We introduce JBE-QA, a Japanese Bar Exam Question-Answering dataset to evaluate large language models' legal knowledge. Derived from the multiple-choice (tanto-shiki) section of the Japanese bar exam (2015-2024), JBE-QA provides the first comprehensive benchmark for Japanese legal-domain evaluation of LLMs. It covers the Civil Code, the Penal Code, and the Constitution, extending beyond the Civil Code focus of prior Japanese resources. Each question is decomposed into independent true/false judgments with structured contextual fields. The dataset contains 3,464 items with balanced labels. We evaluate 26 LLMs, including proprietary, open-weight, Japanese-specialised, and reasoning models. Our results show that proprietary models with reasoning enabled perform best, and the Constitution questions are generally easier than the Civil Code or the Penal Code questions.

The challenge is growing towards extreme and short-duration rainfall events like a cloudburst that are peculiar to the traditional forecasting systems, in which the predictions and the response are taken as two distinct processes. The paper outlines an agentic artificial intelligence system to study atmospheric water-cycle intelligence, which combines sensing, forecasting, downscaling, hydrological modeling and coordinated response into a single, interconnected, priceless, closed-loop system. The framework uses autonomous but cooperative agents that reason, sense, and act throughout the entire event lifecycle, and use the intelligence of weather prediction to become real-time decision intelligence. Comparison of multi-year radar, satellite, and ground-based evaluation of the northern part of Pakistan demonstrates that the multi-agent configuration enhances forecast reliability, critical success index and warning lead time compared to the baseline models. Population reach was maximised, and errors during evacuation were minimised through communication and routing agents, and adaptive recalibration and transparent auditability were provided by the embedded layer of learning. Collectively, this leads to the conclusion that collaborative AI agents are capable of transforming atmospheric data streams into practicable foresight and provide a platform of scalable adaptive and learning-based climate resilience.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReAG.

Understanding structure-property relationships in materials is fundamental in condensed matter physics and materials science. Over the past few years, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool for advancing this understanding and accelerating materials discovery. Early ML approaches primarily focused on constructing and screening large material spaces to identify promising candidates for various applications. More recently, research efforts have increasingly shifted toward generating crystal structures using end-to-end generative models. This review analyzes the current state of generative modeling for crystal structure prediction and \textit{de novo} generation. It examines crystal representations, outlines the generative models used to design crystal structures, and evaluates their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, the review highlights experimental considerations for evaluating generated structures and provides recommendations for suitable existing software tools. Emerging topics, such as modeling disorder and defects, integration in advanced characterization, and incorporating synthetic feasibility constraints, are explored. Ultimately, this work aims to inform both experimental scientists looking to adapt suitable ML models to their specific circumstances and ML specialists seeking to understand the unique challenges related to inverse materials design and discovery.

We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of social choice functions such as efficiency given ex post awareness. Assuming quasi-linear utilities and private values, we show that we can implement in conditional dominant strategies a social choice function that is utilitarian ex post efficient under pooled awareness without the need of the social planner being fully aware ex ante. To this end, we develop novel dynamic versions of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms in which true types are revealed and subsequently elaborated at endogenous higher awareness levels. We explore how asymmetric awareness affects budget balance and participation constraints. We show that ex ante unforeseen contingencies are no excuse for deficits. Finally, we propose a dynamic elaboration reverse second price auction for efficient procurement of complex incompletely specified projects with budget balance and participation constraints.

This paper introduces CoMuRoS (Collaborative Multi-Robot System), a generalizable hierarchical architecture for heterogeneous robot teams that unifies centralized deliberation with decentralized execution, and supports event-driven replanning. A Task Manager LLM interprets natural-language goals, classifies tasks, and allocates subtasks using static rules plus dynamic contexts (task, history, robot and task status, and events).Each robot runs a local LLM that composes executable Python code from primitive skills (ROS2 nodes, policies), while onboard perception (VLMs/image processing) continuously monitors events and classifies them into relevant or irrelevant to the task. Task failures or user intent changes trigger replanning, allowing robots to assist teammates, resume tasks, or request human help. Hardware studies demonstrate autonomous recovery from disruptive events, filtering of irrelevant distractions, and tightly coordinated transport with emergent human-robot cooperation (e.g., multirobot collaborative object recovery success rate: 9/10, coordinated transport: 8/8, human-assisted recovery: 5/5).Simulation studies show intention-aware replanning. A curated textual benchmark spanning 22 scenarios (3 tasks each, around 20 robots) evaluates task allocation, classification, IoU, executability, and correctness, with high average scores (e.g., correctness up to 0.91) across multiple LLMs, a separate replanning set (5 scenarios) achieves 1.0 correctness. Compared with prior LLM-based systems, CoMuRoS uniquely demonstrates runtime, event-driven replanning on physical robots, delivering robust, flexible multi-robot and human-robot collaboration.

Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains challenging. This study develops ECO-GROW, a multi-graph framework modeling China's inter-city networks (2005-2021) to generate urban embeddings that model urban economic vitality. Traditional approaches relying on static city-level aggregates fail to capture a fundamental dynamic: the developmental trajectory of one city today may mirror that of its structurally similar counterparts tomorrow. ECO-GROW overcomes this limitation by integrating industrial linkages, POI similarities, migration similarities and temporal network evolution over 15 years. The framework combines a Dynamic Top-K GCN to adaptively select influential inter-city connections and an adaptive Graph Scorer mechanism to dynamically weight cross-regional impacts. Additionally, the model incorporates a link prediction task based on Barabasi Proximity, optimizing the graph representation. Experimental results demonstrate ECO-GROW's superior accuracy in predicting entrepreneurial activities and employment trends compared to conventional models. By open-sourcing our code, we enable government agencies and public sector organizations to leverage big data analytics for evidence-based urban planning, economic policy formulation, and resource allocation decisions that benefit society at large.

A new measure, value-linked credit exposure between protocols, is defined as the inferred financial dependency relationships derived from changes in Total Value Locked (TVL). We develop a token-to-protocol model using DefiLlama metadata to infer inter-protocol credit exposure from the token's stock dynamics, as reported by the protocols. Based on the curated dataset, we develop three benchmarks for machine learning research with financial applications: (1) graph clustering for global network measurement, tracking the structural evolution of credit exposure networks, (2) vector autoregression for sector-level credit exposure dynamics during major shocks (Terra and FTX), and (3) temporal graph neural networks for dynamic link prediction on temporal graphs. From the analysis, we observe (1) a rapid growth of network volume, (2) a trend of concentration to key protocols, (3) a decline of network density (the ratio of actual connections to possible connections), and (4) distinct shock propagation across sectors, such as lending platforms, trading exchanges, and asset management protocols. The DeXposure dataset and code have been released publicly. We envision they will help with research and practice in machine learning as well as financial risk monitoring, policy analysis, DeFi market modeling, amongst others. The dataset also contributes to machine learning research by offering benchmarks for graph clustering, vector autoregres-sion, and temporal graph analysis.

We evaluate the performance of various text embedding models and pipeline configurations for AI-driven search systems. We compare sentence-transformer and generative embedding models (e.g., All-MPNet, BGE, GTE, and Qwen) at different dimensions, indexing methods (Milvus HNSW/IVF), and chunking strategies. A custom evaluation dataset of 11,975 query-chunk pairs was synthesized from US City Council meeting transcripts using a local large language model (LLM). The data pipeline includes preprocessing, automated question generation per chunk, manual validation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) integration. We measure retrieval accuracy using reference-based metrics: Top-K Accuracy and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Our results demonstrate that higher-dimensional embeddings significantly boost search quality (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-8B/4096 achieves Top-3 accuracy about 0.571 versus 0.412 for GTE-large/1024), and that neural re-rankers (e.g., a BGE cross-encoder) further improve ranking accuracy (Top-3 up to 0.527). Finer-grained chunking (512 characters versus 2000 characters) also improves accuracy. We discuss the impact of these factors and outline future directions for pipeline automation and evaluation.

Can language models (LMs) self-refine their own responses? This question is increasingly relevant as a wide range of real-world user interactions involve refinement requests. However, prior studies have largely tested LMs' refinement abilities on verifiable tasks such as competition math or symbolic reasoning with simplified scaffolds, whereas users often pose open-ended queries and provide varying degrees of feedback on what they desire. The recent advent of reasoning models that exhibit self-reflection patterns in their chains-of-thought further motivates this question. To analyze this, we introduce RefineBench, a benchmark of 1,000 challenging problems across 11 domains paired with a checklist-based evaluation framework. We evaluate two refinement modes: (1) guided refinement, where an LM is provided natural language feedback, and (2) self-refinement, where LMs attempt to improve without guidance. In the self-refinement setting, even frontier LMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 achieve modest baseline scores of 31.3% and 29.1%, respectively, and most models fail to consistently improve across iterations (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro gains only +1.8%, while DeepSeek-R1 declines by -0.1%). By contrast, in guided refinement, both proprietary LMs and large open-weight LMs (>70B) can leverage targeted feedback to refine responses to near-perfect levels within five turns. These findings suggest that frontier LMs require breakthroughs to self-refine their incorrect responses, and that RefineBench provides a valuable testbed for tracking progress.