Deep Reinforcement Learning have achieved significant success in automatically devising effective traffic signal control (TSC) policies. Neural policies, however, tend to be over-parameterized and non-transparent, hindering their interpretability and deployability on resource-limited edge devices. This work presents SymLight, a priority function search framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for discovering inherently interpretable and deployable symbolic priority functions to serve as the TSC policies. The priority function, in particular, accepts traffic features as input and then outputs a priority for each traffic signal phase, which subsequently directs the phase transition. For effective search, we propose a concise yet expressive priority function representation. This helps mitigate the combinatorial explosion of the action space in MCTS. Additionally, a probabilistic structural rollout strategy is introduced to leverage structural patterns from previously discovered high-quality priority functions, guiding the rollout process. Our experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate SymLight's superior performance across a range of baselines. A key advantage is SymLight's ability to produce interpretable and deployable TSC policies while maintaining excellent performance.

Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by entropy maximization, yet do not achieve collective objectives. Despite this analogy, no unified framework exists to explain the stochastic behavior in both biological and physical systems. Here, we present empirical evidence from \textit{Formica polyctena} ants that reveals a shared statistical mechanism underlying both systems: maximization under different energy function constraints. We further demonstrate that robotic swarms governed by this principle can exhibit scalable, decentralized cooperation, mimicking physical phase-like behaviors with minimal individual computation. These findings established a unified stochastic model linking biological, physical, and robotic swarms, offering a scalable principle for designing robust and intelligent swarm robotics.

Ambient sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) in smart homes remains challenging due to the need for real-time inference, spatially grounded reasoning, and context-aware temporal modeling. Existing approaches often rely on pre-segmented, within-activity data and overlook the physical layout of the environment, limiting their robustness in continuous, real-world deployments. In this paper, we propose MARAuder's Map, a novel framework for real-time activity recognition from raw, unsegmented sensor streams. Our method projects sensor activations onto the physical floorplan to generate trajectory-aware, image-like sequences that capture the spatial flow of human movement. These representations are processed by a hybrid deep learning model that jointly captures spatial structure and temporal dependencies. To enhance temporal awareness, we introduce a learnable time embedding module that encodes contextual cues such as hour-of-day and day-of-week. Additionally, an attention-based encoder selectively focuses on informative segments within each observation window, enabling accurate recognition even under cross-activity transitions and temporal ambiguity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world smart home datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines, offering a practical solution for real-time HAR in ambient sensor environments.

Within this field, Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) focuses on recognizing single, context-free signs, which can be seen as the building blocks for continuous sign language understanding. While ISLR provides an environment to study the visual and temporal characteristics of signs, it also poses significant challenges due to intra-class variations, such as differences in signing speed, hand orientation, and signer-dependent styles. Addressing these challenges is essential for building reliable models that can generalize across diverse signers and recording conditions. Moreover, the recognition of isolated signs provides a basis for Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR), where the boundaries between consecutive signs are not explicitly defined. ISLR is typically formulated as a classification problem, where each video segment corresponds to a single label representing a sign.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without exposing clients' private data, but its deployment is often constrained by the communication cost of transmitting gradients between clients and the central server, especially under system heterogeneity where low-bandwidth clients bottleneck overall performance. Lossy compression of gradient data can mitigate this overhead, and error-bounded lossy compression (EBLC) is particularly appealing for its fine-grained utility-compression tradeoff. However, existing EBLC methods (e.g., SZ), originally designed for smooth scientific data with strong spatial locality, rely on generic predictors such as Lorenzo and interpolation for entropy reduction to improve compression ratio. Gradient tensors, in contrast, exhibit low smoothness and weak spatial correlation, rendering these predictors ineffective and leading to poor compression ratios. To address this limitation, we propose an EBLC framework tailored for FL gradient data to achieve high compression ratios while preserving model accuracy. The core of it is an innovative prediction mechanism that exploits temporal correlations across FL training rounds and structural regularities within convolutional kernels to reduce residual entropy. The predictor is compatible with standard quantizers and entropy coders and comprises (1) a cross-round magnitude predictor based on a normalized exponential moving average, and (2) a sign predictor that leverages gradient oscillation and kernel-level sign consistency. Experiments show that this new EBLC yields up to 1.53x higher compression ratios than SZ3 with lower accuracy loss. Integrated into a real-world FL framework, APPFL, it reduces end-to-end communication time by 76.1%-96.2% under various constrained-bandwidth scenarios, demonstrating strong scalability for real-world FL deployments.

We conducted three 90 - minute workshops at Talenthub Op Zuid, each with a different group of participants (total N=24, MAge =17.6, SD=1.2, see S upplement for additional details). In the first workshop, participants reviewed the prior 13 personas from Stage 1 and critiqued them for gaps in relevance. The scoping personas generated from survey and forum data gave youth stakeholders a concrete starting point for consulting as experts by experience in initial co - design activities. They challenged the realism of the scoping personas . Using fill - in - the - blank templates to guide but not restrict their persona creation (created by a youth member of the research team with design training, see Supplement), youth added contextual details to the project personas, such as daily routines, stressors, and digital habits, and brainstormed plausible backstories involving bullying, school difficulties, or parental conflict. The second workshop engaged a new participant group who expanded on previous outputs and addressed additional questions on living environment and emotional support needs, as this was suggested as relevant by youth from the prior workshop . Participants revised or created new personas b ased on their own or peers' experiences. In t he third workshop, a new group of participants again reviewed prior co - creation and outputs and further refined the personas .

We study the problem of efficiently estimating the mean of a $k$-class random variable, $Y$, using a limited number of labels, $N$, in settings where the analyst has access to auxiliary information (i.e.: covariates) $X$ that may be informative about $Y$. We propose an active learning algorithm ("PartiBandits") to estimate $\mathbb{E}[Y]$. The algorithm yields an estimate, $\widehatμ_{\text{PB}}$, such that $\left( \widehatμ_{\text{PB}} - \mathbb{E}[Y]\right)^2$ is $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( \frac{ν+ \exp(c \cdot (-N/\log(N))) }{N} \right)$, where $c > 0$ is a constant and $ν$ is the risk of the Bayes-optimal classifier. PartiBandits is essentially a two-stage algorithm. In the first stage, it learns a partition of the unlabeled data that shrinks the average conditional variance of $Y$. In the second stage it uses a UCB-style subroutine ("WarmStart-UCB") to request labels from each stratum round-by-round. Both the main algorithm's and the subroutine's convergence rates are minimax optimal in classical settings. PartiBandits bridges the UCB and disagreement-based approaches to active learning despite these two approaches being designed to tackle very different tasks. We illustrate our methods through simulation using nationwide electronic health records. Our methods can be implemented using the PartiBandits package in R.

This work introduces the quantum-inspired variational convolution (QiVC) framework, a novel learning paradigm that integrates principles of probabilistic inference, variational optimization, and quantum-inspired transformations within convolutional architectures. The central innovation of QiVC lies in its quantum-inspired rotated ensemble (QiRE) mechanism. QiRE performs differentiable low-dimensional subspace rotations of convolutional weights, analogously to quantum state evolution. This approach enables structured uncertainty modeling while preserving the intrinsic geometry of the parameter space, resulting in more expressive, stable, and uncertainty-aware representations. To demonstrate its practical potential, the concept is instantiated in a QiVC-based convolutional network (QiVC-Net) and evaluated in the context of biosignal classification, focusing on phonocardiogram (PCG) recordings, a challenging domain characterized by high noise, inter-subject variability, and often imbalanced data. The proposed QiVC-Net integrates an architecture in which the QiVC layer does not introduce additional parameters, instead performing an ensemble rotation of the convolutional weights through a structured mechanism ensuring robustness without added highly computational burden. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, PhysioNet CinC 2016 and PhysioNet CirCor DigiScope 2022, show that QiVC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching accuracies of 97.84% and 97.89%, respectively. These findings highlight the versatility of the QiVC framework and its promise for advancing uncertainty-aware modeling in real-world biomedical signal analysis. The implementation of the QiVConv layer is openly available in GitHub.

We introduce the first formal large-scale assessment of the utility of traditional chemical functional groups as used in chemical explanations. Our assessment employs a fundamental principle from computational learning theory: a good explanation of data should also compress the data. We introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm based on the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle that searches for substructures that compress around three million biologically relevant molecules. We demonstrate that the discovered substructures contain most human-curated functional groups as well as novel larger patterns with more specific functions. We also run our algorithm on 24 specific bioactivity prediction datasets to discover dataset-specific functional groups. Fingerprints constructed from dataset-specific functional groups are shown to significantly outperform other fingerprint representations, including the MACCS and Morgan fingerprint, when training ridge regression models on bioactivity regression tasks.

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity plays a pivotal role in accelerating the discovery of novel drugs and vaccines, particularly for gastrointestinal (GI) diseases such as gastric ulcers, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. Traditional computational models often rely on structural information alone and thus fail to capture the genetic determinants that influence disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses. To address this gap, we propose GastroDL-Fusion, a dual-modal deep learning framework that integrates protein-ligand complex data with disease-associated gene sequence information for drug and vaccine development. In our approach, protein-ligand complexes are represented as molecular graphs and modeled using a Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN), while gene sequences are encoded into biologically meaningful embeddings via a pre-trained Transformer (ProtBERT/ESM). These complementary modalities are fused through a multi-layer perceptron to enable robust cross-modal interaction learning. We evaluate the model on benchmark datasets of GI disease-related targets, demonstrating that GastroDL-Fusion significantly improves predictive performance over conventional methods. Specifically, the model achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.12 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.75, outperforming CNN, BiLSTM, GIN, and Transformer-only baselines. These results confirm that incorporating both structural and genetic features yields more accurate predictions of binding affinities, providing a reliable computational tool for accelerating the design of targeted therapies and vaccines in the context of gastrointestinal diseases.