Industrial smoke segmentation is critical for air-quality monitoring and environmental protection but is often hampered by the high cost and scarcity of pixel-level annotations in real-world settings. We introduce CEDANet, a human-in-the-loop, class-aware domain adaptation framework that uniquely integrates weak, citizen-provided video-level labels with adversarial feature alignment. Specifically, we refine pseudo-labels generated by a source-trained segmentation model using citizen votes, and employ class-specific domain discriminators to transfer rich source-domain representations to the industrial domain. Comprehensive experiments on SMOKE5K and custom IJmond datasets demonstrate that CEDANet achieves an F1-score of 0.414 and a smoke-class IoU of 0.261 with citizen feedback, vastly outperforming the baseline model, which scored 0.083 and 0.043 respectively. This represents a five-fold increase in F1-score and a six-fold increase in smoke-class IoU. Notably, CEDANet with citizen-constrained pseudo-labels achieves performance comparable to the same architecture trained on limited 100 fully annotated images with F1-score of 0.418 and IoU of 0.264, demonstrating its ability to reach small-sampled fully supervised-level accuracy without target-domain annotations. Our research validates the scalability and cost-efficiency of combining citizen science with weakly supervised domain adaptation, offering a practical solution for complex, data-scarce environmental monitoring applications.

We study Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge (DSB) models in the context of dynamical astrophysical systems, specifically tackling observational inverse prediction tasks within Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) for star formation. We introduce the Astro-DSB model, a variant of DSB with the pairwise domain assumption tailored for astrophysical dynamics. By investigating its learning process and prediction performance in both physically simulated data and in real observations (the Taurus B213 data), we present two main takeaways. First, from the astrophysical perspective, our proposed paired DSB method improves interpretability, learning efficiency, and prediction performance over conventional astrostatistical and other machine learning methods. Second, from the generative modeling perspective, probabilistic generative modeling reveals improvements over discriminative pixel-to-pixel modeling in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) testing cases of physical simulations with unseen initial conditions and different dominant physical processes. Our study expands research into diffusion models beyond the traditional visual synthesis application and provides evidence of the models' learning abilities beyond pure data statistics, paving a path for future physics-aware generative models which can align dynamics between machine learning and real (astro)physical systems.

The sim-to-real gap, where agents trained in a simulator face significant performance degradation during testing, is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Extansive works adopt the framework of distributionally robust RL, to learn a policy that acts robustly under worst case environment shift. Within this framework, our objective is to devise algorithms that are sample efficient with interactive data collection and large state spaces. By assuming d-rectangularity of environment dynamic shift, we identify a fundamental hardness result for learning in online Markov game, and address it by adopting minimum value assumption. Then, a novel least square value iteration type algorithm, DR-CCE-LSI, with exploration bonus devised specifically for multiple agents, is proposed to find an \episilon-approximate robust Coarse Correlated Equilibrium(CCE). To obtain sample efficient learning, we find that: when the feature mapping function satisfies certain properties, our algorithm, DR-CCE-LSI, is able to achieve ε-approximate CCE with a regret bound of O{dHmin{H,1/min{σ_i}}\sqrt{K}}, where K is the number of interacting episodes, H is the horizon length, d is the feature dimension, and \simga_i represents the uncertainty level of player i. Our work introduces the first sample-efficient algorithm for this setting, matches the best result so far in single agent setting, and achieves minimax optimalsample complexity in terms of the feature dimension d. Meanwhile, we also conduct simulation study to validate the efficacy of our algorithm in learning a robust equilibrium.

The cost of error in many high-stakes settings is asymmetric: misdiagnosing pneumonia when absent is an inconvenience, but failing to detect it when present can be life-threatening. Because of this, artificial intelligence (AI) models used to assist such decisions are frequently trained with asymmetric loss functions that incorporate human decision-makers' trade-offs between false positives and false negatives. In two focal applications, we show that this standard alignment practice can backfire. In both cases, it would be better to train the machine learning model with a loss function that ignores the human's objective and then adjust predictions ex post according to that objective. We rationalize this result using an economic model of incentive design with endogenous information acquisition. The key insight from our theoretical framework is that machine classifiers perform not one but two incentivized tasks: choosing how to classify and learning how to classify. We show that while the adjustments engineers use correctly incentivize choosing, they can simultaneously reduce the incentives to learn. Our formal treatment of the problem reveals that methods embraced for their intuitive appeal can in fact misalign human and machine objectives in predictable ways.

Multi-environment (M-En) networks integrate diverse traffic sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) and traditional computing systems, creating complex and evolving conditions for malicious traffic detection. Existing machine learning (ML)-based approaches, typically trained on static single-domain datasets, often fail to generalize across heterogeneous network environments. To address this gap, we develop a realistic Docker-NS3-based testbed that emulates both IoT and traditional traffic conditions, enabling the generation and capture of live, labeled network flows. The resulting M-En Dataset combines this traffic with curated public PCAP traces to provide comprehensive coverage of benign and malicious behaviors. Building on this foundation, we propose Multi-LF, a real-time continuous learning framework that combines a lightweight model (M1) for rapid detection with a deeper model (M2) for high-confidence refinement and adaptation. A confidence-based coordination mechanism enhances efficiency without compromising accuracy, while weight interpolation mitigates catastrophic forgetting during continuous updates. Features extracted at 1-second intervals capture fine-grained temporal patterns, enabling early recognition of evolving attack behaviors. Implemented and evaluated within the Docker-NS3 testbed on live traffic, Multi-LF achieves an accuracy of 0.999 while requiring human intervention for only 0.0026 percent of packets, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality for real-time malicious traffic detection in heterogeneous network environments.

We introduce a novel Mutual Information (MI) estimator that fundamentally reframes the discriminative approach. Instead of training a classifier to discriminate between joint and marginal distributions, we learn a normalizing flow that transforms one into the other. This technique produces a computationally efficient and precise MI estimate that scales well to high dimensions and across a wide range of ground-truth MI values.

The integration of different learning paradigms has long been a focus of machine learning research, aimed at overcoming the inherent limitations of individual methods. Fuzzy rule-based models excel in interpretability and have seen widespread application across diverse fields. However, they face challenges such as complex design specifications and scalability issues with large datasets. The fusion of different techniques and strategies, particularly Gradient Boosting, with Fuzzy Rule-Based Models offers a robust solution to these challenges. This paper proposes an Integrated Fusion Framework that merges the strengths of both paradigms to enhance model performance and interpretability. At each iteration, a Fuzzy Rule-Based Model is constructed and controlled by a dynamic factor to optimize its contribution to the overall ensemble. This control factor serves multiple purposes: it prevents model dominance, encourages diversity, acts as a regularization parameter, and provides a mechanism for dynamic tuning based on model performance, thus mitigating the risk of overfitting. Additionally, the framework incorporates a sample-based correction mechanism that allows for adaptive adjustments based on feedback from a validation set. Experimental results substantiate the efficacy of the presented gradient boosting framework for fuzzy rule-based models, demonstrating performance enhancement, especially in terms of mitigating overfitting and complexity typically associated with many rules. By leveraging an optimal factor to govern the contribution of each model, the framework improves performance, maintains interpretability, and simplifies the maintenance and update of the models.

Multivariate time series data come as a collection of time series describing different aspects of a certain temporal phenomenon. Anomaly detection in this type of data constitutes a challenging problem yet with numerous applications in science and engineering because anomaly scores come from the simultaneous consideration of the temporal and variable relationships. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based approach to detect anomalies concerning the amplitude and the shape of multivariate time series. First, we use a sliding window to generate a set of multivariate subsequences and thereafter apply an extended fuzzy clustering to reveal a structure present within the generated multivariate subsequences. Finally, a reconstruction criterion is employed to reconstruct the multivariate subsequences with the optimal cluster centers and the partition matrix. We construct a confidence index to quantify a level of anomaly detected in the series and apply Particle Swarm Optimization as an optimization vehicle for the problem of anomaly detection. Experimental studies completed on several synthetic and six real-world datasets suggest that the proposed methods can detect the anomalies in multivariate time series. With the help of available clusters revealed by the extended fuzzy clustering, the proposed framework can detect anomalies in the multivariate time series and is suitable for identifying anomalous amplitude and shape patterns in various application domains such as health care, weather data analysis, finance, and disease outbreak detection.

Infants often exhibit goal-directed behaviors, such as reaching for a sensory stimulus, even when no external reward criterion is provided. These intrinsically motivated behaviors facilitate spontaneous exploration and learning of the body and environment during early developmental stages. Although computational modeling can offer insight into the mechanisms underlying such behaviors, many existing studies on intrinsic motivation focus primarily on how exploration contributes to acquiring external rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel density model for an agent's own multimodal sensory experiences, called the "self-prior," and investigate whether it can autonomously induce goal-directed behavior. Integrated within an active inference framework based on the free energy principle, the self-prior generates behavioral references purely from an intrinsic process that minimizes mismatches between average past sensory experiences and current observations. This mechanism is also analogous to the acquisition and utilization of a body schema through continuous interaction with the environment. We examine this approach in a simulated environment and confirm that the agent spontaneously reaches toward a tactile stimulus. Our study implements intrinsically motivated behavior shaped by the agent's own sensory experiences, demonstrating the spontaneous emergence of intentional behavior during early development.

Bayesian networks and causal models provide frameworks for handling queries about external interventions and counterfactuals, enabling tasks that go beyond what probability distributions alone can address. While these formalisms are often informally described as capturing causal knowledge, there is a lack of a formal theory characterizing the type of knowledge required to predict the effects of external interventions. This work introduces the theoretical framework of causal systems to clarify Aristotle's distinction between knowledge that and knowledge why within artificial intelligence. By interpreting existing artificial intelligence technologies as causal systems, it investigates the corresponding types of knowledge. Furthermore, it argues that predicting the effects of external interventions is feasible only with knowledge why, providing a more precise understanding of the knowledge necessary for such tasks.