Social media enables data-driven analysis of public opinion on contested issues. Target-Stance Extraction (TSE) is the task of identifying the target discussed in a document and the document's stance towards that target. Many works classify stance towards a given target in a multilingual setting, but all prior work in TSE is English-only. This work introduces the first multilingual TSE benchmark, spanning Catalan, Estonian, French, Italian, Mandarin, and Spanish corpora. It manages to extend the original TSE pipeline to a multilingual setting without requiring separate models for each language. Our model pipeline achieves a modest F1 score of 12.78, underscoring the increased difficulty of the multilingual task relative to English-only setups and highlighting target prediction as the primary bottleneck. We are also the first to demonstrate the sensitivity of TSE's F1 score to different target verbalizations. Together these serve as a much-needed baseline for resources, algorithms, and evaluation criteria in multilingual TSE.

H(x) includes large-weight penalty terms for each constraint (visiting each customer once, capacity limit, time windows, depot start/return, etc.). The result is a quadratic binary optimization problem whose ground-state solution corresponds to an optimal or near-optimal set of routes for the CVRPTW [14]. Prior works have demonstrated how to construct such QUBO models for vehicle routing problems. For instance, Papal-itsas et al. [14] developed a QUBO model for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows, encoding time window constraints with binary variables and penalties. Likewise, recent studies have formulated capacitated VRPs as QUBO by embedding route feasibility conditions into the objective function [8]. Although formulating the CVRPTW as a QUBO is complex - especially due to the time window inequalities - it enables the use of quantum annealers and digital annealing hardware to search for high-quality solutions by minimizing the combined objective [10].

Software testing is a critical component in the software engineering field and is important for software engineering education. Thus, it is vital for academia to continuously improve and update educational methods to reflect the current state of the field. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) certification framework is globally recognized and widely adopted in industry and academia. However, ISTQB-based learning has been rarely applied with recent generative artificial intelligence advances. Despite the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), ISTQB-based learning and instruction with LLMs have not been thoroughly explored. This paper explores and evaluates how LLMs can complement the ISTQB framework for higher education. The findings present four key contributions: (i) the creation of a comprehensive ISTQB-aligned dataset spanning over a decade, consisting of 28 sample exams and 1,145 questions; (ii) the development of a domain-optimized prompt that enhances LLM precision and explanation quality on ISTQB tasks; (iii) a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset; and (iv) actionable insights and recommendations for integrating LLMs into software testing education. These findings highlight the promise of LLMs in supporting ISTQB certification preparation and offer a foundation for their broader use in software engineering at higher education.

Analogical reasoning, the transfer of relational structures across contexts (e.g., planet is to sun as electron is to nucleus), is fundamental to scientific discovery. Yet human insight is often constrained by domain expertise and surface-level biases, limiting access to deeper, structure-driven analogies both within and across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast cross-domain data, present a promising yet underexplored tool for analogical reasoning in science. Here, we demonstrate that LLMs can generate novel battery materials by (1) retrieving cross-domain analogs and analogy-guided exemplars to steer exploration beyond conventional dopant substitutions, and (2) constructing in-domain analogical templates from few labeled examples to guide targeted exploitation. These explicit analogical reasoning strategies yield candidates outside established compositional spaces and outperform standard prompting baselines. Our findings position LLMs as interpretable, expert-like hypothesis generators that leverage analogy-driven generalization for scientific innovation.

Timely access to laboratory values is critical for clinical decision-making, yet current approaches rely on invasive venous sampling and are intrinsically delayed. Electrocardiography (ECG), as a non-invasive and widely available signal, offers a promising modality for rapid laboratory estimation. Recent progress in deep learning has enabled the extraction of latent hematological signatures from ECGs. However, existing models are constrained by low signal-to-noise ratios, substantial inter-individual variability, limited data diversity, and suboptimal generalization, especially when adapted to low-lead wearable devices. In this work, we conduct an exploratory study leveraging transfer learning to fine-tune ECGFounder, a large-scale pre-trained ECG foundation model, on the Multimodal Clinical Monitoring in the Emergency Department (MC-MED) dataset from Stanford. We generated a corpus of more than 20 million standardized ten-second ECG segments to enhance sensitivity to subtle biochemical correlates. On internal validation, the model demonstrated strong predictive performance (area under the curve above 0.65) for thirty-three laboratory indicators, moderate performance (between 0.55 and 0.65) for fifty-nine indicators, and limited performance (below 0.55) for sixteen indicators. This study provides an efficient artificial-intelligence driven solution and establishes the feasibility scope for real-time, non-invasive estimation of laboratory values.

Homophily, the tendency of nodes from the same class to connect, is a fundamental property of real-world graphs, underpinning structural and semantic patterns in domains such as citation networks and social networks. Existing methods exploit homophily through designing homophily-aware GNN architectures or graph structure learning strategies, yet they primarily focus on GNN learning with training graphs. However, in real-world scenarios, test graphs often suffer from data quality issues and distribution shifts, such as domain shifts across users from different regions in social networks and temporal evolution shifts in citation network graphs collected over varying time periods. These factors significantly compromise the pre-trained model's robustness, resulting in degraded test-time performance. With empirical observations and theoretical analysis, we reveal that transforming the test graph structure by increasing homophily in homophilic graphs or decreasing it in heterophilic graphs can significantly improve the robustness and performance of pre-trained GNNs on node classifications, without requiring model training or update. Motivated by these insights, a novel test-time graph structural transformation method grounded in homophily, named GrapHoST, is proposed. Specifically, a homophily predictor is developed to discriminate test edges, facilitating adaptive test-time graph structural transformation by the confidence of predicted homophily scores. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets under a range of test-time data quality issues demonstrate that GrapHoST consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of up to 10.92%. Our code has been released at https://github.com/YanJiangJerry/GrapHoST.

International Journal of Applied Mathematics Volume 38 No. 5 s, 2025 ISSN: 1311 - 1728 (printed version); ISSN: 1314 - 8060 (on - line version) Received: August 0 7, 2025 550 Abstract The growing instability of both global and domestic economic environments has increased the risk of financial distress at the household level. However, traditional econometric models often rely on delayed and aggregated data, limiting their effectiveness. This study introduces a machine learning - based early warning system that utilizes real - time digital and macroeconomic signals to identify financial distress in near real - time. Using a panel dataset of 750 households tracked over three monitoring rounds spa nning 13 months, the framework combines socioeconomic attributes, macroeconomic indicators (such as GDP growth, inflation, and foreign exchange fluctuations), and digital economy measures (including ICT demand and market volatility). Through data preproces sing and feature engineering, we introduce lagged variables, volatility measures, and interaction terms to capture both gradual and sudden changes in financial stability. We benchmark baseline classifiers, such as logistic regression and decision trees, ag ainst advanced ensemble models including random forests, XGBoost, and LightGBM. Our results indicate that the engineered features from the digital economy significantly enhance predictive accuracy. The system performs reliably for both binary distress dete ction and multi - class severity classification, with SHAP - based explanations identifying inflation volatility and ICT demand as key predictors. Crucially, the framework is International Journal of Applied Mathematics Volume 38 No. 5 s, 2025 ISSN: 1311 - 1728 (printed version); ISSN: 1314 - 8060 (on - line version) Received: August 0 7, 2025 551 By implementing machine learning in a transparent and interpretable manner, this study demonstrates the feasibility and impact of providing near - real - time early warnings of financial distress. This offers actionable insights that can strengthen household resilience and guide preemptive intervention strategies. Keywords: Financial Distress, Early Warning Systems, Machine Learning, Digital Economy, Temporal Classification, Explainable AI 1. Introduction 1.1 Background and Motivation The prediction of financial distress has long been recognized as a critical element for ensuring economic resilience and mitigating systemic risk across households, firms, and national economies.

We study clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the CADEC corpus and compare three families of approaches: (i) BERT-style encoders (BERT Base, BioClinicalBERT, RoBERTa-large), (ii) GPT-4o used with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) under simple vs.\ complex prompts, and (iii) GPT-4o with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). All models are evaluated on standard NER metrics over CADEC's five entity types (ADR, Drug, Disease, Symptom, Finding). RoBERTa-large and BioClinicalBERT offer limited improvements over BERT Base, showing the limit of these family of models. Among LLM settings, simple ICL outperforms a longer, instruction-heavy prompt, and SFT achieves the strongest overall performance (F1 $\approx$ 87.1%), albeit with higher cost. We find that the LLM achieve higher accuracy on simplified tasks, restricting classification to two labels.

Wide-bandgap (WBG) technologies offer unprecedented improvements in power system efficiency, size, and performance, but also introduce unique sensor corruption and cybersecurity risks in industrial control systems (ICS), particularly due to high-frequency noise and sophisticated cyber-physical threats. This proof-of-concept (PoC) study demonstrates the adaptation of a noise-driven physically unclonable function (PUF) and machine learning (ML)-assisted anomaly detection framework to the demanding environment of WBG-based ICS sensor pathways. By extracting entropy from unavoidable WBG switching noise (up to 100 kHz) as a PUF source, and simultaneously using this noise as a real-time threat indicator, the proposed system unites hardware-level authentication and anomaly detection. Our approach integrates hybrid machine learning (ML) models with adaptive Bayesian filtering, providing robust and low-latency detection capabilities resilient to both natural electromagnetic interference (EMI) and active adversarial manipulation. Through detailed simulations of WBG modules under benign and attack scenarios--including EMI injection, signal tampering, and node impersonation--we achieve 95% detection accuracy and sub-millisecond processing latency. These results demonstrate the feasibility of physics-driven, dual-use noise exploitation as a scalable ICS defense primitive. Our findings lay the groundwork for next-generation security strategies that leverage inherent device characteristics, bridging hardware and artificial intelligence (AI) for enhanced protection of critical ICS infrastructure.

Harnessing publicly available, large-scale web data, such as street view and satellite imagery, urban socio-economic sensing is of paramount importance for achieving global sustainable development goals. With the emergence of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), new opportunities have arisen to solve this task by treating it as a multi-modal perception and understanding problem. However, recent studies reveal that LVLMs still struggle with accurate and interpretable socio-economic predictions from visual data. To address these limitations and maximize the potential of LVLMs, we introduce \textbf{CityRiSE}, a novel framework for \textbf{R}eason\textbf{i}ng urban \textbf{S}ocio-\textbf{E}conomic status in LVLMs through pure reinforcement learning (RL). With carefully curated multi-modal data and verifiable reward design, our approach guides the LVLM to focus on semantically meaningful visual cues, enabling structured and goal-oriented reasoning for generalist socio-economic status prediction. Experiments demonstrate that CityRiSE with emergent reasoning process significantly outperforms existing baselines, improving both prediction accuracy and generalization across diverse urban contexts, particularly for prediction on unseen cities and unseen indicators. This work highlights the promise of combining RL and LVLMs for interpretable and generalist urban socio-economic sensing.