A key challenge in this domain is the balance between exploration and exploitation, which often results in slow learning and suboptimal performance [10], [11]. These limitations highlight the need for more effective learning strategies that can improve both the speed and performance of skill acquisition, especially for high-dimensional humanoid control tasks. During human development, external assistance plays a crucial role in learning motion skills [12]. Infants, for example, often rely on parental support during their first steps, with walkers or direct physical assistance to help them gain the confidence and balance needed for independent locomotion [13], [14]. Similarly, in the case of highly complexmovementslikebackflips,experiencedcoachesprovide physical guidance, supporting the learner's back and applying upward forces to prevent falls and promote proper technique [15]. Studies indicate that such external aids not only expedite the learning process but also help prevent learners from adopting ineffective or unsafe strategies [16].

Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for accelerating our pursuit of knowledge, not all scientific text is faithful to the underlying science. As the volume of this text has burgeoned online in recent years, it has become a problem of societal importance to be able to identify the faithfulness of a given piece of scientific text automatically. This thesis is concerned with the cultivation of datasets, methods, and tools for machine understanding of scientific language, in order to analyze and understand science communication at scale. To arrive at this, I present several contributions in three areas of natural language processing and machine learning: automatic fact checking, learning with limited data, and scientific text processing. These contributions include new methods and resources for identifying check-worthy claims, adversarial claim generation, multi-source domain adaptation, learning from crowd-sourced labels, cite-worthiness detection, zero-shot scientific fact checking, detecting exaggerated scientific claims, and modeling degrees of information change in science communication. Critically, I demonstrate how the research outputs of this thesis are useful for effectively learning from limited amounts of scientific text in order to identify misinformative scientific statements and generate new insights into the science communication process

Large language models (LLMs) have moved far beyond their initial form as simple chatbots, now carrying out complex reasoning, planning, writing, coding, and research tasks. These skills overlap significantly with those that human scientists use day-to-day to solve complex problems that drive the cutting edge of research. Using LLMs in "agentic" AI has the potential to revolutionize modern science and remove bottlenecks to progress. In this work, we present URSA, a scientific agent ecosystem for accelerating research tasks. URSA consists of a set of modular agents and tools, including coupling to advanced physics simulation codes, that can be combined to address scientific problems of varied complexity and impact. This work highlights the architecture of URSA, as well as examples that highlight the potential of the system.

This thesis explores the impact of the Climate Emergency movement on local government climate policy, using computational methods. The Climate Emergency movement sought to accelerate climate action at local government level through the mechanism of Climate Emergency Declarations (CEDs), resulting in a series of commitments from councils to treat climate change as an emergency. With the aim of assessing the potential of current large language models to answer complex policy questions, I first built and configured a system named PALLM (Policy Analysis with a Large Language Model), using the OpenAI model GPT-4. This system is designed to apply a conceptual framework for climate emergency response plans to a dataset of climate policy documents. I validated the performance of this system with the help of local government policymakers, by generating analyses of the climate policies of 11 local governments in Victoria and assessing the policymakers' level of agreement with PALLM's responses. Having established that PALLM's performance is satisfactory, I used it to conduct a large-scale analysis of current policy documents from local governments in the state of Victoria, Australia. This thesis presents the methodology and results of this analysis, comparing the results for councils which have passed a CED to those which did not. This study finds that GPT-4 is capable of high-level policy analysis, with limitations including a lack of reliable attribution, and can also enable more nuanced analysis by researchers. Its use in this research shows that councils which have passed a CED are more likely to have a recent and climate-specific policy, and show more attention to urgency, prioritisation, and equity and social justice, than councils which have not. It concludes that the ability to assess policy documents at scale opens up exciting new opportunities for policy researchers.

Global Climate Models (GCMs) are critical for simulating large-scale climate dynamics, but their coarse spatial resolution limits their applicability in regional studies. Regional Climate Models (RCMs) refine this through dynamic downscaling, albeit at considerable computational cost and with limited flexibility. While deep learning has emerged as an efficient data-driven alternative, most existing studies have focused on single-variable models that downscale one variable at a time. This approach can lead to limited contextual awareness, redundant computation, and lack of cross-variable interaction. Our study addresses these limitations by proposing a multi-task, multi-variable Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture with a shared encoder and variable-specific decoders (1EMD). The proposed architecture jointly predicts three key climate variables: surface temperature (tas), wind speed (sfcWind), and 500 hPa geopotential height (zg500), directly from GCM-resolution inputs, emulating RCM-scale downscaling over Europe. We show that our multi-variable approach achieves positive cross-variable knowledge transfer and consistently outperforms single-variable baselines trained under identical conditions, while also improving computational efficiency. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-variable modeling for high-resolution climate downscaling.

We argue that viewing AI as a simple reduction in input costs overlooks two critical dynamics: (a) the inherent trade-offs among generality, accuracy, and simplicity, and (b) the redistribution of complexity across stakeholders. While LLMs appear to defy the traditional trade-off by offering high generality and accuracy through simple interfaces, this user-facing simplicity masks a significant shift of complexity to infrastructure, compliance, and specialized personnel. The GAS trade-off, therefore, does not disappear but is relocated from the user to the organization, creating new managerial challenges, particularly around accuracy in high-stakes applications. We contend that competitive advantage no longer stems from mere AI adoption, but from mastering this redistributed complexity through the design of abstraction layers, workflow alignment, and complementary expertise.

A significant portion of the energy consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs) arises from their inference processes; hence developing energy-efficient methods for inference is crucial. While several techniques exist for inference optimization, output compression remains relatively unexplored, with only a few preliminary efforts addressing this aspect. In this work, we first benchmark 12 decoder-only LLMs across 5 datasets, revealing that these models often produce responses that are substantially longer than necessary. We then conduct a comprehensive quality assessment of LLM responses, formally defining six information categories present in LLM responses. We show that LLMs often tend to include redundant or additional information besides the minimal answer. To address this issue of long responses by LLMs, we explore several simple and intuitive prompt-engineering strategies. Empirical evaluation shows that appropriate prompts targeting length reduction and controlling information content can achieve significant energy optimization between 25-60\% by reducing the response length while preserving the quality of LLM responses.

Neural Quantum States (NQS) are a class of variational wave functions parametrized by neural networks (NNs) to study quantum many-body systems. In this work, we propose \texttt{SineKAN}, a NQS \textit{ansatz} based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), to represent quantum mechanical wave functions as nested univariate functions. We show that \texttt{SineKAN} wavefunction with learnable sinusoidal activation functions can capture the ground state energies, fidelities and various correlation functions of the one dimensional Transverse-Field Ising model, Anisotropic Heisenberg model, and Antiferromagnetic $J_{1}-J_{2}$ model with different chain lengths. In our study of the $J_1-J_2$ model with $L=100$ sites, we find that the \texttt{SineKAN} model outperforms several previously explored neural quantum state \textit{ansätze}, including Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), Long Short-Term Memory models (LSTMs), and Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLP) \textit{a.k.a.} Feed Forward Neural Networks, when compared to the results obtained from the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) algorithm. We find that \texttt{SineKAN} models can be trained to high precisions and accuracies with minimal computational costs.

This white paper discusses and explores the various points of intersection between quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI). It describes how quantum computing could support the development of innovative AI solutions. It also examines use cases of classical AI that can empower research and development in quantum technologies, with a focus on quantum computing and quantum sensing. The purpose of this white paper is to provide a long-term research agenda aimed at addressing foundational questions about how AI and quantum computing interact and benefit one another. It concludes with a set of recommendations and challenges, including how to orchestrate the proposed theoretical work, align quantum AI developments with quantum hardware roadmaps, estimate both classical and quantum resources - especially with the goal of mitigating and optimizing energy consumption - advance this emerging hybrid software engineering discipline, and enhance European industrial competitiveness while considering societal implications.

The ability to quickly and accurately compute properties from atomic simulations is critical for advancing a large number of applications in chemistry and materials science including drug discovery, energy storage, and semiconductor manufacturing. To address this need, Meta FAIR presents a family of Universal Models for Atoms (UMA), designed to push the frontier of speed, accuracy, and generalization. UMA models are trained on half a billion unique 3D atomic structures (the largest training runs to date) by compiling data across multiple chemical domains, e.g. molecules, materials, and catalysts. We develop empirical scaling laws to help understand how to increase model capacity alongside dataset size to achieve the best accuracy. The UMA small and medium models utilize a novel architectural design we refer to as mixture of linear experts that enables increasing model capacity without sacrificing speed. For example, UMA-medium has 1.4B parameters but only ~50M active parameters per atomic structure. We evaluate UMA models on a diverse set of applications across multiple domains and find that, remarkably, a single model without any fine-tuning can perform similarly or better than specialized models. We are releasing the UMA code, weights, and associated data to accelerate computational workflows and enable the community to continue to build increasingly capable AI models.