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Do you know your'sweat score'? One of the biggest controversies of the 2026 World Cup so far has been the hydration breaks, which - while not entirely new - are for the first time occurring twice during every match in the tournament. The breaks aren't really about hydration, some spectators say. They're just an opportunity for certain broadcasters to show more ads, they break up the natural flow of games, and are unnecessary in air conditioned stadiums. Whether or not you agree with these complaints, there's no doubt that hydration itself is an increasingly prominent point of discussion worldwide.

Scientists develop method to convert discarded plastic water bottles into high-performance supercapacitors, potentially reducing pollution while advancing clean energy.

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Filippos's PhD dissertation focuses on developing a method for recognizing object states without visual training data. By leveraging semantic knowledge from online sources and Large Language Models, structured as Knowledge Graphs, Graph Neural Networks learn representations for accurate state classification. In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. In this latest interview, we met with Filippos Gouidis, who has recently completed his PhD, and found out more about his research on object state classification.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly sensitive to prompts, including additional context provided therein. As LLMs grow in capability, understanding their prompt-sensitivity becomes increasingly crucial for ensuring reliable and robust performance, particularly since evaluating these models becomes more challenging. In this work, we investigate how current models (Llama, Mixtral, Falcon) respond when presented with additional input from another model, mimicking a scenario where a more capable model -- or a system with access to more external information -- provides supplementary information to the target model. Across a diverse spectrum of question-answering tasks, we study how an LLM's response to multiple-choice questions changes when the prompt includes a prediction and explanation from another model. Specifically, we explore the influence of the presence of an explanation, the stated authoritativeness of the source, and the stated confidence of the supplementary input. Our findings reveal that models are strongly influenced, and when explanations are provided they are swayed irrespective of the quality of the explanation. The models are more likely to be swayed if the input is presented as being authoritative or confident, but the effect is small in size. This study underscores the significant prompt-sensitivity of LLMs and highlights the potential risks of incorporating outputs from external sources without thorough scrutiny and further validation. As LLMs continue to advance, understanding and mitigating such sensitivities will be crucial for their reliable and trustworthy deployment.

We propose AToM-Bot, a novel task generation and execution framework for proactive robot-human interaction, which leverages the human mental and physical state inference capabilities of the Vision Language Model (VLM) prompted by the Affective Theory of Mind (AToM). Without requiring explicit commands by humans, AToM-Bot proactively generates and follows feasible tasks to improve general human well-being. When around humans, AToM-Bot first detects current human needs based on inferred human states and observations of the surrounding environment. It then generates tasks to fulfill these needs, taking into account its embodied constraints. We designed 16 daily life scenarios spanning 4 common scenes and tasked the same visual stimulus to 59 human subjects and our robot. We used the similarity between human open-ended answers and robot output, and the human satisfaction scores to metric robot performance. AToM-Bot received high human evaluations in need detection (6.42/7, 91.7%), embodied solution (6.15/7, 87.8%) and task execution (6.17/7, 88.1%). We show that AToM-Bot excels in generating and executing feasible plans to fulfill unspoken human needs. Videos and code are available at https://affective-tom-bot.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs) are being applied as actors for sequential decision making tasks in domains such as robotics and games, utilizing their general world knowledge and planning abilities. However, previous work does little to explore what environment state information is provided to LLM actors via language. Exhaustively describing high-dimensional states can impair performance and raise inference costs for LLM actors. Previous LLM actors avoid the issue by relying on hand-engineered, task-specific protocols to determine which features to communicate about a state and which to leave out. In this work, we propose Brief Language INputs for DEcision-making Responses (BLINDER), a method for automatically selecting concise state descriptions by learning a value function for task-conditioned state descriptions. We evaluate BLINDER on the challenging video game NetHack and a robotic manipulation task. Our method improves task success rate, reduces input size and compute costs, and generalizes between LLM actors.

Abstract-- Quadruped robots have received increasing attention for the past few years. For instance, Cheetah can reach a top speed I. INTRODUCTION A controlled backflip is achieved by Panther locomotion capability of quadruped robots like the MIT by representing the rotational dynamics using the rotation Cheetah [1] and ETH Anymal [2]. Still, few prior works focus on solving tasks to find one in daily scenarios, since the dynamic and with complex temporal and logic constraints in unstructured unstructured environment poses significant challenges to and dynamic environments. Hence, this work is motivated to To this end, we consider a robot integrated with vision develop a reactive planning and control strategy for quadruped performing high-level linear temporal logic (LTL) tasks that robots with temporal logic specifications and multi-modal encode position constraints to the target object, as shown in perception to enable mission operation in unstructured Figure 1. To cope with unstructured dynamic environments, we dynamic environments.

We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score. For n answer choices, this is equivalent to an n-class classification setup where only one class (true answer) is correct. We instead show that classifying (question, true answer) as positive instances and (question, false answer) as negative instances is significantly more effective across various models and datasets. We show the efficacy of our proposed approach in different tasks -- abductive reasoning, commonsense question answering, science question answering, and sentence completion. Our DeBERTa binary classification model reaches the top or close to the top performance on public leaderboards for these tasks. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/TEAM.