Coronary angiography is the main tool for assessing coronary artery disease, but visual grading of stenosis is variable and only moderately related to ischaemia. Wire based fractional flow reserve (FFR) improves lesion selection but is not used systematically. Angiography derived indices such as quantitative flow ratio (QFR) offer wire free physiology, yet many tools are workflow intensive and separate from automated anatomy analysis and virtual PCI planning. We developed AngioAI-QFR, an end to end angiography only pipeline combining deep learning stenosis detection, lumen segmentation, centreline and diameter extraction, per millimetre Relative Flow Capacity profiling, and virtual stenting with automatic recomputation of angiography derived QFR. The system was evaluated in 100 consecutive vessels with invasive FFR as reference. Primary endpoints were agreement with FFR (correlation, mean absolute error) and diagnostic performance for FFR <= 0.80. On held out frames, stenosis detection achieved precision 0.97 and lumen segmentation Dice 0.78. Across 100 vessels, AngioAI-QFR correlated strongly with FFR (r = 0.89, MAE 0.045). The AUC for detecting FFR <= 0.80 was 0.93, with sensitivity 0.88 and specificity 0.86. The pipeline completed fully automatically in 93 percent of vessels, with median time to result 41 s. RFC profiling distinguished focal from diffuse capacity loss, and virtual stenting predicted larger QFR gain in focal than in diffuse disease. AngioAI-QFR provides a practical, near real time pipeline that unifies computer vision, functional profiling, and virtual PCI with automated angiography derived physiology.

Accurate interpretation of pediatric dental clinical records and safe antibiotic prescribing remain persistent challenges in dental informatics. Traditional rule-based clinical decision support systems struggle with unstructured dental narratives, incomplete radiographic descriptions, and complex safety constraints. To address these limitations, this study proposes a Knowledge-Guided Large Language Model (KG-LLM) that integrates a pediatric dental knowledge graph, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and a multi-stage safety validation pipeline for evidence-grounded antibiotic recommendation. The framework first employs a clinical NER/RE module to extract structured entities and relations from dental notes and radiology reports. Relevant guidelines, drug-safety rules, and analogous historical cases are subsequently retrieved from the knowledge graph and supplied to the LLM for diagnostic summarization and dose-drug-duration prediction. Safety assurance is achieved through a dual-layer validation mechanism combining deterministic rule checking with a learned classifier for detecting allergies, contraindications, and dosing errors. Experiments on 32,000 de-identified pediatric dental visit records demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared with a domain-adapted Llama-2 clinical baseline, KG-LLM improves record-understanding performance (F1: 0.914 vs. 0.867), drug-dose-duration accuracy (Top-1: 0.782 vs. 0.716), and reduces unsafe antibiotic suggestions by 50%. Additional evaluation across summary quality, recommendation accuracy, and global safety scores further confirms the robustness of the system. Ablation analyses indicate that the knowledge graph, RAG, and safety modules each contribute substantially to clinical reliability and interpretability.

Agentic AI systems built on large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential for automating complex workflows, from software development to customer support. However, LLM agents often underperform due to suboptimal configurations; poorly tuned prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters that typically require weeks of manual refinement. Existing optimization methods either are too complex for general use or treat components in isolation, missing critical interdependencies. We present ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that jointly optimizes agent configurations through semantically-aware genetic operators. Given only a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS automatically discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without requiring architectural modifications. We evaluate ARTEMIS on four representative agent systems: the \emph{ALE Agent} for competitive programming on AtCoder Heuristic Contest, achieving a \textbf{$13.6\%$ improvement} in acceptance rate; the \emph{Mini-SWE Agent} for code optimization on SWE-Perf, with a statistically significant \textbf{10.1\% performance gain}; and the \emph{CrewAI Agent} for cost and mathematical reasoning on Math Odyssey, achieving a statistically significant \textbf{$36.9\%$ reduction} in the number of tokens required for evaluation. We also evaluate the \emph{MathTales-Teacher Agent} powered by a smaller open-source model (Qwen2.5-7B) on GSM8K primary-level mathematics problems, achieving a \textbf{22\% accuracy improvement} and demonstrating that ARTEMIS can optimize agents based on both commercial and local models.

Cognitive trust and the belief that a robot is capable of accurately performing tasks, are recognized as central factors in fostering high-quality human-robot interactions. It is well established that performance factors such as the robot's competence and its reliability shape cognitive trust. Recent studies suggest that affective factors, such as robotic attentiveness, also play a role in building cognitive trust. This work explores the interplay between these two factors that shape cognitive trust. Specifically, we evaluated whether different combinations of robotic competence and attentiveness introduce a compensatory mechanism, where one factor compensates for the lack of the other. In the experiment, participants performed a search task with a robotic dog in a 2x2 experimental design that included two factors: competence (high or low) and attentiveness (high or low). The results revealed that high attentiveness can compensate for low competence. Participants who collaborated with a highly attentive robot that performed poorly reported trust levels comparable to those working with a highly competent robot. When the robot did not demonstrate attentiveness, low competence resulted in a substantial decrease in cognitive trust. The findings indicate that building cognitive trust in human-robot interaction may be more complex than previously believed, involving emotional processes that are typically overlooked. We highlight an affective compensatory mechanism that adds a layer to consider alongside traditional competence-based models of cognitive trust.

Understanding driver interactions is critical to designing autonomous vehicles to interoperate safely with human-driven cars. We consider the impact of these interactions on the policies drivers employ when navigating unsigned intersections in a driving simulator. The simulator allows the collection of naturalistic decision-making and behavior data in a controlled environment. Using these data, we model the human driver responses as state-based feedback controllers learned via Gaussian Process regression methods. We compute the feedback gain of the controller using a weighted combination of linear and nonlinear priors. We then analyze how the individual gains are reflected in driver behavior. We also assess differences in these controllers across populations of drivers. Our work in data-driven analyses of how drivers determine their policies can facilitate future work in the design of socially responsive autonomy for vehicles.

Deep learning models for medical image segmentation suffer significant performance drops due to distribution shifts, but the causal mechanisms behind these drops remain poorly understood. We extend causal attribution frameworks to high-dimensional segmentation tasks, quantifying how acquisition protocols and annotation variability independently contribute to performance degradation. We model the data-generating process through a causal graph and employ Shapley values to fairly attribute performance changes to individual mechanisms. Our framework addresses unique challenges in medical imaging: high-dimensional outputs, limited samples, and complex mechanism interactions. Validation on multiple sclerosis (MS) lesion segmentation across 4 centers and 7 annotators reveals context-dependent failure modes: annotation protocol shifts dominate when crossing annotators (7.4% $\pm$ 8.9% DSC attribution), while acquisition shifts dominate when crossing imaging centers (6.5% $\pm$ 9.1%). This mechanism-specific quantification enables practitioners to prioritize targeted interventions based on deployment context.

Hallucinations are outputs by Large Language Models (LLMs) that are factually incorrect yet appear plausible [1]. This paper investigates how such hallucinations influence users' trust in LLMs and users' interaction with LLMs. To explore this in everyday use, we conducted a qualitative study with 192 participants. Our findings show that hallucinations do not result in blanket mistrust but instead lead to context-sensitive trust calibration. Building on the calibrated trust model by Lee & See [2] and Afroogh et al.'s trust-related factors [3], we confirm expectancy [3], [4], prior experience [3], [4], [5], and user expertise & domain knowledge [3], [4] as userrelated (human) trust factors, and identify intuition as an additional factor relevant for hallucination detection. Additionally, we found that trust dynamics are further influenced by contextual factors, particularly perceived risk [3] and decision stakes [6]. Consequently, we validate the recursive trust calibration process proposed by Blöbaum [7] and extend it by including intuition as a user-related trust factor. Based on these insights, we propose practical recommendations for responsible and reflective LLM use.

Narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) entangle autonomy, the capacity to self-govern, with sentience, the capacity to sense and feel. AI agents that perform tasks autonomously and companions that recognize and express emotions may activate mental models of autonomy and sentience, respectively, provoking distinct reactions. To examine this possibility, we conducted three pilot studies (N = 374) and four preregistered vignette experiments describing an AI as autonomous, sentient, both, or neither (N = 2,702). Activating a mental model of sentience increased general mind perception (cognition and emotion) and moral consideration more than autonomy, but autonomy increased perceived threat more than sentience. Sentience also increased perceived autonomy more than vice versa. Based on a within-paper meta-analysis, sentience changed reactions more than autonomy on average. By disentangling different mental models of AI, we can study human-AI interaction with more precision to better navigate the detailed design of anthropomorphized AI and prompting interfaces.

Severe heatwaves in urban areas significantly threaten public health, calling for establishing early warning strategies. Despite predicting occurrence of heatwaves and attributing historical mortality, predicting an incoming deadly heatwave remains a challenge due to the difficulty in defining and estimating heat-related mortality. Furthermore, establishing an early warning system imposes additional requirements, including data availability, spatial and temporal robustness, and decision costs. To address these challenges, we propose DeepTherm, a modular early warning system for deadly heatwave prediction without requiring heat-related mortality history. By highlighting the flexibility of deep learning, DeepTherm employs a dual-prediction pipeline, disentangling baseline mortality in the absence of heatwaves and other irregular events from all-cause mortality. We evaluated DeepTherm on real-world data across Spain. Results demonstrate consistent, robust, and accurate performance across diverse regions, time periods, and population groups while allowing trade-off between missed alarms and false alarms.

Neural networks, while effective for tackling many challengi ng scientific tasks, are not known to perform well out-of-distribution (OOD), i.e., within domains which d iffer from their training data. Understanding neural network OOD generalization is paramount to their suc cessful deployment in experimental workflows, especially when ground-truth knowledge about the experime nt is hard to establish or experimental conditions significantly vary. With inherent access to ground-truth in formation and fine-grained control of underlying distributions, simulation-based data curation facilitate s precise investigation of OOD generalization behavior. Here, we probe generalization with respect to imaging condi tions of neural network segmentation models for high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) imaging of nanoparticles, training and measuring the OOD generalization of over 12,000 neural networks using synthetic data generated via random structure sampling and multislice simulation. Using the HRTEM contra st transfer function, we further develop a framework to compare information content of HRTEM datasets an d quantify OOD domain shifts. We demonstrate that neural network segmentation models enjoy significant performance stability, but will smoothly and predictably worsen as imaging conditions shift from the training distribution. Lastly, we consider limitations of our approach in explaining other OOD shifts, s uch as of the atomic structures, and discuss complementary techniques for understanding generalizatio n in such settings.