Industry
AR-Med: Automated Relevance Enhancement in Medical Search via LLM-Driven Information Augmentation
Wang, Chuyue, Feng, Jie, Wu, Yuxi, Zhang, Hang, Fan, Zhiguo, Cheng, Bing, Lin, Wei
Accurate and reliable search on online healthcare platforms is critical for user safety and service efficacy. Traditional methods, however, often fail to comprehend complex and nuanced user queries, limiting their effectiveness. Large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution, offering powerful semantic understanding to bridge this gap. Despite their potential, deploying LLMs in this high-stakes domain is fraught with challenges, including factual hallucinations, specialized knowledge gaps, and high operational costs. To overcome these barriers, we introduce \textbf{AR-Med}, a novel framework for \textbf{A}utomated \textbf{R}elevance assessment for \textbf{Med}ical search that has been successfully deployed at scale on the Online Medical Delivery Platforms. AR-Med grounds LLM reasoning in verified medical knowledge through a retrieval-augmented approach, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. To enable efficient online service, we design a practical knowledge distillation scheme that compresses large teacher models into compact yet powerful student models. We also introduce LocalQSMed, a multi-expert annotated benchmark developed to guide model iteration and ensure strong alignment between offline and online performance. Extensive experiments show AR-Med achieves an offline accuracy of over 93\%, a 24\% absolute improvement over the original online system, and delivers significant gains in online relevance and user satisfaction. Our work presents a practical and scalable blueprint for developing trustworthy, LLM-powered systems in real-world healthcare applications.
Crossing the Sim2Real Gap Between Simulation and Ground Testing to Space Deployment of Autonomous Free-flyer Control
Stewart, Kenneth, Chapin, Samantha, Leontie, Roxana, Henshaw, Carl Glen
Abstract-- Reinforcement learning (RL) offers transforma-tive potential for robotic control in space. We present the first on-orbit demonstration of RL-based autonomous control of a free-flying robot, the NASA Astrobee, aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Using NVIDIA's Omniverse physics simulator and curriculum learning, we trained a deep neural network to replace Astrobee's standard attitude and translation control, enabling it to navigate in microgravity. This successful deployment demonstrates the feasibility of training RL policies terrestrially and transferring them to space-based applications. This paves the way for future work in In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), enabling rapid on-orbit adaptation to dynamic mission requirements. Future In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) missions require increasingly autonomous robotic systems capable of adapting to the dynamic and uncertain conditions of space.
Out-of-the-box: Black-box Causal Attacks on Object Detectors
Navaratnarajah, Melane, Kelly, David A., Chockler, Hana
Adversarial perturbations are a useful way to expose vulnerabilities in object detectors. Existing perturbation methods are frequently white-box and architecture specific. More importantly, while they are often successful, it is rarely clear why they work. Insights into the mechanism of this success would allow developers to understand and analyze these attacks, as well as fine-tune the model to prevent them. This paper presents BlackCAtt, a black-box algorithm and a tool, which uses minimal, causally sufficient pixel sets to construct explainable, imperceptible, reproducible, architecture-agnostic attacks on object detectors. BlackCAtt combines causal pixels with bounding boxes produced by object detectors to create adversarial attacks that lead to the loss, modification or addition of a bounding box. BlackCAtt works across different object detectors of different sizes and architectures, treating the detector as a black box. We compare the performance of BlackCAtt with other black-box attack methods and show that identification of causal pixels leads to more precisely targeted and less perceptible attacks. On the COCO test dataset, our approach is 2.7 times better than the baseline in removing a detection, 3.86 times better in changing a detection, and 5.75 times better in triggering new, spurious, detections. The attacks generated by BlackCAtt are very close to the original image, and hence imperceptible, demonstrating the power of causal pixels.
Autonomous Planning In-space Assembly Reinforcement-learning free-flYer (APIARY) International Space Station Astrobee Testing
Chapin, Samantha, Stewart, Kenneth, Leontie, Roxana, Henshaw, Carl Glen
The US Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL's) Autonomous Planning In-space Assembly Reinforcement-learning free-flYer (APIARY) experiment pioneers the use of reinforcement learning (RL) for control of free-flying robots in the zero-gravity (zero-G) environment of space. On Tuesday, May 27th 2025 the APIARY team conducted the first ever, to our knowledge, RL control of a free-flyer in space using the NASA Astrobee robot on-board the International Space Station (ISS). A robust 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) control policy was trained using an actor-critic Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) network within the NVIDIA Isaac Lab simulation environment, randomizing over goal poses and mass distributions to enhance robustness. This paper details the simulation testing, ground testing, and flight validation of this experiment. This on-orbit demonstration validates the transformative potential of RL for improving robotic autonomy, enabling rapid development and deployment (in minutes to hours) of tailored behaviors for space exploration, logistics, and real-time mission needs.
Context-Aware Hierarchical Learning: A Two-Step Paradigm towards Safer LLMs
Ma, Tengyun, Yao, Jiaqi, He, Daojing, Peng, Shihao, Li, Yu, Liu, Shaohui, Tian, Zhuotao
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for diverse applications. However, their uniform token processing paradigm introduces critical vulnerabilities in instruction handling, particularly when exposed to adversarial scenarios. In this work, we identify and propose a novel class of vulnerabilities, termed Tool-Completion Attack (TCA), which exploits function-calling mechanisms to subvert model behavior. To evaluate LLM robustness against such threats, we introduce the Tool-Completion benchmark, a comprehensive security assessment framework, which reveals that even state-of-the-art models remain susceptible to TCA, with surprisingly high attack success rates. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce Context-Aware Hierarchical Learning (CAHL), a sophisticated mechanism that dynamically balances semantic comprehension with role-specific instruction constraints. CAHL leverages the contextual correlations between different instruction segments to establish a robust, context-aware instruction hierarchy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAHL significantly enhances LLM robustness against both conventional attacks and the proposed TCA, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities in zero-shot evaluations while still preserving model performance on generic tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/S2AILab/CAHL.
Over-the-Air Federated Learning: Rethinking Edge AI Through Signal Processing
Azimi-Abarghouyi, Seyed Mohammad, Fischione, Carlo, Huang, Kaibin
Over-the-Air Federated Learning (AirFL) is an emerging paradigm that tightly integrates wireless signal processing and distributed machine learning to enable scalable AI at the network edge. By leveraging the superposition property of wireless signals, AirFL performs communication and model aggregation of the learning process simultaneously, significantly reducing latency, bandwidth, and energy consumption. This article offers a tutorial treatment of AirFL, presenting a novel classification into three design approaches: CSIT -aware, blind, and weighted AirFL. We provide a comprehensive guide to theoretical foundations, performance analysis, complexity considerations, practical limitations, and prospective research directions.
Quantum Topological Graph Neural Networks for Detecting Complex Fraud Patterns
Doost, Mohammad, Manthouri, Mohammad
We propose a novel QTGNN framework for detecting fraudulent transactions in large-scale financial networks. By integrating quantum embedding, variational graph convolutions, and topological data analysis, QTGNN captures complex transaction dynamics and structural anomalies indicative of fraud. The methodology includes quantum data embedding with entanglement enhancement, variational quantum graph convolutions with non-linear dynamics, extraction of higher-order topological invariants, hybrid quantum-classical anomaly learning with adaptive optimization, and interpretable decision-making via topological attribution. Rigorous convergence guarantees ensure stable training on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, while stability of topological signatures provides robust fraud detection. Optimized for NISQ hardware with circuit simplifications and graph sampling, the framework scales to large transaction networks. Simulations on financial datasets, such as PaySim and Elliptic, benchmark QTGNN against classical and quantum baselines, using metrics like ROC-AUC, precision, and false positive rate. An ablation study evaluates the contributions of quantum embeddings, topological features, non-linear channels, and hybrid learning. QTGNN offers a theoretically sound, interpretable, and practical solution for financial fraud detection, bridging quantum machine learning, graph theory, and topological analysis.
SRPG: Semantically Reconstructed Privacy Guard for Zero-Trust Privacy in Educational Multi-Agent Systems
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) with large language models (LLMs) enable personalized education but risk leaking minors personally identifiable information (PII) via unstructured dialogue. Existing privacy methods struggle to balance security and utility: role-based access control fails on unstructured text, while naive masking destroys pedagogical context. We propose SRPG, a privacy guard for educational MAS, using a Dual-Stream Reconstruction Mechanism: a strict sanitization stream ensures zero PII leakage, and a context reconstruction stream (LLM driven) recovers mathematical logic. This decouples instructional content from private data, preserving teaching efficacy. Tests on MathDial show SRPG works across models; with GPT-4o, it achieves 0.0000 Attack Success Rate (ASR) (zero leakage) and 0.8267 Exact Match, far outperforming the zero trust Pure LLM baseline (0.2138). SRPG effectively protects minors privacy without sacrificing mathematical instructional quality.
AITutor-EvalKit: Exploring the Capabilities of AI Tutors
Naeem, Numaan, Maurya, Kaushal Kumar, Petukhova, Kseniia, Kochmar, Ekaterina
We present AITutor-EvalKit, an application that uses language technology to evaluate the pedagogical quality of AI tutors, provides software for demonstration and evaluation, as well as model inspection and data visualization. This tool is aimed at education stakeholders as well as *ACL community at large, as it supports learning and can also be used to collect user feedback and annotations.
A Novel Approach to Tomato Harvesting Using a Hybrid Gripper with Semantic Segmentation and Keypoint Detection
Ansari, Shahid, Gohil, Mahendra Kumar, Maeda, Yusuke, Bhattacharya, Bishakh
Precision agriculture and smart farming are increasingly adopted to improve productivity, reduce input waste, and maintain high product quality under growing demand. These approaches integrate sensing, automation, and data-driven decision-making to improve crop yield and post-harvest quality (Gupta, Abdelsalam, Khorsandroo, and Mittal (2020)). In this context, autonomous robotic harvesting is a key enabling technology for horticulture, where labor shortages and high labor costs directly affect production and consistency. Despite progress in mechanization, many conventional harvesting methods (e.g., combine harvesters, reapers, and trunk shakers) are unsuitable for soft and delicate crops such as tomatoes and strawberries because large contact forces and impacts can bruise or damage the fruit (Cho, Iida, Suguri, Masuda, and Kurita (2014); Shojaei (2021)). Selective harvesting, where fruits are picked individually at the appropriate ripeness stage, is therefore preferred for high-value crops. However, selective harvesting remains challenging because a robot must (i) detect the target fruit under occlusion, (ii) estimate its pose and identify the pedicel cutting location, and (iii) execute grasping and detachment without damaging the fruit or plant. In real cultivation environments, tomatoes are often densely packed and partially occluded by leaves and branches, making perception and reliable manipulation difficult (Chen et al. (2015)). Consequently, integrated harvesting systems that combine compliant end-effectors, robust perception, and closed-loop control remain an active research topic (Comba, Gay, Piccarolo, and Ricauda Aimonino (2010); Ling, Zhao, Gong, Liu, and Wang (2019)). A wide range of end-effectors has been explored for harvesting and handling soft produce.