The automation of the medical evidence acquisition and diagnosis process has recently attracted increasing attention in order to reduce the workload of doctors and democratize access to medical care. However, most works proposed in the machine learning literature focus solely on improving the prediction accuracy of a patient's pathology. We argue that this objective is insufficient to ensure doctors' acceptability of such systems. In their initial interaction with patients, doctors do not only focus on identifying the pathology a patient is suffering from; they instead generate a differential diagnosis (in the form of a short list of plausible diseases) because the medical evidence collected from patients is often insufficient to establish a final diagnosis. Moreover, doctors explicitly explore severe pathologies before potentially ruling them out from the differential, especially in acute care settings. Finally, for doctors to trust a system's recommendations, they need to understand how the gathered evidences led to the predicted diseases.

We consider imitation learning problems where the learner's ability to mimic the expert increases throughout the course of an episode as more information is revealed. One example of this is when the expert has access to privileged information: while the learner might not be able to accurately reproduce expert behavior early on in an episode, by considering the entire history of states and actions, they might be able to eventually identify the hidden context and act as the expert would. We prove that on-policy imitation learning algorithms (with or without access to a queryable expert) are better equipped to handle these sorts of asymptotically realizable problems than off-policy methods. This is because on-policy algorithms provably learn to recover from their initially suboptimal actions, while off-policy methods treat their suboptimal past actions as though they came from the expert.

With the recent surge in personalized learning, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that can accurately track students' individual knowledge states and provide tailored learning paths based on this information are in demand as an essential task. This paper focuses on the core technology of Knowledge Tracing (KT) models that analyze students' sequences of interactions to predict their knowledge acquisition levels. However, existing KT models suffer from limitations such as restricted input data formats, cold start problems arising with new student enrollment or new question addition, and insufficient stability in real-world service environments. To overcome these limitations, a Practical Interlinked Concept Knowledge Tracing (PICKT) model that can effectively process multiple types of input data is proposed. Specifically, a knowledge map structures the relationships among concepts considering the question and concept text information, thereby enabling effective knowledge tracing even in cold start situations. Experiments reflecting real operational environments demonstrated the model's excellent performance and practicality. The main contributions of this research are as follows. First, a model architecture that effectively utilizes diverse data formats is presented. Second, significant performance improvements are achieved over existing models for two core cold start challenges: new student enrollment and new question addition. Third, the model's stability and practicality are validated through delicate experimental design, enhancing its applicability in real-world product environments. This provides a crucial theoretical and technical foundation for the practical implementation of next-generation ITS.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training LLMs on such data mixtures, knowledge acquisition from knowledge-dense datasets, unlike training exclusively on knowledge-dense data (arXiv:2404.05405), does not always follow a smooth scaling law but can exhibit phase transitions with respect to the mixing ratio and model size. Through controlled experiments on a synthetic biography dataset mixed with web-scraped data, we demonstrate that: (1) as we increase the model size to a critical value, the model suddenly transitions from memorizing very few to most of the biographies; (2) below a critical mixing ratio, the model memorizes almost nothing even with extensive training, but beyond this threshold, it rapidly memorizes more biographies. We attribute these phase transitions to a capacity allocation phenomenon: a model with bounded capacity must act like a knapsack problem solver to minimize the overall test loss, and the optimal allocation across datasets can change discontinuously as the model size or mixing ratio varies. We formalize this intuition in an information-theoretic framework and reveal that these phase transitions are predictable, with the critical mixing ratio following a power-law relationship with the model size. Our findings highlight a concrete case where a good mixing recipe for large models may not be optimal for small models, and vice versa.

Knowledge-based conversational question answering (KBCQA) confronts persistent challenges in resolving coreference, modeling contextual dependencies, and executing complex logical reasoning. Existing approaches, whether end-to-end semantic parsing or stepwise agent-based reasoning--often suffer from structural inaccuracies and prohibitive computational costs, particularly when processing intricate queries over large knowledge graphs. To address these limitations, we introduce SEAL, a novel two-stage semantic parsing framework grounded in self-evolving agentic learning. This core is then refined by an agentic calibration module, which corrects syntactic inconsistencies and aligns entities and relations precisely with the underlying knowledge graph. This decomposition not only simplifies logical form generation but also significantly enhances structural fidelity and linking efficiency. Crucially, SEAL incorporates a self-evolving mechanism that integrates local and global memory with a reflection module, enabling continuous adaptation from dialog history and execution feedback without explicit retraining. Extensive experiments on the SPICE benchmark demonstrate that SEAL achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in multi-hop reasoning, comparison, and aggregation tasks. Introduction A Knowledge Graph (KG) is a structured representation of knowledge, typically organized as triples (head entity, relation, tail entity) to encode factual information [1]. In recent years, KGs have gained widespread attention in both academia and industry [2, 3]. Knowledge-based Question Answering (KBQA) systems are designed to query these structured KGs, using reasoning to provide accurate answers to natural language questions [4, 5]. Among KBQA methods, Semantic Parsing (SP) based approaches translate questions into structured queries (e.g., SPARQL, Cypher, etc.) for execution against the KG, offering strong interpretability and high efficiency [6, 7]. These systems are widely applied in fields such as healthcare and business, significantly reducing the technical threshold for accessing complex knowledge systems. Knowledge-based conversational QA (KBCQA) extends this paradigm to multi-turn interactive scenarios, requiring the system to conduct continuous reasoning and to address dialog understanding challenges such as coreference resolution [8, 9]. For this task, SP remains a mainstream approach, where the goal is to convert contextual natural language queries into executable logical forms. While LLMs offer significant opportunities for SP-based KBQA, and KBCQA tasks, current methods face substantial limitations in handling struc-2 turally complex questions [15].

The blockchain oracle problem, which refers to the challenge of injecting reliable external data into decentralized systems, remains a fundamental limitation to the development of trustless applications. While recent years have seen a proliferation of architectural, cryptographic, and economic strategies to mitigate this issue, no one has yet fully resolved the fundamental question of how a blockchain can gain knowledge about the off-chain world. In this position paper, we critically assess the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in tackling the oracle problem. Drawing from both academic literature and practitioner implementations, we examine how AI techniques such as anomaly detection, language-based fact extraction, dynamic reputation modeling, and adversarial resistance can enhance oracle systems. We observe that while AI introduces powerful tools for improving data quality, source selection, and system resilience, it cannot eliminate the reliance on unverifiable off-chain inputs. Therefore, this study supports the idea that AI should be understood as a complementary layer of inference and filtering within a broader oracle design, not a substitute for trust assumptions.

Stock price prediction is challenging due to market volatility and its sensitivity to real-time events. While large language models (LLMs) offer new avenues for text-based forecasting, their application in finance is hindered by noisy news data and the lack of explicit answers in text. General-purpose memory architectures struggle to identify the key drivers of price movements. To address this, we propose StockMem, an event-reflection dual-layer memory framework. It structures news into events and mines them along two dimensions: horizontal consolidation integrates daily events, while longitudinal tracking captures event evolution to extract incremental information reflecting market expectation discrepancies. This builds a temporal event knowledge base. By analyzing event-price dynamics, the framework further forms a reflection knowledge base of causal experiences. For prediction, it retrieves analogous historical scenarios and reasons with current events, incremental data, and past experiences. Experiments show StockMem outperforms existing memory architectures and provides superior, explainable reasoning by tracing the information chain affecting prices, enhancing decision transparency in financial forecasting.

This research introduces the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) TrustBoost Framework, which combines blockchain technology and Explainable AI to address challenges faced by lenders underwriting small business loan applications from low-wealth households. The framework is designed with a strong emphasis on fulfilling four crucial requirements of blockchain and AI systems: confidentiality, compliance with data protection laws, resistance to adversarial attacks, and compliance with regulatory audits. It presents a technique for tamper-proof auditing of automated AI decisions and a strategy for on-chain (inside-blockchain) and off-chain data storage to facilitate collaboration within and across financial organizations.

Numerous graph neural network (GNN)-based algorithms have been proposed to solve graph-based combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), but methods to explain their predictions remain largely undeveloped. We introduce ARM-Explainer, a post-hoc, model-level explainer based on association rule mining, and demonstrate it on the predictions of the hybrid geometric scattering (HGS) GNN for the maximum clique problem (MCP), a canonical NP-hard graph-based COP. The eight most explanatory association rules discovered by ARM-Explainer achieve high median lift and confidence values of 2.42 and 0.49, respectively, on test instances from the TWITTER and BHOSLIB-DIMACS benchmark datasets. ARM-Explainer identifies the most important node features, together with their value ranges, that influence the GNN's predictions on these datasets. Furthermore, augmenting the GNN with informative node features substantially improves its performance on the MCP, increasing the median largest-found clique size by 22% (from 29.5 to 36) on large graphs from the BHOSLIB-DIMACS dataset.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReAG.