Real-world knowledge can take various forms, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Among these, knowledge graphs are a form of structured human knowledge that integrate heterogeneous data sources into structured representations but typically reduce complex n-ary relations to simple triples, thereby losing higher-order relational details. In contrast, hypergraphs naturally represent n-ary relations with hyperedges, which directly connect multiple entities together. Yet hypergraph representation learning often overlooks entity roles in hyperedges, limiting the finegrained semantic modelling. To address these issues, knowledge hypergraphs and hyper-relational knowledge graphs combine the advantages of knowledge graphs and hypergraphs to better capture the complex structures and role-specific semantics of real world knowledge. This survey provides a comprehensive review of methods handling n-ary relational data, covering both knowledge hypergraphs and hyper-relational knowledge graphs literatures. We propose a two-dimensional taxonomy: the first dimension categorises models based on their methodology, i.e., translation-based models, tensor factorisation-based models, deep neural network-based models, logic rules-based models, and hyperedge expansion-based models. The second dimension classifies models according to their awareness of entity roles and positions in n-ary relations, dividing them into aware-less, position-aware, and role-aware approaches. Finally, we discuss existing datasets, training settings and strategies, and outline open challenges to inspire future research.

This white paper discusses and explores the various points of intersection between quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI). It describes how quantum computing could support the development of innovative AI solutions. It also examines use cases of classical AI that can empower research and development in quantum technologies, with a focus on quantum computing and quantum sensing. The purpose of this white paper is to provide a long-term research agenda aimed at addressing foundational questions about how AI and quantum computing interact and benefit one another. It concludes with a set of recommendations and challenges, including how to orchestrate the proposed theoretical work, align quantum AI developments with quantum hardware roadmaps, estimate both classical and quantum resources - especially with the goal of mitigating and optimizing energy consumption - advance this emerging hybrid software engineering discipline, and enhance European industrial competitiveness while considering societal implications.

Sound deductive reasoning -- the ability to derive new knowledge from existing facts and rules -- is an indisputably desirable aspect of general intelligence. Despite the major advances of AI systems in areas such as math and science, especially since the introduction of transformer architectures, it is well-documented that even the most advanced frontier systems regularly and consistently falter on easily-solvable deductive reasoning tasks. Hence, these systems are unfit to fulfill the dream of achieving artificial general intelligence capable of sound deductive reasoning. We argue that their unsound behavior is a consequence of the statistical learning approach powering their development. To overcome this, we contend that to achieve reliable deductive reasoning in learning-based AI systems, researchers must fundamentally shift from optimizing for statistical performance against distributions on reasoning problems and algorithmic tasks to embracing the more ambitious exact learning paradigm, which demands correctness on all inputs. We argue that exact learning is both essential and possible, and that this ambitious objective should guide algorithm design.

Living plants, while contributing to ecological balance and climate regulation, also function as natural sensors capable of transmitting information about their internal physiological states and surrounding conditions. This rich source of data provides potential for applications in environmental monitoring and precision agriculture. With integration into biohybrid systems, we establish novel channels of physiological signal flow between living plants and artificial devices. We equipped *Hedera helix* with a plant-wearable device called PhytoNode to continuously record the plant's electrophysiological activity. We deployed plants in an uncontrolled outdoor environment to map electrophysiological patterns to environmental conditions. Over five months, we collected data that we analyzed using state-of-the-art and automated machine learning (AutoML). Our classification models achieve high performance, reaching macro F1 scores of up to 95 percent in binary tasks. AutoML approaches outperformed manual tuning, and selecting subsets of statistical features further improved accuracy. Our biohybrid living system monitors the electrophysiology of plants in harsh, real-world conditions. This work advances scalable, self-sustaining, and plant-integrated living biohybrid systems for sustainable environmental monitoring.

We consider centralized distributed optimization in the classical federated learning setup, where $n$ workers jointly find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of an $L$-smooth, $d$-dimensional nonconvex function $f$, having access only to unbiased stochastic gradients with variance $σ^2$. Each worker requires at most $h$ seconds to compute a stochastic gradient, and the communication times from the server to the workers and from the workers to the server are $τ_{s}$ and $τ_{w}$ seconds per coordinate, respectively. One of the main motivations for distributed optimization is to achieve scalability with respect to $n$. For instance, it is well known that the distributed version of SGD has a variance-dependent runtime term $\frac{h σ^2 L Δ}{n \varepsilon^2},$ which improves with the number of workers $n,$ where $Δ= f(x^0) - f^*,$ and $x^0 \in R^d$ is the starting point. Similarly, using unbiased sparsification compressors, it is possible to reduce both the variance-dependent runtime term and the communication runtime term. However, once we account for the communication from the server to the workers $τ_{s}$, we prove that it becomes infeasible to design a method using unbiased random sparsification compressors that scales both the server-side communication runtime term $τ_{s} d \frac{L Δ}{\varepsilon}$ and the variance-dependent runtime term $\frac{h σ^2 L Δ}{\varepsilon^2},$ better than poly-logarithmically in $n$, even in the homogeneous (i.i.d.) case, where all workers access the same distribution. To establish this result, we construct a new "worst-case" function and develop a new lower bound framework that reduces the analysis to the concentration of a random sum, for which we prove a concentration bound. These results reveal fundamental limitations in scaling distributed optimization, even under the homogeneous assumption.

Table foundation models bring high hopes to data science: pre-trained on tabular data to embark knowledge or priors, they should facilitate downstream tasks on tables. One specific challenge is that of data semantics: numerical entries take their meaning from context, e.g., column name. Pre-trained neural networks that jointly model column names and table entries have recently boosted prediction accuracy. While these models outline the promises of world knowledge to interpret table values, they lack the convenience of popular foundation models in text or vision. Indeed, they must be fine-tuned to bring benefits, come with sizeable computation costs, and cannot easily be reused or combined with other architectures. Here we introduce TARTE, a foundation model that transforms tables to knowledge-enhanced vector representations using the string to capture semantics. Pre-trained on large relational data, TARTE yields representations that facilitate subsequent learning with little additional cost. These representations can be fine-tuned or combined with other learners, giving models that push the state-of-the-art prediction performance and improve the prediction/computation performance trade-off. Specialized to a task or a domain, TARTE gives domain-specific representations that facilitate further learning. Our study demonstrates an effective approach to knowledge pre-training for tabular learning.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and mastering increasingly complex problems with astonishing performance, the safety assurance of such systems is a major concern. Particularly in the context of safety-critical, real-world cyber-physical systems, AI promises to achieve a new level of autonomy but is hampered by a lack of safety assurance. While data-driven control takes up recent developments in AI to improve control systems, control theory in general could be leveraged to improve AI safety. Therefore, this article outlines a new perspective on AI safety based on an interdisciplinary interpretation of the underlying data-generation process and the respective abstraction by AI systems in a system theory-inspired and system analysis-driven manner. In this context, the new perspective, also referred to as data control, aims to stimulate AI engineering to take advantage of existing safety analysis and assurance in an interdisciplinary way to drive the paradigm of data control. Following a top-down approach, a generic foundation for safety analysis and assurance is outlined at an abstract level that can be refined for specific AI systems and applications and is prepared for future innovation.

Lecture slide element detection and retrieval are key problems in slide understanding. Training effective models for these tasks often depends on extensive manual annotation. However, annotating large volumes of lecture slides for supervised training is labor intensive and requires domain expertise. To address this, we propose a large language model (LLM)-guided synthetic lecture slide generation pipeline, SynLec-SlideGen, which produces high-quality, coherent and realistic slides. We also create an evaluation benchmark, namely RealSlide by manually annotating 1,050 real lecture slides. To assess the utility of our synthetic slides, we perform few-shot transfer learning on real data using models pre-trained on them. Experimental results show that few-shot transfer learning with pretraining on synthetic slides significantly improves performance compared to training only on real data. This demonstrates that synthetic data can effectively compensate for limited labeled lecture slides. The code and resources of our work are publicly available on our project website: https://synslidegen.github.io/.

Federated learning with secure aggregation enables private and collaborative learning from decentralised data without leaking sensitive client information. However, secure aggregation also complicates the detection of malicious client behaviour and the evaluation of individual client contributions to the learning. To address these challenges, QI (Pejo et al.) and FedGT (Xhemrishi et al.) were proposed for contribution evaluation (CE) and misbehaviour detection (MD), respectively. QI, however, lacks adequate MD accuracy due to its reliance on the random selection of clients in each training round, while FedGT lacks the CE ability. In this work, we combine the strengths of QI and FedGT to achieve both robust MD and accurate CE. Our experiments demonstrate superior performance compared to using either method independently.

Training on test-time data enables deep learning models to adapt to dynamic environmental changes, enhancing their practical applicability. Online adaptation from source to target domains is promising but it remains highly reliant on the performance of source pretrained model. In this paper, we investigate whether test-time adaptation (TTA) methods can continuously improve models trained via self-supervised learning (SSL) without relying on source pretraining. We introduce a self-supervised TTA protocol after observing that existing TTA approaches struggle when directly applied to self-supervised models with low accuracy on the source domain. Furthermore, we propose a collaborative learning framework that integrates SSL and TTA models, leveraging contrastive learning and knowledge distillation for stepwise representation refinement. We validate our method on diverse self-supervised models, including DINO, MoCo, and iBOT, across TTA benchmarks. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in SSL, showing that it achieves competitive performance even without source pretraining.