Groundwater is eventually undermined by human exercises, such as fast industrialization, urbanization, over-extraction, and contamination from agrarian and urban sources. From among the different contaminants, the presence of heavy metals like cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), arsenic (As), and lead (Pb) proves to have serious dangers when present in huge concentrations in groundwater. Long-term usage of these poisonous components may lead to neurological disorders, kidney failure and different sorts of cancer. To address these issues, this study developed a machine learning-based predictive model to evaluate the Groundwater Quality Index (GWQI) and identify the main contaminants which are affecting the water quality. It has been achieved with the help of a hybrid machine learning model i.e. LCBoost Fusion . The model has undergone several processes like data preprocessing, hyperparameter tuning using Differential Evolution (DE) optimization, and evaluation through cross-validation. The LCBoost Fusion model outperforms individual models (CatBoost and LightGBM), by achieving low RMSE (0.6829), MSE (0.5102), MAE (0.3147) and a high R$^2$ score of 0.9809. Feature importance analysis highlights Potassium (K), Fluoride (F) and Total Hardness (TH) as the most influential indicators of groundwater contamination. This research successfully demonstrates the application of machine learning in assessing groundwater quality risks in Odisha. The proposed LCBoost Fusion model offers a reliable and efficient approach for real-time groundwater monitoring and risk mitigation. These findings will help the environmental organizations and the policy makers to map out targeted places for sustainable groundwater management. Future work will focus on using remote sensing data and developing an interactive decision-making system for groundwater quality assessment.

The source localization problem in graph information propagation is crucial for managing various network disruptions, from misinformation spread to infrastructure failures. While recent deep generative approaches have shown promise in this domain, their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of real-world propagation data. This paper introduces SIDSL (\textbf{S}tructure-prior \textbf{I}nformed \textbf{D}iffusion model for \textbf{S}ource \textbf{L}ocalization), a novel framework that addresses three key challenges in limited-data scenarios: unknown propagation patterns, complex topology-propagation relationships, and class imbalance between source and non-source nodes. SIDSL incorporates topology-aware priors through graph label propagation and employs a propagation-enhanced conditional denoiser with a GNN-parameterized label propagation module (GNN-LP). Additionally, we propose a structure-prior biased denoising scheme that initializes from structure-based source estimations rather than random noise, effectively countering class imbalance issues. Experimental results across four real-world datasets demonstrate SIDSL's superior performance, achieving 7.5-13.3% improvements in F1 scores compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, when pretrained with simulation data of synthetic patterns, SIDSL maintains robust performance with only 10% of training data, surpassing baselines by more than 18.8%. These results highlight SIDSL's effectiveness in real-world applications where labeled data is scarce.

Improvements in the area of large language models have shifted towards the construction of models capable of using external tools and interpreting their outputs. These so-called web agents have the ability to interact autonomously with the internet. This allows them to become powerful daily assistants handling time-consuming, repetitive tasks while supporting users in their daily activities. While web agent research is thriving, the sustainability aspect of this research direction remains largely unexplored. We provide an initial exploration of the energy and CO2 cost associated with web agents. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy. We highlight lacking transparency regarding the disclosure of model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. As such, our work advocates a change in thinking when evaluating web agents, warranting dedicated metrics for energy consumption and sustainability.

Drone-based remote sensing combined with AI-driven methodologies has shown great potential for accurate mapping and monitoring of coral reef ecosystems. This study presents a novel multi-scale approach to coral reef monitoring, integrating fine-scale underwater imagery with medium-scale aerial imagery. Underwater images are captured using an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), while aerial images are acquired with an aerial drone. A transformer-based deep-learning model is trained on underwater images to detect the presence of 31 classes covering various coral morphotypes, associated fauna, and habitats. These predictions serve as annotations for training a second model applied to aerial images. The transfer of information across scales is achieved through a weighted footprint method that accounts for partial overlaps between underwater image footprints and aerial image tiles. The results show that the multi-scale methodology successfully extends fine-scale classification to larger reef areas, achieving a high degree of accuracy in predicting coral morphotypes and associated habitats. The method showed a strong alignment between underwater-derived annotations and ground truth data, reflected by an AUC (Area Under the Curve) score of 0.9251. This shows that the integration of underwater and aerial imagery, supported by deep-learning models, can facilitate scalable and accurate reef assessments. This study demonstrates the potential of combining multi-scale imaging and AI to facilitate the monitoring and conservation of coral reefs. Our approach leverages the strengths of underwater and aerial imagery, ensuring the precision of fine-scale analysis while extending it to cover a broader reef area.

It is a significant requirement for a quadrotor trajectory planner to simultaneously guarantee trajectory quality and system lightweight. Many researchers focus on this problem, but there's still a gap between their performance and our common wish. In this paper, we propose an ultra lightweight quadrotor planner with time-optimal primitives. Firstly, a novel motion primitive library is proposed to generate time-optimal and dynamical feasible trajectories offline. Secondly, we propose a fast collision checking method with a deterministic time consumption, independent of the sampling resolution of the primitives. Finally, we select the minimum cost trajectory to execute among the safe primitives based on user-defined requirements. The propsed transformation relation between the local trajectories ensures the smoothness of the global trajectory. The planner reduces unnecessary online computing power consumption as much as possible, while ensuring a high-quality trajectory. Benchmark comparisons show that our method can generate the shortest flight time and distance of trajectory with the lowest computation overload. Challenging real-world experiments validate the robustness of our method.

Achieving large-scale aerial swarms is challenging due to the inherent contradictions in balancing computational efficiency and scalability. This paper introduces Primitive-Swarm, an ultra-lightweight and scalable planner designed specifically for large-scale autonomous aerial swarms. The proposed approach adopts a decentralized and asynchronous replanning strategy. Within it is a novel motion primitive library consisting of time-optimal and dynamically feasible trajectories. They are generated utlizing a novel time-optimial path parameterization algorithm based on reachability analysis (TOPP-RA). Then, a rapid collision checking mechanism is developed by associating the motion primitives with the discrete surrounding space according to conflicts. By considering both spatial and temporal conflicts, the mechanism handles robot-obstacle and robot-robot collisions simultaneously. Then, during a replanning process, each robot selects the safe and minimum cost trajectory from the library based on user-defined requirements. Both the time-optimal motion primitive library and the occupancy information are computed offline, turning a time-consuming optimization problem into a linear-complexity selection problem. This enables the planner to comprehensively explore the non-convex, discontinuous 3-D safe space filled with numerous obstacles and robots, effectively identifying the best hidden path. Benchmark comparisons demonstrate that our method achieves the shortest flight time and traveled distance with a computation time of less than 1 ms in dense environments. Super large-scale swarm simulations, involving up to 1000 robots, running in real-time, verify the scalability of our method. Real-world experiments validate the feasibility and robustness of our approach. The code will be released to foster community collaboration.

Recent Multi-Party Conversation (MPC) models typically rely on graph-based approaches to capture dialogue structures. However, these methods have limitations, such as information loss during the projection of utterances into structural embeddings and constraints in leveraging pre-trained language models directly. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SS-MPC}, a response generation model for MPC that eliminates the need for explicit graph structures. Unlike existing models that depend on graphs to analyze conversation structures, SS-MPC internally encodes the dialogue structure as a sequential input, enabling direct utilization of pre-trained language models. Experimental results show that \textbf{SS-MPC} achieves \textbf{15.60\% BLEU-1} and \textbf{12.44\% ROUGE-L} score, outperforming the current state-of-the-art MPC response generation model by \textbf{3.91\%p} in \textbf{BLEU-1} and \textbf{0.62\%p} in \textbf{ROUGE-L}. Additionally, human evaluation confirms that SS-MPC generates more fluent and accurate responses compared to existing MPC models.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming materials science, enabling both theoretical advancements and accelerated materials discovery. Recent progress in crystal generation models, which design crystal structures for targeted properties, and foundation atomic models (FAMs), which capture interatomic interactions across the periodic table, has significantly improved inverse materials design. However, an efficient integration of these two approaches remains an open challenge. Here, we present an active learning framework that combines crystal generation models and foundation atomic models to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of inverse design. As a case study, we employ Con-CDVAE to generate candidate crystal structures and MACE-MP-0 FAM as one of the high-throughput screeners for bulk modulus evaluation. Through iterative active learning, we demonstrate that Con-CDVAE progressively improves its accuracy in generating crystals with target properties, highlighting the effectiveness of a property-driven fine-tuning process. Our framework is general to accommodate different crystal generation and foundation atomic models, and establishes a scalable approach for AI-driven materials discovery. By bridging generative modeling with atomic-scale simulations, this work paves the way for more accurate and efficient inverse materials design.

Understanding the uncertainty in large language model (LLM) explanations is important for evaluating their faithfulness and reasoning consistency, and thus provides insights into the reliability of LLM's output regarding a question. In this work, we propose a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty in LLM explanations through a reasoning topology perspective. By designing a structural elicitation strategy, we guide the LLMs to frame the explanations of an answer into a graph topology. This process decomposes the explanations into the knowledge related sub-questions and topology-based reasoning structures, which allows us to quantify uncertainty not only at the semantic level but also from the reasoning path. It further brings convenience to assess knowledge redundancy and provide interpretable insights into the reasoning process. Our method offers a systematic way to interpret the LLM reasoning, analyze limitations, and provide guidance for enhancing robustness and faithfulness. This work pioneers the use of graph-structured uncertainty measurement in LLM explanations and demonstrates the potential of topology-based quantification.

Impact of Compression on Model Performance: Through comprehensive experiments, the study demonstrates that moderate pruning can enhance model efficiency, but excessive compression leads to substantial performance degradation in both language and multimodal models. Sustainable AI Development: The findings emphasize the need for optimized AI models to reduce the environmental impact, addressing critical issues like carbon footprint, electricity, and water consumption associated with training and deploying large-scale AI systems. Systematic Weight Evaluation for Pruning Large Language Models: Enhancing Performance and Sustainability Ashhadul Islam a, Samir Brahim Belhaouari a, Amine Bermak a a College Of Science & Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Education City, Doha, 34110, QatarAbstract The exponential growth of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has revolutionized artificial intelligence, offering unprecedented capabilities in natural language processing. However, the extensive computational resources required for training these models have significant environmental implications, including high carbon emissions, energy consumption, and water usage. This research presents a novel approach to LLM pruning, focusing on the systematic evaluation of individual weight importance throughout the training process. By monitoring parameter evolution over time, we propose a method that effectively reduces model size without compromising performance. Extensive experiments with both a scaled-down LLM and a large multimodal model reveal that moderate pruning enhances efficiency and reduces loss, while excessive pruning drastically deteriorates model performance. These findings highlight the critical need for optimized AI models to ensure sustainable development, balancing technological advancement with environmental responsibility.