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Lin Jiang, Dahai Yu, Rongchao Xu, Tian Tang, Guang Wang

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, highlights the urgent need for efficient and equitable power system restoration. Many electricity providers make restoration decisions primarily based on the volume of power restoration requests from each region. However, our data-driven analysis reveals significant disparities in request submission volume, as disadvantaged communities tend to submit fewer restoration requests. This disparity makes the current restoration solution inequitable, leaving these communities vulnerable to extended power outages. To address this, we aim to propose an equity-aware power restoration strategy that balances both restoration efficiency and equity across communities. However, achieving this goal is challenging for two reasons: the difficulty of predicting repair durations under dataset heteroscedasticity, and the tendency of reinforcement learning agents to favor low-uncertainty actions, which potentially undermine equity. To overcome these challenges, we design a predict-then-optimize framework called EPOPR with two key components: (1) Equity-Conformalized Quantile Regression for uncertainty-aware repair duration prediction, and (2) Spatial-Temporal Attentional RL that adapts to varying uncertainty levels across regions for equitable decision-making. Experimental results show that our EPOPR effectively reduces the average power outage duration by 3.60% and decreases inequity between different communities by 14.19% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Dina Hussein, Chibuike E. Ugwu, Ganapati Bhat, Janardhan Rao Doppa

Achieving good health and well-being through lower mortality rates of non-communicable diseases and early warning of health risks are key goals of United Nations (UN). Wearable internet of things (IoT) are one of the most promising technology to achieve these goals through their ubiquitous monitoring of key health indicators and in-situ data processing. However, small form-factor of wearable devices constrains the battery capacity, thus requiring frequent recharging or battery replacements, which lowers their adoption rate and benefits. Augmentation of battery energy by scavenging ambient sources, such as light, is a promising solution to improve operating lifetime of IoT devices. However, ambient energy sources are highly uncertain, making energy management (EM) challenging. To handle these challenges, this paper presents a novel uncertainty-aware EM approach. First, we develop a conformal prediction-based method for future energy harvest (EH) that provides small uncertainty regions with provable coverage guarantees (true output vector is within the region). The EH uncertainty regions are then leveraged in an EM algorithm that uses overhead-aware sampling to evaluate the quality of multiple decisions with varying EH before making a decision using a lightweight machine learning model. Experiments on two diverse real-world datasets with 10 users show that conformal prediction achieves more than 90% coverage with tight prediction intervals; and the EM algorithm produces decisions that are, on average, within 2 Joules of an optimal Oracle.

Yuting Hu, Dancheng Liu, Qingyun Wang, Charles Yu, Chenhui Xu, Qingxiao Zheng, Heng Ji, Jinjun Xiong

Identifying effective interventions from the scientific literature is challenging due to the high volume of publications, specialized terminology, and inconsistent reporting formats, making manual curation laborious and prone to oversight. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel framework leveraging large language models (LLMs), which integrates a progressive ontology prompting (POP) algorithm with a dual-agent system, named LLM-Duo. On the one hand, the POP algorithm conducts a prioritized breadth-first search (BFS) across a predefined ontology, generating structured prompt templates and action sequences to guide the automatic annotation process. On the other hand, the LLM-Duo system features two specialized LLM agents, an explorer and an evaluator, working collaboratively and adversarially to continuously refine annotation quality. We showcase the real-world applicability of our framework through a case study focused on speech-language intervention discovery. Experimental results show that our approach surpasses advanced baselines, achieving more accurate and comprehensive annotations through a fully automated process. Our approach successfully identified 2,421 interventions from a corpus of 64,177 research articles in the speech-language pathology domain, culminating in the creation of a publicly accessible intervention knowledge base with great potential to benefit the speech-language pathology community.

Oishee Bintey Hoque, Nibir Chandra Mandal, Abhijin Adiga, Samarth Swarup, Sayjro Kossi Nouwakpo, Amanda Wilson, Madhav Marathe

Accurate mapping of irrigation methods is crucial for sustainable agricultural practices and food systems. However, existing models that rely solely on spectral features from satellite imagery are ineffective due to the complexity of agricultural landscapes and limited training data, making this a challenging problem. We present Knowledge-Informed Irrigation Mapping (KIIM), a novel Swin-Transformer based approach that uses (i) a specialized projection matrix to encode crop to irrigation probability, (ii) a spatial attention map to identify agricultural lands from non-agricultural lands, (iii) bi-directional cross-attention to focus complementary information from different modalities, and (iv) a weighted ensemble for combining predictions from images and crop information. Our experimentation on five states in the US shows up to 22.9% (IoU) improvement over baseline with a 71.4% (IoU) improvement for hard-to-classify drip irrigation. In addition, we propose a two-phase transfer learning approach to enhance cross-state irrigation mapping, achieving a 51% IoU boost in a state with limited labeled data. The ability to achieve baseline performance with only 40% of the training data highlights its efficiency, reducing the dependency on extensive manual labeling efforts and making large-scale, automated irrigation mapping more feasible and cost-effective. Code: https://github.com/Nibir088/KIIM

Oishee Bintey Hoque, Abhijin Adiga, Aniruddha Adiga, Siddharth Chaudhary, Madhav V. Marathe, S.S. Ravi, Kirti Rajagopalan, Amanda Wilson, Samarth Swarup

Accurate canal network mapping is essential for water management, including irrigation planning and infrastructure maintenance. State-of-the-art semantic segmentation models for infrastructure mapping, such as roads, rely on large, well-annotated remote sensing datasets. However, incomplete or inadequate ground truth can hinder these learning approaches. Many infrastructure networks have graph-level properties such as reachability to a source (like canals) or connectivity (roads) that can be leveraged to improve these existing ground truth. This paper develops a novel iterative framework IGraSS, combining a semantic segmentation module—incorporating RGB and additional modalities (NDWI, DEM)—with a graph-based ground-truth refinement module. The segmentation module processes satellite imagery patches, while the refinement module operates on the entire data viewing the infrastructure network as a graph. Experiments show that IGraSS reduces unreachable canal segments from ~18% to ~3%, and training with refined ground truth significantly improves canal identification. IGraSS serves as a robust framework for both refining noisy ground truth and mapping canal networks from remote sensing imagery. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of IGraSS using road networks as an example, applying a different graph-theoretic constraint to complete road networks.

Prabath Hetti Mudiyanselage, Ruwan Tennakoon, John Thangarajah, Robert Ware, Jason Callahan

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful imaging modality for assessing biochemical processes within the body. However, accurate image reconstruction is challenged by photon attenuation, particularly in dense structures such as bones, leading to quantification errors and reduced diagnostic confidence. Computed Tomography (CT) based attenuation correction is the standard approach but introduces additional radiation exposure, longer imaging times, and patient inconvenience, as well as potential registration errors, motion artifacts, and energy scaling inaccuracies. In this study, we propose a 3D U-Net based deep learning framework that directly estimates attenuation information from PET sinograms, eliminating the need for additional imaging modalities. Our approach integrates PET physics and employs custom skip connections to enhance cross-domain learning. We evaluate our model on a simulated brain dataset derived from real patient templates, achieving a Dice coefficient of 0.650 and an accuracy of 0.486 for bone structures. The clinical applicability of our method is further assessed by reconstructing PET images with the generated attenuation maps, yielding an MSE of 0.007 and an SSIM of 0.956, demonstrating strong structural consistency with CT-based attenuation correction. These results highlight the feasibility of performing PET image attenuation correction using PET sinograms alone, offering a promising alternative that reduces imaging time, radiation exposure, and patient burden while enabling faster and more efficient PET reconstruction.

Fang He, Jiaqi Fan, Yang Deng, Xiaoyang Zhang, Ka Tai Lau, Dan Wang

The solar photovoltaic power forecasting (SPPF) of a PV system is vital for the downstream power estimation. While approaches for recent decentralized PV systems require customized models for each PV installation, this method is labor-intensive and not scalable. Therefore, developing a general SPPF model for a decentralized PV system is essential. The primary challenge in developing such a model is accounting for regional weather variations. Recent advancements in weather foundation models (WFMs) offer a promising opportunity, providing accurate forecasts with reduced computational demands. However, integrating WFMs into SPPF models remains challenging due to the complexity of WFMs. This paper introduces a novel approach, spatio-temporal knowledge distillation (STKD), to efficiently adapt WFMs for SPPF. The proposed STKD-PV models leverage regional weather and PV power data to forecast power generation from six hours to a day ahead. Globally evaluated across six datasets, STKD-PV models demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) time-series models and fine-tuned WFMs, achieving significant improvements in forecasting accuracy. This study marks the first application of knowledge distillation from WFMs to SPPF, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for decentralized PV systems.

Ziyu Ge, Yuhao Wu, Daniel Wai Kit Chin, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Rui Cao

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in fact-checking tasks by integrating external knowledge. However, their reliability decreases when confronted with conflicting evidence from sources of varying credibility. This paper presents the first systematic evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for fact-checking in the presence of conflicting evidence. To support this study, we introduce CONFACT (Conflicting Evidence for Fact-Checking), a novel dataset comprising questions paired with conflicting information from various sources. Extensive experiments reveal critical vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art RAG methods, particularly in resolving conflicts stemming from differences in media source credibility. To address these challenges, we investigate strategies to integrate media background information into both the retrieval and generation stages. Our results show that effectively incorporating source credibility significantly enhances the ability of RAG models to resolve conflicting evidence and improve fact-checking performance.

Vasuki Garg, Osman Y. Özaltın, Maria E. Mayorga, Sherrie Bosisto

Thousands of Illicit Massage Businesses (IMBs) are estimated to be operating in the United States by disguising themselves as legitimate establishments while exploiting trafficked workers, harming both the victims and the massage industry. The increasing digital presence of these illicit businesses presents an opportunity for detection, a crucial task for law enforcement and social service agencies aiming to disrupt their operations. Our research leverages user-generated business reviews from Yelp.com, enriched with data from multiple sources, including RubMaps.ch, U.S. Census records, GIS data, and licensing information. We present a feasibility study of developing a graph convolutional network (GCN) for a novel application and exploring its benefits and drawbacks in identifying IMBs. The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to link and analyze businesses, reviews, and reviewers within a heterogeneous network and employ a relational GCN to capture their complex relationships.

Wentao Gao, Jiuyong Li, Debo Cheng, Lin Liu, Jixue Liu, Thuc Le, Xiaojing Du, Xiongren Chen, Yun Chen, Yanchang Zhao

Global Climate Models (GCMs) are crucial for predicting future climate changes by simulating the Earth systems. However, GCM outputs exhibit systematic biases due to model uncertainties, parameterization simplifications, and inadequate representation of complex climate phenomena. Traditional bias correction methods, which rely on historical observation data and statistical techniques, often neglect unobserved confounders, leading to biased results. This paper proposes a novel bias correction approach to utilize both GCM and observational data to learn a factor model that captures multi-cause latent confounders. Inspired by recent advances in causality based time series deconfounding, our method first constructs a factor model to learn latent confounders from historical data and then applies them to enhance the bias correction process using advanced time series forecasting models. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the accuracy of precipitation outputs. By addressing unobserved confounders, our approach offers a robust and theoretically grounded solution for climate model bias correction.

Arka Dutta, Syed Mohammad Sualeh Ali, Usman Naseem, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh

Human input plays a critical role in modern AI systems. As machines take on increasingly nuanced tasks, it becomes essential for the community to embrace subjectivity and diverse perspectives. However, research on sensitive topics often fails to incorporate diverse and balanced perspectives. This paper makes a key contribution to participatory AI design in the context of conflicts between nuclear adversaries (India and Pakistan); where disagreement between stakeholders is anticipated. The paper explores the notion of hope speech detection -- detecting de-escalating content in the context of nuclear adversaries on the brink of war -- through the lens of participatory AI design and vicarious interactions. We release a dataset of 10,081 social web posts annotated by raters from India and Pakistan and examine the bipartisan nature of the language of de-escalation. Our study reveals that vicarious perspectives can be useful for modeling out-group preferences.

Jiwei Deng, Youheng Bai, Mingliang Hou, Teng Guo, Zitao Liu, Weiqi Luo

Knowledge tracing (KT) is an essential task in online education systems. It aims to predict the future performance of students based on their historical learning interaction data. Despite significant advancements in attention-based KT models, they still face some limitations: inaccurate input representation and excessive student forgetting modeling. These limitations often lead to the attention noise problem: the model assigns non-negligible attention weight to some information that is cognitively irrelevant in nature, thereby generating interference signals. To address this problem, we propose a novel KT model, i.e., DenoiseKT. DenoiseKT effectively models the difficulty of the questions and utilizes graph neural network to capture the complex relationship between questions, thereby refining the representations of input features. Additionally, the denoised attention mechanism introduces a weight factor to reduce the model's attention weight distribution on irrelevant information. We extensively compare DenoiseKT with 22 state-of-the-art KT models on 4 widely-used public datasets. Experimental results show that DenoiseKT can effectively solve the attention noise problem and outperform other models. The source code of DenoiseKT is available at https://pykt.org.

Longchao Da, Xiangrui Liu, Mithun Shivakoti, Thirulogasankar Pranav Kutralingam, Yezhou Yang, Hua Wei

Heatwaves pose a significant threat to public health, especially as global warming intensifies. However, current routing systems (e.g., online maps) fail to incorporate shade information due to the difficulty of estimating shades directly from noisy satellite imagery and the limited availability of training data for generative models. In this paper, we address these challenges through two main contributions. First, we build an extensive dataset covering diverse longitude-latitude regions, varying levels of building density, and different urban layouts. Leveraging Blender-based 3D simulations alongside building outlines, we capture building shadows under various solar zenith angles throughout the year and at different times of day. These simulated shadows are aligned with satellite images, providing a rich resource for learning shade patterns. Second, we propose the DeepShade, a diffusion-based model designed to learn and synthesize shade variations over time. It emphasizes the nuance of edge features by jointly considering RGB with the Canny edge layer, and incorporates contrastive learning to capture the temporal change rules of shade. Then, by conditioning on textual descriptions of known conditions (e.g., time of day, solar angles), our framework provides improved performance in generating shade images. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using our shade predictions to calculate shade ratios for real-world route planning in Tempe, Arizona. We believe this work will benefit society by providing a reference for urban planning in extreme heat weather and its potential practical applications in the environment.

Kangning Cui, Rongkun Zhu, Manqi Wang, Wei Tang, Gregory D. Larsen, Victor P. Pauca, Sarra Alqahtani, Fan Yang, David Segurado, David A. Lutz 等

Palms are ecologically and economically indicators of tropical forest health, biodiversity, and human impact that support local economies and global forest product supply chains. While palm detection in plantations is well-studied, efforts to map naturally occurring palms in dense forests remain limited by overlapping crowns, uneven shading, and heterogeneous landscapes. We develop PRISM (Processing, Inference, Segmentation, and Mapping), a flexible pipeline for detecting and localizing palms in dense tropical forests using large orthomosaic images. Orthomosaics are created from thousands of aerial images and spanning several to hundreds of gigabytes. Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a large UAV-derived orthomosaic dataset collected across 21 ecologically diverse sites in western Ecuador, annotated with 8,830 bounding boxes and 5,026 palm center points. Second, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art object detectors based on efficiency and performance, integrating zero-shot SAM~2 as the segmentation backbone, and refining the results for precise geographic mapping. Third, we apply calibration methods to align confidence scores with IoU and explore saliency maps for feature explainability. Though optimized for palms, PRISM is adaptable for identifying other natural objects, such as eastern white pines. Future work will explore transfer learning for lower-resolution datasets (0.5–1m). Data and code can be found at github.com/Zippppo/PRISM.

Emilio Colombo, Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Antonio Serino

AI and related technologies are reshaping jobs and tasks, either by automating or augmenting human skills in the workplace. Many researchers have been working on estimating if and to what extent jobs and tasks are exposed to the risk of being automatized by AI-related technologies. Our work tackles this issue through a data-driven approach by: (i) developing a reproducible framework that uses cutting-edge open-source large language models to assess the current capabilities of AI and robotics in performing job-related tasks; (ii) formalizing and computing a measure of AI exposure by occupation, the Task Exposure to AI (TEAI) index, and a measure of Task Replacement by AI (TRAI) index, both validated through a human user evaluation and compared with the state-of-the-art. Our results show that the TEAI index is positively correlated with cognitive, problem-solving, and management skills, while it is negatively correlated with social skills. Results also suggest that about one-third of U.S. employment is highly exposed to AI, primarily in high-skill jobs requiring a graduate or postgraduate level of education. We also find that AI exposure is positively associated with employment and wage growth from 2003 to 2023, suggesting that AI has had an overall positive effect on productivity. Considering specifically the TRAI index, we find that even in high-skill occupations, AI exhibits high variability in task substitution, suggesting that AI and humans complement each other within the same occupation, while the allocation of tasks within occupations is likely to change. All results, models, and code are freely available online to allow the community to reproduce our results, compare outcomes, and use our work as a benchmark to monitor AI’s progress over time.

Zirong Chen, Ziyan An, Jennifer Reynolds, Kristin Mullen, Stephen Maritini, Meiyi Ma

Emergency response services are critical to public safety, with 9-1-1 call-takers playing a key role in ensuring timely and effective emergency operations. To ensure call-taking performance consistency, quality assurance is implemented to evaluate and refine call-takers' skillsets. However, traditional human-led evaluations struggle with high call volumes, leading to low coverage and delayed assessments. We introduce LogiDebrief, an AI-driven framework that automates traditional 9-1-1 call debriefing by integrating Signal-Temporal Logic (STL) with Large Language Models (LLMs) for fully-covered rigorous performance evaluation. LogiDebrief formalizes call-taking requirements as logical specifications, enabling systematic assessment of 9-1-1 calls against procedural guidelines. It employs a three-step verification process: (1) contextual understanding to identify responder types, incident classifications, and critical conditions; (2) STL-based runtime checking with LLM integration to ensure compliance; and (3) automated aggregation of results into quality assurance reports. Beyond its technical contributions, LogiDebrief has demonstrated real-world impact. Successfully deployed at Metro Nashville Department of Emergency Communications, it has assisted in debriefing 1,701 real-world calls, saving 311.85 hours of active engagement. Empirical evaluation with real-world data confirms its accuracy, while a case study and extensive user study highlight its effectiveness in enhancing call-taking performance.

Palok Biswas, Zuzanna Osika, Isidoro Tamassia, Adit Whorra, Jazmin Zatarain-Salazar, Jan Kwakkel, Frans A. Oliehoek, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

Addressing climate change requires coordinated policy efforts of nations worldwide. These efforts are informed by scientific reports, which rely in part on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), prominent tools used to assess the economic impacts of climate policies. However, traditional IAMs optimize policies based on a single objective, limiting their ability to capture the trade-offs among economic growth, temperature goals, and climate justice. As a result, policy recommendations have been criticized for perpetuating inequalities, fueling disagreements during policy negotiations. We introduce JUSTICE, the first framework integrating IAM with Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MOMARL). By incorporating multiple objectives, JUSTICE generates policy recommendations that shed light on equity while balancing climate and economic goals. Further, using multiple agents can provide a realistic representation of the interactions among the diverse policy actors. We identify equitable Pareto-optimal policies using our framework, which facilitates deliberative decision-making by presenting policymakers with the inherent trade-offs in climate and economic policy.

Frédéric Berdoz, Dustin Brunner, Yann Vonlanthen, Roger Wattenhofer

Voting advice applications (VAAs) help millions of voters understand which political parties or candidates best align with their views. This paper explores the potential risks these applications pose to the democratic process when targeted by adversarial entities. In particular, we expose 11 manipulation strategies and measure their impact using data from Switzerland’s primary VAA, Smartvote, collected during the last two national elections. We find that altering application parameters, such as the matching method, can shift a party’s recommendation frequency by up to 105%. Cherry-picking questionnaire items can increase party recommendation frequency by over 261%, while subtle changes to parties’ or candidates’ responses can lead to a 248% increase. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose adversarial robustness properties VAAs should satisfy, introduce empirical metrics for assessing the resilience of various matching methods, and suggest possible avenues for research toward mitigating the effect of manipulation. Our framework is key to ensuring secure and reliable AI-based VAAs poised to emerge in the near future.

Shreya Banerjee, Soheil Saneei, Lisa Pham, Elliott Alexander Beaton, Henry Fordjour Ansah, Ben Samuel, Jenny Spicer, Huda Hammad, Amanda Stage

The earliest years of life, from birth to elementary school, are the most critical time for children's social and emotional development. Recently, schools and workplaces have become increasingly concerned with cultivating social and emotional skills, especially with the decline of face-to-face interaction and the pervasive influence of modern communications technology. This paper proposes a game in development that navigates this challenge and aims to facilitate skill development in children ages 3-10 by having them identify, understand, feel their emotions, and regulate their actions. Using an established framework for social and emotional learning, it employs multi-agent artificial intelligence-based interactive gaming that generates dynamic scenarios and adjusts learning experiences based on individual child's or group's needs over time. We discuss the various modes of this game and its target frameworks, along with ways to evaluate effectiveness in facilitating social and emotional skill development.

Haitao Bai, Pinghui Wang, Ruofei Zhang, Ziyang Zhou, Juxiang Zeng, Yulou Su, Li Xing, Zhou Su, Chen Zhang, Lizhen Cui 等

Telecommunication fraud refers to deceptive activities in the field of communication services. This research focuses on a category of fraud identified as ''mutation telecommunication fraud". There is currently a lack of research on mutation telecommunication fraud detection, allowing this type of fraud to persist uncaught. We identify that detecting mutation fraud requires capturing multi-source patterns, including user communication graphs and temporal-spatial Voice of Call (VOC) features. Specifically, we introduce MutationGuard, which leverages Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to capture changes in user communication graphs. For VOC records, we map call start times onto a 3D cylindrical surface, thereby representing each VOC record in spatial coordinates and utilizing proposed LFFE and TCFE modules to capture local fraud behaviors and temporal behavior changes. The proposed neural modeling approach that facilitates multi-source information fusion constitutes a significant advancement in detecting mutation fraud. Experiment results reveal a significant improvement in the AUC score by 1.52% and the F1 score by 1.36% on the proposed telecommunication fraud dataset. Particularly, our method shows a significant improvement of 13.93% in accuracy on mutation fraud data. We also validate the effectiveness of our method on the publicly available Sichuan Telecommunication Fraud dataset.