Our code is publicly available at a GitHub repository: https://github.com/12wang3/rrl. The datasets used in this paper come from the UCI machine learning repository and GitHub. In Table 2, the first nine data sets are small data sets while the last four are large data sets. Discrete or continuous feature type indicates features in that data set are all discrete or all continuous. Table 2: Data sets properties.

Personalized decision systems in healthcare and behavioral support often rely on static rule-based or engagement-maximizing heuristics that overlook users' emotional context and ethical constraints. Such approaches risk recommending insensitive or unsafe interventions, especially in domains involving serious mental illness, substance use disorders, or depression. To address this limitation, we propose a Responsible Reinforcement Learning (RRL) framework that integrates emotional and contextual understanding with ethical considerations into the sequential decision-making process. RRL formulates personalization as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), where the agent optimizes engagement and adherence while ensuring emotional alignment and ethical safety. We introduce a multi-objective reward function that explicitly balances short-term behavioral engagement with long-term user well-being, and define an emotion-informed state representation that captures fluctuations in emotional readiness, affect, and risk. The proposed architecture can be instantiated with any RL algorithm (e.g., DQN, PPO) augmented with safety constraints or Lagrangian regularization. Conceptually, this framework operationalizes empathy and responsibility within machine learning policy optimization, bridging safe RL, affective computing and responsible AI. We discuss the implications of this approach for human-centric domains such as behavioral health, education, and digital therapeutics, and outline simulation-based validation paths for future empirical work. This paper aims to initiate a methodological conversation about ethically aligned reinforcement learning for emotionally aware and trustworthy personalization systems.

RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) are old pulsating variables widely used as metallicity tracers due to the correlation between their metal abundances and light curve morphology. With ESA Gaia DR3 providing light curves for about 270,000 RRLs, there is a pressing need for scalable methods to estimate their metallicities from photometric data. We introduce a unified deep learning framework that estimates metallicities for both fundamental-mode (RRab) and first-overtone (RRc) RRLs using Gaia G-band light curves. This approach extends our previous work on RRab stars to include RRc stars, aiming for high predictive accuracy and broad generalization across both pulsation types. The model is based on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network optimized for time-series extrinsic regression. Our pipeline includes preprocessing steps such as phase folding, smoothing, and sample weighting, and uses photometric metallicities from the literature as training targets. The architecture is designed to handle morphological differences between RRab and RRc light curves without requiring separate models. On held-out validation sets, our GRU model achieves strong performance: for RRab stars, MAE = 0.0565 dex, RMSE = 0.0765 dex, R^2 = 0.9401; for RRc stars, MAE = 0.0505 dex, RMSE = 0.0720 dex, R^2 = 0.9625. These results show the effectiveness of deep learning for large-scale photometric metallicity estimation and support its application to studies of stellar populations and Galactic structure.

Rule-based models, e.g., decision trees, are widely used in scenarios demanding high model interpretability for their transparent inner structures and good model expressivity. However, rule-based models are hard to optimize, especially on large data sets, due to their discrete parameters and structures. Ensemble methods and fuzzy/soft rules are commonly used to improve performance, but they sacrifice the model interpretability. To obtain both good scalability and interpretability, we propose a new classifier, named Rule-based Representation Learner (RRL), that automatically learns interpretable non-fuzzy rules for data representation and classification. To train the non-differentiable RRL effectively, we project it to a continuous space and propose a novel training method, called Gradient Grafting, that can directly optimize the discrete model using gradient descent. A novel design of logical activation functions is also devised to increase the scalability of RRL and enable it to discretize the continuous features end-to-end. Exhaustive experiments on ten small and four large data sets show that RRL outperforms the competitive interpretable approaches and can be easily adjusted to obtain a trade-off between classification accuracy and model complexity for different scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/12wang3/rrl.

Rule-based models, e.g., decision trees, are widely used in scenarios demanding high model interpretability for their transparent inner structures and good model expressivity. However, rule-based models are hard to optimize, especially on large data sets, due to their discrete parameters and structures. Ensemble methods and fuzzy/soft rules are commonly used to improve performance, but they sacrifice the model interpretability. To obtain both good scalability and interpretability, we propose a new classifier, named Rule-based Representation Learner (RRL), that automatically learns interpretable non-fuzzy rules for data representation and classification. To train the non-differentiable RRL effectively, we project it to a continuous space and propose a novel training method, called Gradient Grafting, that can directly optimize the discrete model using gradient descent. An improved design of logical activation functions is also devised to increase the scalability of RRL and enable it to discretize the continuous features end-to-end. Exhaustive experiments on nine small and four large data sets show that RRL outperforms the competitive interpretable approaches and can be easily adjusted to obtain a trade-off between classification accuracy and model complexity for different scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/12wang3/rrl.

The creation of a 3D map of the bulge using RRLyrae (RRL) is one of the main goals of the VVV(X) surveys. The overwhelming number of sources under analysis request the use of automatic procedures. In this context, previous works introduced the use of Machine Learning (ML) methods for the variable star classification. Our goal is the development and analysis of an automatic procedure, based on ML, for the identification of RRLs in the VVV Survey. This procedure will be use to generate reliable catalogs integrated over several tiles in the survey. After the reconstruction of light-curves, we extract a set of period and intensity-based features. We use for the first time a new subset of pseudo color features. We discuss all the appropriate steps needed to define our automatic pipeline: selection of quality measures; sampling procedures; classifier setup and model selection. As final result, we construct an ensemble classifier with an average Recall of 0.48 and average Precision of 0.86 over 15 tiles. We also make available our processed datasets and a catalog of candidate RRLs. Perhaps most interestingly, from a classification perspective based on photometric broad-band data, is that our results indicate that Color is an informative feature type of the RRL that should be considered for automatic classification methods via ML. We also argue that Recall and Precision in both tables and curves are high quality metrics for this highly imbalanced problem. Furthermore, we show for our VVV data-set that to have good estimates it is important to use the original distribution more than reduced samples with an artificial balance. Finally, we show that the use of ensemble classifiers helps resolve the crucial model selection step, and that most errors in the identification of RRLs are related to low quality observations of some sources or to the difficulty to resolve the RRL-C type given the date.

Machine Learning based Quality of Experience (QoE) models potentially suffer from over-fitting due to limitations including low data volume, and limited participant profiles. This prevents models from becoming generic. Consequently, these trained models may under-perform when tested outside the experimented population. One reason for the limited datasets, which we refer in this paper as small QoE data lakes, is due to the fact that often these datasets potentially contain user sensitive information and are only collected throughout expensive user studies with special user consent. Thus, sharing of datasets amongst researchers is often not allowed. In recent years, privacy preserving machine learning models have become important and so have techniques that enable model training without sharing datasets but instead relying on secure communication protocols. Following this trend, in this paper, we present Round-Robin based Collaborative Machine Learning model training, where the model is trained in a sequential manner amongst the collaborated partner nodes. We benchmark this work using our customized Federated Learning mechanism as well as conventional Centralized and Isolated Learning methods.