The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into human cognition raises a fundamental question: does AI merely improve efficiency, or does it alter how we think? This study experimentally tested whether short-term exposure to narrow AI tools enhances core cognitive abilities or simply optimizes task performance. Thirty young adults completed standardized neuropsychological assessments embedded in a seven-week protocol with a four-week online intervention involving problem-solving and verbal comprehension tasks, either with or without AI support (ChatGPT). While AI-assisted participants completed several tasks faster and more accurately, no significant pre-post differences emerged in standardized measures of problem solving or verbal comprehension. These results demonstrate efficiency gains without cognitive change, suggesting that current narrow AI systems serve as cognitive scaffolds extending performance without transforming underlying mental capacities. The findings highlight the need for ethical and educational frameworks that promote critical and autonomous thinking in an increasingly AI-augmented cognitive ecology.

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User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, existing simulators often rely solely on text utterances, missing implicit user traits such as personality, speaking style, and goals. In contrast, persona-based methods lack generalizability, as they depend on predefined profiles of famous individuals or archetypes. To address these challenges, we propose User Simulator with implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine conversations and uses them to generate more personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema. Then, we refine the simulation through conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing it at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, we adopt a diverse profile sampler to capture the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while achieving comparable performance in consistency. Furthermore, dynamic multi-turn evaluations based on USP strongly align with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

In the past decade, motivated by the putative failure of naive self-play deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in adversarial imperfect-information games, researchers have developed numerous DRL algorithms based on fictitious play (FP), double oracle (DO), and counterfactual regret minimization (CFR). In light of recent results of the magnetic mirror descent algorithm, we hypothesize that simpler generic policy gradient methods like PPO are competitive with or superior to these FP, DO, and CFR-based DRL approaches. To facilitate the resolution of this hypothesis, we implement and release the first broadly accessible exact exploitability computations for four large games. Using these games, we conduct the largest-ever exploitability comparison of DRL algorithms for imperfect-information games. Over 5600 training runs, FP, DO, and CFR-based approaches fail to outperform generic policy gradient methods. Code is available at https://github.com/nathanlct/IIG-RL-Benchmark and https://github.com/gabrfarina/exp-a-spiel .

This study develops a transfer learning model for the automated classification of two species of fruit flies, Anastrepha fraterculus and Ceratitis capitata, in a controlled laboratory environment. The research addresses the need to optimize identification and classification, which are currently performed manually by experts, being affected by human factors and facing time challenges. The methodological process of this study includes the capture of high-quality images using a mobile phone camera and a stereo microscope, followed by segmentation to reduce size and focus on relevant morphological areas. The images were carefully labeled and preprocessed to ensure the quality and consistency of the dataset used to train the pre-trained convolutional neural network models VGG16, VGG19, and Inception-v3. The results were evaluated using the F1-score, achieving 82% for VGG16 and VGG19, while Inception-v3 reached an F1-score of 93%. Inception-v3's reliability was verified through model testing in uncontrolled environments, with positive results, complemented by the Grad-CAM technique, demonstrating its ability to capture essential morphological features. These findings indicate that Inception-v3 is an effective and replicable approach for classifying Anastrepha fraterculus and Ceratitis capitata, with potential for implementation in automated monitoring systems.

To build large language models for Ukrainian we need to expand our corpora with large amounts of new algorithmic tasks expressed in natural language. Examples of task performance expressed in English are abundant, so with a high-quality translation system our community will be enabled to curate datasets faster. To aid this goal, we introduce a recipe to build a translation system using supervised finetuning of a large pretrained language model with a noisy parallel dataset of 3M pairs of Ukrainian and English sentences followed by a second phase of training using 17K examples selected by k-fold perplexity filtering on another dataset of higher quality. Our decoder-only model named Dragoman beats performance of previous state of the art encoder-decoder models on the FLORES devtest set.

This paper investigates the enhancement of financial time series forecasting with the use of neural networks through supervised autoencoders, aiming to improve investment strategy performance. It specifically examines the impact of noise augmentation and triple barrier labeling on risk-adjusted returns, using the Sharpe and Information Ratios. The study focuses on the S&P 500 index, EUR/USD, and BTC/USD as the traded assets from January 1, 2010, to April 30, 2022. Findings indicate that supervised autoencoders, with balanced noise augmentation and bottleneck size, significantly boost strategy effectiveness. However, excessive noise and large bottleneck sizes can impair performance, highlighting the importance of precise parameter tuning. This paper also presents a derivation of a novel optimization metric that can be used with triple barrier labeling. The results of this study have substantial policy implications, suggesting that financial institutions and regulators could leverage techniques presented to enhance market stability and investor protection, while also encouraging more informed and strategic investment approaches in various financial sectors.