In Part I of this series, we established a rigorous mathematical isomorphism between ant colony decision-making and random forest learning, demonstrating that variance reduction through decorrelation is a universal principle shared by biological and computational ensembles. Here we turn to the complementary mechanism: bias reduction through adaptive weighting. Just as boosting algorithms sequentially focus on difficult instances, ant colonies dynamically amplify successful foraging paths through pheromone-mediated recruitment. We prove that these processes are mathematically isomorphic, establishing that the fundamental theorem of weak learnability has a direct analog in colony decision-making. We develop a formal mapping between AdaBoost's adaptive reweighting and ant recruitment dynamics, show that the margin theory of boosting corresponds to the stability of quorum decisions, and demonstrate through comprehensive simulation that ant colonies implementing adaptive recruitment achieve the same bias-reduction benefits as boosting algorithms. This completes a unified theory of ensemble intelligence, revealing that both variance reduction (Part I) and bias reduction (Part II) are manifestations of the same underlying mathematical principles governing collective intelligence in biological and computational systems.

Social insect colonies and ensemble machine learning methods represent two of the most successful examples of decentralized information processing in nature and computation respectively. Here we develop a rigorous mathematical framework demonstrating that ant colony decision-making and random forest learning are isomorphic under a common formalism of \textbf{stochastic ensemble intelligence}. We show that the mechanisms by which genetically identical ants achieve functional differentiation -- through stochastic response to local cues and positive feedback -- map precisely onto the bootstrap aggregation and random feature subsampling that decorrelate decision trees. Using tools from Bayesian inference, multi-armed bandit theory, and statistical learning theory, we prove that both systems implement identical variance reduction strategies through decorrelation of identical units. We derive explicit mappings between ant recruitment rates and tree weightings, pheromone trail reinforcement and out-of-bag error estimation, and quorum sensing and prediction averaging. This isomorphism suggests that collective intelligence, whether biological or artificial, emerges from a universal principle: \textbf{randomized identical agents + diversity-enforcing mechanisms $\rightarrow$ emergent optimality}.

Russia's war death tally spurs European scrutiny on recruitment Ukrainian servicemen prepare before training at an undisclosed location in the country's Donetsk region on Wednesday. The number of Russian soldiers killed in action in the war in Ukraine has jumped in recent weeks, a dynamic that -- if sustained -- could make it hard for the Kremlin to replace troops without some form of mobilization, according to European estimates. In the grim calculus of war, he cited an ambition to raise that number to 50,000 by this summer -- a figure that would roughly double the monthly average calculated by NATO in 2025. The higher lethality is a result of more effective Ukrainian drone operations, with the ratio of killed to wounded skewing recently toward war dead, according to assessments from multiple European governments. With those estimates showing that the number of fatalities has reached the Kremlin's recruitment level, several of the people said the trajectory would make it difficult to replace losses without a mobilization drive.

Adaptive behavior in volatile environments requires agents to deploy different value-control regimes across latent contexts, but representing separate preferences, policy biases, and action confidence for every situation is intractable. We introduce value profiles: a small set of reusable bundles of value-related parameters--outcome preferences, policy priors, and policy precision--that are assigned to hidden states in the generative model. As posterior beliefs over states evolve trial-by-trial, effective control parameters emerge through belief-weighted mixing, enabling state-conditional strategy recruitment without maintaining independent parameters for each situation. We evaluate this framework in probabilistic reversal learning, comparing static precision, entropy-coupled dynamic precision, and profile-based models using cross-validated log-likelihood and information criteria. Model comparison using AIC favors the profile-based model over simpler alternatives ( 100-point differences), with consistent parameter recovery demonstrating structural identifiability even when context must be inferred from noisy observations. Model-based inference suggests that, in this task, adaptive control operates primarily through policy prior modulation rather than policy precision modulation, with gradual belief-driven profile recruitment confirming state-conditional rather than merely uncertainty-driven control. Overall, reusable value profiles provide a tractable computational account of belief-conditioned value control in volatile environments, providing a reusable, mode-like representational scheme for behavioral flexibility that yields testable signatures of belief-conditioned control.

Academia heavily relies on trust. This trust-based system, however, creates a significant vulnerability: identity theft. In this Opinion column, we describe newly uncovered cases of identity theft within the scientific peer-review process within the research area of artificial intelligence (AI), involving modus operandi that could also disrupt other academic procedures. We begin by outlining the peer-review process, focusing on scientific conferences since they are the most prominent venues of publication in computer science. Peer review is foundational to scientific inquiry, relying on researchers to voluntarily apply their expertise in evaluating scientific papers.

The diffusion of ideas and language in society has conventionally been described by S-shaped models, such as the logistic curve. However, the role of sub-exponential growth -- a slower-than-exponential pattern known in epidemiology -- has been largely overlooked in broader social phenomena. Here, we present a piecewise power-law model to characterize complex growth curves with a few parameters. We systematically analyzed a large-scale dataset of approximately one billion Japanese blog articles linked to Wikipedia vocabulary, and observed consistent patterns in web search trend data (English, Spanish, and Japanese). Our analysis of 2,963 items, selected for reliable estimation (e.g., sufficient duration/peak, monotonic growth), reveals that 1,625 (55%) diffusion patterns without abrupt level shifts were adequately described by one or two segments. For single-segment curves, we found that (i) the mode of the shape parameter $α$ was near 0.5, indicating prevalent sub-exponential growth; (ii) the peak diffusion scale is primarily determined by the growth rate $R$, with minor contributions from $α$ or the duration $T$; and (iii) $α$ showed a tendency to vary with the nature of the topic, being smaller for niche/local topics and larger for widely shared ones. Furthermore, a micro-behavioral model of outward (stranger) vs. inward (community) contact suggests that $α$ can be interpreted as an index of the preference for outward-oriented communication. These findings suggest that sub-exponential growth is a common pattern of social diffusion, and our model provides a practical framework for consistently describing, comparing, and interpreting complex and diverse growth curves.

We present a novel framework for training large language models with continuously adjustable internal representations that span the full spectrum from localist (interpretable, rule-based) to distributed (generalizable, efficient) encodings. The key innovations are (1) a locality dial, a tunable parameter that dynamically controls the degree of localization during both training and inference without requiring model retraining, (2) an information-theoretic recruitment mechanism that adaptively allocates semantic blocks as needed, eliminating the requirement for complete domain knowledge at initialization, and (3) a hierarchical recruitment framework that extends capacity allocation to entire specialized LLMs, enabling multi-granularity architectural adaptation. This is achieved through group sparsity penalties on attention mechanisms, information-theoretic anchor design, dynamic rule injection, and principled recruitment criteria based on penalized likelihood with explicit units. We provide rigorous mathematical results establishing explicit threshold conditions under which attention provably concentrates on semantically relevant blocks at stationary points, with exact bounds on attention entropy and pointer fidelity. The hierarc hical recruitment mechanism provides convergence guarantees at both the block level (fine-grained, within-LLM) and the LLM level (coarse-grained, cross-domain), ensuring the system discovers semantic partitions that balance model complexity against data encoding efficiency. This framework enables practitioners to continuously interpolate between interpretable and high-performance modes while adapti ng architectural capacity at multiple granularities, supporting applications in regulated domains requiring both transparency and capability.

The promise of AI in medicine depends on learning from data that reflect what matters to patients and clinicians. Most existing models are trained on electronic health records (EHRs), which capture biological measures but rarely patient-clinician interactions. These relationships, central to care, unfold across voice, text, and video, yet remain absent from datasets. As a result, AI systems trained solely on EHRs risk perpetuating a narrow biomedical view of medicine and overlooking the lived exchanges that define clinical encounters. Our objective is to design, implement, and evaluate the feasibility of a longitudinal, multimodal system for capturing patient-clinician encounters, linking 360 degree video/audio recordings with surveys and EHR data to create a dataset for AI research. This single site study is in an academic outpatient endocrinology clinic at Mayo Clinic. Adult patients with in-person visits to participating clinicians are invited to enroll. Encounters are recorded with a 360 degree video camera. After each visit, patients complete a survey on empathy, satisfaction, pace, and treatment burden. Demographic and clinical data are extracted from the EHR. Feasibility is assessed using five endpoints: clinician consent, patient consent, recording success, survey completion, and data linkage across modalities. Recruitment began in January 2025. By August 2025, 35 of 36 eligible clinicians (97%) and 212 of 281 approached patients (75%) had consented. Of consented encounters, 162 (76%) had complete recordings and 204 (96%) completed the survey. This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a replicable framework for capturing the multimodal dynamics of patient-clinician encounters. By detailing workflows, endpoints, and ethical safeguards, it provides a template for longitudinal datasets and lays the foundation for AI models that incorporate the complexity of care.

Clinical trials (CT) are essential for advancing medical research and treatment, yet efficiently recruiting eligible participants -- each of whom must meet complex eligibility criteria -- remains a significant challenge. Traditional recruitment approaches, such as advertisements or electronic health record screening within hospitals, are often time-consuming and geographically constrained. This work addresses the recruitment challenge by leveraging the vast amount of health-related information individuals share on social media platforms. With the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs) capable of sophisticated text understanding, we pose the central research question: Can LLM-driven tools facilitate CT recruitment by identifying potential participants through their engagement on social media? To investigate this question, we introduce TRIALQA, a novel dataset comprising two social media collections from the subreddits on colon cancer and prostate cancer. Using eligibility criteria from public real-world CTs, experienced annotators are hired to annotate TRIALQA to indicate (1) whether a social media user meets a given eligibility criterion and (2) the user's stated reasons for interest in participating in CT. We benchmark seven widely used LLMs on these two prediction tasks, employing six distinct training and inference strategies. Our extensive experiments reveal that, while LLMs show considerable promise, they still face challenges in performing the complex, multi-hop reasoning needed to accurately assess eligibility criteria.

Heterogeneous data, which encompass both numerical financial variables and textual records, present substantial challenges for credit monitoring. To address this issue, we propose Advanced Spectral Clustering (ASC), a method that integrates financial and textual similarities through an optimized weight parameter and selects eigenvectors using a novel eigenvalue-silhouette optimization approach. Evaluated on a dataset comprising 1,428 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), ASC achieves a Silhouette score that is 18% higher than that of a single-type data baseline method. Furthermore, the resulting clusters offer actionable insights; for instance, 51% of low-risk firms are found to include the term 'social recruitment' in their textual records. The robustness of ASC is confirmed across multiple clustering algorithms, including k-means, k-medians, and k-medoids, with ΔIntra/Inter < 0.13 and ΔSilhouette Coefficient < 0.02. By bridging spectral clustering theory with heterogeneous data applications, ASC enables the identification of meaningful clusters, such as recruitment-focused SMEs exhibiting a 30% lower default risk, thereby supporting more targeted and effective credit interventions.