Hyperparameter optimization (HPO), for example, based on Bayesian optimization (BO), supports users in designing models well-suited for a given dataset. HPO has proven its effectiveness on several applications, ranging from classical machine learning for tabular data to deep neural networks for computer vision and transformers for natural language processing. However, HPO still sometimes lacks acceptance by machine learning experts due to its black-box nature and limited user control. Addressing this, first approaches have been proposed to initialize BO methods with expert knowledge. However, these approaches do not allow for online steering during the optimization process. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that enables repeated interventions to steer BO via user input, specifying expert knowledge and user preferences at runtime of the HPO process in the form of prior distributions. To this end, we generalize an existing method, $π$BO, preserving theoretical guarantees. We also introduce a misleading prior detection scheme, which allows protection against harmful user inputs. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our method can effectively incorporate multiple priors, leveraging informative priors, whereas misleading priors are reliably rejected or overcome. Thereby, we achieve competitiveness to unperturbed BO.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning and verifiable rewards have achieved strong results on complex reasoning tasks. Recent work extends this paradigm to a multi-agent setting, where a meta-thinking agent proposes plans and monitors progress while a reasoning agent executes subtasks through sequential conversational turns. Despite promising performance, we identify a critical limitation: lazy agent behavior, in which one agent dominates while the other contributes little, undermining collaboration and collapsing the setup to an ineffective single agent. In this paper, we first provide a theoretical analysis showing why lazy behavior naturally arises in multi-agent reasoning. We then introduce a stable and efficient method for measuring causal influence, helping mitigate this issue. Finally, as collaboration intensifies, the reasoning agent risks getting lost in multi-turn interactions and trapped by previous noisy responses. To counter this, we propose a verifiable reward mechanism that encourages deliberation by allowing the reasoning agent to discard noisy outputs, consolidate instructions, and restart its reasoning process when necessary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework alleviates lazy agent behavior and unlocks the full potential of multi-agent framework for complex reasoning tasks. Techniques such as chain-of-thought prompting (Wei et al., 2022; Kojima et al., 2022) and structured methods like Tree-of-Thoughts and Graph-of-Thoughts (Y ao et al., 2023; Besta et al., 2024) expand the space for deliberation. More recently, multi-agent frameworks enable LLMs with specialized roles to collaborate via planning, delegation, and debate, echoing human team dynamics (Li et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2024a; Chen et al., 2023; Du et al., 2023; Y uan & Xie). To support multi-agent and multi-turn reinforcement learning, multi-turn Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO) (Wan et al., 2025; Shi et al., 2025; Wei et al., 2025) and its variants (Guo et al., 2025b; Zhang et al., 2025c; Ning et al., 2025; Xue et al., 2025) compute advantages and importance ratios at the turn level, enabling finer-grained optimization and more precise credit assignment. Building on this foundation, ReMA (Wan et al., 2025) introduces a multi-agent LLM reasoning framework with two specialized roles: a meta-thinking agent, which decomposes tasks, sets intermediate goals, and adapts based on feedback, and a reasoning agent, which performs step-by-step 1 The agents alternate sequentially, but since only a final outcome reward is available, ReMA computes a group advantage following GRPO (Shao et al., 2024) and uniformly assigns this trajectory-level signal to every turn in the rollout.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) has been an established problem in the educational data mining field for decades, and it is commonly assumed that the underlying learning process being modeled remains static. Given the ever-changing landscape of online learning platforms (OLPs), we investigate how concept drift and changing student populations can impact student behavior within an OLP through testing model performance both within a single academic year and across multiple academic years. Four well-studied KT models were applied to five academic years of data to assess how susceptible KT models are to concept drift. Through our analysis, we find that all four families of KT models can exhibit degraded performance, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) remains the most stable KT model when applied to newer data, while more complex, attention based models lose predictive power significantly faster.

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems rely on high-quality benchmarks to evaluate complex multi-hop reasoning. However, despite their widespread use, popular datasets such as WebQSP and CWQ suffer from critical quality issues, including inaccurate or incomplete ground-truth annotations, poorly constructed questions that are ambiguous, trivial, or unanswerable, and outdated or inconsistent knowledge. Through a manual audit of 16 popular KGQA datasets, including WebQSP and CWQ, we find that the average factual correctness rate is only 57 %. To address these issues, we introduce KGQAGen, an LLM-in-the-loop framework that systematically resolves these pitfalls. KGQAGen combines structured knowledge grounding, LLM-guided generation, and symbolic verification to produce challenging and verifiable QA instances. Using KGQAGen, we construct KGQAGen-10k, a ten-thousand scale benchmark grounded in Wikidata, and evaluate a diverse set of KG-RAG models. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art systems struggle on this benchmark, highlighting its ability to expose limitations of existing models. Our findings advocate for more rigorous benchmark construction and position KGQAGen as a scalable framework for advancing KGQA evaluation.

The extent to which large language models (LLMs) can perform culturally grounded reasoning across non-English languages remains underexplored. This paper examines the reasoning and self-assessment abilities of LLMs across seven major Indian languages-Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. We introduce a multilingual riddle dataset combining traditional riddles with context-reconstructed variants and evaluate five LLMs-Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral-Saba, LLaMA 4 Scout, and LLaMA 4 Maverick-under seven prompting strategies. In the first stage, we assess riddle-solving performance and find that while Gemini 2.5 Pro performs best overall, few-shot methods yield only marginal gains, and accuracy varies notably across languages. In the second stage, we conduct a self-evaluation experiment to measure reasoning consistency. The results reveal a key finding: a model's initial accuracy is inversely correlated with its ability to identify its own mistakes. Top-performing models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro are overconfident (4.34% True Negative Rate), whereas lower-performing models like LLaMA 4 Scout are substantially more self-aware (42.09% True Negative Rate). These results point to clear gaps in multilingual reasoning and highlight the need for models that not only reason effectively but also recognize their own limitations.

Purpose: To evaluate deep learning (DL) models for enhancing vitreous optical coherence tomography (OCT) image quality and reducing acquisition time. Methods: Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (cDDPMs), Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (BBDMs), U-Net, Pix2Pix, and Vector-Quantised Generative Adversarial Network (VQ-GAN) were used to generate high-quality spectral-domain (SD) vitreous OCT images. Inputs were SD ART10 images, and outputs were compared to pseudoART100 images obtained by averaging ten ART10 images per eye location. Model performance was assessed using image quality metrics and Visual Turing Tests, where ophthalmologists ranked generated images and evaluated anatomical fidelity. The best model's performance was further tested within the manually segmented vitreous on newly acquired data. Results: U-Net achieved the highest Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR: 30.230) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM: 0.820), followed by cDDPM. For Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), Pix2Pix (0.697) and cDDPM (0.753) performed best. In the first Visual Turing Test, cDDPM ranked highest (3.07); in the second (best model only), cDDPM achieved a 32.9% fool rate and 85.7% anatomical preservation. On newly acquired data, cDDPM generated vitreous regions more similar in PSNR to the ART100 reference than true ART1 or ART10 B-scans and achieved higher PSNR on whole images when conditioned on ART1 than ART10. Conclusions: Results reveal discrepancies between quantitative metrics and clinical evaluation, highlighting the need for combined assessment. cDDPM showed strong potential for generating clinically meaningful vitreous OCT images while reducing acquisition time fourfold. Translational Relevance: cDDPMs show promise for clinical integration, supporting faster, higher-quality vitreous imaging. Dataset and code will be made publicly available.

The rapid growth of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems has created new challenges for anomaly detection in high-dimensional, multivariate time-series, where privacy, scalability, and communication efficiency are critical. Classical federated learning approaches mitigate privacy concerns by enabling decentralized training, but they often struggle with highly non-linear decision boundaries and imbalanced anomaly distributions. To address this gap, we propose a Federated Quantum Kernel Learning (FQKL) framework that integrates quantum feature maps with federated aggregation to enable distributed, privacy-preserving anomaly detection across heterogeneous IoT networks. In our design, quantum edge nodes locally compute compressed kernel statistics using parameterized quantum circuits and share only these summaries with a central server, which constructs a global Gram matrix and trains a decision function (e.g., Fed-QSVM). Experimental results on synthetic IIoT benchmarks demonstrate that FQKL achieves superior generalization in capturing complex temporal correlations compared to classical federated baselines, while significantly reducing communication overhead. This work highlights the promise of quantum kernels in federated settings, advancing the path toward scalable, robust, and quantum-enhanced intelligence for next-generation IoT infrastructures.

Accurate air quality forecasts are vital for public health alerts, exposure assessment, and emissions control. In practice, observational data are often missing in varying proportions and patterns due to collection and transmission issues. These incomplete spatiotemporal records impede reliable inference and risk assessment and can lead to overconfident extrapolation. To address these challenges, we propose an end to end framework, the channel gated learning unit based spatiotemporal bayesian neural field (CGLUBNF). It uses Fourier features with a graph attention encoder to capture multiscale spatial dependencies and seasonal temporal dynamics. A channel gated learning unit, equipped with learnable activations and gated residual connections, adaptively filters and amplifies informative features. Bayesian inference jointly optimizes predictive distributions and parameter uncertainty, producing point estimates and calibrated prediction intervals. We conduct a systematic evaluation on two real world datasets, covering four typical missing data patterns and comparing against five state of the art baselines. CGLUBNF achieves superior prediction accuracy and sharper confidence intervals. In addition, we further validate robustness across multiple prediction horizons and analysis the contribution of extraneous variables. This research lays a foundation for reliable deep learning based spatio-temporal forecasting with incomplete observations in emerging sensing paradigms, such as real world vehicle borne mobile monitoring.

Access to clinical multi-channel EEG remains limited in many regions worldwide. We present NEUROSKY-EPI, the first open dataset of single-channel, consumer-grade EEG for epilepsy, collected in a South Asian clinical setting along with rich contextual metadata. To explore its utility, we introduce EmbedCluster, a patient-stratification pipeline that transfers representations from EEGNet models trained on clinical data and enriches them with contextual autoencoder embeddings, followed by unsupervised clustering of patients based on EEG patterns. Results show that low-cost, single-channel data can support meaningful stratification. Beyond algorithmic performance, we emphasize human-centered concerns such as deployability in resource-constrained environments, interpretability for non-specialists, and safeguards for privacy, inclusivity, and bias. By releasing the dataset and code, we aim to catalyze interdisciplinary research across health technology, human-computer interaction, and machine learning, advancing the goal of affordable and actionable EEG-based epilepsy care.

Despite remarkable capabilities, artificial neural networks exhibit limited flexible, generalizable intelligence. This limitation stems from their fundamental divergence from biological cognition that overlooks both neural regions' functional specialization and the temporal dynamics critical for coordinating these specialized systems. We propose a tripartite brain-inspired architecture comprising functionally specialized perceptual, auxiliary, and executive systems. Moreover, the integration of temporal dynamics through the simulation of multi-frequency neural oscillation and synaptic dynamic adaptation mechanisms enhances the architecture, thereby enabling more flexible and efficient artificial cognition. Initial evaluations demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art temporal processing approaches, with 2.18\% accuracy improvements while reducing required computation iterations by 48.44\%, and achieving higher correlation with human confidence patterns. Though currently demonstrated on visual processing tasks, this architecture establishes a theoretical foundation for brain-like intelligence across cognitive domains, potentially bridging the gap between artificial and biological intelligence.