This study explores the relationship between voter trust and their experiences during elections by applying a rule-based data mining technique to the 2022 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE). Using the Apriori algorithm and setting parameters to capture meaningful associations (support >= 3%, confidence >= 60%, and lift > 1.5), the analysis revealed a strong connection between demographic attributes and voting-related challenges, such as registration hurdles, accessibility issues, and queue times. For instance, respondents who indicated that accessing polling stations was "very easy" and who reported moderate confidence were found to be over six times more likely (lift = 6.12) to trust their county's election outcome and experience no registration issues. A further analysis, which adjusted the support threshold to 2%, specifically examined patterns among minority voters. It revealed that 98.16 percent of Black voters who reported easy access to polling locations also had smooth registration experiences. Additionally, those who had high confidence in the vote-counting process were almost two times as likely to identify as Democratic Party supporters. These findings point to the important role that enhancing voting access and offering targeted support can play in building trust in the electoral system, particularly among marginalized communities.

Traditional agent-based urban mobility simulations often rely on rigid rule-based systems that struggle to capture the complexity, adaptability, and behavioral diversity inherent in human travel decision making. Recent advancements in large language models and AI agent technologies present new opportunities to develop agents with enhanced reasoning capabilities, persistent memory, and adaptive learning. We introduce GATSim (Generative-Agent Transport Simulation), a novel framework that leverages these advancements to simulate urban mobility using generative agents with rich, human-like behaviors. Unlike conventional approaches, GATSim agents are characterized by diverse socioeconomic profiles, individual lifestyles, and evolving preferences shaped through psychologically informed memory systems, tool usage, and lifelong learning. The main contributions of this work are: (1) a comprehensive architecture that integrates an urban mobility foundation model with agent cognitive systems and a transport simulation environment; (2) a hierarchical memory designed for efficient retrieval of contextually relevant information, incorporating spatial and temporal associations, keyword matching, and semantic relevance; (3) innovative planning and reactive mechanisms for modeling adaptive mobility behaviors which integrate a multi-scale reflection process to transform specific travel experiences into generalized behavioral insights. We implement a prototype system and conduct systematic validation, demonstrating that generative agents produce believable and coherent travel behaviors. Experimental results indicate that generative agents perform at least as well as human annotators with 92\% posterior probability, while naturally producing realistic macroscopic traffic patterns. The code for the prototype implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/gatsim.

This paper presents a framework to convert argumentative texts into argument knowledge graphs (AKG). The proposed argumentative knowledge representation framework (AKReF) extends the theoretical foundation and enables the AKG to provide a graphical view of the argumentative structure that is easier to understand. Starting with basic annotations of argumentative components (ACs) and argumentative relations (ARs), we enrich the information by constructing a knowledge base (KB) graph with metadata attributes for nodes. Next, we apply modus ponens on premises and inference rules from the KB to form arguments. From these arguments, we create an AKG. The nodes and edges of the AKG have attributes capturing key argumentative features such as the type of premise (e.g., axiom, ordinary premise, assumption), the type of inference rule (e.g., strict, defeasible), preference order over defeasible rules, markers (e.g., "therefore", "however"), and the type of attack (e.g., undercut, rebuttal, undermining). We identify inference rules by locating a specific set of markers, called inference markers (IM). This, in turn, makes it possible to identify undercut attacks previously undetectable in existing datasets. AKG prepares the ground for reasoning tasks, including checking the coherence of arguments and identifying opportunities for revision. For this, it is essential to find indirect relations, many of which are implicit. Our proposed AKG format, with annotated inference rules and modus ponens, helps reasoning models learn the implicit, indirect relations that require inference over arguments and their interconnections. We use an essay from the AAEC dataset to illustrate the framework. We further show its application in complex analyses such as extracting a conflict-free set and a maximal set of admissible arguments.

For clinical data integration and healthcare services, the HL7 FHIR standard has established itself as a desirable format for interoperability between complex health data. Previous attempts at automating the translation from free-form clinical notes into structured FHIR resources rely on modular, rule-based systems or LLMs with instruction tuning and constrained decoding. Since they frequently suffer from limited generalizability and structural inconformity, we propose an end-to-end framework powered by LLM agents, code execution, and healthcare terminology database tools to address these issues. Our solution, called Infherno, is designed to adhere to the FHIR document schema and competes well with a human baseline in predicting FHIR resources from unstructured text. The implementation features a front end for custom and synthetic data and both local and proprietary models, supporting clinical data integration processes and interoperability across institutions.

In multiple unmanned ground vehicle confrontations, autonomously evolving multi-agent tactical decisions from situational awareness remain a significant challenge. Traditional handcraft rule-based methods become vulnerable in the complicated and transient battlefield environment, and current reinforcement learning methods mainly focus on action manipulation instead of strategic decisions due to lack of interpretability. Here, we propose a vision-language model-based commander to address the issue of intelligent perception-to-decision reasoning in autonomous confrontations. Our method integrates a vision language model for scene understanding and a lightweight large language model for strategic reasoning, achieving unified perception and decision within a shared semantic space, with strong adaptability and interpretability. Unlike rule-based search and reinforcement learning methods, the combination of the two modules establishes a full-chain process, reflecting the cognitive process of human commanders. Simulation and ablation experiments validate that the proposed approach achieves a win rate of over 80% compared with baseline models.

This paper presents a novel rule-based approach for generating music by varying existing tunes. We parse each tune to find the Pathway Assembly (PA) [ 1], that is a structure representing all repetitions in the tune. The Sequitur algorithm [2 ] is used for this. The result is a grammar. We then carry out mutation on the grammar, rather than on a tune directly. There are potentially 19 types of mutations such as adding, removing, swapping or reversing parts of the grammar that can be applied to the grammars. The system employs one of the mutations randomly in this step to automatically manipulate the grammar. Following the mutation, we need to expand the grammar which returns a new tune. The output after 1 or more mutations will be a new tune related to the original tune. Our study examines how tunes change gradually over the course of multiple mutations. Edit distances, structural complexity and length of the tunes are used to show how a tune is changed after multiple mutations. In addition, the size of effect of each mutation type is analyzed. As a final point, we review the musical aspect of the output tunes. It should be noted that the study only focused on generating new pitch sequences. The study is based on an Irish traditional tune dataset and a list of integers has been used to represent each tune's pitch values.

We introduce an algorithm for identifying interpretable subgroups with elevated treatment effects, given an estimate of individual or conditional average treatment effects (CATE). Subgroups are characterized by "rule sets"--easy-to-understand statements of the form (Condition A AND Condition B) OR (Condition C) --which can capture high-order interactions while retaining interpretability. Our method complements existing approaches for estimating the CATE, which often produce high dimensional and uninterpretable results, by summarizing and extracting critical information from fitted models to aid decision making, policy implementation, and scientific understanding. We propose an objective function that trades-off subgroup size and effect size, and varying the hyperparameter that controls this trade-off results in a "frontier" of Pareto optimal rule sets, none of which dominates the others across all criteria. Valid inference is achievable through sample splitting. We demonstrate the utility and limitations of our method using simulated and empirical examples. In causal inference, average treatment effects (ATE) and average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) are the estimands that garner the most interest. Even if the effect of a treatment is known to be positive on average, it can vary greatly across individuals; some individuals will benefit, but some may experience no effect, and others may even be hurt.

The ontological and epistemic complexities inherent in the moral domain make it challenging to establish clear standards for evaluating the performance of a moral machine. In this paper, we present a formal method to describe Ethical Decision Making models based on ethical risk assessment. Then, we show how these models that are specified as fuzzy rules can be verified and validated using fuzzy Petri nets. A case study from the medical field is considered to illustrate the proposed approach.

--Detecting DNS tunneling is a significant challenge in cybersecurity due to its capacity to hide harmful actions within DNS traffic that appears to be normal and legitimate. Traditional detection methods based on rule-based approaches or signature matching are often insufficient to accurately identify such covert communication channels. This paper addresses the necessity of machine learning methods for effective DNS tunneling detection. We propose a novel approach to detect DNS tunneling. Through the combination of advanced machine learning algorithms and the analysis of various features extracted from DNS traffic, our aim is to provide an accurate DNS tunneling detection model. A. About the Subject The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system crucial for internet functionality [1]. As a core component of internet infrastructure, DNS is used in nearly every online transaction, making it a prime target for a variety of cyber threats. Due to its foundational role and widespread trust, DNS is vulnerable to several types of attacks, threat landscape can be seen in [2], such as cache poisoning, amplification and DoS attacks, and phishing attacks. These vulnerabilities offer attackers multiple possibilities to disrupt or manipulate internet traffic.

The Swa-bhasha Resource Hub provides a comprehensive collection of data resources and algorithms developed for Romanized Sinhala to Sinhala transliteration between 2020 and 2025. These resources have played a significant role in advancing research in Sinhala Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in training transliteration models and developing applications involving Romanized Sinhala. The current openly accessible data sets and corresponding tools are made publicly available through this hub. This paper presents a detailed overview of the resources contributed by the authors and includes a comparative analysis of existing transliteration applications in the domain.