Expert Systems
Knowledge-based Visual Question Answer with Multimodal Processing, Retrieval and Filtering
Hong, Yuyang, Gu, Jiaqi, Yang, Qi, Fan, Lubin, Wu, Yue, Wang, Ying, Ding, Kun, Xiang, Shiming, Ye, Jieping
Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires visual language models (VLMs) to integrate visual understanding with external knowledge retrieval. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) achieves significant advances in this task by combining knowledge-base querying, it still struggles with the quality of multimodal queries and the relevance of retrieved results. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage method, termed Wiki-PRF, including Processing, Retrieval and Filtering stages. The processing stage dynamically invokes visual tools to extract precise multimodal information for retrieval. The retrieval stage integrates visual and text features to achieve multimodal knowledge retrieval. The filtering stage performs relevance filtering and concentration on retrieval results. To this end, we introduce a visual language model trained with answer accuracy and format consistency as reward signals via a reinforcement learning manner. This enhances the model's reasoning, tool invocation for accurate queries, and filtering of irrelevant content. Experiments on benchmark datasets (E-VQA and InfoSeek) show significant improvements~(36.0 and 42.8) in answer quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/cqu-student/Wiki-PRF
From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Wei, Jiaqi, Yang, Yuejin, Zhang, Xiang, Chen, Yuhan, Zhuang, Xiang, Gao, Zhangyang, Zhou, Dongzhan, Wang, Guangshuai, Gao, Zhiqiang, Cao, Juntai, Qiu, Zijie, Hu, Ming, Ma, Chenglong, Tang, Shixiang, He, Junjun, Song, Chunfeng, He, Xuming, Zhang, Qiang, You, Chenyu, Zheng, Shuangjia, Ding, Ning, Ouyang, Wanli, Dong, Nanqing, Cheng, Yu, Sun, Siqi, Bai, Lei, Zhou, Bowen
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.
ATA: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Implement Autonomous and Trustworthy Agents
Peer, David, Stabinger, Sebastian
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, yet their deployment in high-stakes domains is hindered by inherent limitations in trustworthiness, including hallucinations, instability, and a lack of transparency. To address these challenges, we introduce a generic neuro-symbolic approach, which we call Autonomous Trustworthy Agents (ATA). The core of our approach lies in decoupling tasks into two distinct phases: Offline knowledge ingestion and online task processing. During knowledge ingestion, an LLM translates an informal problem specification into a formal, symbolic knowledge base. This formal representation is crucial as it can be verified and refined by human experts, ensuring its correctness and alignment with domain requirements. In the subsequent task processing phase, each incoming input is encoded into the same formal language. A symbolic decision engine then utilizes this encoded input in conjunction with the formal knowledge base to derive a reliable result. Through an extensive evaluation on a complex reasoning task, we demonstrate that a concrete implementation of ATA is competitive with state-of-the-art end-to-end reasoning models in a fully automated setup while maintaining trustworthiness. Crucially, with a human-verified and corrected knowledge base, our approach significantly outperforms even larger models, while exhibiting perfect determinism, enhanced stability against input perturbations, and inherent immunity to prompt injection attacks. By generating decisions grounded in symbolic reasoning, ATA offers a practical and controllable architecture for building the next generation of transparent, auditable, and reliable autonomous agents.
Global-focal Adaptation with Information Separation for Noise-robust Transfer Fault Diagnosis
Ren, Junyu, Gan, Wensheng, Zhang, Guangyu, Zhong, Wei, Yu, Philip S.
Rotating machinery [1] is critical in industrial applications, where system reliability is essential to avoid financial losses and safety risks. Therefore, timely fault diagnosis is a crucial engineering priority. Deep learning-based fault diagnosis has achieved remarkable success due to its ability to extract features and model complex nonlinear relationships [2, 3]. However, industrial rotating machines operate under diverse conditions, leading to domain shifts that degrade the diagnostic performance of conventional deep learning methods [4]. Among the powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, transfer learning [5] can address these limitations through cross-task knowledge transfer, where domain adaptation has become a widely adopted technique in fault diagnosis, primarily encompassing metric-based approaches, adversarial frameworks, and their hybrid variants [4, 6]. Currently, cross-domain fault diagnosis methods have been extended to encompass a wider range of diverse and practical application scenarios [7]. Given that source domain data are often more abundant in real-world settings, several studies have proposed multi-source transfer fault diagnosis approaches [8, 9]. For closed-set scenarios, various domain adaptation methods have been developed [10]. Since the label categories between source and target domains may not be completely identical, open-set domain adaptation and partial domain adaptation methods have been developed for fault diagnosis [11].
Hypergraph Contrastive Sensor Fusion for Multimodal Fault Diagnosis in Induction Motors
Ali, Usman, Zia, Ali, Ali, Waqas, Ramzan, Umer, Rehman, Abdul, Chaudhry, Muhammad Tayyab, Xiang, Wei
Abstract--Reliable induction motor (IM) fault diagnosis is vital for industrial safety and operational continuity, mitigating costly unplanned downtime. Conventional approaches often struggle to capture complex multimodal signal relationships, are constrained to unimodal data or single fault types, and exhibit performance degradation under noisy or cross-domain conditions. This paper proposes the Multimodal Hypergraph Contrastive Attention Network (MM-HCAN), a unified framework for robust fault diagnosis. T o the best of our knowledge, MM-HCAN is the first to integrate contrastive learning within a hypergraph topology specifically designed for multimodal sensor fusion, enabling the joint modelling of intra-and inter-modal dependencies and enhancing generalisation beyond Euclidean embedding spaces. Evaluated on three real-world benchmarks, MM-HCAN achieves up to 99.82% accuracy with strong cross-domain generalisation and resilience to noise, demonstrating its suitability for real-world deployment. MM-HCAN provides a scalable and robust solution for comprehensive multi-fault diagnosis, supporting predictive maintenance and extended asset longevity in industrial environments. NDUCTION motors (IMs) are essential to modern industrial systems, supporting sectors like manufacturing, energy, and transportation. However, faults in IMs can cause downtime, high maintenance costs, and substantial economic losses. As a result, fault diagnosis in IMs has become a focal point of research, with recent studies highlighting its importance in enhancing operational resilience and minimising financial impacts. IMs faults are broadly classified as either electrical, with stator faults comprising 28-36%, or mechanical, encompassing bearing (42-55%) and rotor (8-10%) failures [1].
Explanatory Summarization with Discourse-Driven Planning
Liu, Dongqi, Yu, Xi, Demberg, Vera, Lapata, Mirella
Lay summaries for scientific documents typically include explanations to help readers grasp sophisticated concepts or arguments. However, current automatic summarization methods do not explicitly model explanations, which makes it difficult to align the proportion of explanatory content with human-written summaries. In this paper, we present a plan-based approach that leverages discourse frameworks to organize summary generation and guide explanatory sentences by prompting responses to the plan. Specifically, we propose two discourse-driven planning strategies, where the plan is conditioned as part of the input or part of the output prefix, respectively. Empirical experiments on three lay summarization datasets show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of summary quality, and it enhances model robustness, controllability, and mitigates hallucination.
A Design Framework for operationalizing Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Requirements, Tradeoffs and Challenges for its Clinical Adoption
Moreno-Sรกnchez, Pedro A., Del Ser, Javier, van Gils, Mark, Hernesniemi, Jussi
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise for transforming healthcare, particularly in disease diagnosis, prognosis, and patient care. The increasing availability of digital medical data, such as images, omics, biosignals, and electronic health records, combined with advances in computing, has enabled AI models to approach expert-level performance. However, widespread clinical adoption remains limited, primarily due to challenges beyond technical performance, including ethical concerns, regulatory barriers, and lack of trust. To address these issues, AI systems must align with the principles of Trustworthy AI (TAI), which emphasize human agency and oversight, algorithmic robustness, privacy and data governance, transparency, bias and discrimination avoidance, and accountability. Yet, the complexity of healthcare processes (e.g., screening, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment) and the diversity of stakeholders (clinicians, patients, providers, regulators) complicate the integration of TAI principles. To bridge the gap between TAI theory and practical implementation, this paper proposes a design framework to support developers in embedding TAI principles into medical AI systems. Thus, for each stakeholder identified across various healthcare processes, we propose a disease-agnostic collection of requirements that medical AI systems should incorporate to adhere to the principles of TAI. Additionally, we examine the challenges and tradeoffs that may arise when applying these principles in practice. To ground the discussion, we focus on cardiovascular diseases, a field marked by both high prevalence and active AI innovation, and demonstrate how TAI principles have been applied and where key obstacles persist.
Towards Neurocognitive-Inspired Intelligence: From AI's Structural Mimicry to Human-Like Functional Cognition
Golilarz, Noorbakhsh Amiri, Khatib, Hassan S. Al, Rahimi, Shahram
Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly through deep learning, reinforcement learning, and large language and vision models. However, these systems often remain task specific, struggle to adapt to changing conditions, and cannot generalize in ways similar to human cognition. Additionally, they mainly focus on mimicking brain structures, which often leads to black-box models with limited transparency and adaptability. Inspired by the structure and function of biological cognition, this paper introduces the concept of "Neurocognitive-Inspired Intelligence (NII)," a hybrid approach that combines neuroscience, cognitive science, computer vision, and AI to develop more general, adaptive, and robust intelligent systems capable of rapid learning, learning from less data, and leveraging prior experience. These systems aim to emulate the human brain's ability to flexibly learn, reason, remember, perceive, and act in real-world settings with minimal supervision. We review the limitations of current AI methods, define core principles of neurocognitive-inspired intelligence, and propose a modular, biologically inspired architecture that emphasizes integration, embodiment, and adaptability. We also discuss potential implementation strategies and outline various real-world applications, from robotics to education and healthcare. Importantly, this paper offers a hybrid roadmap for future research, laying the groundwork for building AI systems that more closely resemble human cognition.
A Cooperative Approach for Knowledge-based Business Process Design in a Public Authority
Azarijafari, Mohammad, Mich, Luisa, Missikoff, Michele, Missikoff, Oleg
Enterprises are currently undergoing profound transformations due to the unpostponable digital transformation. Then, to remain competitive, enterprises must adapt digital solutions, transforming their organisational structures and operations. This organisational shift is also important for small and medium-sized enterprises. A key innovation frontier is the adoption of process-oriented production models. This paper presents a knowledge-based method to support business experts in designing business processes. The method requires no prior expertise in Knowledge Engineering and guides designers through a structured sequence of steps to produce a diagrammatic workflow of the target process. The construction of the knowledge base starts from simple, text-based, knowledge artefacts and then progresses towards more structured, formal representations. The approach has been conceived to allow a shared approach for all stakeholders and actors who participate in the BP design.
Information Extraction from Conversation Transcripts: Neuro-Symbolic vs. LLM
Kwak, Alice Saebom, Alexeeva, Maria, Hahn-Powell, Gus, Alcock, Keith, McLaughlin, Kevin, McCorkle, Doug, McNunn, Gabe, Surdeanu, Mihai
The current trend in information extraction (IE) is to rely extensively on large language models, effectively discarding decades of experience in building symbolic or statistical IE systems. This paper compares a neuro-symbolic (NS) and an LLM-based IE system in the agricultural domain, evaluating them on nine interviews across pork, dairy, and crop subdomains. The LLM-based system outperforms the NS one (F1 total: 69.4 vs. 52.7; core: 63.0 vs. 47.2), where total includes all extracted information and core focuses on essential details. However, each system has trade-offs: the NS approach offers faster runtime, greater control, and high accuracy in context-free tasks but lacks generalizability, struggles with contextual nuances, and requires significant resources to develop and maintain. The LLM-based system achieves higher performance, faster deployment, and easier maintenance but has slower runtime, limited control, model dependency and hallucination risks. Our findings highlight the "hidden cost" of deploying NLP systems in real-world applications, emphasizing the need to balance performance, efficiency, and control.