The standard theory of model-free reinforcement learning assumes that the environment dynamics are stationary and that agents are decoupled from their environment, such that policies are treated as being separate from the world they inhabit. This leads to theoretical challenges in the multi-agent setting where the non-stationarity induced by the learning of other agents demands prospective learning based on prediction models. To accurately model other agents, an agent must account for the fact that those other agents are, in turn, forming beliefs about it to predict its future behavior, motivating agents to model themselves as part of the environment. Here, building upon foundational work on universal artificial intelligence (AIXI), we introduce a mathematical framework for prospective learning and embedded agency centered on self-prediction, where Bayesian RL agents predict both future perceptual inputs and their own actions, and must therefore resolve epistemic uncertainty about themselves as part of the universe they inhabit. We show that in multi-agent settings, self-prediction enables agents to reason about others running similar algorithms, leading to new game-theoretic solution concepts and novel forms of cooperation unattainable by classical decoupled agents. Moreover, we extend the theory of AIXI, and study universally intelligent embedded agents which start from a Solomonoff prior. We show that these idealized agents can form consistent mutual predictions and achieve infinite-order theory of mind, potentially setting a gold standard for embedded multi-agent learning.

Online pornography and gambling have consistently posed regulatory challenges for governments, threatening both personal assets and privacy. Therefore, it is imperative to research the classification of the newly registered Pornographic and Gambling Domain Names (PGDN). However, scholarly investigation into this topic is limited. Previous efforts in PGDN classification pursue high accuracy using ideal sample data, while others employ up-to-date data from real-world scenarios but achieve lower classification accuracy. This paper introduces the Real-PGDN method, which accomplishes a complete process of timely and comprehensive real-data crawling, feature extraction with feature-missing tolerance, precise PGDN classification, and assessment of application effects in actual scenarios. Our two-level classifier, which integrates CoSENT (BERT-based), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and traditional classification algorithms, achieves a 97.88% precision. The research process amasses the NRD2024 dataset, which contains continuous detection information over 20 days for 1,500,000 newly registered domain names across 6 directions. Results from our case study demonstrate that this method also maintains a forecast precision of over 70% for PGDN that are delayed in usage after registration.

We present a method for trajectory planning for autonomous driving, learning image-based context embeddings that align with motion prediction frameworks and planning-based intention input. Within our method, a ViT encoder takes raw images and past kinematic state as input and is trained to produce context embeddings, drawing inspiration from those generated by the recent MTR (Motion Transformer) encoder, effectively substituting map-based features with learned visual representations. MTR provides a strong foundation for multimodal trajectory prediction by localizing agent intent and refining motion iteratively via motion query pairs; we name our approach MTR-VP (Motion Transformer for Vision-based Planning), and instead of the learnable intention queries used in the MTR decoder, we use cross attention on the intent and the context embeddings, which reflect a combination of information encoded from the driving scene and past vehicle states. We evaluate our methods on the Waymo End-to-End Driving Dataset, which requires predicting the agent's future 5-second trajectory in bird's-eye-view coordinates using prior camera images, agent pose history, and routing goals. We analyze our architecture using ablation studies, removing input images and multiple trajectory output. Our results suggest that transformer-based methods that are used to combine the visual features along with the kinetic features such as the past trajectory features are not effective at combining both modes to produce useful scene context embeddings, even when intention embeddings are augmented with foundation-model representations of scene context from CLIP and DINOv2, but that predicting a distribution over multiple futures instead of a single future trajectory boosts planning performance.

ASD is a complicated neurodevelopmental disorder marked by variation in symptom presentation and neurological underpinnings, making early and objective diagnosis extremely problematic. This paper presents a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) model, incorporating Chebyshev Spectral Graph Convolution and Graph Attention Networks (GAT), to increase the classification accuracy of ASD utilizing multimodal neuroimaging and phenotypic data. Leveraging the ABIDE I dataset, which contains resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), structural MRI (sMRI), and phenotypic variables from 870 patients, the model leverages a multi-branch architecture that processes each modality individually before merging them via concatenation. Graph structure is encoded using site-based similarity to generate a population graph, which helps in understanding relationship connections across individuals. Chebyshev polynomial filters provide localized spectral learning with lower computational complexity, whereas GAT layers increase node representations by attention-weighted aggregation of surrounding information. The proposed model is trained using stratified five-fold cross-validation with a total input dimension of 5,206 features per individual. Extensive trials demonstrate the enhanced model's superiority, achieving a test accuracy of 74.82\% and an AUC of 0.82 on the entire dataset, surpassing multiple state-of-the-art baselines, including conventional GCNs, autoencoder-based deep neural networks, and multimodal CNNs.

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.

Accurate long horizon forecasting of particulate matter (PM) concentration fields is essential for operational public health decisions. However, achieving reliable forecasts remains challenging in regions with complex terrain and strong atmospheric dynamics such as East Asia. While foundation models such as Aurora offer global generality, they often miss region-specific dynamics and rely on non-real-time inputs, limiting their practical utility for localized warning systems. T o address this gap, we construct and release the real-world observations and high-resolution CMAQ-OBS dataset for East Asia, reducing regional error by 59.5% and enabling real-time 48-120 hour forecasts critical for public health alerts. However, standard point-wise objectives cannot reflect asymmetric operational costs, where false alarms deteriorate public trust while missed severe events endanger populations. This cost mismatch causes SFT models to over-predict and yield high False Alarm Rates. W e introduce Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with class-wise rewards and curriculum rollout to align predictions with operational priorities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the reliability of the forecast. Compared to the SFT-only baseline, our model reduces the False Alarm Rate by 47.3% while achieving a competitive F1-score, proving its effectiveness for practical, real-world air quality forecasting systems on long lead time scenarios.

This paper investigates how the dynamic articulatory model DYNARTmo accounts for articulatory tradeoffs between primary and secondary articulators, with a focus on lips-jaw and tongue-jaw coordination. While DYNARTmo does not implement full task-dynamic second-order biomechanics, it adopts first-order task-space gesture specifications comparable to those used in articulatory phonology and integrates a simplified mechanism for distributing articulatory effort across multiple articulators. We first outline the conceptual relationship between task dynamics and DYNARTmo, emphasizing the distinction between high-level task-space trajectories and their low-level articulatory execution. We then present simulation results for a set of CV syllables that illustrate how jaw displacement varies as a function of both place of articulation (labial, apical, dorsal) and vowel context (/a/, /i/, /u/). The model reproduces empirically attested patterns of articulatory synergy, including jaw-supported apical closures, lower-lip elevation in bilabial stops, tongue-jaw co-movement, and saturation effects in labial constrictions. These results demonstrate that even with computationally simplified assumptions, DYNARTmo can generate realistic spatio-temporal movement patterns that capture key aspects of articulatory tradeoff and synergy across a range of consonant-vowel combinations.

Abstract--Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a musculoskeletal condition that can cause significant limitations and impairments in daily activities, especially among older individuals. T o evaluate the severity of KOA, typically, X-ray images of the affected knee are analyzed, and a grade is assigned based on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grading system, which classifies KOA severity into five levels, ranging from 0 to 4. This approach requires a high level of expertise and time and is susceptible to subjective interpretation, thereby introducing potential diagnostic inaccuracies. T o address this problem a stacked ensemble model of fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was developed for two classification tasks: a binary classifier for detecting the presence of KOA, and a multiclass classifier for precise grading across the KL spectrum. The proposed stacked ensemble model consists of a diverse set of pre-trained architectures, including MobileNetV2, Y ou Only Look Once (YOLOv8), and DenseNet201 as base learners and Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) as the meta-learner . This proposed model had a balanced test accuracy of 73% in multiclass classification and 87.5% in binary classification, which is higher than previous works in extant literature. Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) [1] is a degenerative musculoskeletal joint disease in which the knee cartilage breaks down over time.

Advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled effective cross-modality retrieval. However, when both text and images exist in the database, similarity scores would differ in scale by modality. This phenomenon, known as the modality gap, hinders accurate retrieval. Most existing studies address this issue with manually labeled data, e.g., by fine-tuning VLMs on them. In this work, we propose a similarity standardization approach with pseudo data construction. We first compute the mean and variance of the similarity scores between each query and its paired data in text or image modality. Using these modality-specific statistics, we standardize all similarity scores to compare on a common scale across modalities. These statistics are calculated from pseudo pairs, which are constructed by retrieving the text and image candidates with the highest cosine similarity to each query. We evaluate our method across seven VLMs using two multi-modal QA benchmarks (MMQA and WebQA), where each question requires retrieving either text or image data. Our experimental results show that our method significantly improves retrieval performance, achieving average Recall@20 gains of 64% on MMQA and 28% on WebQA when the query and the target data belong to different modalities. Compared to E5-V, which addresses the modality gap through image captioning, we confirm that our method more effectively bridges the modality gap.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of small language models (SLMs) for agentic tasks (function/tool/API calling) with a focus on running agents on edge devices without reliance on cloud infrastructure. We evaluate SLMs using the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) framework and describe parameter-driven optimization strategies that include supervised fine-tuning (SFT), parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), reinforcement learning (RL)-based optimization, preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and hybrid methods. We report results for models including TinyAgent, TinyLlama, Qwen, and xLAM across BFCL categories (simple, multiple, parallel, parallel-multiple, and relevance detection), both in live and non-live settings, and in multi-turn evaluations. We additionally detail a DPO training pipeline constructed from AgentBank data (e.g., ALFRED), including our conversion of SFT data to chosen-rejected pairs using TinyLlama responses as rejected outputs and manual validation. Our results demonstrate clear accuracy differences across model scales where medium-sized models (1-3B parameters) significantly outperform ultra-compact models (<1B parameters), achieving up to 65.74% overall accuracy, and 55.62% multi-turn accuracy with hybrid optimization. This study highlights the importance of hybrid optimization strategies that enable small language models to deliver accurate, efficient, and stable agentic AI on edge devices, making privacy-preserving, low-latency autonomous agents practical beyond the cloud.