Rule-Based Reasoning
BlockScan: Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions
We propose BlockScan, a customized Transformer for anomaly detection in blockchain transactions. Unlike existing methods that rely on rule-based systems or directly apply off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs), BlockScan introduces a series of customized designs to effectively model the unique data structure of blockchain transactions. First, a blockchain transaction is multi-modal, containing blockchain-specific tokens, texts, and numbers. We design a novel modularized tokenizer to handle these multi-modal inputs, balancing the information across different modalities. Second, we design a customized masked language modeling mechanism for pretraining the Transformer architecture, incorporating RoPE embedding and FlashAttention for handling longer sequences. Finally, we design a novel anomaly detection method based on the model outputs.
NeuSymEA: Neuro-symbolic Entity Alignment via Variational Inference
Entity alignment (EA) aims to merge two knowledge graphs (KGs) by identifying equivalent entity pairs. Existing methods can be categorized into symbolic and neural models. Symbolic models, while precise, struggle with substructure heterogeneity and sparsity, whereas neural models, although effective, generally lack interpretability and cannot handle uncertainty. We propose NeuSymEA, a unified neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that combines the strengths of both methods to fully exploit the cross-KG structural pattern for robust entity alignment. NeuSymEA models the joint probability of all possible pairs' truth scores in a Markov random field, regulated by a set of rules, and optimizes it with the variational EM algorithm.
Sound Logical Explanations for Mean Aggregation Graph Neural Networks
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are frequently used for knowledge graph completion. Their black-box nature has motivated work that uses sound logical rules to explain predictions and characterise their expressivity. However, despite the prevalence of GNNs that use mean as an aggregation function, explainability and expressivity results are lacking for them. We consider GNNs with mean aggregation and non-negative weights (MAGNNs), proving the precise class of monotonic rules that can be sound for them, as well as providing a restricted fragment of first-order logic to explain any MAGNN prediction. Our experiments show that restricting mean-aggregation GNNs to have non-negative weights yields comparable or improved performance on standard inductive benchmarks, that sound rules are obtained in practice, that insightful explanations can be generated in practice, and that the sound rules can expose issues in the trained models.
6075d47368ddf560e92efd53264b5405-Paper-Conference.pdf
Visual Reasoning (AVR) entails discerning latent patterns in visual data and inferring underlying rules. Existing solutions often lack scalability and adaptability, as deep architectures tend to overfit training data, and static neural networks fail to dynamically capture diverse rules. To tackle the challenges, we propose a Dynamic and Scalable Reasoning Framework (DSRF) that greatly enhances the reasoning ability by widening the network instead of deepening it, and dynamically adjusting the reasoning network to better fit novel samples instead of a static network. Specifically, we design a Multi-View Reasoning Pyramid (MVRP) to capture complex rules through layered reasoning to focus features at each view on distinct combinations of attributes, widening the reasoning network to cover more attribute combinations analogous to complex reasoning rules. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Domain-Contrast Prediction (DDCP) block to handle varying task-specific relationships dynamically by introducing a Gram matrix to model feature distributions, and a gate matrix to capture subtle domain differences between context and target features. Extensive experiments on six AVR tasks demonstrate DSRF's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art results under various settings. Code is available here: https://github.com/UNNCRoxLi/DSRF.
Quality-Driven Curation of Remote Sensing Vision-Language Data via Learned Scoring Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in interpreting remote sensing (RS) images through language-guided semantic. However, the effectiveness of these VLMs critically depends on high-quality image-text training data that captures rich semantic relationships between visual content and language descriptions. Unlike natural images, RS lacks large-scale interleaved image-text pairs from web data, making data collection challenging. While current approaches rely primarily on rule-based methods or flagship VLMs for data synthesis, a systematic framework for automated quality assessment of such synthetically generated RS vision-language data is notably absent. To fill this gap, we propose a novel score model trained on large-scale RS vision-language preference data for automated quality assessment. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning CLIP or advanced VLMs (e.g., Qwen2-VL) with the top 30% of data ranked by our score model achieves superior accuracy compared to both full-data fine-tuning and CLIP-score-based ranking approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications of our scoring model for reinforcement learning (RL) training and best-of-N (BoN) test-time scaling, enabling significant improvements in VLM performance for RS tasks. Our code, model, and dataset are publicly available.
BlockScan: Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions
We propose BlockScan, a customized Transformer for anomaly detection in blockchain transactions. Unlike existing methods that rely on rule-based systems or directly apply off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs), BlockScan introduces a series of customized designs to effectively model the unique data structure of blockchain transactions. First, a blockchain transaction is multi-modal, containing blockchain-specific tokens, texts, and numbers. We design a novel modularized tokenizer to handle these multi-modal inputs, balancing the information across different modalities. Second, we design a customized masked language modeling mechanism for pretraining the Transformer architecture, incorporating RoPE embedding and FlashAttention for handling longer sequences. Finally, we design a novel anomaly detection method based on the model outputs.
Thailand plans reform of up to 7,000 business rules to tempt foreign investment
Thailand risks losing ground to regional rivals such as Vietnam and Indonesia, which have moved more aggressively to streamline regulatory regimes and court foreign capital. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul's government plans a sweeping reform of more than 7,000 business regulations, aiming to cut bureaucratic hurdles and accelerate investment as it tries to compete for global capital. The planned rollback of ministerial rules and secondary regulations, many of which have accumulated into a significant burden on companies, marks a concerted push to reposition Thailand as a more competitive destination for multinational firms reconfiguring supply chains. The effort was detailed in a government statement Monday and comes as Thailand risks losing ground to regional rivals such as Vietnam and Indonesia, which have moved more aggressively to streamline regulatory regimes and court foreign capital. "Regulations intended to guide have, in practice, become costs," said government spokeswoman Rachada Dhnadirek.
Why Model Selection Fails in Time Series Forecasting: An Empirical Study of Instability Across Data Regimes
Akinci, Tahir Cetin, Martinez-Morales, Alfredo A.
Time series forecasting models often exhibit inconsistent performance across datasets with varying statistical and structural properties. Despite the wide range of available forecasting techniques, it remains unclear whether model selection can be reliably guided by simple data characteristics. This paper investigates why rule-based model selection fails in time series forecasting by analyzing the relationship between data-regime descriptors and model performance. A descriptor-based framework is introduced to characterize time series using measurable properties, including trend strength, seasonality, noise level, and temporal dependence. Based on these descriptors, a rule-based selection mechanism is formulated to map data regimes to candidate forecasting models. The approach is evaluated on multiple real-world datasets across different domains and forecasting horizons. The results show that rule-based model selection achieves low accuracy, with correct model identification occurring in only a small fraction of cases. Significant discrepancies are observed between recommended and empirically optimal models, particularly in noisy and mixed regimes. Further analysis reveals that model performance is highly sensitive to both dataset characteristics and forecasting horizon, resulting in substantial ranking instability across scenarios. These findings explain why simple heuristic rules fail to generalize and demonstrate that forecasting performance cannot be reliably predicted using static, descriptor-based approaches. This study provides empirical evidence that model selection in time series forecasting is inherently context-dependent and highlights the need for more adaptive, data-driven strategies.