A piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) is a central reference document in chemical process engineering. Currently, chemical engineers manually review P&IDs through visual inspection to find and rectify errors. However, engineering projects can involve hundreds to thousands of P&ID pages, creating a significant revision workload. This study proposes a rule-based method to support engineers with error detection and correction in P&IDs. The method is based on a graph representation of P&IDs, enabling automated error detection and correction, i.e., autocorrection, through rule graphs. We use our pyDEXPI Python package to generate P&ID graphs from DEXPI-standard P&IDs. In this study, we developed 33 rules based on chemical engineering knowledge and heuristics, with five selected rules demonstrated as examples. A case study on an illustrative P&ID validates the reliability and effectiveness of the rule-based autocorrection method in revising P&IDs.

Automating planning with LLMs presents transformative opportunities for traditional industries, yet remains underexplored. In commercial construction, the complexity of automated scheduling often requires manual intervention to ensure precision. We propose CONSTRUCTA, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to optimize construction schedules in complex projects like semiconductor fabrication. CONSTRUCTA addresses key challenges by: (1) integrating construction-specific knowledge through static RAG; (2) employing context-sampling techniques inspired by architectural expertise to provide relevant input; and (3) deploying Construction DPO to align schedules with expert preferences using RLHF. Experiments on proprietary data demonstrate performance improvements of +42.3% in missing value prediction, +79.1% in dependency analysis, and +28.9% in automated planning compared to baseline methods, showcasing its potential to revolutionize construction workflows and inspire domain-specific LLM advancements.

Access control is a fundamental security requirement in any organization for ensuring that only authorized users can access certain information or resources under specific conditions. While enforcement needs to be done in computer systems, access control policies are typically decided by the higher management. For example, in a university system, the Department Chair, Dean and the Provost may take a decision on who can access which object (like Conference room printers, Graduate studies applications, Faculty tenure support letters, etc.) at the Department, School and University level, respectively. Such decisions are often noted down as meeting minutes, email exchanges, or other forms of documentation in a natural language like English (hereinafter referred to as Natural Language Access Control Policies, i.e., NLACPs). For information system level implementation of such decisions, System Security Officers (SSOs) must translate the NLACPs into Machine Enforceable Security Policies (MESPs) using a target access control model like Role-based Access Control (RBAC) or Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC). It is apparent that manual conversion of NLACPs into MESPs not only demands time and resource, it is also error prone, especially for large organizations with dynamically changing policies.

The recent adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in robotics has driven the development of algorithms that enable autonomous systems to adapt to complex social environments. In particular, safe and efficient social navigation is a key challenge, requiring AI not only to avoid collisions and deadlocks but also to interact intuitively and predictably with its surroundings. To date, methods based on probabilistic models and the generation of conformal safety regions have shown promising results in defining safety regions with a controlled margin of error, primarily relying on classification approaches and explicit rules to describe collision-free navigation conditions. This work explores how topological features contribute to explainable safety regions in social navigation. Instead of using behavioral parameters, we leverage topological data analysis to classify and characterize different simulation behaviors. First, we apply global rule-based classification to distinguish between safe (collision-free) and unsafe scenarios based on topological properties. Then, we define safety regions, $S_\varepsilon$, in the topological feature space, ensuring a maximum classification error of $\varepsilon$. These regions are built with adjustable SVM classifiers and order statistics, providing robust decision boundaries. Local rules extracted from these regions enhance interpretability, keeping the decision-making process transparent. Our approach initially separates simulations with and without collisions, outperforming methods that not incorporate topological features. It offers a deeper understanding of robot interactions within a navigable space. We further refine safety regions to ensure deadlock-free simulations and integrate both aspects to define a compliant simulation space that guarantees safe and efficient navigation.

This paper presents a complete explainable system that interprets a set of data, abstracts the underlying features and describes them in a natural language of choice. The system relies on two crucial stages: (i) identifying emerging properties from data and transforming them into abstract concepts, and (ii) converting these concepts into natural language. Despite the impressive natural language generation capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models, their statistical nature and the intricacy of their internal mechanism still force us to employ these techniques as black boxes, forgoing trustworthiness. Developing an explainable pipeline for data interpretation would allow facilitating its use in safety-critical environments like processing medical information and allowing non-experts and visually impaired people to access narrated information. To this end, we believe that the fields of knowledge representation and automated reasoning research could present a valid alternative. Expanding on prior research that tackled the first stage (i), we focus on the second stage, named Concept2Text. Being explainable, data translation is easily modeled through logic-based rules, once again emphasizing the role of declarative programming in achieving AI explainability. This paper explores a Prolog/CLP-based rewriting system to interpret concepts-articulated in terms of classes and relations, plus common knowledge-derived from a generic ontology, generating natural language text. Its main features include hierarchical tree rewritings, modular multilingual generation, support for equivalent variants across semantic, grammar, and lexical levels, and a transparent rule-based system. We outline the architecture and demonstrate its flexibility through some examples capable of generating numerous diverse and equivalent rewritings based on the input concept.

The paper proposes an advanced approach for identifying disinformation on Telegram channels related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning techniques and transfer learning. Traditional methods of disinformation detection, often relying on manual verification or rule-based systems, are increasingly inadequate in the face of rapidly evolving propaganda tactics and the massive volume of data generated daily. To address these challenges, the proposed system employs deep learning algorithms, including LLM models, which are fine-tuned on a custom dataset encompassing verified disinformation and legitimate content. The paper's findings indicate that this approach significantly outperforms traditional machine learning techniques, offering enhanced contextual understanding and adaptability to emerging disinformation strategies.

Simultaneously grasping and transporting multiple objects can significantly enhance robotic work efficiency and has been a key research focus for decades. The primary challenge lies in determining how to push objects, group them, and execute simultaneous grasping for respective groups while considering object distribution and the hardware constraints of the robot. Traditional rule-based methods struggle to flexibly adapt to diverse scenarios. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an imitation learning-based approach. We collect a series of expert demonstrations through teleoperation and train a diffusion policy network, enabling the robot to dynamically generate action sequences for pushing, grouping, and grasping, thereby facilitating efficient multi-object grasping and transportation. We conducted experiments to evaluate the method under different training dataset sizes, varying object quantities, and real-world object scenarios. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively and adaptively generate multi-object grouping and grasping strategies. With the support of more training data, imitation learning is expected to be an effective approach for solving the multi-object grasping problem.

Trajectory prediction, the task of forecasting future agent behavior from past data, is central to safe and efficient autonomous driving. A diverse set of methods (e.g., rule-based or learned with different architectures and datasets) have been proposed, yet it is often the case that the performance of these methods is sensitive to the deployment environment (e.g., how well the design rules model the environment, or how accurately the test data match the training data). Building upon the principled theory of online convex optimization but also going beyond convexity and stationarity, we present a lightweight and model-agnostic method to aggregate different trajectory predictors online. We propose treating each individual trajectory predictor as an "expert" and maintaining a probability vector to mix the outputs of different experts. Then, the key technical approach lies in leveraging online data -the true agent behavior to be revealed at the next timestep- to form a convex-or-nonconvex, stationary-or-dynamic loss function whose gradient steers the probability vector towards choosing the best mixture of experts. We instantiate this method to aggregate trajectory predictors trained on different cities in the NUSCENES dataset and show that it performs just as well, if not better than, any singular model, even when deployed on the out-of-distribution LYFT dataset.

While just-in-time interventions (JITIs) have effectively targeted common health behaviors, individuals often have unique needs to intervene in personal undesirable actions that can negatively affect physical, mental, and social well-being. We present WatchGuardian, a smartwatch-based JITI system that empowers users to define custom interventions for these personal actions with a small number of samples. For the model to detect new actions based on limited new data samples, we developed a few-shot learning pipeline that finetuned a pre-trained inertial measurement unit (IMU) model on public hand-gesture datasets. We then designed a data augmentation and synthesis process to train additional classification layers for customization. Our offline evaluation with 26 participants showed that with three, five, and ten examples, our approach achieved an average accuracy of 76.8%, 84.7%, and 87.7%, and an F1 score of 74.8%, 84.2%, and 87.2% We then conducted a four-hour intervention study to compare WatchGuardian against a rule-based intervention. Our results demonstrated that our system led to a significant reduction by 64.0 +- 22.6% in undesirable actions, substantially outperforming the baseline by 29.0%. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of a customizable, AI-driven JITI system for individuals in need of behavioral intervention in personal undesirable actions. We envision that our work can inspire broader applications of user-defined personalized intervention with advanced AI solutions.

We propose ARISE, a framework that iteratively induces rules and generates synthetic data for text classification. We combine synthetic data generation and automatic rule induction, via bootstrapping, to iteratively filter the generated rules and data. We induce rules via inductive generalisation of syntactic n-grams, enabling us to capture a complementary source of supervision. These rules alone lead to performance gains in both, in-context learning (ICL) and fine-tuning (FT) settings. Similarly, use of augmented data from ARISE alone improves the performance for a model, outperforming configurations that rely on complex methods like contrastive learning. Further, our extensive experiments on various datasets covering three full-shot, eight few-shot and seven multilingual variant settings demonstrate that the rules and data we generate lead to performance improvements across these diverse domains and languages.