As a capability coming from computation, how does AI differ fundamentally from the capabilities delivered by rule-based software program? The paper examines the behavior of artificial intelligence (AI) from engineering points of view to clarify its nature and limits. The paper argues that the rationality underlying humanity's impulse to pursue, articulate, and adhere to rules deserves to be valued and preserved. Identifying where rule-based practical rationality ends is the beginning of making it aware until action. Although the rules of AI behaviors are still hidden or only weakly observable, the paper has proposed a methodology to make a sense of discrimination possible and practical to identify the distinctions of the behavior of AI models with three types of decisions. It is a prerequisite for human responsibilities with alternative possibilities, considering how and when to use AI. It would be a solid start for people to ensure AI system soundness for the well-being of humans, society, and the environment.

Rule-based systems must solve complex matching problems within tight time constraints to be effective in real-time applications, such as planning and reactive control for AI agents, as well as low-latency relational database querying. Pattern-matching systems can encounter issues where exponential time and space are required to find matches for rules with many underconstrained variables, or which produce combinatorial intermediate partial matches (but are otherwise well-constrained). When online AI systems automatically generate rules from example-driven induction or code synthesis, they can easily produce worst-case matching patterns that slow or halt program execution by exceeding available memory. In our own work with cognitive systems that learn from example, we've found that aggressive forms of anti-unification-based generalization can easily produce these circumstances. To make these systems practical without hand-engineering constraints or succumbing to unpredictable failure modes, we introduce a new matching algorithm called CORGI (Collection-Oriented Relational Graph Iteration). Unlike RETE-based approaches, CORGI offers quadratic time and space guarantees for finding single satisficing matches, and the ability to iteratively stream subsequent matches without committing entire conflict sets to memory. CORGI differs from RETE in that it does not have a traditional $β$-memory for collecting partial matches. Instead, CORGI takes a two-step approach: a graph of grounded relations is built/maintained in a forward pass, and an iterator generates matches as needed by working backward through the graph. This approach eliminates the high-latency delays and memory overflows that can result from populating full conflict sets. In a performance evaluation, we demonstrate that CORGI significantly outperforms RETE implementations from SOAR and OPS5 on a simple combinatorial matching task.

Personalization, while extensively studied in conventional autonomous driving pipelines, has been largely overlooked in the context of end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD), despite its critical role in fostering user trust, safety perception, and real-world adoption. A primary bottleneck is the absence of large-scale real-world datasets that systematically capture driving preferences, severely limiting the development and evaluation of personalized E2EAD models. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale real-world dataset explicitly curated for personalized E2EAD, integrating comprehensive scene topology with rich dynamic context derived from agent dynamics and semantics inferred via a fine-tuned vision-language model (VLM). We propose a hybrid annotation pipeline that combines behavioral analysis, rule-and-distribution-based heuristics, and subjective semantic modeling guided by VLM reasoning, with final refinement through human-in-the-loop verification. Building upon this dataset, we introduce the first standardized benchmark for systematically evaluating personalized E2EAD models. Empirical evaluations on state-of-the-art architectures demonstrate that incorporating personalized driving preferences significantly improves behavioral alignment with human demonstrations.

The AI conversation can be traced as far back as Alan Turing's milestone paper published in 1950, which considered the fundamental question "Can machines think?" [1]. In 1956, AI got its name and mission as a scientific field at the first AI conference held at Dartmouth College [2]. Following AI's foundational period in the 1950s ~ 1970s, AI has evolved from early rule-based systems (1970s ~ 1990s), through classical machine learning and deep learning with neural networks (1990s ~ 2020s), to today's generative and agentic AI systems (since 2010s). Correspondingly, as a vital requirement of these systems, the reliability concept and concerns are also evolving, particularly in the interpretation of "required function" (see Table 1 in Chapter 10), based on the definition in standards like ISO 8402 "The ability of an item to perform a required function, under given environmental and operational conditions and for a stated period of time ". While a conventional AI system is concerned with providing stable and accurate classifications, predictions, or optimizations, a reliable generative AI system focuses on producing outputs that are trustworthy, consistent, safe, and contextually appropriate [3]. Building on both, a reliable agentic AI system should additionally conduct functions of reasoning, goal alignment, planning, safe adaption and interaction in dynamic and collaborative multi-agent contexts. The expansion of reliability concepts has introduced new challenges and research opportunities, as exemplified in Figure 1. In the following sections, we shed lights on these challenges and opportunities in building reliable AI systems, particularly, agentic AI systems.

Diagnosing the root causes of Quality of Experience (QoE) degradations in operational mobile networks is challenging due to complex cross-layer interactions among kernel performance indicators (KPIs) and the scarcity of reliable expert annotations. Although rule-based heuristics can generate labels at scale, they are noisy and coarse-grained, limiting the accuracy of purely data-driven approaches. To address this, we propose DK-Root, a joint data-and-knowledge-driven framework that unifies scalable weak supervision with precise expert guidance for robust root-cause analysis. DK-Root first pretrains an encoder via contrastive representation learning using abundant rule-based labels while explicitly denoising their noise through a supervised contrastive objective. To supply task-faithful data augmentation, we introduce a class-conditional diffusion model that generates KPIs sequences preserving root-cause semantics, and by controlling reverse diffusion steps, it produces weak and strong augmentations that improve intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Finally, the encoder and the lightweight classifier are jointly fine-tuned with scarce expert-verified labels to sharpen decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on a real-world, operator-grade dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy, with DK-Root surpassing traditional ML and recent semi-supervised time-series methods. Ablations confirm the necessity of the conditional diffusion augmentation and the pretrain-finetune design, validating both representation quality and classification gains.

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 has significantly enhanced data-driven methodologies within the nuclear industry, notably enhancing safety and economic efficiency. This advancement challenges the precise prediction of future maintenance needs for assets, which is crucial for reducing downtime and operational costs. However, the effectiveness of data-driven methodologies in the nuclear sector requires extensive domain knowledge due to the complexity of the systems involved. Thus, this paper proposes a novel predictive maintenance methodology that combines data-driven techniques with domain knowledge from a nuclear equipment. The methodological originality of this paper is located on two levels: highlighting the limitations of purely data-driven approaches and demonstrating the importance of knowledge in enhancing the performance of the predictive models. The applicative novelty of this work lies in its use within a domain such as a nuclear industry, which is highly restricted and ultrasensitive due to security, economic and environmental concerns. A detailed real-world case study which compares the current state of equipment monitoring with two scenarios, demonstrate that the methodology significantly outperforms purely data-driven methods in failure prediction. While purely data-driven methods achieve only a modest performance with a prediction horizon limited to 3 h and a F1 score of 56.36%, the hybrid approach increases the prediction horizon to 24 h and achieves a higher F1 score of 93.12%.

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.

Navigating human-populated environments without causing discomfort is a critical capability for socially-aware agents. While rule-based approaches offer interpretability through predefined psychological principles, they often lack gener-alizability and flexibility. Conversely, data-driven methods can learn complex behaviors from large-scale datasets, but are typically inefficient, opaque, and difficult to align with human intuitions. To bridge this gap, we propose RLSLM, a hybrid Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates a rule-based Social Locomotion Model, grounded in empirical behavioral experiments, into the reward function of a reinforcement learning framework. The social locomotion model generates an orientation-sensitive social comfort field that quantifies human comfort across space, enabling socially aligned navigation policies with minimal training. RL-SLM then jointly optimizes mechanical energy and social comfort, allowing agents to avoid intrusions into personal or group space. A human-agent interaction experiment using an immersive VR-based setup demonstrates that RLSLM outperforms state-of-the-art rule-based models in user experience. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further show the model's significantly improved interpretability over conventional data-driven methods. This work presents a scalable, human-centered methodology that effectively integrates cognitive science and machine learning for real-world social navigation.

Recursive prompting with large language models enables scalable synthetic dataset generation but introduces the risk of bias amplification. We investigate gender bias dynamics across three generations of recursive text generation using three complementary evaluation frameworks: rule-based pattern matching, embedding-based semantic similarity, and downstream task performance. Experiments with three initial bias levels (0.1, 0.3, 0.6) and four mitigation strategies reveal equilibrium dynamics rather than monotonic amplification. The low initial bias amplifies toward the model's inherent bias level (+36%), whereas the high initial bias decays toward it (-26%). Among mitigation methods, contrastive augmentation, which introduces gender-swapped variants, achieves significant downstream bias reduction (98.8% for low initial bias and 91% on average) despite producing higher embedding-based bias scores. This paradox demonstrates that semantic similarity metrics may diverge from behavioral fairness outcomes, highlighting the need for multidimensional evaluation in responsible synthetic data generation.

The art and science of Quranic recitation (Tajweed), a discipline governed by meticulous phonetic, rhythmic, and theological principles, confronts substantial educational challenges in today's digital age. Although modern technology offers unparalleled opportunities for learning, existing automated systems for evaluating recitation have struggled to gain broad acceptance or demonstrate educational effectiveness. This literature review examines this crucial disparity, offering a thorough analysis of scholarly research, digital platforms, and commercial tools developed over the past twenty years. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental flaw in current approaches that adapt Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, which emphasize word identification over qualitative acoustic evaluation. These systems suffer from limitations such as reliance on biased datasets, demographic disparities, and an inability to deliver meaningful feedback for improvement. Challenging these data-centric methodologies, we advocate for a paradigm shift toward a knowledge-based computational framework. By leveraging the unchanging nature of the Quranic text and the well-defined rules of Tajweed, we propose that an effective evaluation system should be built upon rule-based acoustic modeling centered on canonical pronunciation principles and articulation points (Makhraj), rather than depending on statistical patterns derived from flawed or biased data. The review concludes that the future of automated Quranic recitation assessment lies in hybrid systems that combine linguistic expertise with advanced audio processing. Such an approach paves the way for developing reliable, fair, and pedagogically effective tools that can authentically assist learners across the globe.