Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC), a rapidly advancing technology, is transforming content creation across domains, such as text, images, audio, and video. Its growing potential has attracted more and more researchers and investors to explore and expand its possibilities. This review traces AIGC's evolution through four developmental milestones-ranging from early rule-based systems to modern transfer learning models-within a unified framework that highlights how each milestone contributes uniquely to content generation. In particular, the paper employs a common example across all milestones to illustrate the capabilities and limitations of methods within each phase, providing a consistent evaluation of AIGC methodologies and their development. Furthermore, this paper addresses critical challenges associated with AIGC and proposes actionable strategies to mitigate them. This study aims to guide researchers and practitioners in selecting and optimizing AIGC models to enhance the quality and efficiency of content creation across diverse domains.

Causal discovery aims to automatically uncover causal relationships from data, a capability with significant potential across many scientific disciplines. However, its real-world applications remain limited. Current methods often rely on unrealistic assumptions and are evaluated only on simple synthetic toy datasets, often with inadequate evaluation metrics. In this paper, we substantiate these claims by performing a systematic review of the recent causal discovery literature. We present applications in biology, neuroscience, and Earth sciences - fields where causal discovery holds promise for addressing key challenges. We highlight available simulated and real-world datasets from these domains and discuss common assumption violations that have spurred the development of new methods. Our goal is to encourage the community to adopt better evaluation practices by utilizing realistic datasets and more adequate metrics.

Author profiling, the analysis of texts to uncover attributes such as gender and age of the author, has become essential with the widespread use of social media platforms. This paper focuses on author profiling in the Bangla language, aiming to extract valuable insights about anonymous authors based on their writing style on social media. The primary objective is to introduce and benchmark the performance of machine learning approaches on a newly created Bangla Author Profiling dataset, BN-AuthProf. The dataset comprises 30,131 social media posts from 300 authors, labeled by their age and gender. Authors' identities and sensitive information were anonymized to ensure privacy. Various classical machine learning and deep learning techniques were employed to evaluate the dataset. For gender classification, the best accuracy achieved was 80% using Support Vector Machine (SVM), while a Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) classifier achieved the best F1 score of 0.756. For age classification, MNB attained a maximum accuracy score of 91% with an F1 score of 0.905. This research highlights the effectiveness of machine learning in gender and age classification for Bangla author profiling, with practical implications spanning marketing, security, forensic linguistics, education, and criminal investigations, considering privacy and biases.

Hypergraphs extend traditional graphs by allowing edges to connect multiple nodes, while superhypergraphs further generalize this concept to represent even more complex relationships. Neural networks, inspired by biological systems, are widely used for tasks such as pattern recognition, data classification, and prediction. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a well-established framework, have recently been extended to Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs), with their properties and applications being actively studied. The Plithogenic Graph framework enhances graph representations by integrating multi-valued attributes, as well as membership and contradiction functions, enabling the detailed modeling of complex relationships. In the context of handling uncertainty, concepts such as Fuzzy Graphs and Neutrosophic Graphs have gained prominence. It is well established that Plithogenic Graphs serve as a generalization of both Fuzzy Graphs and Neutrosophic Graphs. Furthermore, the Fuzzy Graph Neural Network has been proposed and is an active area of research. This paper establishes the theoretical foundation for the development of SuperHyperGraph Neural Networks (SHGNNs) and Plithogenic Graph Neural Networks, expanding the applicability of neural networks to these advanced graph structures. While mathematical generalizations and proofs are presented, future computational experiments are anticipated.

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) in many applications, from customer service chat bots and software de - velopment assistants to more capable agentic systems neces - sitates research into how to secure these systems. Attacks l ike prompt injection and jailbreaking attempt to elicit respon ses and actions from these models that are not compliant with the safety, privacy, or content policies of organizations u sing the model in their application. In order to counter abuse of LLMs for generating potentially harmful replies or taking u n-desirable actions, LLM owners must apply safeguards during training and integrate additional tools to block the LLM fro m generating text that abuses the model. Jailbreaking prompt s play a vital role in convincing an LLM to generate potentially harmful content, making it important to identify jai l-breaking attempts to block any further steps. In this work, w e propose a novel approach to detect jailbreak prompts based on pairing text embeddings well-suited for retrieval with t ra-ditional machine learning classification algorithms. Our a p-proach outperforms all publicly available methods from ope n source LLM security applications.

Large language models (LLMs) are effective at capturing complex, valuable conceptual representations from textual data for a wide range of real-world applications. However, in fields like Intelligent Fault Diagnosis (IFD), incorporating additional sensor data-such as vibration signals, temperature readings, and operational metrics-is essential but it is challenging to capture such sensor data information within traditional text corpora. This study introduces a novel IFD approach by effectively adapting LLMs to numerical data inputs for identifying various machine faults from time-series sensor data. We propose FD-LLM, an LLM framework specifically designed for fault diagnosis by formulating the training of the LLM as a multi-class classification problem. We explore two methods for encoding vibration signals: the first method uses a string-based tokenization technique to encode vibration signals into text representations, while the second extracts statistical features from both the time and frequency domains as statistical summaries of each signal. We assess the fault diagnosis capabilities of four open-sourced LLMs based on the FD-LLM framework, and evaluate the models' adaptability and generalizability under various operational conditions and machine components, namely for traditional fault diagnosis, cross-operational conditions, and cross-machine component settings. Our results show that LLMs such as Llama3 and Llama3-instruct demonstrate strong fault detection capabilities and significant adaptability across different operational conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) approaches in many cases.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the leading approach for creating artificial agents in complex environments. Model-based approaches, which are RL methods with world models that predict environment dynamics, are among the most promising directions for improving data efficiency, forming a critical step toward bridging the gap between research and real-world deployment. In particular, world models enhance sample efficiency by learning in imagination, which involves training a generative sequence model of the environment in a self-supervised manner. Recently, Masked Generative Modelling has emerged as a more efficient and superior inductive bias for modelling and generating token sequences. Building on the Efficient Stochastic Transformer-based World Models (STORM) architecture, we replace the traditional MLP prior with a Masked Generative Prior (e.g., MaskGIT Prior) and introduce GIT-STORM. We evaluate our model on two downstream tasks: reinforcement learning and video prediction. GIT-STORM demonstrates substantial performance gains in RL tasks on the Atari 100k benchmark. Moreover, we apply Transformer-based World Models to continuous action environments for the first time, addressing a significant gap in prior research. To achieve this, we employ a state mixer function that integrates latent state representations with actions, enabling our model to handle continuous control tasks. We validate this approach through qualitative and quantitative analyses on the DeepMind Control Suite, showcasing the effectiveness of Transformer-based World Models in this new domain. Our results highlight the versatility and efficacy of the MaskGIT dynamics prior, paving the way for more accurate world models and effective RL policies.

Large language models (LLMs) integrated into multistep agent systems enable complex decision-making processes across various applications. However, their outputs often lack reliability, making uncertainty estimation crucial. Existing uncertainty estimation methods primarily focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over the multistep decision-making process and the dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. To address these limitations, we propose SAUP (Situation Awareness Uncertainty Propagation), a novel framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent's reasoning process. SAUP incorporates situational awareness by assigning situational weights to each step's uncertainty during the propagation. Our method, compatible with various one-step uncertainty estimation techniques, provides a comprehensive and accurate uncertainty measure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAUP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 20% improvement in AUROC.

Object tracking is a fundamental tool in modern innovation, with applications in defense systems, autonomous vehicles, and biomedical research. It enables precise identification, monitoring, and spatiotemporal analysis of objects across sequential frames, providing insights into dynamic behaviors. In cell biology, object tracking is vital for uncovering cellular mechanisms, such as migration, interactions, and responses to drugs or pathogens. These insights drive breakthroughs in understanding disease progression and therapeutic interventions. Over time, object tracking methods have evolved from traditional feature-based approaches to advanced machine learning and deep learning frameworks. While classical methods are reliable in controlled settings, they struggle in complex environments with occlusions, variable lighting, and high object density. Deep learning models address these challenges by delivering greater accuracy, adaptability, and robustness. This review categorizes object tracking techniques into traditional, statistical, feature-based, and machine learning paradigms, with a focus on biomedical applications. These methods are essential for tracking cells and subcellular structures, advancing our understanding of health and disease. Key performance metrics, including accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability, are discussed. The paper explores limitations of current methods and highlights emerging trends to guide the development of next-generation tracking systems for biomedical research and broader scientific domains.

Partial observability of the underlying states generally presents significant challenges for reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, certain \emph{privileged information}, e.g., the access to states from simulators, has been exploited in training and has achieved prominent empirical successes. To better understand the benefits of privileged information, we revisit and examine several simple and practically used paradigms in this setting. Specifically, we first formalize the empirical paradigm of \emph{expert distillation} (also known as \emph{teacher-student} learning), demonstrating its pitfall in finding near-optimal policies. We then identify a condition of the partially observable environment, the \emph{deterministic filter condition}, under which expert distillation achieves sample and computational complexities that are \emph{both} polynomial. Furthermore, we investigate another useful empirical paradigm of \emph{asymmetric actor-critic}, and focus on the more challenging setting of observable partially observable Markov decision processes. We develop a belief-weighted asymmetric actor-critic algorithm with polynomial sample and quasi-polynomial computational complexities, in which one key component is a new provable oracle for learning belief states that preserve \emph{filter stability} under a misspecified model, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we also investigate the provable efficiency of partially observable multi-agent RL (MARL) with privileged information. We develop algorithms featuring \emph{centralized-training-with-decentralized-execution}, a popular framework in empirical MARL, with polynomial sample and (quasi-)polynomial computational complexities in both paradigms above. Compared with a few recent related theoretical studies, our focus is on understanding practically inspired algorithmic paradigms, without computationally intractable oracles.