Learning-based approaches are increasingly leveraged to manage and coordinate the operation of grid-edge resources in active power distribution networks. Among these, model-based techniques stand out for their superior data efficiency and robustness compared to model-free methods. However, effective model learning requires a learning-based approximator for the underlying power flow model. This study extends existing work by introducing a data-driven power flow method based on Gaussian Processes (GPs) to approximate the multiphase power flow model, by mapping net load injections to nodal voltages. Simulation results using the IEEE 123-bus and 8500-node distribution test feeders demonstrate that the trained GP model can reliably predict the nonlinear power flow solutions with minimal training data. We also conduct a comparative analysis of the training efficiency and testing performance of the proposed GP-based power flow approximator against a deep neural network-based approximator, highlighting the advantages of our data-efficient approach. Results over realistic operating conditions show that despite an 85% reduction in the training sample size (corresponding to a 92.8% improvement in training time), GP models produce a 99.9% relative reduction in mean absolute error compared to the baselines of deep neural networks.

Accurate imputation of race and ethnicity (R&E) is crucial for analyzing disparities and informing policy. Methods like Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) are widely used but exhibit limitations, including systematic misclassification biases linked to socioeconomic status. This paper introduces LSTM+Geo, a novel approach enhancing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with census tract geolocation information. Using a large voter dataset, we demonstrate that LSTM+Geo (88.7% accuracy) significantly outperforms standalone LSTM (86.4%) and Bayesian methods like BISG (82.9%) and BIFSG (86.8%) in accuracy and F1-score on a held-out validation set. LSTM+Geo reduces the rate at which non-White individuals are misclassified as White (White FPR 19.3%) compared to name-only LSTMs (White FPR 24.6%). While sophisticated ensemble methods incorporating XGBoost achieve the highest overall accuracy (up to 89.4%) and lowest White FPR (17.8%), LSTM+Geo offers strong standalone performance with improved bias characteristics compared to baseline models. Integrating LSTM+Geo into an XGBoost ensemble further boosts accuracy, highlighting its utility as both a standalone model and a component for advanced systems. We give a caution at the end regarding the appropriate use of these methods.

In the era of rapid advancements in vehicle safety technologies, driving risk assessment has become a focal point of attention. Technologies such as collision warning systems, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous driving require driving risks to be evaluated proactively and in real time. To be effective, driving risk assessment metrics must not only accurately identify potential collisions but also exhibit human-like reasoning to enable safe and seamless interactions between vehicles. Existing safety potential field models assess driving risks by considering both objective and subjective safety factors. However, their practical applicability in real-world risk assessment tasks is limited. These models are often challenging to calibrate due to the arbitrary nature of their structures, and calibration can be inefficient because of the scarcity of accident statistics. Additionally, they struggle to generalize across both longitudinal and lateral risks. To address these challenges, we propose a composite safety potential field framework, namely C-SPF, involving a subjective field to capture drivers' risk perception about spatial proximity and an objective field to quantify the imminent collision probability, to comprehensively evaluate driving risks. The C-SPF is calibrated using abundant two-dimensional spacing data from trajectory datasets, enabling it to effectively capture drivers' proximity risk perception and provide a more realistic explanation of driving behaviors. Analysis of a naturalistic driving dataset demonstrates that the C-SPF can capture both longitudinal and lateral risks that trigger drivers' safety maneuvers. Further case studies highlight the C-SPF's ability to explain lateral driver behaviors, such as abandoning lane changes or adjusting lateral position relative to adjacent vehicles, which are capabilities that existing models fail to achieve.

REGULAR ARTICLE Sparse mixed linear modeling with anchor-based guidance for high-entropy alloy discovery Ryo Murakami a, Seiji Miura b, Akihiro Endo a and Satoshi Minamoto a a Materials Data Platform, Research Network and Facility Services Division, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba 305-0044, Ibaraki, Japan b Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-8628, Hokkaido, Japan ARTICLE HISTORY Compiled April 30, 2025 ABSTRACT High-entropy alloys have attracted attention for their exceptional mechanical properties and thermal stability. To solve this problem, machine learning techniques have been increasingly employed for property prediction and high-throughput screening. Nevertheless, highly accurate nonlinear models often suffer from a lack of interpretability, which is a major limitation. In this study, we focus on local data structures that emerge from the greedy search behavior inherent to experimental data acquisition. By introducing a linear and low-dimensional mixture regression model, we strike a balance between predictive performance and model interpretability. In addition, we develop an algorithm that simultaneously performs prediction and feature selection by considering multiple candidate descriptors. Through a case study on high-entropy alloys, this study introduces a method that combines anchor-guided clustering and sparse linear modeling to address biased data structures arising from greedy exploration in materials science. KEYWORDS Sparse modeling; Mixed linear model; Bayesian inference; Materials informatics; Data-driven science; High-entropy alloys 1. Introduction In recent years, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have garnered attention as next-generation materials for their outstanding mechanical properties, thermal stability, and corrosion resistance [1,2]. Unlike conventional alloy designs, HEAs--also referred to as multi-principal element alloys--comprise multiple (typically five or more) principal elements, offering a high degree of chemical and structural freedom. This unique composition enables the exploration of novel properties unattainable in traditional materials systems.

Exponential growth in scientific literature has heightened the demand for efficient evidence-based synthesis, driving the rise of the field of Automated Meta-analysis (AMA) powered by natural language processing and machine learning. This PRISMA systematic review introduces a structured framework for assessing the current state of AMA, based on screening 978 papers from 2006 to 2024, and analyzing 54 studies across diverse domains. Findings reveal a predominant focus on automating data processing (57%), such as extraction and statistical modeling, while only 17% address advanced synthesis stages. Just one study (2%) explored preliminary full-process automation, highlighting a critical gap that limits AMA's capacity for comprehensive synthesis. Despite recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) and advanced AI, their integration into statistical modeling and higher-order synthesis, such as heterogeneity assessment and bias evaluation, remains underdeveloped. This has constrained AMA's potential for fully autonomous meta-analysis. From our dataset spanning medical (67%) and non-medical (33%) applications, we found that AMA has exhibited distinct implementation patterns and varying degrees of effectiveness in actually improving efficiency, scalability, and reproducibility. While automation has enhanced specific meta-analytic tasks, achieving seamless, end-to-end automation remains an open challenge. As AI systems advance in reasoning and contextual understanding, addressing these gaps is now imperative. Future efforts must focus on bridging automation across all meta-analysis stages, refining interpretability, and ensuring methodological robustness to fully realize AMA's potential for scalable, domain-agnostic synthesis.

--Since the emergence of autonomous driving technology, it has advanced rapidly over the past decade. It is becoming increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles (A Vs) would soon coexist with human-driven vehicles (HVs) on the roads. Currently, safety and reliable decision-making remain significant challenges, particularly when A Vs are navigating lane changes and interacting with surrounding HVs. Therefore, precise estimation of the intentions of surrounding HVs can assist A Vs in making more reliable and safe lane change decision-making. This involves not only understanding their current behaviors but also predicting their future motions without any direct communication. However, distinguishing between the passing and yielding intentions of surrounding HVs still remains ambiguous. T o address the challenge, we propose a social intention estimation algorithm rooted in Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), coupled with a decision-making framework employing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms. T o evaluate the method's performance, the proposed framework can be tested and applied in a lane-changing scenario within a simulated environment. Furthermore, the experiment results demonstrate how our approach enhances the ability of A Vs to navigate lane changes safely and efficiently on roads. UTONOMOUS driving decision-making is a critical component of autonomous driving systems, aiming to make reasonable and safe driving decisions based on environmental perception [1]. The decision-making process not only needs to consider the kinematic and dynamic constraints of the vehicle but also needs to comply with traffic rules, evaluate potential risks, and coexist safely with other traffic participants in complex driving scenarios, such as executing lane changes on highways and navigating intersections, as illustrated in Figure 1. Executing lane changes on the highway remains a formidable challenge for A Vs in the real world, primarily due to environmental complexity and uncertainty. Jing Wang, Y an Jin are with the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom (email: jwang61@qub.ac.uk, y.jin@qub.ac.uk)

We study the complexity of satisfiability problems in probabilistic and causal reasoning. Given random variables $X_1, X_2,\ldots$ over finite domains, the basic terms are probabilities of propositional formulas over atomic events $X_i = x_i$, such as $P(X_1 = x_1)$ or $P(X_1 = x_1 \vee X_2 = x_2)$. The basic terms can be combined using addition (yielding linear terms) or multiplication (polynomial terms). The probabilistic satisfiability problem asks whether a joint probability distribution satisfies a Boolean combination of (in)equalities over such terms. Fagin et al. (1990) showed that for basic and linear terms, this problem is NP-complete, making it no harder than Boolean satisfiability, while Mossé et al. (2022) proved that for polynomial terms, it is complete for the existential theory of the reals. Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) extends the probabilistic setting with interventional and counterfactual reasoning, enriching the expressiveness of languages. However, Mossé et al. (2022) found that satisfiability complexity remains unchanged. Van der Zander et al. (2023) showed that introducing a marginalization operator to languages induces a significant increase in complexity. We extend this line of work by adding two new dimensions to the problem by constraining the models. First, we fix the graph structure of the underlying structural causal model, motivated by settings like Pearl's do-calculus, and give a nearly complete landscape across different arithmetics and PCH levels. Second, we study small models. While earlier work showed that satisfiable instances admit polynomial-size models, this is no longer guaranteed with compact marginalization. We characterize the complexities of satisfiability under small-model constraints across different settings.

--We consider a model of Bayesian observational learning in which a sequence of agents receives a private signal about an underlying binary state of the world. Each agent makes a decision based on its own signal and its observations of previous agents. A central planner seeks to improve the accuracy of these signals by allocating a limited budget to enhance signal quality across agents. We formulate and analyze the budget allocation problem and propose two optimal allocation strategies. At least one of these strategies is shown to maximize the probability of achieving a correct information cascade. I NTRODUCTION Consider that an item, which could either be of a "good" or a "bad" quality, is up for sale in a market where agents arrive sequentially and decide whether to buy the item, with their choice serving as a recommendation for later agents. While the quality of the item is unknown to the agents, every agent has its own prior knowledge of the item's quality in the form of its private belief. Each agent then makes a payoff optimal decision based on its own prior knowledge and by observing the choices of its predecessors. Such models of "observational learning" were first studied by [1]-[3] under a Bayesian learning framework wherein each agent's prior knowledge is in the form of a privately observed signal about the pay-off-relevant state of the world, which in this case is the item's quality, and is generated from a commonly known probability distribution. A salient feature of such models is the emergence of information cascades or herding, i.e., at some point, it is optimal for an agent to ignore its own private signal and follow the actions of the past agents. Subsequent agents then follow suit due to their homogeneity.

The integration of Deep Learning (DL) into experimental nuclear and particle physics has driven significant progress in simulation and reconstruction workflows. However, traditional simulation frameworks such as Geant4 remain computationally intensive, especially for Cherenkov detectors, where simulating optical photon transport through complex geometries and reflective surfaces introduces a major bottleneck. To address this, we present an open, standalone fast simulation tool for Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov Light (DIRC) detectors, with a focus on the High-Performance DIRC (hpDIRC) at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Our framework incorporates a suite of generative models tailored to accelerate particle identification (PID) tasks by offering a scalable, GPU-accelerated alternative to full Geant4 -based simulations. Designed with accessibility in mind, our simulation package enables both DL researchers and physicists to efficiently generate high-fidelity large-scale datasets on demand, without relying on complex traditional simulation stacks. This flexibility supports the development and benchmarking of novel DL-driven PID methods. Moreover, this fast simulation pipeline represents a critical step toward enabling EIC-wide PID strategies that depend on virtually unlimited simulated samples, spanning the full acceptance of the hpDIRC.

Identification of defects or anomalies in 3D objects is a crucial task to ensure correct functionality. In this work, we combine Bayesian learning with recent developments in quantum and quantum-inspired machine learning, specifically orthogonal neural networks, to tackle this anomaly detection problem for an industrially relevant use case. Bayesian learning enables uncertainty quantification of predictions, while orthogonality in weight matrices enables smooth training. We develop orthogonal (quantum) versions of 3D convolutional neural networks and show that these models can successfully detect anomalies in 3D objects. To test the feasibility of incorporating quantum computers into a quantum-enhanced anomaly detection pipeline, we perform hardware experiments with our models on IBM's 127-qubit Brisbane device, testing the effect of noise and limited measurement shots.