AI tools in pathology have improved screening throughput, standardized quantification, and revealed prognostic patterns that inform treatment. However, adoption remains limited because most systems still lack the human-readable reasoning needed to audit decisions and prevent errors. We present RECAP-PATH, an interpretable framework that establishes a self-learning paradigm, shifting off-the-shelf multimodal large language models from passive pattern recognition to evidence-linked diagnostic reasoning. At its core is a two-phase learning process that autonomously derives diagnostic criteria: diversification expands pathology-style explanations, while optimization refines them for accuracy. This self-learning approach requires only small labeled sets and no white-box access or weight updates to generate cancer diagnoses. Evaluated on breast and prostate datasets, RECAP-PATH produced rationales aligned with expert assessment and delivered substantial gains in diagnostic accuracy over baselines. By uniting visual understanding with reasoning, RECAP-PATH provides clinically trustworthy AI and demonstrates a generalizable path toward evidence-linked interpretation.

Fine-grained analysis of intraoperative behavior and its impact on patient outcomes remain a longstanding challenge. We present Frame-to-Outcome (F2O), an end-to-end system that translates tissue dissection videos into gesture sequences and uncovers patterns associated with postoperative outcomes. Leveraging transformer-based spatial and temporal modeling and frame-wise classification, F2O robustly detects consecutive short (~2 seconds) gestures in the nerve-sparing step of robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (AUC: 0.80 frame-level; 0.81 video-level). F2O-derived features (gesture frequency, duration, and transitions) predicted postoperative outcomes with accuracy comparable to human annotations (0.79 vs. 0.75; overlapping 95% CI). Across 25 shared features, effect size directions were concordant with small differences (~ 0.07), and strong correlation (r = 0.96, p < 1e-14). F2O also captured key patterns linked to erectile function recovery, including prolonged tissue peeling and reduced energy use. By enabling automatic interpretable assessment, F2O establishes a foundation for data-driven surgical feedback and prospective clinical decision support.

Early and accurate pneumonia detection from chest X-rays (CXRs) is clinically critical to expedite treatment and isolation, reduce complications, and curb unnecessary antibiotic use. Although artificial intelligence (AI) substantially improves CXR-based detection, development is hindered by globally distributed data, high inter-hospital variability, and strict privacy regulations (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR) that make centralization impractical. These constraints are compounded by heterogeneous imaging protocols, uneven data availability, and the costs of transferring large medical images across geographically dispersed sites. In this paper, we evaluate Federated Learning (FL) using the Sherpa.ai FL platform, enabling multiple hospitals (nodes) to collaboratively train a CXR classifier for pneumonia while keeping data in place and private. Using the Pediatric Pneumonia Chest X-ray dataset, we simulate cross-hospital collaboration with non-independent and non-identically distributed (non-IID) data, reproducing real-world variability across institutions and jurisdictions. Our experiments demonstrate that collaborative and privacy-preserving training across multiple hospitals via FL led to a dramatic performance improvement achieving 0.900 Accuracy and 0.966 ROC-AUC, corresponding to 47.5% and 50.0% gains over single-hospital models (0.610; 0.644), without transferring any patient CXR. These results indicate that FL delivers high-performing, generalizable, secure and private pneumonia detection across healthcare networks, with data kept local. This is especially relevant for rare diseases, where FL enables secure multi-institutional collaboration without data movement, representing a breakthrough for accelerating diagnosis and treatment development in low-data domains.

Wildfires pose a significant global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with California experiencing recurring fires due to various factors, including climate, topographical features, vegetation patterns, and human activities. This study aims to develop a comprehensive wildfire risk map for California by applying the random forest (RF) algorithm, augmented with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) through Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to interpret model predictions. Model performance was assessed using both spatial and temporal validation strategies. The RF model demonstrated strong predictive performance, achieving near-perfect discrimination for grasslands (AUC = 0.996) and forests (AUC = 0.997). Spatial cross-validation revealed moderate transferability, yielding ROC-AUC values of 0.6155 for forests and 0.5416 for grasslands. In contrast, temporal split validation showed enhanced generalization, especially for forests (ROC-AUC = 0.6615, PR-AUC = 0.8423). SHAP-based XAI analysis identified key ecosystem-specific drivers: soil organic carbon, tree cover, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) emerged as the most influential in forests, whereas Land Surface Temperature (LST), elevation, and vegetation health indices were dominant in grasslands. District-level classification revealed that Central Valley and Northern Buttes districts had the highest concentration of high-risk grasslands, while Northern Buttes and North Coast Redwoods dominated forested high-risk areas. This RF-SHAP framework offers a robust, comprehensible, and adaptable method for assessing wildfire risks, enabling informed decisions and creating targeted strategies to mitigate dangers.

An ever increasing number of high-stake decisions are made or assisted by automated systems employing brittle artificial intelligence technology. There is a substantial risk that some of these decision induce harm to people, by infringing their well-being or their fundamental human rights. The state-of-the-art in AI systems makes little effort with respect to appropriate documentation of the decision process. This obstructs the ability to trace what went into a decision, which in turn is a prerequisite to any attempt of reconstructing a responsibility chain. Specifically, such traceability is linked to a documentation that will stand up in court when determining the cause of some AI-based decision that inadvertently or intentionally violates the law. This paper takes a radical, yet practical, approach to this problem, by enforcing the documentation of each and every component that goes into the training or inference of an automated decision. As such, it presents the first running workflow supporting the generation of tamper-proof, verifiable and exhaustive traces of AI decisions. In doing so, we expand the Decision Bill of Material (DBOM) concept (Wenzel et al. 2024) into an effective running workflow leveraging confidential computing technology. We demonstrate the inner workings of the workflow in the development of an app to tell poisonous and edible mushrooms apart, meant as a playful example of high-stake decision support.

Machine Learning (ML) models are being increasingly employed for credit risk evaluation, with their effectiveness largely hinging on the quality of the input data. In this paper we investigate the impact of several data quality issues, including missing values, noisy attributes, outliers, and label errors, on the predictive accuracy of the machine learning model used in credit risk assessment. Utilizing an open-source dataset, we introduce controlled data corruption using the Pucktrick library to assess the robustness of 10 frequently used models like Random Forest, SVM, and Logistic Regression and so on. Our experiments show significant differences in model robustness based on the nature and severity of the data degradation. Moreover, the proposed methodology and accompanying tools offer practical support for practitioners seeking to enhance data pipeline robustness, and provide researchers with a flexible framework for further experimentation in data-centric AI contexts.

With more and more existing networks being transformed to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), they need to be more secure and demand smarter ways of traffic control. This work, SmartSecChain-SDN, is a platform that combines machine learning based intrusion detection, blockchain-based storage of logs, and application-awareness-based priority in SDN networks. To detect network intrusions in a real-time, precision and low-false positives setup, the framework utilizes the application of advanced machine learning algorithms, namely Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, and CNN-BiLSTM. SmartSecChain-SDN is based on the Hyperledger Fabric, which is a permissioned blockchain technology, to provide secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving storage and, thus, guarantee that the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) records cannot be altered and can be analyzed comprehensively. The system also has Quality of Service (QoS) rules and traffic shaping based on applications, which enables prioritization of critical services, such as VoIP, video conferencing, and business applications, as well as de-prioritization of non-essential traffic, such as downloads and updates. Mininet can simulate real-time SDN scenarios because it is used to prototype whole architectures. It is also compatible with controllers OpenDaylight and Ryu. It has tested the framework using the InSDN dataset and proved that it can identify different kinds of cyberattacks and handle bandwidth allocation efficiently under circumstances of resource constraints. SmartSecChain-SDN comprehensively addresses SDN system protection, securing and enhancing. The proposed study offers an innovative, extensible way to improve cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and the administration of next-generation programmable networks.

Resting-state fMRI has become a valuable tool for classifying brain disorders and constructing brain functional connectivity networks by tracking BOLD signals across brain regions. However, existing mod els largely neglect the multi-frequency nature of neuronal oscillations, treating BOLD signals as monolithic time series. This overlooks the cru cial fact that neurological disorders often manifest as disruptions within specific frequency bands, limiting diagnostic sensitivity and specificity. While some methods have attempted to incorporate frequency informa tion, they often rely on predefined frequency bands, which may not be optimal for capturing individual variability or disease-specific alterations. To address this, we propose a novel framework featuring Adaptive Cas cade Decomposition to learn task-relevant frequency sub-bands for each brain region and Frequency-Coupled Connectivity Learning to capture both intra- and nuanced cross-band interactions in a unified functional network. This unified network informs a novel message-passing mecha nism within our Unified-GCN, generating refined node representations for diagnostic prediction. Experimental results on the ADNI and ABIDE datasets demonstrate superior performance over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/XXYY20221234/Ada-FCN.

This paper introduces an innovative Electronic Health Record (EHR) foundation model that integrates Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS) as a foundational data modality, moving beyond traditional EHR-only approaches to build more holistic health profiles. Leveraging the extensive and diverse data from the All of Us (AoU) Research Program, this multimodal framework aims to learn complex relationships between clinical data and genetic predispositions. The methodology extends advancements in generative AI to the EHR foundation model space, enhancing predictive capabilities and interpretability. Evaluation on AoU data demonstrates the model's predictive value for the onset of various conditions, particularly Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), and illustrates the interplay between PRS and EHR data. The work also explores transfer learning for custom classification tasks, showcasing the architecture's versatility and efficiency. This approach is pivotal for unlocking new insights into disease prediction, proactive health management, risk stratification, and personalized treatment strategies, laying the groundwork for more personalized, equitable, and actionable real-world evidence generation in healthcare.

Identifying the determinants of academic success in basic education represents a central challenge for educational research and policymaking, particularly in a country with Brazil's vast dimensions and socioeconomic heterogeneity (Issah et al. 2023). A systemic approach is crucial, as student performance is influenced by a complex interplay of factors spanning individual, academic, socioeconomic, and institutional domains (Barrag an Moreno and Guzm an Rinc on 2025). The System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB), conducted by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research An ısio Teixeira (INEP) (INEP 2025), provides a rich, multi-level dataset uniquely suited for such an analysis (Bonamino et al. 2010). The public availability of its anonymized microdata enables the research community to investigate the intricate relationships between student proficiency and a wide array of contextual factors, from socioeconomic backgrounds to school infrastructure and teacher profiles. Consequently, the SAEB microdata is an essential resource for data-driven research aimed at informing and evaluating educational policies in the country (Lundberg and Lee 2017b; Mazoni and Oliveira 2023). While traditional statistical methods are common, the Educational Data Mining (EDM) paradigm offers powerful tools for uncovering complex, non-linear patterns from such data (Romero and Ventura 2010). Furthermore, we demonstrate that by interpreting the model's classification results with XAI techniques, our method provides data-driven insights for educators and policymakers (Idrizi 2024). The primary objective of this research is thus to develop and evaluate a multi-level machine learning model to identify the key systemic factors associated with the academic performance of 9th-grade and high school students, using the SAEB microdata. Building upon this perspective, the study shifts its analytical focus from purely individual student interventions toward addressing the systemic determinants that shape educational outcomes in Brazilian basic education.