Expert Systems
RubikSQL: Lifelong Learning Agentic Knowledge Base as an Industrial NL2SQL System
Chen, Zui, Li, Han, Zhang, Xinhao, Chen, Xiaoyu, Dong, Chunyin, Wang, Yifeng, Cai, Xin, Zhang, Su, Li, Ziqi, Ding, Chi, Li, Jinxu, Wang, Shuai, Zhao, Dousheng, Gao, Sanhai, Liu, Guangyi
We present RubikSQL, a novel NL2SQL system designed to address key challenges in real-world enterprise-level NL2SQL, such as implicit intents and domain-specific terminology. RubikSQL frames NL2SQL as a lifelong learning task, demanding both Knowledge Base (KB) maintenance and SQL generation. RubikSQL systematically builds and refines its KB through techniques including database profiling, structured information extraction, agentic rule mining, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-enhanced SQL profiling. RubikSQL then employs a multi-agent workflow to leverage this curated KB, generating accurate SQLs. RubikSQL achieves SOTA performance on both the KaggleDBQA and BIRD Mini-Dev datasets. Finally, we release the RubikBench benchmark, a new benchmark specifically designed to capture vital traits of industrial NL2SQL scenarios, providing a valuable resource for future research.
A Systematic Literature Review on Multi-label Data Stream Classification
Freire-Oliveira, H., Paiva, E. R. F., Gama, J., Khan, L., Cerri, R.
Classification in the context of multi-label data streams represents a challenge that has attracted significant attention due to its high real-world applicability. However, this task faces problems inherent to dynamic environments, such as the continuous arrival of data at high speed and volume, changes in the data distribution (concept drift), the emergence of new labels (concept evolution), and the latency in the arrival of ground truth labels. This systematic literature review presents an in-depth analysis of multi-label data stream classification proposals. We characterize the latest methods in the literature, providing a comprehensive overview, building a thorough hierarchy, and discussing how the proposals approach each problem. Furthermore, we discuss the adopted evaluation strategies and analyze the methods' asymptotic complexity and resource consumption. Finally, we identify the main gaps and offer recommendations for future research directions in the field.
Explaining Black-box Language Models with Knowledge Probing Systems: A Post-hoc Explanation Perspective
Zhao, Yunxiao, Xu, Hao, Wang, Zhiqiang, Li, Xiaoli, Liang, Jiye, Li, Ru
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on large amounts of unlabeled data, yet they exhibit remarkable reasoning skills. However, the trustworthiness challenges posed by these black-box models have become increasingly evident in recent years. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes a novel Knowledge-guided Probing approach called KnowProb in a post-hoc explanation way, which aims to probe whether black-box PLMs understand implicit knowledge beyond the given text, rather than focusing only on the surface level content of the text. We provide six potential explanations derived from the underlying content of the given text, including three knowledge-based understanding and three association-based reasoning. In experiments, we validate that current small-scale (or large-scale) PLMs only learn a single distribution of representation, and still face significant challenges in capturing the hidden knowledge behind a given text. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective for identifying the limitations of existing black-box models from multiple probing perspectives, which facilitates researchers to promote the study of detecting black-box models in an explainable way.
Reasoning with RAGged events: RAG-Enhanced Event Knowledge Base Construction and reasoning with proof-assistants
Extracting structured representations of historical events from narrative sources still remains challenging when one constructs them manually. While RDF/OWL reasoners support graph-based reasoning, their expressiveness is limited to restricted fragments of first-order logic. We develop automated models for historical event extraction using large language models (GPT-4, Claude, Llama 3.2) with three strategies: direct generation, knowledge-graph augmentation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Using the 10 first chapters of Thucydides works as a case study, we find that different enhancement strategies optimize different performance dimensions rather than providing across the board universal improvements. Direct generation favors coverage, while RAG improves precision but reduces breadth. Model architecture influences this trade-off: large models show stable baselines with incremental RAG benefits, while Llama 3.2 exhibits extreme variance from competitive to catastrophic performance. To address RDF's expressivity limitations, we develop a translation pipeline converting RDF outputs to Coq proof assistant specifications, enabling temporal arithmetic with BCE dates, multi-step causal inference, and formal validation of domain-specific event types. This demonstrates that optimal enhancement strategies depend on specific application requirements, while establishing foundations for computational humanities combining NLP scalability with formal verification.
A Fully Spectral Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Architecture with Graph Signal Processing as the Computational Backbone
We propose a fully spectral, neuro\-symbolic reasoning architecture that leverages Graph Signal Processing (GSP) as the primary computational backbone for integrating symbolic logic and neural inference. Unlike conventional reasoning models that treat spectral graph methods as peripheral components, our approach formulates the entire reasoning pipeline in the graph spectral domain. Logical entities and relationships are encoded as graph signals, processed via learnable spectral filters that control multi-scale information propagation, and mapped into symbolic predicates for rule-based inference. We present a complete mathematical framework for spectral reasoning, including graph Fourier transforms, band-selective attention, and spectral rule grounding. Experiments on benchmark reasoning datasets (ProofWriter, EntailmentBank, bAbI, CLUTRR, and ARC-Challenge) demonstrate improvements in logical consistency, interpretability, and computational efficiency over state\-of\-the\-art neuro\-symbolic models. Our results suggest that GSP provides a mathematically grounded and computationally efficient substrate for robust and interpretable reasoning systems.
LLM-Driven Self-Refinement for Embodied Drone Task Planning
Zhang, Deyu, Zhang, Xicheng, Li, Jiahao, Long, Tingting, Dai, Xunhua, Fu, Yongjian, Zhang, Jinrui, Ren, Ju, Zhang, Yaoxue
We introduce SRDrone, a novel system designed for self-refinement task planning in industrial-grade embodied drones. SRDrone incorporates two key technical contributions: First, it employs a continuous state evaluation methodology to robustly and accurately determine task outcomes and provide explanatory feedback. This approach supersedes conventional reliance on single-frame final-state assessment for continuous, dynamic drone operations. Second, SRDrone implements a hierarchical Behavior Tree (BT) modification model. This model integrates multi-level BT plan analysis with a constrained strategy space to enable structured reflective learning from experience. Experimental results demonstrate that SRDrone achieves a 44.87% improvement in Success Rate (SR) over baseline methods. Furthermore, real-world deployment utilizing an experience base optimized through iterative self-refinement attains a 96.25% SR. By embedding adaptive task refinement capabilities within an industrial-grade BT planning framework, SRDrone effectively integrates the general reasoning intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the stringent physical execution constraints inherent to embodied drones. Code is available at https://github.com/ZXiiiC/SRDrone.
Reasoning is about giving reasons
Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to understanding the underlying "reasons" which make up the proof or disproof of the premise - as a function of the "logical atoms" in the argument. While it has been shown that transformers can "chain" rules to derive simple arguments, the challenge of articulating the "reasons" remains. Not only do current approaches to chaining rules suffer in terms of their interpretability, they are also quite constrained in their ability to accommodate extensions to theoretically equivalent reasoning tasks - a model trained to chain rules cannot support abduction or identify contradictions. In this work we suggest addressing these shortcomings by identifying an intermediate representation (which we call the Representation of the Logical Structure (RLS) of the argument) that possesses an understanding of the logical structure of a natural language argument - the logical atoms in the argument and the rules incorporating them. Given the logical structure, reasoning is deterministic and easy to compute. Therefore, our approach supports all forms of reasoning that depend on the logical structure of the natural language argument, including arbitrary depths of reasoning, on-the-fly mistake rectification and interactive discussion with respect to an argument. We show that we can identify and extract the logical structure of natural language arguments in three popular reasoning datasets with high accuracies, thus supporting explanation generation and extending the reasoning capabilities significantly.
On the Security and Privacy of Federated Learning: A Survey with Attacks, Defenses, Frameworks, Applications, and Future Directions
Jimenez-Gutierrez, Daniel M., Falkouskaya, Yelizaveta, Hernandez-Ramos, Jose L., Anagnostopoulos, Aris, Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis, Vitaletti, Andrea
Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm enabling multiple clients to train a global model collaboratively without sharing their raw data. While FL enhances data privacy by design, it remains vulnerable to various security and privacy threats. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of more than 200 papers regarding the state-of-the-art attacks and defense mechanisms developed to address these challenges, categorizing them into security-enhancing and privacy-preserving techniques. Security-enhancing methods aim to improve FL robustness against malicious behaviors such as byzantine attacks, poisoning, and Sybil attacks. At the same time, privacy-preserving techniques focus on protecting sensitive data through cryptographic approaches, differential privacy, and secure aggregation. We critically analyze the strengths and limitations of existing methods, highlight the trade-offs between privacy, security, and model performance, and discuss the implications of non-IID data distributions on the effectiveness of these defenses. Furthermore, we identify open research challenges and future directions, including the need for scalable, adaptive, and energy-efficient solutions operating in dynamic and heterogeneous FL environments. Our survey aims to guide researchers and practitioners in developing robust and privacy-preserving FL systems, fostering advancements safeguarding collaborative learning frameworks' integrity and confidentiality.
Exploring Content and Social Connections of Fake News with Explainable Text and Graph Learning
Lourenรงo, Vรญtor N., Paes, Aline, Weyde, Tillman
The global spread of misinformation and concerns about content trustworthiness have driven the development of automated fact-checking systems. Since false information often exploits social media dynamics such as "likes" and user networks to amplify its reach, effective solutions must go beyond content analysis to incorporate these factors. Moreover, simply labelling content as false can be ineffective or even reinforce biases such as automation and confirmation bias. This paper proposes an explainable framework that combines content, social media, and graph-based features to enhance fact-checking. It integrates a misinformation classifier with explainability techniques to deliver complete and interpretable insights supporting classification decisions. Experiments demonstrate that multimodal information improves performance over single modalities, with evaluations conducted on datasets in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Additionally, the framework's explanations were assessed for interpretability, trustworthiness, and robustness with a novel protocol, showing that it effectively generates human-understandable justifications for its predictions. The code and experiments are available at https://github.com/MeLLL-UFF/mu2X/ .
Adversarial Attacks on VQA-NLE: Exposing and Alleviating Inconsistencies in Visual Question Answering Explanations
Yeh, Yahsin, Wu, Yilun, Ruan, Bokai, Shuai, Honghan
Natural language explanations in visual question answering (VQA-NLE) aim to make black-box models more transparent by elucidating their decision-making processes. However, we find that existing VQA-NLE systems can produce inconsistent explanations and reach conclusions without genuinely understanding the underlying context, exposing weaknesses in either their inference pipeline or explanation-generation mechanism. To highlight these vulnerabilities, we not only leverage an existing adversarial strategy to perturb questions but also propose a novel strategy that minimally alters images to induce contradictory or spurious outputs. We further introduce a mitigation method that leverages external knowledge to alleviate these inconsistencies, thereby bolstering model robustness. Extensive evaluations on two standard benchmarks and two widely used VQA-NLE models underscore the effectiveness of our attacks and the potential of knowledge-based defenses, ultimately revealing pressing security and reliability concerns in current VQA-NLE systems.