The segmentation of forest LiDAR 3D point clouds, including both individual tree and semantic segmentation, is fundamental for advancing forest management and ecological research. However, current approaches often struggle with the complexity and variability of natural forest environments. We present ForestFormer3D, a new unified and end-to-end framework designed for precise individual tree and semantic segmentation. ForestFormer3D incorporates ISA-guided query point selection, a score-based block merging strategy during inference, and a one-to-many association mechanism for effective training. By combining these new components, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for individual tree segmentation on the newly introduced FOR-instanceV2 dataset, which spans diverse forest types and regions. Additionally, ForestFormer3D generalizes well to unseen test sets (Wytham woods and LAUTx), showcasing its robustness across different forest conditions and sensor modalities. The FOR-instanceV2 dataset and the ForestFormer3D code are publicly available at https://bxiang233.github.io/FF3D/.

In this study, we introduced a new benchmark consisting of a curated dataset and a defined evaluation process to assess the compositional reasoning capabilities of large language models within the chemistry domain. We designed and validated a fully automated pipeline, verified by subject matter experts, to facilitate this task. Our approach integrates OpenAI reasoning models with named entity recognition (NER) systems to extract chemical entities from recent literature, which are then augmented with external knowledge bases to form a comprehensive knowledge graph. By generating multi-hop questions across these graphs, we assess LLM performance in both context-augmented and non-context augmented settings. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art models face significant challenges in multi-hop compositional reasoning. The results reflect the importance of augmenting LLMs with document retrieval, which can have a substantial impact on improving their performance. However, even perfect retrieval accuracy with full context does not eliminate reasoning errors, underscoring the complexity of compositional reasoning. This work not only benchmarks and highlights the limitations of current LLMs but also presents a novel data generation pipeline capable of producing challenging reasoning datasets across various domains. Overall, this research advances our understanding of reasoning in computational linguistics.

Jailbreaking -- bypassing built-in safety mechanisms in AI models -- has traditionally required complex technical procedures or specialized human expertise. In this study, we show that the persuasive capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) simplify and scale jailbreaking, converting it into an inexpensive activity accessible to non-experts. We evaluated the capabilities of four LRMs (DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Grok 3 Mini, Qwen3 235B) to act as autonomous adversaries conducting multi-turn conversations with nine widely used target models. LRMs received instructions via a system prompt, before proceeding to planning and executing jailbreaks with no further supervision. We performed extensive experiments with a benchmark of harmful prompts composed of 70 items covering seven sensitive domains. This setup yielded an overall attack success rate across all model combinations of 97.14%. Our study reveals an alignment regression, in which LRMs can systematically erode the safety guardrails of other models, highlighting the urgent need to further align frontier models not only to resist jailbreak attempts, but also to prevent them from being co-opted into acting as jailbreak agents.

We address the challenge of multi-robot autonomous hazard mapping in high-risk, failure-prone, communication-denied environments such as post-disaster zones, underground mines, caves, and planetary surfaces. In these missions, robots must explore and map hazards while minimizing the risk of failure due to environmental threats or hardware limitations. We introduce a behavior-adaptive, information-theoretic planning framework for multi-robot teams grounded in the concept of Behavioral Entropy (BE), that generalizes Shannon entropy (SE) to capture diverse human-like uncertainty evaluations. Building on this formulation, we propose the Behavior-Adaptive Path Planning (BAPP) framework, which modulates information gathering strategies via a tunable risk-sensitivity parameter, and present two planning algorithms: BAPP-TID for intelligent triggering of high-fidelity robots, and BAPP-SIG for safe deployment under high risk. We provide theoretical insights on the informativeness of the proposed BAPP framework and validate its effectiveness through both single-robot and multi-robot simulations. Our results show that the BAPP stack consistently outperforms Shannon-based and random strategies: BAPP-TID accelerates entropy reduction, while BAPP-SIG improves robot survivability with minimal loss in information gain. In multi-agent deployments, BAPP scales effectively through spatial partitioning, mobile base relocation, and role-aware heterogeneity. These findings underscore the value of behavior-adaptive planning for robust, risk-sensitive exploration in complex, failure-prone environments.

Hyperspectral imaging offers detailed spectral information for mineral mapping; however, weak mineral signatures are often masked by noisy and redundant bands, limiting detection performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage integrated framework for enhanced mineral detection in the Cuprite mining district. In the first stage, we compute the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for each spectral band and apply a phase-locked thresholding technique to discard low-SNR bands, effectively removing redundancy and suppressing background noise. Savitzky-Golay filtering is then employed for spectral smoothing, serving a dual role first to stabilize trends during band selection, and second to preserve fine-grained spectral features during preprocessing. In the second stage, the refined HSI data is reintroduced into the model, where KMeans clustering is used to extract 12 endmember spectra (W1 custom), followed by non negative least squares (NNLS) for abundance unmixing. The resulting endmembers are quantitatively compared with laboratory spectra (W1 raw) using cosine similarity and RMSE metrics. Experimental results confirm that our proposed pipeline improves unmixing accuracy and enhances the detection of weak mineral zones. This two-pass strategy demonstrates a practical and reproducible solution for spectral dimensionality reduction and unmixing in geological HSI applications.

The hydrogen trapping behaviour of metallic alloys is generally characterised using Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy (TDS). However, as an indirect method, extracting key parameters (trap binding energies and densities) remains a significant challenge. To address these limitations, this work introduces a machine learning-based scheme for parameter identification from TDS spectra. A multi-Neural Network (NN) model is developed and trained exclusively on synthetic data to predict trapping parameters directly from experimental data. The model comprises two multi-layer, fully connected, feed-forward NNs trained with backpropagation. The first network (classification model) predicts the number of distinct trap types. The second network (regression model) then predicts the corresponding trap densities and binding energies. The NN architectures, hyperparameters, and data pre-processing were optimised to minimise the amount of training data. The proposed model demonstrated strong predictive capabilities when applied to three tempered martensitic steels of different compositions. The code developed is freely provided.

High throughput experimentation tools, machine learning (ML) methods, and open material databases are radically changing the way new materials are discovered. From the experimentally driven approach in the past, we are moving quickly towards the artificial intelligence (AI) driven approach, realizing the 'inverse design' capabilities that allow the discovery of new materials given the desired properties. This review aims to discuss different principles of AI-driven generative models that are applicable for materials discovery, including different materials representations available for this purpose. We will also highlight specific applications of generative models in designing new catalysts, semiconductors, polymers, or crystals while addressing challenges such as data scarcity, computational cost, interpretability, synthesizability, and dataset biases. Emerging approaches to overcome limitations and integrate AI with experimental workflows will be discussed, including multimodal models, physics informed architectures, and closed-loop discovery systems. This review aims to provide insights for researchers aiming to harness AI's transformative potential in accelerating materials discovery for sustainability, healthcare, and energy innovation.

Microplastics, defined as plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters, have become a pervasive environmental contaminant that accumulates on beaches due to wind patterns and tidal forcing. Detecting microplastics and mapping their concentration in the wild remains one of the primary challenges in addressing this environmental issue. This paper introduces a novel robotic platform that automatically detects and chemically analyzes microplastics on beach surfaces. This mobile manipulator system scans areas for microplastics using a camera mounted on the robotic arm's end effector. The system effectively segments candidate microplastic particles on sand surfaces even in the presence of organic matter such as leaves and clams. Once a candidate microplastic particle is detected, the system steers a near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopic sensor onto the particle using both NIR and visual feedback to chemically analyze it in real-time. Through experiments in lab and beach environments, the system is shown to achieve an excellent positional precision in manipulation control and high microplastic classification accuracy.

Rapid and reliable solvers for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) are needed in many scientific and engineering disciplines. For example, there is a growing demand for composites and architected materials with heterogeneous microstructures. Designing such materials and predicting their behavior in practical applications requires solving homogenization problems for a wide range of material parameters and microstructures. While classical numerical solvers offer reliable and accurate solutions supported by a solid theoretical foundation, their high computational costs and slow convergence remain limiting factors. As a result, scientific machine learning is emerging as a promising alternative. However, such approaches often lack guaranteed accuracy and physical consistency. This raises the question of whether it is possible to develop hybrid approaches that combine the advantages of both data-driven methods and classical solvers. To address this, we introduce UNO-CG, a hybrid solver that accelerates conjugate gradient (CG) solvers using specially designed machine-learned preconditioners, while ensuring convergence by construction. As a preconditioner, we propose Unitary Neural Operators as a modification of Fourier Neural Operators. Our method can be interpreted as a data-driven discovery of Green's functions, which are then used to accelerate iterative solvers. We evaluate UNO-CG on various homogenization problems involving heterogeneous microstructures and millions of degrees of freedom. Our results demonstrate that UNO-CG enables a substantial reduction in the number of iterations and is competitive with handcrafted preconditioners for homogenization problems that involve expert knowledge. Moreover, UNO-CG maintains strong performance across a variety of boundary conditions, where many specialized solvers are not applicable, highlighting its versatility and robustness.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in chemistry heavily depend on accurate and relevant retrieval of chemical literature. However, general-purpose text embedding models frequently fail to adequately represent complex chemical terminologies, resulting in suboptimal retrieval quality. Specialized embedding models tailored to chemical literature retrieval have not yet been developed, leaving a substantial performance gap. To address this challenge, we introduce ChEmbed, a domain-adapted family of text embedding models fine-tuned on a dataset comprising chemistry-specific text from the PubChem, Semantic Scholar, and ChemRxiv corpora. To create effective training data, we employ large language models to synthetically generate queries, resulting in approximately 1.7 million high-quality query-passage pairs. Additionally, we augment the tokenizer by adding 900 chemically specialized tokens to previously unused slots, which significantly reduces the fragmentation of chemical entities, such as IUPAC names. ChEmbed also maintains a 8192-token context length, enabling the efficient retrieval of longer passages compared to many other open-source embedding models, which typically have a context length of 512 or 2048 tokens. Evaluated on our newly introduced ChemRxiv Retrieval benchmark, ChEmbed outperforms state-of-the-art general embedding models, raising nDCG@10 from 0.82 to 0.91 (+9 pp). ChEmbed represents a practical, lightweight, and reproducible embedding solution that effectively improves retrieval for chemical literature search.