We introduce the {\em Atlas Urban Index} (AUI), a metric for measuring urban development computed using Sentinel-2 \citep{spoto2012sentinel2} satellite imagery. Existing approaches, such as the {\em Normalized Difference Built-up Index} (NDBI), often struggle to accurately capture urban development due to factors like atmospheric noise, seasonal variation, and cloud cover. These limitations hinder large-scale monitoring of human development and urbanization. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that leverages {\em Vision-Language Models }(VLMs) to provide a development score for regions. Specifically, we collect a time series of Sentinel-2 images for each region. Then, we further process the images within fixed time windows to get an image with minimal cloud cover, which serves as the representative image for that time window. To ensure consistent scoring, we adopt two strategies: (i) providing the VLM with a curated set of reference images representing different levels of urbanization, and (ii) supplying the most recent past image to both anchor temporal consistency and mitigate cloud-related noise in the current image. Together, these components enable AUI to overcome the challenges of traditional urbanization indices and produce more reliable and stable development scores. Our qualitative experiments on Bangalore suggest that AUI outperforms standard indices such as NDBI.

As information technology advances, education is moving from one-size-fits-all instruction toward personalized learning. However, most methods handle modeling, item selection, and feedback in isolation rather than as a closed loop. This leads to coarse or opaque student models, assumption-bound adaptivity that ignores diagnostic posteriors, and generic, non-actionable feedback. To address these limitations, this paper presents an end-to-end personalized learning agent, EduLoop-Agent, which integrates a Neural Cognitive Diagnosis model (NCD), a Bounded-Ability Estimation Computerized Adaptive Testing strategy (BECAT), and large language models (LLMs). The NCD module provides fine-grained estimates of students' mastery at the knowledge-point level; BECAT dynamically selects subsequent items to maximize relevance and learning efficiency; and LLMs convert diagnostic signals into structured, actionable feedback. Together, these components form a closed-loop framework of ``Diagnosis--Recommendation--Feedback.'' Experiments on the ASSISTments dataset show that the NCD module achieves strong performance on response prediction while yielding interpretable mastery assessments. The adaptive recommendation strategy improves item relevance and personalization, and the LLM-based feedback offers targeted study guidance aligned with identified weaknesses. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed design is effective and practically deployable, providing a feasible pathway to generating individualized learning trajectories in intelligent education.

Upcoming surveys will produce billions of galaxy images but comparatively few spectra, motivating models that learn cross-modal representations. We build a dataset of 134,533 galaxy images (HSC-PDR2) and spectra (DESI-DR1) and adapt a Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoder (MMAE) to embed both images and spectra in a shared representation. The MMAE is a transformer-based architecture, which we train by masking 75% of the data and reconstructing missing image and spectral tokens. We use this model to test three applications: spectral and image reconstruction from heavily masked data and redshift regression from images alone. It recovers key physical features, such as galaxy shapes, atomic emission line peaks, and broad continuum slopes, though it struggles with fine image details and line strengths. For redshift regression, the MMAE performs comparably or better than prior multi-modal models in terms of prediction scatter even when missing spectra in testing. These results highlight both the potential and limitations of masked autoencoders in astrophysics and motivate extensions to additional modalities, such as text, for foundation models.

Random walk neural networks (RWNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for graph representation learning, leveraging recent advances in sequence models to process random walks. However, under realistic sampling constraints, RWNNs often fail to capture global structure even in small graphs due to incomplete node and edge coverage, limiting their expressivity. To address this, we propose \textit{random search neural networks} (RSNNs), which operate on random searches, each of which guarantees full node coverage. Theoretically, we demonstrate that in sparse graphs, only $O(\log |V|)$ searches are needed to achieve full edge coverage, substantially reducing sampling complexity compared to the $O(|V|)$ walks required by RWNNs (assuming walk lengths scale with graph size). Furthermore, when paired with universal sequence models, RSNNs are universal approximators. We lastly show RSNNs are probabilistically invariant to graph isomorphisms, ensuring their expectation is an isomorphism-invariant graph function. Empirically, RSNNs consistently outperform RWNNs on molecular and protein benchmarks, achieving comparable or superior performance with up to 16$\times$ fewer sampled sequences. Our work bridges theoretical and practical advances in random walk based approaches, offering an efficient and expressive framework for learning on sparse graphs.

High-temperature superconductors are essential for next-generation energy and quantum technologies, yet their performance is often limited by the critical current density ($J_c$), which is strongly influenced by microstructural defects. Optimizing $J_c$ through defect engineering is challenging due to the complex interplay of defect type, density, and spatial correlation. Here we present an integrated workflow that combines reinforcement learning (RL) with time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) simulations to autonomously identify optimal defect configurations that maximize $J_c$. In our framework, TDGL simulations generate current-voltage characteristics to evaluate $J_c$, which serves as the reward signal that guides the RL agent to iteratively refine defect configurations. We find that the agent discovers optimal defect densities and correlations in two-dimensional thin-film geometries, enhancing vortex pinning and $J_c$ relative to the pristine thin-film, approaching 60\% of theoretical depairing limit with up to 15-fold enhancement compared to random initialization. This RL-driven approach provides a scalable strategy for defect engineering, with broad implications for advancing HTS applications in fusion magnets, particle accelerators, and other high-field technologies.

Controlling high-dimensional stochastic systems, critical in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and hyperchaotic systems, faces the curse of dimensionality, lacks temporal abstraction, and often fails to ensure stochastic stability. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces the Multi-Timescale Lyapunov-Constrained Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (MTLHRL) framework. MTLHRL integrates a hierarchical policy within a semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP), featuring a high-level policy for strategic planning and a low-level policy for reactive control, which effectively manages complex, multi-timescale decision-making and reduces dimensionality overhead. Stability is rigorously enforced using a neural Lyapunov function optimized via Lagrangian relaxation and multi-timescale actor-critic updates, ensuring mean-square boundedness or asymptotic stability in the face of stochastic dynamics. The framework promotes efficient and reliable learning through trust-region constraints and decoupled optimization. Extensive simulations on an 8D hyperchaotic system and a 5-DOF robotic manipulator demonstrate MTLHRL's empirical superiority. It significantly outperforms baseline methods in both stability and performance, recording the lowest error indices (e.g., Integral Absolute Error (IAE): 3.912 in hyperchaotic control and IAE: 1.623 in robotics), achieving faster convergence, and exhibiting superior disturbance rejection. MTLHRL offers a theoretically grounded and practically viable solution for robust control of complex stochastic systems.

Forecasting on widely used benchmark time series data (e.g., ETT, Electricity, Taxi, and Exchange Rate, etc.) has favored smooth, seasonal series, but network telemetry time series -- traffic measurements at service, IP, or subnet granularity -- are instead highly bursty and intermittent, with heavy-tailed bursts and highly variable inactive periods. These properties place the latter in the statistical regimes made famous and popularized more than 20 years ago by B.~Mandelbrot. Yet forecasting such time series with modern-day AI architectures remains underexplored. We introduce NetBurst, an event-centric framework that reformulates forecasting as predicting when bursts occur and how large they are, using quantile-based codebooks and dual autoregressors. Across large-scale sets of production network telemetry time series and compared to strong baselines, such as Chronos, NetBurst reduces Mean Average Scaled Error (MASE) by 13--605x on service-level time series while preserving burstiness and producing embeddings that cluster 5x more cleanly than Chronos. In effect, our work highlights the benefits that modern AI can reap from leveraging Mandelbrot's pioneering studies for forecasting in bursty, intermittent, and heavy-tailed regimes, where its operational value for high-stakes decision making is of paramount interest.

Analogical reasoning, the transfer of relational structures across contexts (e.g., planet is to sun as electron is to nucleus), is fundamental to scientific discovery. Yet human insight is often constrained by domain expertise and surface-level biases, limiting access to deeper, structure-driven analogies both within and across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast cross-domain data, present a promising yet underexplored tool for analogical reasoning in science. Here, we demonstrate that LLMs can generate novel battery materials by (1) retrieving cross-domain analogs and analogy-guided exemplars to steer exploration beyond conventional dopant substitutions, and (2) constructing in-domain analogical templates from few labeled examples to guide targeted exploitation. These explicit analogical reasoning strategies yield candidates outside established compositional spaces and outperform standard prompting baselines. Our findings position LLMs as interpretable, expert-like hypothesis generators that leverage analogy-driven generalization for scientific innovation.

Abstract--While low-altitude wireless networks (LA WNs) based on uncrewed aerial vehicles (UA Vs) offer high mobility, flexibility, and coverage for urban communications, they face severe signal attenuation in dense environments due to obstructions. T o address this critical issue, we consider introducing collaborative beamforming (CB) of UA Vs and omnidirectional reconfigurable beamforming (ORB) of simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ST AR-RIS) to enhance the signal quality and directionality. On this basis, we formulate a joint rate and energy optimization problem (JREOP) to maximize the transmission rate of the overall system, while minimizing the energy consumption of the UA V swarm. Due to the non-convex and NP-hard nature of JREOP, we propose a heterogeneous multi-agent collaborative dynamic (HMCD) optimization framework, which has two core components. The first component is a simulated annealing (SA)-based ST AR-RIS control method, which dynamically optimizes reflection and transmission coefficients to enhance signal propagation. The second component is an improved multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) control method, which incorporates a self-attention evaluation mechanism to capture interactions between UA Vs and an adaptive velocity transition mechanism to enhance training stability. Simulation results demonstrate that HMCD outperforms various baselines in terms of convergence speed, average transmission rate, and energy consumption. Further analysis reveals that the average transmission rate of the overall system scales positively with both UA V count and ST AR-RIS element numbers. Index T erms--UA V, ST AR-RIS, secure communications, collaborative beamforming, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Xinyue Liang, Hui Kang, Junwei Che, and Jiahui Li are with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China (e-mails: xyliang25@mails.jlu.edu.cn; Geng Sun is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China, and with Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China; he is also affiliated with the College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (e-mail: sungeng@jlu.edu.cn).

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has taken a tight hold on broad aspects of society, industry, business, and governance in ways that dictate the prosperity and might of the world's economies. The AI market size is projected to grow from 189 billion USD in 2023 to 4.8 trillion USD by 2033. Currently, AI is dominated by large language models that exhibit linguistic and visual intelligence. However, training these models requires a massive amount of data scraped from the web as well as large amounts of energy (50--60 GWh to train GPT-4). Despite these costs, these models often hallucinate, a characteristic that prevents them from being deployed in critical application domains. In contrast, the human brain consumes only 20~W of power. What is needed is the next level of AI evolution in which lightweight domain-specific multimodal models with higher levels of intelligence can reason, plan, and make decisions in dynamic environments with real-time data and prior knowledge, while learning continuously and evolving in ways that enhance future decision-making capability. This will define the next wave of AI, progressing from today's large models, trained with vast amounts of data, to nimble energy-efficient domain-specific agents that can reason and think in a world full of uncertainty. To support such agents, hardware will need to be reimagined to allow energy efficiencies greater than 1000x over the state of the art. Such a vision of future AI systems is developed in this work.