Quantum magnetic sensing based on spin systems has emerged as a new paradigm for detecting ultra-weak magnetic fields with unprecedented sensitivity, revitalizing applications in navigation, geo-localization, biology, and beyond. At the heart of quantum magnetic sensing, from the protocol perspective, lies the design of optimal sensing parameters to manifest and then estimate the underlying signals of interest (SoI). Existing studies on this front mainly rely on adaptive algorithms based on black-box AI models or formula-driven principled searches. However, when the SoI spans a wide range and the quantum sensor has physical constraints, these methods may fail to converge efficiently or optimally, resulting in prolonged interrogation times and reduced sensing accuracy. In this work, we report the design of a new protocol using a two-stage optimization method. In the 1st Stage, a Bayesian neural network with a fixed set of sensing parameters is used to narrow the range of SoI. In the 2nd Stage, a federated reinforcement learning agent is designed to fine-tune the sensing parameters within a reduced search space. The proposed protocol is developed and evaluated in a challenging context of single-shot readout of an NV-center electron spin under a constrained total sensing time budget; and yet it achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and resource efficiency for wide-range D.C. magnetic field estimation compared to the state of the art.

In this work, we evaluate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in building Bayesian Networks (BNs) by approximating domain expert priors. LLMs have demonstrated potential as factual knowledge bases; however, their capability to generate probabilistic knowledge about real-world events remains understudied. We explore utilizing the probabilistic knowledge inherent in LLMs to derive probability estimates for statements regarding events and their relationships within a BN. Using LLMs in this context allows for the parameterization of BNs, enabling probabilistic modeling within specific domains. Our experiments on eighty publicly available Bayesian Networks, from healthcare to finance, demonstrate that querying LLMs about the conditional probabilities of events provides meaningful results when compared to baselines, including random and uniform distributions, as well as approaches based on next-token generation probabilities. We explore how these LLM-derived distributions can serve as expert priors to refine distributions extracted from data, especially when data is scarce. Overall, this work introduces a promising strategy for automatically constructing Bayesian Networks by combining probabilistic knowledge extracted from LLMs with real-world data. Additionally, we establish the first comprehensive baseline for assessing LLM performance in extracting probabilistic knowledge.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models' current trend consists of using increasingly more extra-data to build the best models as possible. It implies more expensive computational costs and training time, difficulties for deployment, and worries about these models' carbon footprint reveal a critical problem in the future. Against this trend, our goal is to develop NLP models requiring no extra-data and minimizing training time. To do so, in this paper, we explore Markov chain models, Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) and Pairwise Markov Chain (PMC), for NLP segmentation tasks. We apply these models for three classic applications: POS Tagging, Named-Entity-Recognition, and Chunking. We develop an original method to adapt these models for text segmentation's specific challenges to obtain relevant performances with very short training and execution times. PMC achieves equivalent results to those obtained by Conditional Random Fields (CRF), one of the most applied models for these tasks when no extra-data are used. Moreover, PMC has training times 30 times shorter than the CRF ones, which validates this model given our objectives.

Decision support systems are designed to assist human experts in classification tasks by providing conformal prediction sets derived from a pre-trained model. This human-AI collaboration has demonstrated enhanced classification performance compared to using either the model or the expert independently. In this study, we focus on the selection of instance-specific experts from a pool of multiple human experts, contrasting it with existing research that typically focuses on single-expert scenarios. We characterize the conditions under which multiple experts can benefit from the conformal sets. With the insight that only certain experts may be relevant for each instance, we explore the problem of subset selection and introduce a greedy algorithm that utilizes conformal sets to identify the subset of expert predictions that will be used in classifying an instance. This approach is shown to yield better performance compared to naive methods for human subset selection. Based on real expert predictions from the CIFAR-10H and ImageNet-16H datasets, our simulation study indicates that our proposed greedy algorithm achieves near-optimal subsets, resulting in improved classification performance among multiple experts.

With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have dominated the path to AI, recent studies are exploring the potential of biologically based systems, such as networks of living biological neuronal networks. Along with promises of high power and data efficiency, these systems may also inform more explainable and biologically plausible models. In this work, we propose a framework rooted in active inference, a general theory of behaviour, to model decision-making in embodied agents. Using experiment-informed generative models, we simulate decision-making processes in a simulated game-play environment, mirroring experimental setups that use biological neurons. Our results demonstrate learning in these agents, providing insights into the role of memory-based learning and predictive planning in intelligent decision-making. This work contributes to the growing field of explainable AI by offering a biologically grounded and scalable approach to understanding purposeful behaviour in agents.

Plasticity loss, a diminishing capacity to adapt as training progresses, is a critical challenge in deep reinforcement learning. We examine this issue in multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL), where higher representational flexibility is crucial for managing diverse and potentially conflicting task demands. We systematically explore how sparsification methods, particularly Gradual Magnitude Pruning (GMP) and Sparse Evolutionary Training (SET), enhance plasticity and consequently improve performance in MTRL agents. We evaluate these approaches across distinct MTRL architectures (shared backbone, Mixture of Experts, Mixture of Orthogonal Experts) on standardized MTRL benchmarks, comparing against dense baselines, and a comprehensive range of alternative plasticity-inducing or regularization methods. Our results demonstrate that both GMP and SET effectively mitigate key indicators of plasticity degradation, such as neuron dormancy and representational collapse. These plasticity improvements often correlate with enhanced multi-task performance, with sparse agents frequently outperforming dense counterparts and achieving competitive results against explicit plasticity interventions. Our findings offer insights into the interplay between plasticity, network sparsity, and MTRL designs, highlighting dynamic sparsification as a robust but context-sensitive tool for developing more adaptable MTRL systems.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been recently utilized in multi-access edge computing (MEC) as edge servers. It is desirable to design UAVs' trajectories and user to UAV assignments to ensure satisfactory service to the users and energy efficient operation simultaneously. The posed optimization problem is challenging to solve because: (i) The formulated problem is non-convex, (ii) Due to the mobility of ground users, their future positions and channel gains are not known in advance, (iii) Local UAVs' observations should be communicated to a central entity that solves the optimization problem. The (semi-) centralized processing leads to communication overhead, communication/processing bottlenecks, lack of flexibility and scalability, and loss of robustness to system failures. To simultaneously address all these limitations, we advocate a fully decentralized setup with no centralized entity. Each UAV obtains its local observation and then communicates with its immediate neighbors only. After sharing information with neighbors, each UAV determines its next position via a locally run deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. None of the UAVs need to know the global communication graph. Two main components of our proposed solution are (i) Graph attention layers (GAT), and (ii) Experience and parameter sharing proximal policy optimization (EPS-PPO). Our proposed approach eliminates all the limitations of semi-centralized MADRL methods such as MAPPO and MA deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG), while guaranteeing a better performance than independent local DRLs such as in IPPO. Numerical results reveal notable performance gains in several different criteria compared to the existing MADDPG algorithm, demonstrating the potential for offering a better performance, while utilizing local communications only.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to coordinate multiple agents to achieve a common goal. A key challenge in MARL is credit assignment, which involves assessing each agent's contribution to the shared reward. Given the diversity of tasks, agents may perform different types of coordination, with rewards attributed to diverse and often overlapping agent subsets. In this work, we formalize the credit assignment level as the number of agents cooperating to obtain a reward, and address scenarios with multiple coexisting levels. We introduce a multi-level advantage formulation that performs explicit counterfactual reasoning to infer credits across distinct levels. Our method, Multi-level Advantage Credit Assignment (MACA), captures agent contributions at multiple levels by integrating advantage functions that reason about individual, joint, and correlated actions. Utilizing an attention-based framework, MACA identifies correlated agent relationships and constructs multi-level advantages to guide policy learning. Comprehensive experiments on challenging Starcraft v1\&v2 tasks demonstrate MACA's superior performance, underscoring its efficacy in complex credit assignment scenarios.

Diffusion policies excel at learning complex action distributions for robotic visuomotor tasks, yet their iterative denoising process poses a major bottleneck for real-time deployment. Existing acceleration methods apply a fixed number of denoising steps per action, implicitly treating all actions as equally important. However, our experiments reveal that robotic tasks often contain a mix of \emph{crucial} and \emph{routine} actions, which differ in their impact on task success. Motivated by this finding, we propose \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{D}enoising \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{(D3P)}, a diffusion-based policy that adaptively allocates denoising steps across actions at test time. D3P uses a lightweight, state-aware adaptor to allocate the optimal number of denoising steps for each action. We jointly optimize the adaptor and base diffusion policy via reinforcement learning to balance task performance and inference efficiency. On simulated tasks, D3P achieves an averaged 2.2$\times$ inference speed-up over baselines without degrading success. Furthermore, we demonstrate D3P's effectiveness on a physical robot, achieving a 1.9$\times$ acceleration over the baseline.

Digital Twins (DTs) are transforming industries through advanced data processing and analysis, positioning the world of DTs, Digital World, as a cornerstone of nextgeneration technologies including embodied AI. As robotics and automated systems scale, efficient data-sharing frameworks and robust algorithms become critical. We explore the pivotal role of data handling in next-gen networks, focusing on dynamics between application and network providers (AP/NP) in DT ecosystems. We introduce PANAMA, a novel algorithm with Priority Asymmetry for Network Aware Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) based multi-agent path finding (MAPF). By adopting a Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework and asynchronous actor-learner architectures, PANAMA accelerates training while enabling autonomous task execution by embodied AI. Our approach demonstrates superior pathfinding performance in accuracy, speed, and scalability compared to existing benchmarks. Through simulations, we highlight optimized data-sharing strategies for scalable, automated systems, ensuring resilience in complex, real-world environments. PANAMA bridges the gap between network-aware decision-making and robust multi-agent coordination, advancing the synergy between DTs, wireless networks, and AI-driven automation.