Expert Systems
Targeted Test Selection Approach in Continuous Integration
Plyusnin, Pavel, Antonov, Aleksey, Ermakov, Vasilii, Khaybriev, Aleksandr, Kikot, Margarita, Alimova, Ilseyar, Moiseev, Stanislav
Abstract--In modern software development change-based testing plays a crucial role. However, as codebases expand and test suites grow, efficiently managing the testing process becomes increasingly challenging, especially given the high frequency of daily code commits. We propose T argeted T est Selection (T -TS), a machine learning approach for industrial test selection. Our key innovation is a data representation that represent commits as Bags-of-Words of changed files, incorporates cross-file and additional predictive features, and notably avoids the use of coverage maps. Deployed in production, T -TS was comprehensively evaluated against industry standards and recent methods using both internal and public datasets, measuring time efficiency and fault detection. On live industrial data, T -TS selects only 15% of tests, reduces execution time by 5.9, accelerates the pipeline by 5.6, and detects over 95% of test failures. The implementation is publicly available to support further research and practical adoption. Continuous integration (CI) is a common and widely used software engineering development practice. Each CI cycle involves software testing that aims to detect potential bugs in the changed code before deploying it to production. One of the key tasks performed in CI testing is regression testing, where new code changes are tested within each CI cycle. In order to prevent bugs occurring after critical stage in CI cycle (e.g. As long as a project is being developed and handled, the amount of test cases increases proportionally. This necessity leads to huge computational resources consumption and regression testing becomes time-consuming. Hence, feedback for authors of changes is available long after tests execution had been run and further development is thus collapsed until all executed tests outcomes are known.
XAgents: A Unified Framework for Multi-Agent Cooperation via IF-THEN Rules and Multipolar Task Processing Graph
Yang, Hailong, Gu, Mingxian, Wang, Jianqi, Wang, Guanjin, Deng, Zhaohong
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in supporting humans with complex, real-world tasks. However, MAS still face challenges in effective task planning when handling highly complex tasks with uncertainty, often resulting in misleading or incorrect outputs that hinder task execution. To address this, we propose XAgents, a unified multi-agent cooperative framework built on a multipolar task processing graph and IF-THEN rules. XAgents uses the multipolar task processing graph to enable dynamic task planning and handle task uncertainty. During subtask processing, it integrates domain-specific IF-THEN rules to constrain agent behaviors, while global rules enhance inter-agent collaboration. We evaluate the performance of XAgents across three distinct datasets, demonstrating that it consistently surpasses state-of-the-art single-agent and multi-agent approaches in both knowledge-typed and logic-typed question-answering tasks. The codes for XAgents are available at: https://github.com/AGI-FHBC/XAgents.
A Knowledge Noise Mitigation Framework for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Liu, Zhiyue, Liu, Sihang, Liu, Jinyuan, Zhang, Xinru
Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires a model to understand images and utilize external knowledge to provide accurate answers. Existing approaches often directly augment models with retrieved information from knowledge sources while ignoring substantial knowledge redundancy, which introduces noise into the answering process. To address this, we propose a training-free framework with knowledge focusing for KB-VQA, that mitigates the impact of noise by enhancing knowledge relevance and reducing redundancy. First, for knowledge retrieval, our framework concludes essential parts from the image-question pairs, creating low-noise queries that enhance the retrieval of highly relevant knowledge. Considering that redundancy still persists in the retrieved knowledge, we then prompt large models to identify and extract answer-beneficial segments from knowledge. In addition, we introduce a selective knowledge integration strategy, allowing the model to incorporate knowledge only when it lacks confidence in answering the question, thereby mitigating the influence of redundant information. Our framework enables the acquisition of accurate and critical knowledge, and extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
PromptGuard: An Orchestrated Prompting Framework for Principled Synthetic Text Generation for Vulnerable Populations using LLMs with Enhanced Safety, Fairness, and Controllability
Vu, Tung, Nguyen, Lam, Dao, Quynh
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications poses unprecedented risks of generating harmful, biased, or misleading information to vulnerable populations including LGBTQ+ individuals, single parents, and marginalized communities. While existing safety approaches rely on post-hoc filtering or generic alignment techniques, they fail to proactively prevent harmful outputs at the generation source. This paper introduces PromptGuard, a novel modular prompting framework with our breakthrough contribution: VulnGuard Prompt, a hybrid technique that prevents harmful information generation using real-world data-driven contrastive learning. VulnGuard integrates few-shot examples from curated GitHub repositories, ethical chain-of-thought reasoning, and adaptive role-prompting to create population-specific protective barriers. Our framework employs theoretical multi-objective optimization with formal proofs demonstrating 25-30% analytical harm reduction through entropy bounds and Pareto optimality. PromptGuard orchestrates six core modules: Input Classification, VulnGuard Prompting, Ethical Principles Integration, External Tool Interaction, Output Validation, and User-System Interaction, creating an intelligent expert system for real-time harm prevention. We provide comprehensive mathematical formalization including convergence proofs, vulnerability analysis using information theory, and theoretical validation framework using GitHub-sourced datasets, establishing mathematical foundations for systematic empirical research.
Unsupervised Multi-Attention Meta Transformer for Rotating Machinery Fault Diagnosis
Wang, Hanyang, Yang, Yuxuan, Wang, Hongjun, Wang, Lihui
The intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating mechanical equipment usually requires a large amount of labeled sample data. However, in practical industrial applications, acquiring enough data is both challenging and expensive in terms of time and cost. Moreover, different types of rotating mechanical equipment with different unique mechanical properties, require separate training of diagnostic models for each case. To address the challenges of limited fault samples and the lack of generalizability in prediction models for practical engineering applications, we propose a Multi-Attention Meta Transformer method for few-shot unsupervised rotating machinery fault diagnosis (MMT-FD). This framework extracts potential fault representations from unlabeled data and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, making it suitable for diagnosing faults across various types of mechanical equipment. The MMT-FD framework integrates a time-frequency domain encoder and a meta-learning generalization model. The time-frequency domain encoder predicts status representations generated through random augmentations in the time-frequency domain. These enhanced data are then fed into a meta-learning network for classification and generalization training, followed by fine-tuning using a limited amount of labeled data. The model is iteratively optimized using a small number of contrastive learning iterations, resulting in high efficiency. To validate the framework, we conducted experiments on a bearing fault dataset and rotor test bench data. The results demonstrate that the MMT-FD model achieves 99\% fault diagnosis accuracy with only 1\% of labeled sample data, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities.
Neuro-Symbolic Frameworks: Conceptual Characterization and Empirical Comparative Analysis
Sinha, Sania, Premsri, Tanawan, Kamali, Danial, Kordjamshidi, Parisa
Neurosymbolic (NeSy) frameworks combine neural representations and learning with symbolic representations and reasoning. Combining the reasoning capacities, explainability, and interpretability of symbolic processing with the flexibility and power of neural computing allows us to solve complex problems with more reliability while being data-efficient. However, this recently growing topic poses a challenge to developers with its learning curve, lack of user-friendly tools, libraries, and unifying frameworks. In this paper, we characterize the technical facets of existing NeSy frameworks, such as the symbolic representation language, integration with neural models, and the underlying algorithms. A majority of the NeSy research focuses on algorithms instead of providing generic frameworks for declarative problem specification to leverage problem solving. To highlight the key aspects of Neurosymbolic modeling, we showcase three generic NeSy frameworks - \textit{DeepProbLog}, \textit{Scallop}, and \textit{DomiKnowS}. We identify the challenges within each facet that lay the foundation for identifying the expressivity of each framework in solving a variety of problems. Building on this foundation, we aim to spark transformative action and encourage the community to rethink this problem in novel ways.
Benchmarking Vision Transformers and CNNs for Thermal Photovoltaic Fault Detection with Explainable AI Validation
Artificial intelligence deployment for automated photovoltaic (PV) monitoring faces interpretability barriers that limit adoption in energy infrastructure applications. While deep learning achieves high accuracy in thermal fault detection, validation that model decisions align with thermal physics principles remains lacking, creating deployment hesitancy where understanding model reasoning is critical. This study provides a systematic comparison of convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0) and vision transformers (ViT-Tiny, Swin-Tiny) for thermal PV fault detection, using XRAI saliency analysis to assess alignment with thermal physics principles. This represents the first systematic comparison of CNNs and vision transformers for thermal PV fault detection with physics-validated interpretability. Evaluation on 20,000 infrared images spanning normal operation and 11 fault categories shows that Swin Transformer achieves the highest performance (94% binary accuracy; 73% multiclass accuracy) compared to CNN approaches. XRAI analysis reveals that models learn physically meaningful features, such as localized hotspots for cell defects, linear thermal paths for diode failures, and thermal boundaries for vegetation shading, consistent with expected thermal signatures. However, performance varies significantly across fault types: electrical faults achieve strong detection (F1-scores >0.90) while environmental factors like soiling remain challenging (F1-scores 0.20-0.33), indicating limitations imposed by thermal imaging resolution. The thermal physics-guided interpretability approach provides methodology for validating AI decision-making in energy monitoring applications, addressing deployment barriers in renewable energy infrastructure.
Neuro-Symbolic AI for Cybersecurity: State of the Art, Challenges, and Opportunities
Hakim, Safayat Bin, Adil, Muhammad, Velasquez, Alvaro, Xu, Shouhuai, Song, Houbing Herbert
Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches in cybersecurity exhibit fundamental limitations: inadequate conceptual grounding leading to non-robustness against novel attacks; limited instructibility impeding analyst-guided adaptation; and misalignment with cybersecurity objectives. Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI has emerged with the potential to revolutionize cybersecurity AI. However, there is no systematic understanding of this emerging approach. These hybrid systems address critical cybersecurity challenges by combining neural pattern recognition with symbolic reasoning, enabling enhanced threat understanding while introducing concerning autonomous offensive capabilities that reshape threat landscapes. In this survey, we systematically characterize this field by analyzing 127 publications spanning 2019-July 2025. We introduce a Grounding-Instructibility-Alignment (G-I-A) framework to evaluate these systems, focusing on both cyber defense and cyber offense across network security, malware analysis, and cyber operations. Our analysis shows advantages of multi-agent NeSy architectures and identifies critical implementation challenges including standardization gaps, computational complexity, and human-AI collaboration requirements that constrain deployment. We show that causal reasoning integration is the most transformative advancement, enabling proactive defense beyond correlation-based approaches. Our findings highlight dual-use implications where autonomous systems demonstrate substantial capabilities in zero-day exploitation while achieving significant cost reductions, altering threat dynamics. We provide insights and future research directions, emphasizing the urgent need for community-driven standardization frameworks and responsible development practices that ensure advancement serves defensive cybersecurity objectives while maintaining societal alignment.
Domain-Aware RAG: MoL-Enhanced RL for Efficient Training and Scalable Retrieval
Lin, Hao, Xie, Peitong, Chen, Jingxue, Lin, Jie, Tang, Qingkun, Lu, Qianchun
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely heavily on the retrieval stage, particularly the coarse-ranking process. Existing coarse-ranking optimization approaches often struggle to balance domain-specific knowledge learning with query enhencement, resulting in suboptimal retrieval performance. To address this challenge, we propose MoLER, a domain-aware RAG method that uses MoL-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning to optimize retrieval. MoLER has a two-stage pipeline: a continual pre-training (CPT) phase using a Mixture of Losses (MoL) to balance domain-specific knowledge with general language capabilities, and a reinforcement learning (RL) phase leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize query and passage generation for maximizing document recall. A key innovation is our Multi-query Single-passage Late Fusion (MSLF) strategy, which reduces computational overhead during RL training while maintaining scalable inference via Multi-query Multi-passage Late Fusion (MMLF). Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that MoLER achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming baseline methods. MoLER bridges the knowledge gap in RAG systems, enabling robust and scalable retrieval in specialized domains.
Lattice Annotated Temporal (LAT) Logic for Non-Markovian Reasoning
Mukherji, Kaustuv, Patil, Jaikrishna Manojkumar, Aditya, Dyuman, Shakarian, Paulo, Parkar, Devendra, Pokala, Lahari, Dorman, Clark, Simari, Gerardo I.
We introduce Lattice Annotated Temporal (LAT) Logic, an extension of Generalized Annotated Logic Programs (GAPs) that incorporates temporal reasoning and supports open-world semantics through the use of a lower lattice structure. This logic combines an efficient deduction process with temporal logic programming to support non-Markovian relationships and open-world reasoning capabilities. The open-world aspect, a by-product of the use of the lower-lattice annotation structure, allows for efficient grounding through a Skolemization process, even in domains with infinite or highly diverse constants. We provide a suite of theoretical results that bound the computational complexity of the grounding process, in addition to showing that many of the results on GAPs (using an upper lattice) still hold with the lower lattice and temporal extensions (though different proof techniques are required). Our open-source implementation, PyReason, features modular design, machine-level optimizations, and direct integration with reinforcement learning environments. Empirical evaluations across multi-agent simulations and knowledge graph tasks demonstrate up to three orders of magnitude speedup and up to five orders of magnitude memory reduction while maintaining or improving task performance. Additionally, we evaluate LAT Logic's value in reinforcement learning environments as a non-Markovian simulator, achieving up to three orders of magnitude faster simulation with improved agent performance, including a 26% increase in win rate due to capturing richer temporal dependencies. These results highlight LAT Logic's potential as a unified, extensible framework for open-world temporal reasoning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Our implementation is available at: pyreason.syracuse.edu.