A key challenge in this domain is the balance between exploration and exploitation, which often results in slow learning and suboptimal performance [10], [11]. These limitations highlight the need for more effective learning strategies that can improve both the speed and performance of skill acquisition, especially for high-dimensional humanoid control tasks. During human development, external assistance plays a crucial role in learning motion skills [12]. Infants, for example, often rely on parental support during their first steps, with walkers or direct physical assistance to help them gain the confidence and balance needed for independent locomotion [13], [14]. Similarly, in the case of highly complexmovementslikebackflips,experiencedcoachesprovide physical guidance, supporting the learner's back and applying upward forces to prevent falls and promote proper technique [15]. Studies indicate that such external aids not only expedite the learning process but also help prevent learners from adopting ineffective or unsafe strategies [16].

Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for accelerating our pursuit of knowledge, not all scientific text is faithful to the underlying science. As the volume of this text has burgeoned online in recent years, it has become a problem of societal importance to be able to identify the faithfulness of a given piece of scientific text automatically. This thesis is concerned with the cultivation of datasets, methods, and tools for machine understanding of scientific language, in order to analyze and understand science communication at scale. To arrive at this, I present several contributions in three areas of natural language processing and machine learning: automatic fact checking, learning with limited data, and scientific text processing. These contributions include new methods and resources for identifying check-worthy claims, adversarial claim generation, multi-source domain adaptation, learning from crowd-sourced labels, cite-worthiness detection, zero-shot scientific fact checking, detecting exaggerated scientific claims, and modeling degrees of information change in science communication. Critically, I demonstrate how the research outputs of this thesis are useful for effectively learning from limited amounts of scientific text in order to identify misinformative scientific statements and generate new insights into the science communication process

Achieving seamless coordination between AI agents and humans is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains a significant open challenge. Hanabi is a cooperative card game featuring imperfect information, constrained communication, theory of mind requirements, and coordinated action -- making it an ideal testbed for human-AI coordination. However, its use for human-AI interaction has been limited by the challenges of human evaluation. In this work, we introduce the Ad-Hoc Human-AI Coordination Challenge (AH2AC2) to overcome the constraints of costly and difficult-to-reproduce human evaluations. We develop \textit{human proxy agents} on a large-scale human dataset that serve as robust, cheap, and reproducible human-like evaluation partners in AH2AC2. To encourage the development of data-efficient methods, we open-source a dataset of 3,079 games, deliberately limiting the amount of available human gameplay data. We present baseline results for both two- and three- player Hanabi scenarios. To ensure fair evaluation, we host the proxy agents through a controlled evaluation system rather than releasing them publicly. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/FLAIROx/ah2ac2}{https://github.com/FLAIROx/ah2ac2}.

Neural Quantum States (NQS) are a class of variational wave functions parametrized by neural networks (NNs) to study quantum many-body systems. In this work, we propose \texttt{SineKAN}, a NQS \textit{ansatz} based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), to represent quantum mechanical wave functions as nested univariate functions. We show that \texttt{SineKAN} wavefunction with learnable sinusoidal activation functions can capture the ground state energies, fidelities and various correlation functions of the one dimensional Transverse-Field Ising model, Anisotropic Heisenberg model, and Antiferromagnetic $J_{1}-J_{2}$ model with different chain lengths. In our study of the $J_1-J_2$ model with $L=100$ sites, we find that the \texttt{SineKAN} model outperforms several previously explored neural quantum state \textit{ansätze}, including Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), Long Short-Term Memory models (LSTMs), and Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLP) \textit{a.k.a.} Feed Forward Neural Networks, when compared to the results obtained from the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) algorithm. We find that \texttt{SineKAN} models can be trained to high precisions and accuracies with minimal computational costs.

This white paper discusses and explores the various points of intersection between quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI). It describes how quantum computing could support the development of innovative AI solutions. It also examines use cases of classical AI that can empower research and development in quantum technologies, with a focus on quantum computing and quantum sensing. The purpose of this white paper is to provide a long-term research agenda aimed at addressing foundational questions about how AI and quantum computing interact and benefit one another. It concludes with a set of recommendations and challenges, including how to orchestrate the proposed theoretical work, align quantum AI developments with quantum hardware roadmaps, estimate both classical and quantum resources - especially with the goal of mitigating and optimizing energy consumption - advance this emerging hybrid software engineering discipline, and enhance European industrial competitiveness while considering societal implications.

This study introduces an enhanced approach to video super-resolution by extending ordinary Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) structure to handle spatio-temporal data. While SRGAN has proven effective for single-image enhancement, its design does not account for the temporal continuity required in video processing. To address this, a modified framework that incorporates 3D Non-Local Blocks is proposed, which is enabling the model to capture relationships across both spatial and temporal dimensions. An experimental training pipeline is developed, based on patch-wise learning and advanced data degradation techniques, to simulate real-world video conditions and learn from both local and global structures and details. This helps the model generalize better and maintain stability across varying video content while maintaining the general structure besides the pixel-wise correctness. Two model variants--one larger and one more lightweight--are presented to explore the trade-offs between performance and efficiency. The results demonstrate improved temporal coherence, sharper textures, and fewer visual artifacts compared to traditional single-image methods. This work contributes to the development of practical, learning-based solutions for video enhancement tasks, with potential applications in streaming, gaming, and digital restoration.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and mastering increasingly complex problems with astonishing performance, the safety assurance of such systems is a major concern. Particularly in the context of safety-critical, real-world cyber-physical systems, AI promises to achieve a new level of autonomy but is hampered by a lack of safety assurance. While data-driven control takes up recent developments in AI to improve control systems, control theory in general could be leveraged to improve AI safety. Therefore, this article outlines a new perspective on AI safety based on an interdisciplinary interpretation of the underlying data-generation process and the respective abstraction by AI systems in a system theory-inspired and system analysis-driven manner. In this context, the new perspective, also referred to as data control, aims to stimulate AI engineering to take advantage of existing safety analysis and assurance in an interdisciplinary way to drive the paradigm of data control. Following a top-down approach, a generic foundation for safety analysis and assurance is outlined at an abstract level that can be refined for specific AI systems and applications and is prepared for future innovation.

Distinguishing cause and effect from bivariate observational data is a foundational problem in many disciplines, but challenging without additional assumptions. Additive noise models (ANMs) are widely used to enable sample-efficient bivariate causal discovery. However, conventional ANM-based methods fail when unobserved mediators corrupt the causal relationship between variables. This paper makes three key contributions: first, we rigorously characterize why standard ANM approaches break down in the presence of unmeasured mediators. Second, we demonstrate that prior solutions for hidden mediation are brittle in finite sample settings, limiting their practical utility. To address these gaps, we propose Bivariate Denoising Diffusion (BiDD) for causal discovery, a method designed to handle latent noise introduced by unmeasured mediators. Unlike prior methods that infer directionality through mean squared error loss comparisons, our approach introduces a novel independence test statistic: during the noising and denoising processes for each variable, we condition on the other variable as input and evaluate the independence of the predicted noise relative to this input. We prove asymptotic consistency of BiDD under the ANM, and conjecture that it performs well under hidden mediation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate consistent performance, outperforming existing methods in mediator-corrupted settings while maintaining strong performance in mediator-free settings.

Generative models have gained significant attention for their ability to produce realistic synthetic data that supplements the quantity of real-world datasets. While recent studies show performance improvements in wireless sensing tasks by incorporating all synthetic data into training sets, the quality of synthetic data remains unpredictable and the resulting performance gains are not guaranteed. To address this gap, we propose tractable and generalizable metrics to quantify quality attributes of synthetic data - affinity and diversity. Our assessment reveals prevalent affinity limitation in current wireless synthetic data, leading to mislabeled data and degraded task performance. We attribute the quality limitation to generative models' lack of awareness of untrained conditions and domain-specific processing. To mitigate these issues, we introduce SynCheck, a quality-guided synthetic data utilization scheme that refines synthetic data quality during task model training. Our evaluation demonstrates that SynCheck consistently outperforms quality-oblivious utilization of synthetic data, and achieves 4.3% performance improvement even when the previous utilization degrades performance by 13.4%.

--Learning the structure of Bayesian networks (BNs) from data is challenging, especially for datasets involving a large number of variables. The recently proposed divide-and-conquer (D&D) strategies present a promising approach for learning large BNs. However, they still face a main issue of unstable learning accuracy across subproblems. In this work, we introduce the idea of employing structure learning ensemble (SLE), which combines multiple BN structure learning algorithms, to consistently achieve high learning accuracy. We further propose an automatic approach called Auto-SLE for learning near-optimal SLEs, addressing the challenge of manually designing high-quality SLEs. The learned SLE is then integrated into a D&D method. Extensive experiments firmly show the superiority of our method over D&D methods with single BN structure learning algorithm in learning large BNs, achieving accuracy improvement usually by 30% 225% on datasets involving 10,000 variables. These results indicate the significant potential of employing (automatic learning of) SLEs for scalable BN structure learning. Learning the structure of Bayesian networks (BNs) [1] from data has attracted much research interest, due to its wide applications in machine learning, statistical modeling, and causal inference [2]-[4].