Ultrasound scanning is a critical imaging technique for real-time, non-invasive diagnostics. However, variations in patient anatomy and complex human-in-the-loop interactions pose significant challenges for autonomous robotic scanning. Existing ultrasound scanning robots are commonly limited to relatively low generalization and inefficient data utilization. To overcome these limitations, we present UltraDP, a Diffusion-Policy-based method that receives multi-sensory inputs (ultrasound images, wrist camera images, contact wrench, and probe pose) and generates actions that are fit for multi-modal action distributions in autonomous ultrasound scanning of carotid artery. We propose a specialized guidance module to enable the policy to output actions that center the artery in ultrasound images. To ensure stable contact and safe interaction between the robot and the human subject, a hybrid force-impedance controller is utilized to drive the robot to track such trajectories. Also, we have built a large-scale training dataset for carotid scanning comprising 210 scans with 460k sample pairs from 21 volunteers of both genders. By exploring our guidance module and DP's strong generalization ability, UltraDP achieves a 95% success rate in transverse scanning on previously unseen subjects, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Introduction: The application of Artificial Intelligence in games has evolved significantly, allowing for dynamic content generation. However, its use as a core gameplay co-creation tool remains underexplored. Objective: This paper proposes SpellForger, a game where players create custom spells by writing natural language prompts, aiming to provide a unique experience of personalization and creativity. Methodology: The system uses a supervised-trained BERT model to interpret player prompts. This model maps textual descriptions to one of many spell prefabs and balances their parameters (damage, cost, effects) to ensure competitive integrity. The game is developed in the Unity Game Engine, and the AI backend is in Python. Expected Results: W e expect to deliver a functional prototype that demonstrates the generation of spells in real time, applied to an engaging gameplay loop, where player creativity is central to the experience, validating the use of AI as a direct gameplay mechanic.

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for improving Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, existing RL approaches often rely on human-annotated labels or task-specific heuristics to define verifiable rewards, both of which are costly and difficult to scale. We introduce VisPlay, a self-evolving RL framework that enables VLMs to autonomously improve their reasoning abilities using large amounts of unlabeled image data. Starting from a single base VLM, VisPlay assigns the model into two interacting roles: an Image-Conditioned Questioner that formulates challenging yet answerable visual questions, and a Multimodal Reasoner that generates silver responses. These roles are jointly trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which incorporates diversity and difficulty rewards to balance the complexity of generated questions with the quality of the silver answers. VisPlay scales efficiently across two model families. When trained on Qwen2.5-VL and MiMo-VL, VisPlay achieves consistent improvements in visual reasoning, compositional generalization, and hallucination reduction across eight benchmarks, including MM-Vet and MMMU, demonstrating a scalable path toward self-evolving multimodal intelligence. The project page is available at https://bruno686.github.io/VisPlay/

IMACT-CXR is an interactive multi-agent conversational tutor that helps trainees interpret chest X-rays by unifying spatial annotation, gaze analysis, knowledge retrieval, and image-grounded reasoning in a single AutoGen-based workflow. The tutor simultaneously ingests learner bounding boxes, gaze samples, and free-text observations. Specialized agents evaluate localization quality, generate Socratic coaching, retrieve PubMed evidence, suggest similar cases from REFLACX, and trigger NV-Reason-CXR-3B for vision-language reasoning when mastery remains low or the learner explicitly asks. Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) maintains skill-specific mastery estimates that drive both knowledge reinforcement and case similarity retrieval. A lung-lobe segmentation module derived from a TensorFlow U-Net enables anatomically aware gaze feedback, and safety prompts prevent premature disclosure of ground-truth labels. We describe the system architecture, implementation highlights, and integration with the REFLACX dataset for real DICOM cases. IMACT-CXR demonstrates responsive tutoring flows with bounded latency, precise control over answer leakage, and extensibility toward live residency deployment. Preliminary evaluation shows improved localization and diagnostic reasoning compared to baselines.

Abstract--In serial batch (s-batch) scheduling, jobs from similar families are grouped into batches and processed sequentially to avoid repetitive setups that are required when processing consecutive jobs of different families. Despite its large success in scheduling, only three Constraint Programming (CP) models have been proposed for this problem considering minimum batch sizes, which is a common requirement in many practical settings, including the ion implantation area in semiconductor manufacturing. These existing CP models rely on a predefined virtual set of possible batches that suffers from the curse of dimensionality and adds complexity to the problem. This paper proposes a novel CP model that does not rely on this virtual set. Instead, it uses key alignment parameters that allow it to reason directly on the sequences of same-family jobs scheduled on the machines, resulting in a more compact formulation. This new model is further improved by exploiting the problem's structure with tailored search phases and strengthened inference levels of the constraint propagators. The extensive computational experiments on nearly five thousand instances compare the proposed models against existing methods in the literature, including mixed-integer programming formulations, tabu search meta-heuristics, and CP approaches. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed models on small-to-medium instances with up to 100 jobs, and their ability to find solutions up to 25% better than the ones produces by existing methods on large-scale instances with up to 500 jobs, 10 families, and 10 machines. In the current and highly competitive landscape of the manufacturing industry, companies are under growing pressure to minimize production costs and reduce cycle times. A crucial approach to achieving these goals and boosting production efficiency is processing multiple similar jobs in groups called batches [1]. Two types of batching can be distinguished in the scheduling literature, depending on how the jobs are processed inside their batch: (i) parallel batching (p-batch), where jobs inside a batch are processed in parallel at the same time [2]; and (ii) serial batching (s-batch), where jobs inside a batch are processed sequentially, one after the other [3]. The benefits of p-batching in the manufacturing industry are straightforward due to the parallelized processing of the jobs inside a batch. In contrast, the benefits of s-batching usually come from grouping jobs that require similar machine configurations to avoid repetitive setups [4].

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), are fundamentally transforming accounting research, creating both opportunities and competitive threats for scholars. This paper proposes a framework that classifies AI-accounting research along two dimensions: research focus (accounting-centric versus AI-centric) and methodological approach (AI-based versus traditional methods). We apply this framework to papers from the IJAIS special issue and recent AI-accounting research published in leading accounting journals to map existing studies and identify research opportunities. Using this same framework, we analyze how accounting researchers can leverage their expertise through strategic positioning and collaboration, revealing where accounting scholars' strengths create the most value. We further examine how GenAI and LLMs transform the research process itself, comparing the capabilities of human researchers and AI agents across the entire research workflow. This analysis reveals that while GenAI democratizes certain research capabilities, it simultaneously intensifies competition by raising expectations for higher-order contributions where human judgment, creativity, and theoretical depth remain valuable. These shifts call for reforming doctoral education to cultivate comparative advantages while building AI fluency.

Large language model (LLM) agents have recently shown strong performance on repository-level issue resolution, but existing systems are almost exclusively designed for Python and rely heavily on lexical retrieval and shallow code navigation. These approaches transfer poorly to C++ projects, where overloaded identifiers, nested namespaces, template instantiations, and deep control-flow structures make context retrieval and fault localization substantially more difficult. As a result, state-of-the-art Python-oriented agents show a drastic performance drop on the C++ subset of MultiSWE-bench. We introduce INFCODE-C++, the first C++-aware autonomous system for end-to-end issue resolution. The system combines two complementary retrieval mechanisms -- semantic code-intent retrieval and deterministic AST-structured querying -- to construct accurate, language-aware context for repair.These components enable precise localization and robust patch synthesis in large, statically typed C++ repositories. Evaluated on the \texttt{MultiSWE-bench-CPP} benchmark, INFCODE-C++ achieves a resolution rate of 25.58\%, outperforming the strongest prior agent by 10.85 percentage points and more than doubling the performance of MSWE-agent. Ablation and behavioral studies further demonstrate the critical role of semantic retrieval, structural analysis, and accurate reproduction in C++ issue resolution. INFCODE-C++ highlights the need for language-aware reasoning in multi-language software agents and establishes a foundation for future research on scalable, LLM-driven repair for complex, statically typed ecosystems.

Old cloud edge workload resource management is too reactive. The problem with relying on static thresholds is that we are either overspending for more resources than needed or have reduced performance because of their lack. This is why we work on proactive solutions. A framework developed for it stops reacting to the problems but starts expecting them. We design a hybrid architecture, combining two powerful tools: the CNN LSTM model for time series forecasting and an orchestrator based on multi agent Deep Reinforcement Learning In fact the novelty is in how we combine them as we embed the predictive forecast from the CNN LSTM directly into the DRL agent state space. That is what makes the AI manager smarter it sees the future, which allows it to make better decisions about a long term plan for where to run tasks That means finding that sweet spot between how much money is saved while keeping the system healthy and apps fast for users That is we have given it eyes in order to see down the road so that it does not have to lurch from one problem to another it finds a smooth path forward Our tests show our system easily beats the old methods It is great at solving tough problems like making complex decisions and juggling multiple goals at once like being cheap fast and reliable

Abstract--Underwater robotic manipulation is fundamentally challenged by extreme lighting variations, color distortion, and reduced visibility. We introduce Bi-AQUA, the first underwater bilateral control-based imitation learning framework that integrates lighting-aware visual processing for underwater robot arms. Bi-AQUA employs a hierarchical three-level lighting adaptation mechanism: a Lighting Encoder that extracts lighting representations from RGB images without manual annotation and is implicitly supervised by the imitation objective, FiLM modulation of visual backbone features for adaptive, lighting-aware feature extraction, and an explicit lighting token added to the transformer encoder input for task-aware conditioning. Experiments on a real-world underwater pick-and-place task under diverse static and dynamic lighting conditions show that Bi-AQUA achieves robust performance and substantially outperforms a bilateral baseline without lighting modeling. Ablation studies further confirm that all three lighting-aware components are critical. Underwater robotic manipulation is uniquely challenging because the visual appearance of the same scene can change drastically within seconds under shifts in the spectrum, intensity, and direction of underwater lighting [1].

Speculative sampling reduces the latency of autoregressive decoding for target model LLMs without sacrificing inference quality, by using a cheap draft model to suggest a candidate token and a verification criterion to accept or resample this token. To improve acceptance and decoding efficiency, recent work has explored the multi-draft extension, where at each step $n$ draft tokens are generated, and the verification criterion is a distribution conditioned on these. When this criterion maximizes the probability of accepting some draft token, it is called the optimal transport (OT). However, finding the OT is difficult, as it is the solution of a linear program (OTLP) in over $V^n$ variables, with $V$ being the vocabulary size. Two recent theoretical works have reframed the OTLP in terms of importance sampling or subset selection. In this work, we prove that these formulations are equivalent to an exponentially large relaxed OTLP, so it remains infeasible to solve. Then, we reverse engineer subset selection to formulate the OTLP as a max-flow problem. With a novel application of polymatroid theory, we reduce the exponentially large OTLP to a convex optimization problem in at most $V$ variables. This allows us to devise an algorithm for optimal $n$-draft speculative sampling when the $n$ tokens are chosen i.i.d. from a single draft model, which can be tuned to arbitrary accuracy. Finally, we measure acceptance rates and algorithm runtimes for various $n$ and top-$k$ draft sampling settings. Our findings give the first multi-draft algorithm with 90% acceptance and under 100 ms of overhead per generated token with negligible deviation from the target model distribution.