The extensive use of pesticides and synthetic dyes poses critical threats to food safety, human health, and environmental sustainability, necessitating rapid and reliable detection methods. Raman spectroscopy offers molecularly specific fingerprints but suffers from spectral noise, fluorescence background, and band overlap, limiting its real-world applicability. Here, we propose a deep learning framework based on ResNet-18 feature extraction, combined with advanced classifiers, including XGBoost, SVM, and their hybrid integration, to detect pesticides and dyes from Raman spectroscopy, called MLRaman. The MLRaman with the CNN-XGBoost model achieved a predictive accuracy of 97.4% and a perfect AUC of 1.0, while it with the CNN-SVM model provided competitive results with robust class-wise discrimination. Dimensionality reduction analyses (PCA, t-SNE, UMAP) confirmed the separability of Raman embeddings across 10 analytes, including 7 pesticides and 3 dyes. Finally, we developed a user-friendly Streamlit application for real-time prediction, which successfully identified unseen Raman spectra from our independent experiments and also literature sources, underscoring strong generalization capacity. This study establishes a scalable, practical MLRaman model for multi-residue contaminant monitoring, with significant potential for deployment in food safety and environmental surveillance.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the mainstream paradigm for graph representation learning due to their effective message aggregation. However, this advantage also amplifies biases inherent in graph topology, raising fairness concerns. Existing fairness-aware GNNs provide satisfactory performance on fairness metrics such as Statistical Parity and Equal Opportunity while maintaining acceptable accuracy trade-offs. Unfortunately, we observe that this pursuit of fairness metrics neglects the GNN's ability to predict negative labels, which renders their predictions with extremely high False Positive Rates (FPR), resulting in negative effects in high-risk scenarios. To this end, we advocate that classification performance should be carefully calibrated while improving fairness, rather than simply constraining accuracy loss. Furthermore, we propose Fair GNN via Structural Entropy (\textbf{FairGSE}), a novel framework that maximizes two-dimensional structural entropy (2D-SE) to improve fairness without neglecting false positives. Experiments on several real-world datasets show FairGSE reduces FPR by 39\% vs. state-of-the-art fairness-aware GNNs, with comparable fairness improvement.

Electroencephalography (EEG) offers detailed access to neural dynamics but remains constrained by noise and trial-by-trial variability, limiting decoding performance in data-restricted or complex paradigms. Data augmentation is often employed to enhance feature representations, yet conventional uniform averaging overlooks differences in trial informativeness and can degrade representational quality. We introduce a weighted bootstrapping approach that prioritizes more reliable trials to generate higher-quality augmented samples. In a Sentence Evaluation paradigm, weights were computed from relative ERP differences and applied during probabilistic sampling and averaging. Across conditions, weighted bootstrapping improved decoding accuracy relative to unweighted (from 68.35% to 71.25% at best), demonstrating that emphasizing reliable trials strengthens representational quality. The results demonstrate that reliability-based augmentation yields more robust and discriminative EEG representations. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lyricists/NeuroBootstrap.

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.

Understanding 3D scene-level affordances from natural language instructions is essential for enabling embodied agents to interact meaningfully in complex environments. However, this task remains challenging due to the need for semantic reasoning and spatial grounding. Existing methods mainly focus on object-level affordances or merely lift 2D predictions to 3D, neglecting rich geometric structure information in point clouds and incurring high computational costs. To address these limitations, we introduce Task-Aware 3D Scene-level Affordance segmentation (T ASA), a novel geometry-optimized framework that jointly leverages 2D semantic cues and 3D geometric reasoning in a coarse-to-fine manner. To improve the affordance detection efficiency, T ASA features a task-aware 2D affordance detection module to identify manipulable points from language and visual inputs, guiding the selection of task-relevant views. To fully exploit 3D geometric information, a 3D affordance refinement module is proposed to integrate 2D semantic priors with local 3D geometry, resulting in accurate and spatially coherent 3D affor-dance masks. Experiments on SceneFun3D demonstrate that T ASA significantly outperforms the baselines in both accuracy and efficiency in scene-level affordance segmentation.

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.