethical and socio-technical questions about the real-world use of wellbeing robots. We group participants' insights and discussions around these broad thematic questions, discuss them in light of state-of-the-art literature, and highlight areas for future investigation. Finally, we provide the four questions as a broad framework that roboticists can and should use during robotic development and deployment, in order to reflect on the ethics and socio-technical dimensions of their robotic applications, and to engage in dialogue with communities of robot users. The four questions are: 1) Is the robot safe and how can we know that?, 2) Who is the robot built for and with?, 3) Who owns the robot and the data?, and 4) Why a robot?.

Administrative registry data can be used to construct population-scale networks whose ties reflect shared social contexts between persons. With machine learning, such networks can be encoded into numerical representations -- embeddings -- that automatically capture individuals' position within the network. We created embeddings for all persons in the Dutch population from a population-scale network that represents five shared contexts: neighborhood, work, family, household, and school. To assess the informativeness of these embeddings, we used them to predict right-wing populist voting. Embeddings alone predicted right-wing populist voting above chance-level but performed worse than individual characteristics. Combining the best subset of embeddings with individual characteristics only slightly improved predictions. After transforming the embeddings to make their dimensions more sparse and orthogonal, we found that one embedding dimension was strongly associated with the outcome. Mapping this dimension back to the population network revealed differences in network structure related to right-wing populist voting between different school ties and achieved education levels. Our study contributes methodologically by demonstrating how population-scale network embeddings can be made interpretable, and substantively by linking structural network differences in education to right-wing populist voting.

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them--I generally choose not to--but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter.

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity in conducting prediction tasks in-context, understanding the sources of uncertainty in in-context learning becomes essential to ensuring reliability. The recent hypothesis of in-context learning performing predictive Bayesian inference opens the avenue for Bayesian uncertainty estimation, particularly for decomposing uncertainty into epistemic uncertainty due to lack of in-context data and aleatoric uncertainty inherent in the in-context prediction task. However, the decomposition idea remains under-explored due to the intractability of the latent parameter posterior from the underlying Bayesian model. In this work, we introduce a variational uncertainty decomposition framework for in-context learning without explicitly sampling from the latent parameter posterior, by optimising auxiliary queries as probes to obtain an upper bound to the aleatoric uncertainty of an LLM's in-context learning procedure, which also induces a lower bound to the epistemic uncertainty. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world tasks, we show quantitatively and qualitatively that the decomposed uncertainties obtained from our method exhibit desirable properties of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty.