The rapid development of artificial intelligence has brought about substantial advancements in the field. One promising direction is the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured knowledge-based systems. This approach aims to enhance AI capabilities by combining the generative language understanding of LLMs with the precise knowledge representation of structured systems. This survey explores the synergy between LLMs and knowledge bases, focusing on real-world applications and addressing associated technical, operational, and ethical challenges. Through a comprehensive literature review, the study identifies critical issues and evaluates existing solutions. The paper highlights the benefits of integrating generative AI with knowledge bases, including improved data contextualization, enhanced model accuracy, and better utilization of knowledge resources. The findings provide a detailed overview of the current state of research, identify key gaps, and offer actionable recommendations. These insights contribute to advancing AI technologies and support their practical deployment across various sectors.

In this paper, we propose a new method for knowledge base completion (KBC): instance-based learning (IBL). For example, to answer (Jill Biden, lived city,? Through prototype entities, IBL provides interpretability. We develop theories for modeling prototypes and combining IBL with translational models. Experiments on various tasks confirmed the IBL model's effectiveness and interpretability.In addition, IBL shed light on the mechanism of rule-based KBC models.

For example, in online learning, an AI social assistant may connect learners and thereby enhance social interaction. These social AI assistants too need to explain themselves in order to enhance transparency and trust with the learners. We present a method of self-explanation that uses introspection over a self-model of an AI social assistant. The self-model is captured as a functional model that specifies how the methods of the agent use knowledge to achieve its tasks. The process of generating self-explanations uses Chain of Thought to reflect on the self-model and ChatGPT to provide explanations about its functioning. We evaluate the self-explanation of the AI social assistant for completeness and correctness. We also report on its deployment in a live class.

The deductive closure of an ideal knowledge base (KB) contains exactly the logical queries that the KB can answer. However, in practice KBs are both incomplete and over-specified, failing to answer some queries that have real-world answers. However, experiments in this paper show that QE systems may disagree with deductive reasoning on answers that do not require generalization or relaxation. We address this problem with a novel QE method that is more faithful to deductive reasoning, and show that this leads to better performance on complex queries to incomplete KBs. Finally we show that inserting this new QE module into a neural question-answering system leads to substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art.

Tabular data is one of the most widely used formats across industries, driving critical applications in areas such as finance, healthcare, and marketing. In the era of data-centric AI, improving data quality and representation has become essential for enhancing model performance, particularly in applications centered around tabular data. This survey examines the key aspects of tabular data-centric AI, emphasizing feature selection and feature generation as essential techniques for data space refinement. We provide a systematic review of feature selection methods, which identify and retain the most relevant data attributes, and feature generation approaches, which create new features to simplify the capture of complex data patterns. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of current methodologies through an analysis of recent advancements, practical applications, and the strengths and limitations of these techniques. Finally, we outline open challenges and suggest future perspectives to inspire continued innovation in this field.

This habilitation thesis is cumulative and, therefore, is collecting and connecting research that I (together with several co-authors) have conducted over the last few years. Thus, the absolute core of the work is formed by the ten publications listed on page 5 under the name Contributions 1 to 10. The references to the complete versions of these articles are also found in this list, making them as easily accessible as possible for readers wishing to dive deep into the different research projects. The chapters following this thesis, namely Parts A to C and the concluding remarks, serve to place the articles in a larger scientific context, to (briefly) explain their respective content on a less formal level, and to highlight some interesting perspectives for future research in their respective contexts. Naturally, therefore, the following presentation has neither the level of detail nor the formal rigor that can (hopefully) be found in the papers. The purpose of the following text is to provide the reader an easy and high-level access to this interesting and important research field as a whole, thereby, advertising it to a broader audience.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires VQA systems to utilize knowledge from external knowledge bases to answer visually-grounded questions. Retrieval-Augmented Visual Question Answering (RA-VQA), a strong framework to tackle KB-VQA, first retrieves related documents with Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and then uses them to answer questions. This paper proposes Fine-grained Late-interaction Multi-modal Retrieval (FLMR) which significantly improves knowledge retrieval in RA-VQA. FLMR addresses two major limitations in RA-VQA's retriever: (1) the image representations obtained via image-to-text transforms can be incomplete and inaccurate and (2) similarity scores between queries and documents are computed with one-dimensional embeddings, which can be insensitive to finer-grained similarities.FLMR overcomes these limitations by obtaining image representations that complement those from the image-to-text transform using a vision model aligned with an existing text-based retriever through a simple alignment network. FLMR also encodes images and questions using multi-dimensional embeddings to capture finer-grained similarities between queries and documents.

Many non-traditional students in cybersecurity programs often lack access to advice from peers, family members and professors, which can hinder their educational experiences. Additionally, these students may not fully benefit from various LLM-powered AI assistants due to issues like content relevance, locality of advice, minimum expertise, and timing. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing an application designed to provide comprehensive support by answering questions related to knowledge, skills, and career preparation advice tailored to the needs of these students. We developed a learning tool platform, CyberMentor, to address the diverse needs and pain points of students majoring in cybersecurity. Powered by agentic workflow and Generative Large Language Models (LLMs), the platform leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for accurate and contextually relevant information retrieval to achieve accessibility and personalization. We demonstrated its value in addressing knowledge requirements for cybersecurity education and for career marketability, in tackling skill requirements for analytical and programming assignments, and in delivering real time on demand learning support. Using three use scenarios, we showcased CyberMentor in facilitating knowledge acquisition and career preparation and providing seamless skill-based guidance and support. We also employed the LangChain prompt-based evaluation methodology to evaluate the platform's impact, confirming its strong performance in helpfulness, correctness, and completeness. These results underscore the system's ability to support students in developing practical cybersecurity skills while improving equity and sustainability within higher education. Furthermore, CyberMentor's open-source design allows for adaptation across other disciplines, fostering educational innovation and broadening its potential impact.

--Class-incremental fault diagnosis requires a model to adapt to new fault classes while retaining previous knowledge. However, limited research exists for imbalanced and long-tailed data. Extracting discriminative features from few-shot fault data is challenging, and adding new fault classes often demands costly model retraining. T o tackle these issues, we introduce a Supervised Contrastive knowledge distiLlation for class Incremental Fault Diagnosis (SCLIFD) framework proposing supervised contrastive knowledge distillation for improved representation learning capability and less forgetting, a novel prioritized exemplar selection method for sample replay to alleviate catastrophic forgetting, and the Random Forest Classifier to address the class imbalance. Extensive experimentation on simulated and real-world industrial datasets across various imbalance ratios demonstrates the superiority of SCLIFD over existing approaches. Data-driven fault diagnosis techniques have gained significant prominence over the past two decades [1-5]. However, most of them necessitate sufficient training data to achieve reliable modeling performance[6-9]. Unfortunately, fault data is typically limited in comparison to normal data. This is because engineering equipment primarily operates under normal conditions, and the probabilities of faults vary across different working environments. Besides, fault simulation experiments are costly and inevitably deviate to some extent from real industrial environments. These possible reasons consequently contribute to class imbalance and a long-tailed distribution among different conditions [10]. The performance of the model typically suffers as it tends to prioritize the normal class, consequently neglecting fault classes or tail classes.

Recent progress in Learning by Reading and Machine Reading systems has significantly increased the capacity of knowledge-based systems to learn new facts. In this work, we discuss the problem of selecting a set of learning requests for these knowledge-based systems which would lead to maximum Q/A performance. To understand the dynamics of this problem, we simulate the properties of a learning strategy, which sends learning requests to an external knowledge source. We show that choosing an optimal set of facts for these learning systems is similar to a coordination game, and use reinforcement learning to solve this problem. Experiments show that such an approach can significantly improve Q/A performance.