Existing vision-language-action (VLA) models act in 3D real-world but are typically built on 2D encoders, leaving a spatial reasoning gap that limits generalization and adaptability. Recent 3D integration techniques for VLAs either require specialized sensors and transfer poorly across modalities, or inject weak cues that lack geometry and degrade vision-language alignment. In this work, we introduce FALCON (From Spatial to Action), a novel paradigm that injects rich 3D spatial tokens into the action head. FALCON leverages spatial foundation models to deliver strong geometric priors from RGB alone, and includes an Embodied Spatial Model that can optionally fuse depth, or pose for higher fidelity when available, without retraining or architectural changes. To preserve language reasoning, spatial tokens are consumed by a Spatial-Enhanced Action Head rather than being concatenated into the vision-language backbone. These designs enable FALCON to address limitations in spatial representation, modality transferability, and alignment. In comprehensive evaluations across three simulation benchmarks and eleven real-world tasks, our proposed FALCON achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently surpasses competitive baselines, and remains robust under clutter, spatial-prompt conditioning, and variations in object scale and height.

The rapidly increasing volume of electronic health record (EHR) data underscores a pressing need to unlock biomedical knowledge from unstructured clinical texts to support advancements in data-driven clinical systems, including patient diagnosis, disease progression monitoring, treatment effects assessment, prediction of future clinical events, etc. While contextualized language models have demonstrated impressive performance improvements for named entity recognition (NER) systems in English corpora, there remains a scarcity of research focused on clinical texts in low-resource languages. To bridge this gap, our study aims to develop multiple deep contextual embedding models to enhance clinical NER in the cardiology domain, as part of the BioASQ MultiCardioNER shared task. We explore the effectiveness of different monolingual and multilingual BERT-based models, trained on general domain text, for extracting disease and medication mentions from clinical case reports written in English, Spanish, and Italian. We achieved an F1-score of 77.88% on Spanish Diseases Recognition (SDR), 92.09% on Spanish Medications Recognition (SMR), 91.74% on English Medications Recognition (EMR), and 88.9% on Italian Medications Recognition (IMR). These results outperform the mean and median F1 scores in the test leaderboard across all subtasks, with the mean/median values being: 69.61%/75.66% for SDR, 81.22%/90.18% for SMR, 89.2%/88.96% for EMR, and 82.8%/87.76% for IMR.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to autonomously call tools during reasoning, with search as the most common application. These models excel at multi-step reasoning tasks, but their safety properties are not well understood. In this study, we show that RL-trained search models inherit refusal from instruction tuning and often deflect harmful requests by turning them into safe queries. However, this safety is fragile. Two simple attacks, one that forces the model to begin response with search (Search attack), another that encourages models to repeatedly search (Multi-search attack), trigger cascades of harmful searches and answers. The attacks succeed by triggering models to generate harmful, request-mirroring search queries before they can generate the inherited refusal tokens. This exposes a core weakness of current RL training: it rewards continued generation of effective queries without accounting for their harmfulness. As a result, RL search models have vulnerabilities that users can easily exploit, making it urgent to develop safety-aware agentic RL pipelines optimising for safe search. Instruction tuning (IT) is the standard method to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and teach them to refuse harmful requests (Schulman et al., 2017; Shao et al., 2024). However, IT only shapes static responses and is insufficient in agentic settings, where models must also decide when and how to call external tools, capabilities not explicitly learned during pre-training (Zhang et al., 2025). Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for tool-use (Zhang et al., 2025) tackles this by fine-tuning models to interleave reasoning with tool use (Dong et al., 2025). In practice, search is the most common tool: agentic RL rewards effective, well-timed search queries and achieves strong gains on multi-hop reasoning tasks (Song et al., 2025a;b; Jin et al., 2025). Despite the progress, effect of agentic RL on safety of IT models remains unclear. While prior work reported safety degradation of retrieval-augmented agents (Y u et al., 2025), little is known about whether agentic RL for search preserves refusal of harmful requests. As agentic RL is now deployed in closed-source systems such as OpenAI's DeepSearch (OpenAI, 2025), this evaluation gap can create real deployment risks.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), with a history spanning over two millennia, plays a role in global healthcare. However, applying large language models (LLMs) to TCM remains challenging due to its reliance on holistic reasoning, implicit logic, and multimodal diagnostic cues. Existing TCM-domain LLMs have made progress in text-based understanding but lack multimodal integration, interpretability, and clinical applicability. To address these limitations, we developed BenCao, a ChatGPT-based multimodal assistant for TCM, integrating structured knowledge bases, diagnostic data, and expert feedback refinement. BenCao was trained through natural language instruction tuning rather than parameter retraining, aligning with expert-level reasoning and ethical norms specific to TCM. The system incorporates a comprehensive knowledge base of over 1,000 classical and modern texts, a scenario-based instruction framework for diverse interactions, a chain-of-thought simulation mechanism for interpretable reasoning, and a feedback refinement process involving licensed TCM practitioners. BenCao connects to external APIs for tongue-image classification and multimodal database retrieval, enabling dynamic access to diagnostic resources. In evaluations across single-choice question benchmarks and multimodal classification tasks, BenCao achieved superior accuracy to general-domain and TCM-domain models, particularly in diagnostics, herb recognition, and constitution classification. The model was deployed as an interactive application on the OpenAI GPTs Store, accessed by nearly 1,000 users globally as of October 2025. This study demonstrates the feasibility of developing a TCM-domain LLM through natural language-based instruction tuning and multimodal integration, offering a practical framework for aligning generative AI with traditional medical reasoning and a scalable pathway for real-world deployment.

Accurate prediction of lithium-ion battery capacity and its associated uncertainty is essential for reliable battery management but remains challenging due to the stochastic nature of aging. This paper presents a novel method, termed the Condition Diffusion U-Net with Attention (CDUA), which integrates feature engineering and deep learning to address this challenge. The proposed approach employs a diffusion-based generative model for time-series forecasting and incorporates attention mechanisms to enhance predictive performance. Battery capacity is first derived from real-world vehicle operation data. The most relevant features are then identified using the Pearson correlation coefficient and the XGBoost algorithm. These features are used to train the CDUA model, which comprises two core components: (1) a contextual U-Net with self-attention to capture complex temporal dependencies, and (2) a denoising network to reconstruct accurate capacity values from noisy observations. Experimental validation on the real-world vehicle data demonstrates that the proposed CDUA model achieves a relative Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.94% and a relative Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.14%, with a narrow 95% confidence interval of 3.74% in relative width. These results confirm that CDUA provides both accurate capacity estimation and reliable uncertainty quantification. Comparative experiments further verify its robustness and superior performance over existing mainstream approaches.

-- This paper presents a novel methodology that integrates trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) with an energy - efficient robotic arm for intelligent waste classification and sorting. By utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) enhanced through trans fer learning with MobileNetV2, the system accurately classifies waste into six categories: plastic, glass, metal, paper, cardboard, and trash. The model achieved a high training accuracy of 99.8% and a validation accuracy of 80.5%, demonstrating strong lea rning and generalization. A robotic arm simulator is implemented to perform virtual sorting, calculating the energy cost for each action using Euclidean distance to ensure optimal and efficient movement. The framework incorporates key elements of trustwort hy AI, such as transparency, robustness, fairness, and safety, making it a reliable and scalable solution for smart waste management systems in urban settings. I. INTRODUCTION As cities grow and industries expand, managing waste effectively has become a major global issue.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) exemplifies biosignal-based time series with continuous, temporally ordered structure reflecting cardiac physiological and pathophysiological dynamics. Detailed analysis of these dynamics has proven challenging, as conventional methods capture either global trends or local waveform features but rarely their simultaneous interplay at high temporal resolution. To bridge global and local signal analysis, we introduce S4ECG, a novel deep learning architecture leveraging structured state space models for multi-epoch arrhythmia classification. Our joint multi-epoch predictions significantly outperform single-epoch approaches by 1.0-11.6% in macro-AUROC, with atrial fibrillation specificity improving from 0.718-0.979 to 0.967-0.998, demonstrating superior performance in-distribution and enhanced out-of-distribution robustness. Systematic investigation reveals optimal temporal dependency windows spanning 10-20 minutes for peak performance. This work contributes to a paradigm shift toward temporally-aware arrhythmia detection algorithms, opening new possibilities for ECG interpretation, in particular for complex arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) presents a rich and structurally unique knowledge system that challenges conventional applications of large language models (LLMs). Although previous TCM - specific LLMs have shown progress through supervised fine - tuning, they often face limitations in alignment, data quality, and evaluation consistency. In this study, we introduce Ladder - base, the first TCM - focused LLM trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method that improves reasoning and factual consistency by optimizing response selection based on intra - group comparisons. Ladder - base is built upon the Qwen2.5 - 7B - Instruct foundation model and trained exclusively on the textual subset of the TCM - Ladder benchmark, using 80 percent of the data for training and the remaining 20 percent split evenly between validation and test sets. Through standardized evaluation, Ladder - base demonstrates superior performance across multiple reasoning metrics when compared to both state - of - the - art general - purpose LLMs such as GPT - 4, Gemini 2.5, Claude 3, and Qwen3 and domain - specific TCM models including BenTsao, HuatuoGPT2, and Zhongjing. These findings suggest that GRPO provides an effective and efficient strategy for aligning LLMs with expert - level reasoning in traditional medical domains and supports the development of trustworthy and clinically grounded TCM artificial intelligence systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming education by answering questions, explaining complex concepts, and generating content across a wide range of subjects. Despite strong performance on academic benchmarks, they often fail to tailor responses to students' grade levels. This is a critical need in K-12 education, where age-appropriate vocabulary and explanation are essential for effective learning. Existing models frequently produce outputs that are too advanced or vague for younger learners, and there are no standardized benchmarks to evaluate their ability to adjust across cognitive and developmental stages. To address this gap, we introduce EduAdapt, a benchmark of nearly 48k grade-labeled QA pairs across nine science subjects, spanning Grades 1-12 and grouped into four grade levels. We evaluate a diverse set of open-source LLMs on EduAdapt and find that while larger models generally perform better, they still struggle with generating suitable responses for early-grade students (Grades 1-5). Our work presents the first dataset and evaluation framework for assessing grade-level adaptability in LLMs, aiming to foster more developmentally aligned educational AI systems through better training and prompting strategies. EduAdapt code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/NaumanNaeem/EduAdapt.

Optimizing the energy management within a smart grids scenario presents significant challenges, primarily due to the complexity of real-world systems and the intricate interactions among various components. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is gaining prominence as a solution for addressing the challenges of Optimal Power Flow (OPF) in smart grids. However, RL needs to iterate compulsively throughout a given environment to obtain the optimal policy. This means obtaining samples from a, most likely, costly simulator, which can lead to a sample e fficiency problem. In this work, we address this problem by substituting costly smart grid simulators with surrogate models built using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN)s, optimizing the RL policy training process by arriving to convergent results in a fraction of the time employed by the original environment. Specifically, we tested the performance of our PINN surrogate against other state-of-the-art data-driven surrogates and found that the understanding of the underlying physical nature of the problem makes the PINN surrogate the only method that we studied capable of learning a good RL policy, in addition to not having to use samples from the real simulator. Our work shows that, by employing PINN surrogates, we can improve training speed by 50%, comparing to training the RL policy by not using any surrogate model, enabling us to achieve results with score on par with the original simulator more rapidly. Keywords: Smart Grids Control, Reinforcement Learning, Physics-informed Neural Networks, Active Network Management, Optimal Power Flow, Surrogate Models, Renewable EnergyRL Reinforcement Learning EA Expert agent PINN Physics-Informed Neural Networks ANN Artificial Neural Network OPF Optimal Power Flow ESS Energy Storage Systems SoC State of Change MAE Mean Absolute Error 1. Introduction Smart grids are a pivotal concept driving the current modernization of electrical networks, addressing the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance energy e fficiency, and improve grid stability through demand response mechanisms. The European Union aims to achieve 43% renewable energy generation by 2030 [1], and in 2021, the renewable energy share rose to 32 .1% [2]. Corresponding author Email address: julen.cestero@polimi.it Modern societies require advanced grids capable of predicting and mitigating the uncertainties associated with renewable energy sources.