Bus transit plays a vital role in urban public transportation but often struggles to provide accurate and reliable departure times. This leads to delays, passenger dissatisfaction, and decreased ridership, particularly in transit-dependent areas. A major challenge lies in the discrepancy between actual and scheduled bus departure times, which disrupts timetables and impacts overall operational efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper presents a neural network-based approach for real-time bus departure time prediction tailored for smart IoT public transit applications. We leverage AI-driven models to enhance the accuracy of bus schedules by preprocessing data, engineering relevant features, and implementing a fully connected neural network that utilizes historical departure data to predict departure times at subsequent stops. In our case study analyzing bus data from Boston, we observed an average deviation of nearly 4 minutes from scheduled times. However, our model, evaluated across 151 bus routes, demonstrates a significant improvement, predicting departure time deviations with an accuracy of under 80 seconds. This advancement not only improves the reliability of bus transit schedules but also plays a crucial role in enabling smart bus systems and IoT applications within public transit networks. By providing more accurate real-time predictions, our approach can facilitate the integration of IoT devices, such as smart bus stops and passenger information systems, that rely on precise data for optimal performance.

Epilepsy is a prevalent neurological disorder globally, impacting around 50 million people \cite{WHO_epilepsy_50million}. Epileptic seizures result from sudden abnormal electrical activity in the brain, which can be read as sudden and significant changes in the EEG signal of the brain. The signal can vary in severity and frequency, which results in loss of consciousness and muscle contractions for a short period of time \cite{epilepsyfoundation_myoclonic}. Individuals with epilepsy often face significant employment challenges due to safety concerns in certain work environments. Many jobs that involve working at heights, operating heavy machinery, or in other potentially hazardous settings may be restricted for people with seizure disorders. This certainly limits job options and economic opportunities for those living with epilepsy.

Training on diverse, internet-scale data is a key factor in the success of recent large foundation models. Yet, using the same recipe for building embodied agents has faced noticeable difficulties. Despite the availability of many crowd-sourced embodied datasets, their action spaces often exhibit significant heterogeneity due to distinct physical embodiment and control interfaces for different robots, causing substantial challenges in developing embodied foundation models using cross-domain data. In this paper, we introduce UniAct, a new embodied foundation modeling framework operating in a tokenized Universal Action Space. Our learned universal actions capture the generic atomic behaviors across diverse robots by exploiting their shared structural features, and enable enhanced cross-domain data utilization and cross-embodiment generalizations by eliminating the notorious heterogeneity. The universal actions can be efficiently translated back to heterogeneous actionable commands by simply adding embodiment-specific details, from which fast adaptation to new robots becomes simple and straightforward. Our 0.5B instantiation of UniAct outperforms 14X larger SOTA embodied foundation models in extensive evaluations on various real-world and simulation robots, showcasing exceptional cross-embodiment control and adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of adopting universal actions. Project page: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct

Modeling lithium-ion battery (LIB) degradation offers significant cost savings and enhances the safety and reliability of electric vehicles (EVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Whilst data-driven methods have received great attention for forecasting degradation, they often demonstrate limited generalization ability and tend to underperform particularly in critical scenarios involving accelerated degradation, which are crucial to predict accurately. These methods also fail to elucidate the underlying causes of degradation. Alternatively, physical models provide a deeper understanding, but their complex parameters and inherent uncertainties limit their applicability in real-world settings. To this end, we propose a new model - ACCEPT. Our novel framework uses contrastive learning to map the relationship between the underlying physical degradation parameters and observable operational quantities, combining the benefits of both approaches. Furthermore, due to the similarity of degradation paths between LIBs with the same chemistry, this model transfers non-trivially to most downstream tasks, allowing for zero-shot inference. Additionally, since categorical features can be included in the model, it can generalize to other LIB chemistries. This work establishes a foundational battery degradation model, providing reliable forecasts across a range of battery types and operating conditions.

LLM test-time compute (or LLM inference) via search has emerged as a promising research area with rapid developments. However, current frameworks often adopt distinct perspectives on three key aspects (task definition, LLM profiling, and search procedures), making direct comparisons challenging. Moreover, the search algorithms employed often diverge from standard implementations, and their specific characteristics are not thoroughly specified. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive technical review that unifies task definitions and provides modular definitions of LLM profiling and search procedures. The definitions enable precise comparisons of various LLM inference frameworks while highlighting their departures from conventional search algorithms. We also discuss the applicability, performance, and efficiency of these methods. For further details and ongoing updates, please refer to our GitHub repository: https://github.com/xinzhel/LLM-Agent-Survey/blob/main/search.md

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in natural language processing tasks, but their ability to generate human-quality text raises significant ethical and operational concerns in settings where it is important to recognize whether or not a given text was generated by a human. Thus, recent work has focused on developing techniques for watermarking LLM-generated text, i.e., introducing an almost imperceptible signal that allows a provider equipped with a secret key to determine if given text was generated by their model. Current watermarking techniques are often not practical due to concerns with generation latency, detection time, degradation in text quality, or robustness. Many of these drawbacks come from the focus on token-level watermarking, which ignores the inherent structure of text. In this work, we introduce a new scheme, GaussMark, that is simple and efficient to implement, has formal statistical guarantees on its efficacy, comes at no cost in generation latency, and embeds the watermark into the weights of the model itself, providing a structural watermark. Our approach is based on Gaussian independence testing and is motivated by recent empirical observations that minor additive corruptions to LLM weights can result in models of identical (or even improved) quality. We show that by adding a small amount of Gaussian noise to the weights of a given LLM, we can watermark the model in a way that is statistically detectable by a provider who retains the secret key. We provide formal statistical bounds on the validity and power of our procedure. Through an extensive suite of experiments, we demonstrate that GaussMark is reliable, efficient, and relatively robust to corruptions such as insertions, deletions, substitutions, and roundtrip translations and can be instantiated with essentially no loss in model quality.

The use of computational ontologies is well-established in the field of Medical Informatics. The topic of Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) has also received extensive attention. Work at the intersection of ontologies and SDoH has been published. However, a standardized framework for Social Determinants of Education (SDoEd) is lacking. In this paper, we are closing the gap by introducing an SDoEd ontology for creating a precise conceptualization of the interplay between life circumstances of students and their possible educational achievements. The ontology was developed utilizing suggestions from ChatGPT-3.5-010422 and validated using peer-reviewed research articles. The first version of developed ontology was evaluated by human experts in the field of education and validated using standard ontology evaluation software. This version of the SDoEd ontology contains 231 domain concepts, 10 object properties, and 24 data properties

Dynamic predictive modeling using electronic health record (EHR) data has gained significant attention in recent years. The reliability and trustworthiness of such models depend heavily on the quality of the underlying data, which is largely determined by the stages preceding the model development: data extraction from EHR systems and data preparation. We list over forty challenges encountered during these stages and provide actionable recommendations for addressing them. These challenges are organized into four categories: cohort definition, outcome definition, feature engineering, and data cleaning. This list is designed to serve as a practical guide for data extraction engineers and researchers, supporting better practices and improving the quality and real-world applicability of dynamic prediction models in clinical settings.

With the rapid development of large models in the field of artificial intelligence, how to enhance their application capabilities in handling complex problems in the field of scientific research remains a challenging problem to be solved. This study proposes an improved Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method based on prompt words. In the simulation search stage, it introduces dynamic adjustment of exploration parameters and adaptive selection strategies, which can better balance exploration and exploitation, thereby reducing the hallucination phenomenon. This paper takes the four subsets of the SciEval dataset as the test objects, and compares the Glm-4-flash+Improved MCTS method with the methods of several existing models. The results show that the Improved MCTS method performs better, providing new ideas and methods for the application of large models in the field of scientific research.

Learning robust and generalizable world models is crucial for enabling efficient and scalable robotic control in real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for learning world models that accurately capture complex, partially observable, and stochastic dynamics. The proposed method employs a dual-autoregressive mechanism and self-supervised training to achieve reliable long-horizon predictions without relying on domain-specific inductive biases, ensuring adaptability across diverse robotic tasks. We further propose a policy optimization framework that leverages world models for efficient training in imagined environments and seamless deployment in real-world systems. Through extensive experiments, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior autoregressive prediction accuracy, robustness to noise, and generalization across manipulation and locomotion tasks. Notably, policies trained with our method are successfully deployed on ANYmal D hardware in a zero-shot transfer, achieving robust performance with minimal sim-to-real performance loss. This work advances model-based reinforcement learning by addressing the challenges of long-horizon prediction, error accumulation, and sim-to-real transfer. By providing a scalable and robust framework, the introduced methods pave the way for adaptive and efficient robotic systems in real-world applications.