Industry
Will AI mean better adverts or 'creepy slop'?
Will AI mean better adverts or'creepy slop'? Imagine one night, you're scrolling through social media on your phone, and the ads start to look remarkably familiar. They're decked out in your favourite colours, are featuring your favourite music and the wording sounds like phrases you regularly use. Welcome to the future of advertising, which is already here thanks to AI. Advertising company Cheil UK, for example, has been working with startup Spotlight on using large language AI models to understand people's online activity, and adapt that content based on what the AI interprets an individual's personality to be. The technology can then mirror how someone talks in terms of tone, phrase and pace to change the text of an ad accordingly, and insert music and colours to match, say, whether the AI deems someone to be introverted or extroverted, or have specific preferences for loud or calm music, or light or dark colours.
Regular Games -- an Automata-Based General Game Playing Language
Miernik, Radosลaw, Szykuลa, Marek, Kowalski, Jakub, Cieลluk, Jakub, Galas, ลukasz, Pawlik, Wojciech
We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) system called Regular Games (RG). The main goal of RG is to be both computationally efficient and convenient for game design. The system consists of several languages. The core component is a low-level language that defines the rules by a finite automaton. It is minimal with only a few mechanisms, which makes it easy for automatic processing (by agents, analysis, optimization, etc.). The language is universal for the class of all finite turn-based games with imperfect information. Higher-level languages are introduced for game design (by humans or Procedural Content Generation), which are eventually translated to a low-level language. RG generates faster forward models than the current state of the art, beating other GGP systems (Regular Boardgames, Ludii) in terms of efficiency. Additionally, RG's ecosystem includes an editor with LSP, automaton visualization, benchmarking tools, and a debugger of game description transformations.
Boosted GFlowNets: Improving Exploration via Sequential Learning
Dall'Antonia, Pedro, da Silva, Tiago, de Souza, Daniel Augusto, Mattos, Cรฉsar Lincoln C., Mesquita, Diego
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are powerful samplers for compositional objects that, by design, sample proportionally to a given non-negative reward. Nonetheless, in practice, they often struggle to explore the reward landscape evenly: trajectories toward easy-to-reach regions dominate training, while hard-to-reach modes receive vanishing or uninformative gradients, leading to poor coverage of high-reward areas. We address this imbalance with Boosted GFlowNets, a method that sequentially trains an ensemble of GFlowNets, each optimizing a residual reward that compensates for the mass already captured by previous models. This residual principle reactivates learning signals in underexplored regions and, under mild assumptions, ensures a monotone non-degradation property: adding boosters cannot worsen the learned distribution and typically improves it. Empirically, Boosted GFlowNets achieve substantially better exploration and sample diversity on multimodal synthetic benchmarks and peptide design tasks, while preserving the stability and simplicity of standard trajectory-balance training.
Algorithm Design and Stronger Guarantees for the Improving Multi-Armed Bandits Problem
Blum, Avrim, Garicano, Marten, Ravichandran, Kavya, Sharma, Dravyansh
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection from learning curves. Each pull of an arm provides reward that increases monotonically with diminishing returns. A growing line of work has designed algorithms for improving bandits, albeit with somewhat pessimistic worst-case guarantees. Indeed, strong lower bounds of $ฮฉ(k)$ and $ฮฉ(\sqrt{k})$ multiplicative approximation factors are known for both deterministic and randomized algorithms (respectively) relative to the optimal arm, where $k$ is the number of bandit arms. In this work, we propose two new parameterized families of bandit algorithms and bound the sample complexity of learning the near-optimal algorithm from each family using offline data. The first family we define includes the optimal randomized algorithm from prior work. We show that an appropriately chosen algorithm from this family can achieve stronger guarantees, with optimal dependence on $k$, when the arm reward curves satisfy additional properties related to the strength of concavity. Our second family contains algorithms that both guarantee best-arm identification on well-behaved instances and revert to worst case guarantees on poorly-behaved instances. Taking a statistical learning perspective on the bandit rewards optimization problem, we achieve stronger data-dependent guarantees without the need for actually verifying whether the assumptions are satisfied.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine: A Scoping Review of Technical Implementations, Clinical Applications, and Ethical Considerations
Yang, Rui, Wong, Matthew Yu Heng, Li, Huitao, Li, Xin, Zhu, Wentao, Liao, Jingchi, Yu, Kunyu, Liew, Jonathan Chong Kai, Xuan, Weihao, Chen, Yingjian, Ke, Yuhe, Ong, Jasmine Chiat Ling, Teodoro, Douglas, Hong, Chuan, Ting, Daniel Shi Wei, Liu, Nan
The rapid growth of medical knowledge and increasing complexity of clinical practice pose challenges. In this context, large language models ( LLMs) have demonstrated value; however, inherent limitations remain. Retrieval-augmented generation ( RAG) technologies show potential to enhance their clinical applicability. This study reviewed RAG applications in medicine. We found that research primarily relied on publicly available data, with limited application in private data. For retrieval, approaches commonly relied on English-centric embedding models, while LLMs were mostly generic, with limited use of medical-specific LLMs. For evaluation, automated metrics evaluated generation quality and task performance, whereas human evaluation focused on accuracy, completeness, relevance, and fluency, with insufficient attention to bias and safety. RAG applications were concentrated on question answering, report generation, text summarization, and information extraction. Overall, medical RAG remains at an early stage, requiring advances in clinical validation, cross-linguistic adaptation, and support for low-resource settings to enable trustworthy and responsible global use.
AI-Integrated Decision Support System for Real-Time Market Growth Forecasting and Multi-Source Content Diffusion Analytics
Yin, Ziqing, Chen, Xuanjing, Zhang, Xi
The rapid proliferation of AI-generated content ( AIGC) has reshaped the dynamics of digital marketing and online consumer behavior. However, predicting the diffusion trajectory and market impact of such content remains challenging due to data heterogeneity, non-linear propagation mechanisms, and evolving consumer interactions. This study proposes an AI-driven Decision Support System ( DSS) that integrates multi-source data--including social media streams, marketing expenditure records, consumer engagement logs, and sentiment dynamics--using a hybrid Graph Neural Network ( GNN) and Temporal Transformer framework. The model jointly learns the content diffusion structure and temporal influence evolution through a dual-channel architecture, while causal inference modules disentangle the effects of marketing stimuli on return on investment ( ROI) and market visibility. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets collected from multiple online platforms such as Twitter, Tik Tok, and You Tube advertising show that our system outperforms existing baselines in all six metrics. The proposed DSS enhances marketing decisions by providing interpretable real-time insights into AIGC driven content dissemination and market growth patterns.
FineSkiing: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Skiing Action Quality Assessment
Zhang, Yongji, Li, Siqi, Gao, Yue, Jiang, Yu
Action Quality Assessment (AQA) aims to evaluate and score sports actions, which has attracted widespread interest in recent years. Existing AQA methods primarily predict scores based on features extracted from the entire video, resulting in limited interpretability and reliability. Meanwhile, existing AQA datasets also lack fine-grained annotations for action scores, especially for deduction items and sub-score annotations. In this paper, we construct the first AQA dataset containing fine-grained sub-score and deduction annotations for aerial skiing, which will be released as a new benchmark. For the technical challenges, we propose a novel AQA method, named JudgeMind, which significantly enhances performance and reliability by simulating the judgment and scoring mindset of professional referees. Our method segments the input action video into different stages and scores each stage to enhance accuracy. Then, we propose a stage-aware feature enhancement and fusion module to boost the perception of stage-specific key regions and enhance the robustness to visual changes caused by frequent camera viewpoints switching. In addition, we propose a knowledge-based grade-aware decoder to incorporate possible deduction items as prior knowledge to predict more accurate and reliable scores. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Reasoning About Intent for Ambiguous Requests
Saparina, Irina, Lapata, Mirella
Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation. Intent misunderstandings can frustrate users and create safety risks. To address this, we propose generating multiple interpretation-answer pairs in a single structured response to ambiguous requests. Our models are trained with reinforcement learning and customized reward functions using multiple valid answers as supervision. Experiments on conversational question answering and semantic parsing demonstrate that our method achieves higher coverage of valid answers than baseline approaches. Human evaluation confirms that predicted interpretations are highly aligned with their answers. Our approach promotes transparency with explicit interpretations, achieves efficiency by requiring only one generation step, and supports downstream applications through its structured output format.