Industry
Advancing site-specific disease and pest management in precision agriculture: From reasoning-driven foundation models to adaptive, feedback-based learning
Rai, Nitin, Daeun, null, Choi, null, Boyd, Nathan S., Schumann, Arnold W.
Site-specific disease management (SSDM) in crops has advanced rapidly through machine and deep learning (ML and DL) for real-time computer vision. Research evolved from handcrafted feature extraction to large-scale automated feature learning. With foundation models (FMs), crop disease datasets are now processed in fundamentally new ways. Unlike traditional neural networks, FMs integrate visual and textual data, interpret symptoms in text, reason about symptom-management relationships, and support interactive QA for growers and educators. Adaptive and imitation learning in robotics further enables field-based disease management. This review screened approx. 40 articles on FM applications for SSDM, focusing on large-language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), and discussing their role in adaptive learning (AL), reinforcement learning (RL), and digital twin frameworks for targeted spraying. Key findings: (a) FMs are gaining traction with surging literature in 2023-24; (b) VLMs outpace LLMs, with a 5-10x increase in publications; (c) RL and AL are still nascent for smart spraying; (d) digital twins with RL can simulate targeted spraying virtually; (e) addressing the sim-to-real gap is critical for real-world deployment; (f) human-robot collaboration remains limited, especially in human-in-the-loop approaches where robots detect early symptoms and humans validate uncertain cases; (g) multi-modal FMs with real-time feedback will drive next-gen SSDM. For updates, resources, and contributions, visit, https://github.com/nitin-dominic/AgriPathogenDatabase, to submit papers, code, or datasets.
Quantifying the Effects of Word Length, Frequency, and Predictability on Dyslexia
Rydel-Johnston, Hugo, Kafkas, Alex
Division of Psychology, Communication & Human Neuroscience, The University of Manchester Author Note Hugo Rydel - Johnston https://orcid.org/0009 - 0006 - 1103 - 1015 Alex Ka fkas https://orcid.org/0000 - 0001 - 5133 - 8827 We have no conflict s of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hugo Rydel - Johnston, Division of Psychology, Communication & Human Neuroscience, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK . DYSLEXIC READING TAKES LONGER 2 Abstract We ask where, and under what conditions, dyslexic reading costs arise in a large - scale naturalistic reading dataset. Using eye - tracking aligned to word - level properties -- word length, frequency, and predictability -- we model the influence of each of these feat ures on dyslexic time costs. We find that all three properties robustly change reading times in both typical and dyslexic readers, but dyslexic readers show stronger sensitivities to each of the three features, especially predictability. Counterfactual man ipulations of these features substantially narrow the dyslexic - control gap -- by about one - third -- with predictability showing the strongest effect, followed by length, and frequency. These patterns align with existing dyslexia theories suggesting heightened de mands on linguistic working memory and phonological encoding in dyslexic reading and directly motivate further research into lexical complexity and preview benefits to further explain the quantified gap. In effect, these findings break down when extra dysl exic costs arise, how large they are, and provide actionable guidance for the development of interventions and computational models for dyslexic readers. Keywords: e ye movements, r eading time, w ord length, l exical f requency, p redictability, s kipping, t otal reading time DYSLEXIC READING TAKES LONGER 3 Why Dyslexic Reading Takes Longer - And When Dyslexia is characterized by persistent difficulty in accurate and/or fluent word recognition and decoding (Lyon et al., 2003) and affects between 4 - 8% of individuals (Yang et al., 2022; Doust et al., 2022).
All in one timestep: Enhancing Sparsity and Energy efficiency in Multi-level Spiking Neural Networks
Castagnetti, Andrea, Pegatoquet, Alain, Miramond, Benoรฎt
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are one of the most promising bio-inspired neural networks models and have drawn increasing attention in recent years. The event-driven communication mechanism of SNNs allows for sparse and theoretically low-power operations on dedicated neuromorphic hardware. However, the binary nature of instantaneous spikes also leads to considerable information loss in SNNs, resulting in accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we propose a multi-level spiking neuron model able to provide both low-quantization error and minimal inference latency while approaching the performance of full precision Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Experimental results with popular network architectures and datasets, show that multi-level spiking neurons provide better information compression, allowing therefore a reduction in latency without performance loss. When compared to binary SNNs on image classification scenarios, multi-level SNNs indeed allow reducing by 2 to 3 times the energy consumption depending on the number of quantization intervals. On neuromorphic data, our approach allows us to drastically reduce the inference latency to 1 timestep, which corresponds to a compression factor of 10 compared to previously published results. At the architectural level, we propose a new residual architecture that we call Sparse-ResNet. Through a careful analysis of the spikes propagation in residual connections we highlight a spike avalanche effect, that affects most spiking residual architectures. Using our Sparse-ResNet architecture, we can provide state-of-the-art accuracy results in image classification while reducing by more than 20% the network activity compared to the previous spiking ResNets.
Symbolic Snapshot Ensembles
Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a form of logical machine learning. Most ILP algorithms learn a single hypothesis from a single training run. Ensemble methods train an ILP algorithm multiple times to learn multiple hypotheses. In this paper, we train an ILP algorithm only once and save intermediate hypotheses. We then combine the hypotheses using a minimum description length weighting scheme. Our experiments on multiple benchmarks, including game playing and visual reasoning, show that our approach improves predictive accuracy by 4% with less than 1% computational overhead.
GroundLoc: Efficient Large-Scale Outdoor LiDAR-Only Localization
Steinke, Nicolai, Goehring, Daniel
Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract--In this letter, we introduce GroundLoc, a LiDAR-only localization pipeline designed to localize a mobile robot in large-scale outdoor environments using prior maps. GroundLoc employs a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) image projection focusing on the perceived ground area and utilizes the place recognition network R2D2, or alternatively, the non-learning approach Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), to identify and select key-points for BEV image map registration. Our results demonstrate that GroundLoc outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the SemanticKITTI and HeLiPR datasets across various sensors. In the multi-session localization evaluation, GroundLoc reaches an A verage Trajectory Error (A TE) well below 50 cm on all Ouster OS2 128 sequences while meeting online runtime requirements. The system supports various sensor models, as evidenced by evaluations conducted with V elodyne HDL-64E, Ouster OS2 128, Aeva Aeries II, and Livox A via sensors. The prior maps are stored as 2D raster image maps, which can be created from a single drive and require only 4 MB of storage per square kilometer . HE accurate self-localization in large-scale outdoor environments remains an important problem in mobile robotics. As mobile robots, such as autonomous vehicles, operate in open, large-scale areas, there is an increase in both run-time and memory requirements for visual localization systems.
A Novel XAI-Enhanced Quantum Adversarial Networks for Velocity Dispersion Modeling in MaNGA Galaxies
Narkedimilli, Sathwik, Kumar, N V Saran, H, Aswath Babu, Vanahalli, Manjunath K, M, Manish, Jain, Vinija, Chadha, Aman
In the ever-evolving landscape of astrophysics and machine learning, understanding the internal kinematics of galaxies remains a formidable challenge. Traditional techniques for modeling galaxy dynamics have offered valuable insights but are often limited by their inability to capture complex, non-linear relationships in high-dimensional data. Recent advances in quantum computing and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provide new avenues for addressing these challenges, paving the way for more sophisticated and interpretable models in astrophysical research [19] [20] [21]. Galaxy velocity dispersion is a critical parameter that underpins our understanding of the mass distribution, dynamical state, and evolutionary history of galaxies. By analyzing detailed stellar population and kinematic properties--such as morphological classification, effective radius, and gradients in stellar age and metallicity, the prediction of velocity dispersion becomes central to characterizing the intricate interplay between a galaxy's structure and its dynamic behavior. The MaNGA dataset, with its rich set of 11 features, offers a robust platform for exploring these phenomena and highlights the technical demands of achieving accurate predictions in this domain [1].
An Adaptive Inspection Planning Approach Towards Routine Monitoring in Uncertain Environments
Viswanathan, Vignesh Kottayam, Bai, Yifan, Fredriksson, Scott, Satpute, Sumeet, Kanellakis, Christoforos, Nikolakopoulos, George
In this work, we present a hierarchical framework designed to support robotic inspection under environment uncertainty. By leveraging a known environment model, existing methods plan and safely track inspection routes to visit points of interest. However, discrepancies between the model and actual site conditions, caused by either natural or human activities, can alter the surface morphology or introduce path obstructions. To address this challenge, the proposed framework divides the inspection task into: (a) generating the initial global view-plan for region of interests based on a historical map and (b) local view replanning to adapt to the current morphology of the inspection scene. The proposed hierarchy preserves global coverage objectives while enabling reactive adaptation to the local surface morphology. This enables the local autonomy to remain robust against environment uncertainty and complete the inspection tasks. We validate the approach through deployments in real-world subterranean mines using quadrupedal robot.
Generative AI for Healthcare: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Perspectives
Chen, Gang, Liu, Changshuo, Ooi, Gene Anne, Tan, Marcus, Xie, Zhongle, Yin, Jianwei, Yip, James Wei Luen, Zhang, Wenqiao, Zhu, Jiaqi, Ooi, Beng Chin
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is taking the world by storm. It promises transformative opportunities for advancing and disrupting existing practices, including healthcare. From large language models (LLMs) for clinical note synthesis and conversational assistance to multimodal systems that integrate medical imaging, electronic health records, and genomic data for decision support, GenAI is transforming the practice of medicine and the delivery of healthcare, such as diagnosis and personalized treatments, with great potential in reducing the cognitive burden on clinicians, thereby improving overall healthcare delivery. However, GenAI deployment in healthcare requires an in-depth understanding of healthcare tasks and what can and cannot be achieved. In this paper, we propose a data-centric paradigm in the design and deployment of GenAI systems for healthcare. Specifically, we reposition the data life cycle by making the medical data ecosystem as the foundational substrate for generative healthcare systems. This ecosystem is designed to sustainably support the integration, representation, and retrieval of diverse medical data and knowledge. With effective and efficient data processing pipelines, such as semantic vector search and contextual querying, it enables GenAI-powered operations for upstream model components and downstream clinical applications. Ultimately, it not only supplies foundation models with high-quality, multimodal data for large-scale pretraining and domain-specific fine-tuning, but also serves as a knowledge retrieval backend to support task-specific inference via the agentic layer. The ecosystem enables the deployment of GenAI for high-quality and effective healthcare delivery.
Dual-Mind World Models: A General Framework for Learning in Dynamic Wireless Networks
Wang, Lingyi, Shelim, Rashed, Saad, Walid, Ramakrishnan, Naren
Despite the popularity of reinforcement learning (RL) in wireless networks, existing approaches that rely on model-free RL (MFRL) and model-based RL (MBRL) are data inefficient and short-sighted. Such RL-based solutions cannot generalize to novel network states since they capture only statistical patterns rather than the underlying physics and logic from wireless data. These limitations become particularly challenging in complex wireless networks with high dynamics and long-term planning requirements. To address these limitations, in this paper, a novel dual-mind world model-based learning framework is proposed with the goal of optimizing completeness-weighted age of information (CAoI) in a challenging mmWave V2X scenario. Inspired by cognitive psychology, the proposed dual-mind world model encompasses a pattern-driven System 1 component and a logic-driven System 2 component to learn dynamics and logic of the wireless network, and to provide long-term link scheduling over reliable imagined trajectories. Link scheduling is learned through end-to-end differentiable imagined trajectories with logical consistency over an extended horizon rather than relying on wireless data obtained from environment interactions. Moreover, through imagination rollouts, the proposed world model can jointly reason network states and plan link scheduling. During intervals without observations, the proposed method remains capable of making efficient decisions. Extensive experiments are conducted on a realistic simulator based on Sionna with real-world physical channel, ray-tracing, and scene objects with material properties. Simulation results show that the proposed world model achieves a significant improvement in data efficiency and achieves strong generalization and adaptation to unseen environments, compared to the state-of-the-art RL baselines, and the world model approach with only System 1.
Open Korean Historical Corpus: A Millennia-Scale Diachronic Collection of Public Domain Texts
Song, Seyoung, Kim, Nawon, Chae, Songeun, Park, Kiwoong, Jin, Jiho, Yoo, Haneul, Cho, Kyunghyun, Oh, Alice
The history of the Korean language is characterized by a discrepancy between its spoken and written forms and a pivotal shift from Chinese characters to the Hangul alphabet. However, this linguistic evolution has remained largely unexplored in NLP due to a lack of accessible historical corpora. To address this gap, we introduce the Open Korean Historical Corpus, a large-scale, openly licensed dataset spanning 1,300 years and 6 languages, as well as under-represented writing systems like Korean-style Sinitic (Idu) and Hanja-Hangul mixed script. This corpus contains 18 million documents and 5 billion tokens from 19 sources, ranging from the 7th century to 2025. We leverage this resource to quantitatively analyze major linguistic shifts: (1) Idu usage peaked in the 1860s before declining sharply; (2) the transition from Hanja to Hangul was a rapid transformation starting around 1890; and (3) North Korea ' s lexical divergence causes modern tokenizers to produce up to 51 times higher out-of-vocabulary rates. This work provides a foundational resource for quantitative diachronic analysis by capturing the history of the Korean language. Moreover, it can serve as a pre-training corpus for large language models, potentially improving their understanding of Sino-Korean vocabulary in modern Hangul as well as archaic writing systems.