Ranking methods or models based on their performance is of prime importance but is tricky because performance is fundamentally multidimensional. In the case of classification, precision and recall are scores with probabilistic interpretations that are both important to consider and complementary. The rankings induced by these two scores are often in partial contradiction. In practice, therefore, it is extremely useful to establish a compromise between the two views to obtain a single, global ranking. Over the last fifty years or so,it has been proposed to take a weighted harmonic mean, known as the F-score, F-measure, or $F_β$. Generally speaking, by averaging basic scores, we obtain a score that is intermediate in terms of values. However, there is no guarantee that these scores lead to meaningful rankings and no guarantee that the rankings are good tradeoffs between these base scores. Given the ubiquity of $F_β$ scores in the literature, some clarification is in order. Concretely: (1) We establish that $F_β$-induced rankings are meaningful and define a shortest path between precision- and recall-induced rankings. (2) We frame the problem of finding a tradeoff between two scores as an optimization problem expressed with Kendall rank correlations. We show that $F_1$ and its skew-insensitive version are far from being optimal in that regard. (3) We provide theoretical tools and a closed-form expression to find the optimal value for $β$ for any distribution or set of performances, and we illustrate their use on six case studies.

Research increasingly relies on computational methods to analyze experimental data and predict molecular properties. Current approaches often require researchers to use a variety of tools for statistical analysis and machine learning, creating workflow inefficiencies. We present an integrated platform that combines classical statistical methods with Random Forest classification for comprehensive data analysis that can be used in the biological sciences. The platform implements automated hyperparameter optimization, feature importance analysis, and a suite of statistical tests including t tests, ANOVA, and Pearson correlation analysis. Our methodology addresses the gap between traditional statistical software, modern machine learning frameworks and biology, by providing a unified interface accessible to researchers without extensive programming experience. The system achieves this through automatic data preprocessing, categorical encoding, and adaptive model configuration based on dataset characteristics. Initial testing protocols are designed to evaluate classification accuracy across diverse chemical datasets with varying feature distributions. This work demonstrates that integrating statistical rigor with machine learning interpretability can accelerate biological discovery workflows while maintaining methodological soundness. The platform's modular architecture enables future extensions to additional machine learning algorithms and statistical procedures relevant to bioinformatics.

W e introduce SuperIntelliAgent, an agentic learning framework that couples a trainable small diffusion model (the learner) with a frozen large language model (the verifier), enabling continual intelligence growth through self-supervised interaction. Unlike conventional supervised fine-tuning with annotated data, SuperIntelliAgent learns autonomously in an annotation-free manner: the learner generates candidate outputs, the verifier evaluates them via step-by-step reasoning, and the learner-verifier interaction loop produces chosen/rejected pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), transforming every input into a pseudo-training signal for continual self-improvement. The framework integrates a dual-scale memory mechanism--short-term, in-context memory that preserves reasoning traces across iterative refinement cycles, and long-term memory that consolidates acquired knowledge into model parameters through on-the-fly fine-tuning. T o enhance optimization, a replay buffer selectively retains samples showing verifiable progress from failed to satisfied conditions and replays them as auxiliary supervision, reinforcing recent learning while bootstrapping adaptive curricula that accelerate intelligence acquisition. Designed to be infrastructure-agnostic, SuperIntelliAgent can be seamlessly integrated into existing agentic frameworks (e.g., autogen, semantic kernel, etc.), while simultaneously transforming ordinary inference cycles into lifelong optimization. W e posit that agentic pairing constitutes the minimal reliable unit of growing intelligence, as paired feedback, augmented with partial-history replay, yields richer learning curricula, tighter preference alignment, and stronger generalization. With extremely few DPO pairs generated automatically by SuperIntelliAgent and used for lightweight fine-tuning, the learner performance improves across all benchmarks.

Given the constant growth and increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, cybersecurity can no longer rely solely on traditional defense techniques and tools. Proactive detection of cyber threats has become essential to help security teams identify potential risks and implement effective mitigation measures. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) plays a key role by providing security analysts with evidence-based knowledge about cyber threats. CTI information can be extracted using various techniques and data sources; however, machine learning has proven promising. As for data sources, social networks and online discussion forums are commonly explored. In this study, we apply text mining techniques and machine learning to data collected from Dark Web forums in Brazilian Portuguese to identify malicious posts. Our contributions include the creation of three original datasets, a novel multi-stage labeling process combining indicators of compromise (IoCs), contextual keywords, and manual analysis, and a comprehensive evaluation of text representations and classifiers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to focus specifically on Brazilian Portuguese content in this domain. The best-performing model, using LightGBM and TF-IDF, was able to detect relevant posts with high accuracy. We also applied topic modeling to validate the model's outputs on unlabeled data, confirming its robustness in real-world scenarios.

Generative foundation models can remove visual artifacts through realistic image inpainting, but their impact on medical AI performance remains uncertain. Pediatric hand radiographs often contain non-anatomical markers, and it is unclear whether inpainting these regions preserves features needed for bone age and gender prediction. To evaluate the clinical reliability of generative model-based inpainting for artifact removal, we used the RSNA Bone Age Challenge dataset, selecting 200 original radiographs and generating 600 inpainted versions with gpt-image-1 using natural language prompts to target non-anatomical artifacts. Downstream performance was assessed with deep learning ensembles for bone age estimation and gender classification, using mean absolute error (MAE) and area under the ROC curve (AUC) as metrics, and pixel intensity distributions to detect structural alterations. Inpainting markedly degraded model performance: bone age MAE increased from 6.26 to 30.11 months, and gender classification AUC decreased from 0.955 to 0.704. Inpainted images displayed pixel-intensity shifts and inconsistencies, indicating structural modifications not corrected by simple calibration. These findings show that, although visually realistic, foundation model-based inpainting can obscure subtle but clinically relevant features and introduce latent bias even when edits are confined to non-diagnostic regions, underscoring the need for rigorous, task-specific validation before integrating such generative tools into clinical AI workflows.

Standard Occupational Classifiers (SOC) are systems used to categorize and classify different types of jobs and occupations based on their similarities in terms of job duties, skills, and qualifications. Integrating these facets with Big Data from job advertisement offers the prospect to investigate labour demand that is specific to various occupations. This project investigates the use of recent developments in natural language processing to construct a classifier capable of assigning an occupation code to a given job advertisement. We develop various classifiers for both UK ONS SOC and US O*NET SOC, using different Language Models. We find that an ensemble model, which combines Google BERT and a Neural Network classifier while considering job title, description, and skills, achieved the highest prediction accuracy. Specifically, the ensemble model exhibited a classification accuracy of up to 61% for the lower (or fourth) tier of SOC, and 72% for the third tier of SOC. This model could provide up to date, accurate information on the evolution of the labour market using job advertisements.

In the supervised binary classification setting, score-oriented losses have been introduced with the aim of optimizing a chosen performance metric directly during the training phase, thus avoiding \textit{a posteriori} threshold tuning. To do this, in their construction, the decision threshold is treated as a random variable provided with a certain \textit{a priori} distribution. In this paper, we use a recently introduced multidimensional threshold-based classification framework to extend such score-oriented losses to multiclass classification, defining the Multiclass Score-Oriented Loss (MultiSOL) functions. As also demonstrated by several classification experiments, this proposed family of losses is designed to preserve the main advantages observed in the binary setting, such as the direct optimization of the target metric and the robustness to class imbalance, achieving performance comparable to other state-of-the-art loss functions and providing new insights into the interaction between simplex geometry and score-oriented learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across various tasks. However, their autoregressive decoding process poses significant challenges for efficient deployment on existing AI hardware. Quantization alleviates memory and compute pressure by compressing weights, activations, and KV caches to low precisions while preserving generation quality. However, existing quantization frameworks typically focus on perplexity or classification accuracy, often omitting critical trustworthiness metrics. This gap introduces risks when applying quantized LLMs to downstream high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of quantization on four trustworthiness metrics (adversarial robustness, fairness, machine ethics, and out-of-distribution robustness) and identify the instability across compression ratios and quantization methods. Building on these observations, we develop a novel precision-ensemble voting approach that leverages predictions from mixed-precision variants of the same model and consistently improves performance by up to $5.8\%$ on trustworthiness metrics. Our results highlight the importance of considering trustworthiness when developing model compression techniques and point to research opportunities at the intersection of compression and trustworthiness for safety-critical applications.

Transformer-based models have gained considerable attention in the field of physiological signal analysis. They leverage long-range dependencies and complex patterns in temporal signals, allowing them to achieve performance superior to traditional RNN and CNN models. However, they require high computational intensity and memory demands. In this work, we present Efficient-Husformer, a novel Transformer-based architecture developed with hyperparameter optimization (HPO) for multi-class stress detection across two multimodal physiological datasets (WESAD and CogLoad). The main contributions of this work are: (1) the design of a structured search space, targeting effective hyperparameter optimization; (2) a comprehensive ablation study evaluating the impact of architectural decisions; (3) consistent performance improvements over the original Husformer, with the best configuration achieving an accuracy of 88.41 and 92.61 (improvements of 13.83% and 6.98%) on WESAD and CogLoad datasets, respectively. The best-performing configuration is achieved with the (L + dm) or (L + FFN) modality combinations, using a single layer, 3 attention heads, a model dimension of 18/30, and FFN dimension of 120/30, resulting in a compact model with only about 30k parameters.

Large Language models are revolutionizing the conversational recommender systems through their impressive capabilities in instruction comprehension, reasoning, and human interaction. A core factor underlying effective recommendation dialogue is the ability to infer and reason about users' mental states (such as desire, intention, and belief), a cognitive capacity commonly referred to as Theory of Mind. Despite growing interest in evaluating ToM in LLMs, current benchmarks predominantly rely on synthetic narratives inspired by Sally-Anne test, which emphasize physical perception and fail to capture the complexity of mental state inference in realistic conversational settings. Moreover, existing benchmarks often overlook a critical component of human ToM: behavioral prediction, the ability to use inferred mental states to guide strategic decision-making and select appropriate conversational actions for future interactions. To better align LLM-based ToM evaluation with human-like social reasoning, we propose RecToM, a novel benchmark for evaluating ToM abilities in recommendation dialogues. RecToM focuses on two complementary dimensions: Cognitive Inference and Behavioral Prediction. The former focus on understanding what has been communicated by inferring the underlying mental states. The latter emphasizes what should be done next, evaluating whether LLMs can leverage these inferred mental states to predict, select, and assess appropriate dialogue strategies. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that RecToM poses a significant challenge. While the models exhibit partial competence in recognizing mental states, they struggle to maintain coherent, strategic ToM reasoning throughout dynamic recommendation dialogues, particularly in tracking evolving intentions and aligning conversational strategies with inferred mental states.