Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Multimodal Procedural Planning (MPP) aims to generate step-by-step instructions that combine text and images, with the central challenge of preserving object-state consistency across modalities while producing informative plans. Existing approaches often leverage large language models (LLMs) to refine textual steps; however, visual object-state alignment and systematic evaluation are largely underexplored. We present MMPlanner, a zero-shot MPP framework that introduces Object State Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (OSR-CoT) prompting to explicitly model object-state transitions and generate accurate multimodal plans. To assess plan quality, we design LLM-as-a-judge protocols for planning accuracy and cross-modal alignment, and further propose a visual step-reordering task to measure temporal coherence. Experiments on RECIPEPLAN and WIKIPLAN show that MMPlanner achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving textual planning by +6.8%, cross-modal alignment by +11.9%, and visual step ordering by +26.7%

The implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in household environments, especially in the form of proactive autonomous agents, brings about possibilities of comfort and attention as well as it comes with intra or extramural ethical challenges. This article analyzes agentic AI and its applications, focusing on its move from reactive to proactive autonomy, privacy, fairness and user control. We review responsible innovation frameworks, human-centered design principles, and governance practices to distill practical guidance for ethical smart home systems. Vulnerable user groups such as elderly individuals, children, and neurodivergent who face higher risks of surveillance, bias, and privacy risks were studied in detail in context of Agentic AI. Design imperatives are highlighted such as tailored explainability, granular consent mechanisms, and robust override controls, supported by participatory and inclusive methodologies. It was also explored how data-driven insights, including social media analysis via Natural Language Processing(NLP), can inform specific user needs and ethical concerns. This survey aims to provide both a conceptual foundation and suggestions for developing transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy agentic AI in household automation.

Autonomous drones are rapidly reshaping industries ranging from aerial delivery and infrastructure inspection to environmental monitoring and disaster response. Ensuring the safety, reliability, and efficiency of these systems is paramount as they transition from research prototypes to mission-critical platforms. This paper presents a step-by-step guide to establishing a robust autonomous drone testing pipeline, covering each critical stage: Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) Simulation Testing, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Testing, Controlled Real-World Testing, and In-Field Testing. Using practical examples, including the marker-based autonomous landing system, we demonstrate how to systematically verify drone system behaviors, identify integration issues, and optimize performance. Furthermore, we highlight emerging trends shaping the future of drone testing, including the integration of Neurosymbolic and LLMs, creating co-simulation environments, and Digital Twin-enabled simulation-based testing techniques. By following this pipeline, developers and researchers can achieve comprehensive validation, minimize deployment risks, and prepare autonomous drones for safe and reliable real-world operations.

For five years or so, I have been running around as a pale imitation of Paul Revere, yelling, "The robots are coming! At schools, social settings, with family and friends, or even to complete strangers with whom I fell into conversations, I have uttered the same warning: "It's critical that you or your children identify a career -- now -- that won't be taken over by robots and artificial intelligence." My particular midnight ride started well before the pandemic reared its ugly head. But the pandemic may have planted a seed in the minds of certain CEOs that human beings are the weakest link on their chain to profit and prosperity. When the first "Terminator" movie was released -- eerily enough, in 1984 -- the world was introduced to Cyberdyne Systems and its "Skynet" artificial superintelligence system, which not only gained self-awareness but realized it could do everything infinitely faster and better than its human creators. Well, ever since that movie got people asking, "What if," the fictional theme -- and warnings about AI -- have been morphing into reality. The latest example of a technology poised to replace a human workforce is ChatGPT, the chatbot auto-generative system created by Open AI for online customer care. It is a pre-trained generative chat, which makes use of natural language processing, or NLP. The source of its data is textbooks, websites and various articles, which it uses to model its own language for responding to human interaction. It's certainly not a stretch to believe that any number of CEOs might think, "Interesting… A self-teaching artificial intelligence system that won't call in sick, doesn't need to be fed or to take bathroom breaks, does not require health care, but can and will work 24/7/365." Not shockingly, it has been reported that Microsoft, which is laying off 10,000 people, announced a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment" in this revolutionary technology, which apparently is growing smarter by the day. Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, warned in an interview with the New York Post: "AI is replacing the white-collar workers.

API development can be a time-consuming and complex task, but it doesn't have to be. With the advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, we now have access to tools like ChatGPT that can greatly simplify the process. In this blog post, we'll be taking a step-by-step approach to using ChatGPT to generate a Flask REST API. We'll cover everything from setting up…

Let's understand NLP and get all fundamental skills from SCRATCH! In this course you are invited to learn all the fundamental skills ... In this course you are invited to learn all the fundamental skills required in any kind of activity related to the Natural Language Processing and you will learn them from a theoretical and practical point of view, in fact you will seat together with me coding and implementing any topic step-by-step, instruction after instruction. Any of these projects will be a real and working use case so you will be able to re-use them in your own apps. In few words, this course is a real journey inside Natural Language Processing starting from the very beginning and finishing with the idea that all modern systems are leveraging: word embeddings. We are exploring NLU, NLG, NLP History, applications and use cases, studing Tokenization, Stopwords, Stemming, Lemmatization, PoS, NER, BoW, TF-IDF and Embeddings.

Code repository for this post is here: you can see the MLFlow Recipes template in the main branch and the filled-in template on the fill-in-steps branch. The announcement of MLFlow 2.0 included a new framework called MLFlow Recipes. For a Data Scientists, using MLFlow Recipes means cloning a git repository, or "template", that comes with a ready-to-go folder structure for any regression or binary classification problem. This folder structure includes everything, from library requirements, configuration, notebooks and tests, that's needed to make a data science project reproducible and production-ready. It's easy to start a new project with MLFlow Recipes -- git clone a template from the MLFlow repository, and you are good to go.

Sparse datasets are a common problem in machine learning, where many examples have a large number of missing or zero-valued features. This can lead to poor model performance and reduced interpretability of the results. In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide on how to address the sparsity challenge in datasets, with a focus on real-world application. The first step in resolving the sparsity challenge is to understand why your dataset is sparse in the first place. Sparsity can be caused by the presence of irrelevant features, missing data, or categorical variables with a large number of levels.

Dramatic employee turnover is being predicted in the post-pandemic era, at the same time that AI is being incorporated into more learning and development solutions, giving employers an opportunity to establish a competitive differentiation. An employee turnover "tsunami" is predicted by results from a survey of 2,000 adults in February conducted by The Work Institute, a research and consulting firm in Franklin, Tenn., according to an account from SHRM, the Society of Human Resource Management. The survey found that half of employees in North America plan to look for a new job in 2021. "We see absolutely pent-up turnover demand in the U.S. workforce," stated Danny Nelms, president of The Work Institute, which is focused on employee engagement and retention. Prior to the pandemic, the firm would see about 3.5 million people leaving their jobs monthly.