Measuring and Fostering Peace through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

We used machine learning and artificial intelligence: 1) to measure levels of peace in countries from news and social media and 2) to develop on-line tools that promote peace by helping users better understand their own media diet. For news media, we used neural networks to measure levels of peace from text embeddings of on-line news sources. The model, trained on one news media dataset also showed high accuracy when used to analyze a different news dataset. For social media, such as YouTube, we developed other models to measure levels of social dimensions important in peace using word level (GoEmotions) and context level (Large Language Model) methods. To promote peace, we note that 71% of people 20-40 years old daily view most of their news through short videos on social media. Content creators of these videos are biased towards creating videos with emotional activation, making you angry to engage you, to increase clicks. We developed and tested a Chrome extension, MirrorMirror, which provides real-time feedback to YouTube viewers about the peacefulness of the media they are watching. Our long term goal is for MirrorMirror to evolve into an open-source tool for content creators, journalists, researchers, platforms, and individual users to better understand the tone of their media creation and consumption and its effects on viewers. Moving beyond simple engagement metrics, we hope to encourage more respectful, nuanced, and informative communication.

CAOS: Conformal Aggregation of One-Shot Predictors

One-shot prediction enables rapid adaptation of pretrained foundation models to new tasks using only one labeled example, but lacks principled uncertainty quantification. While conformal prediction provides finite-sample coverage guarantees, standard split conformal methods are inefficient in the one-shot setting due to data splitting and reliance on a single predictor. We propose Conformal Aggregation of One-Shot Predictors (CAOS), a conformal framework that adaptively aggregates multiple one-shot predictors and uses a leave-one-out calibration scheme to fully exploit scarce labeled data. Despite violating classical exchangeability assumptions, we prove that CAOS achieves valid marginal coverage using a monotonicity-based argument. Experiments on one-shot facial landmarking and RAFT text classification tasks show that CAOS produces substantially smaller prediction sets than split conformal baselines while maintaining reliable coverage.

LELA: an LLM-based Entity Linking Approach with Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation

Entity linking (mapping ambiguous mentions in text to entities in a knowledge base) is a foundational step in tasks such as knowledge graph construction, question-answering, and information extraction. Our method, LELA, is a modular coarse-to-fine approach that leverages the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), and works with different target domains, knowledge bases and LLMs, without any fine-tuning phase. Our experiments across various entity linking settings show that LELA is highly competitive with fine-tuned approaches, and substantially outperforms the non-fine-tuned ones.

SimuAgent: An LLM-Based Simulink Modeling Assistant Enhanced with Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized text-based code automation, but their potential in graph-oriented engineering workflows remains under-explored. We introduce SimuAgent, an LLM-powered modeling and simulation agent tailored for Simulink. SimuAgent replaces verbose XML with a concise, dictionary-style Python representation, dramatically cutting token counts, improving interpretability, and enabling fast, in-process simulation. A lightweight plan-execute architecture, trained in two stages, equips the agent with both low-level tool skills and high-level design reasoning. To tackle sparse rewards in long-horizon tasks, we propose Reflection-GRPO (ReGRPO), which augments Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with self-reflection traces that supply rich intermediate feedback, accelerating convergence and boosting robustness. Experiments on SimuBench, our newly released benchmark comprising 5300 multi-domain modeling tasks, show that a Qwen2.5-7B model fine-tuned with SimuAgent converges faster and achieves higher modeling accuracy than standard RL baselines, and even surpasses GPT-4o when evaluated with few-shot prompting on the same benchmark. Ablations confirm that the two-stage curriculum and abstract-reconstruct data augmentation further enhance generalization. SimuAgent trains and runs entirely on-premise with modest hardware, delivering a privacy-preserving, cost-effective solution for industrial model-driven engineering. SimuAgent bridges the gap between LLMs and graphical modeling environments, offering a practical solution for AI-assisted engineering design in industrial settings.

Inside Out: Evolving User-Centric Core Memory Trees for Long-Term Personalized Dialogue Systems

Existing long-term personalized dialogue systems struggle to reconcile unbounded interaction streams with finite context constraints, often succumbing to memory noise accumulation, reasoning degradation, and persona inconsistency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Inside Out, a framework that utilizes a globally maintained PersonaTree as the carrier of long-term user profiling. By constraining the trunk with an initial schema and updating the branches and leaves, PersonaTree enables controllable growth, achieving memory compression while preserving consistency. Moreover, we train a lightweight MemListener via reinforcement learning with process-based rewards to produce structured, executable, and interpretable {ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, NO_OP} operations, thereby supporting the dynamic evolution of the personalized tree. During response generation, PersonaTree is directly leveraged to enhance outputs in latency-sensitive scenarios; when users require more details, the agentic mode is triggered to introduce details on-demand under the constraints of the PersonaTree. Experiments show that PersonaTree outperforms full-text concatenation and various personalized memory systems in suppressing contextual noise and maintaining persona consistency. Notably, the small MemListener model achieves memory-operation decision performance comparable to, or even surpassing, powerful reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Gemini-3-Pro.

Distilling the Thought, Watermarking the Answer: A Principle Semantic Guided Watermark for Large Reasoning Models

Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) excelling in complex tasks present unique challenges for digital watermarking, as existing methods often disrupt logical coherence or incur high computational costs. Token-based watermarking techniques can corrupt the reasoning flow by applying pseudo-random biases, while semantic-aware approaches improve quality but introduce significant latency or require auxiliary models. This paper introduces ReasonMark, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for reasoning-intensive LLMs. Our approach decouples generation into an undisturbed Thinking Phase and a watermarked Answering Phase. We propose a Criticality Score to identify semantically pivotal tokens from the reasoning trace, which are distilled into a Principal Semantic Vector (PSV). The PSV then guides a semantically-adaptive mechanism that modulates watermark strength based on token-PSV alignment, ensuring robustness without compromising logical integrity. Extensive experiments show ReasonMark surpasses state-of-the-art methods by reducing text Perplexity by 0.35, increasing translation BLEU score by 0.164, and raising mathematical accuracy by 0.67 points. These advancements are achieved alongside a 0.34% higher watermark detection AUC and stronger robustness to attacks, all with a negligible increase in latency. This work enables the traceable and trustworthy deployment of reasoning LLMs in real-world applications.

Re-Align: Structured Reasoning-guided Alignment for In-Context Image Generation and Editing

In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks.

UniLiPs: Unified LiDAR Pseudo-Labeling with Geometry-Grounded Dynamic Scene Decomposition

Unlabeled LiDAR logs, in autonomous driving applications, are inherently a gold mine of dense 3D geometry hiding in plain sight - yet they are almost useless without human labels, highlighting a dominant cost barrier for autonomous-perception research. In this work we tackle this bottleneck by leveraging temporal-geometric consistency across LiDAR sweeps to lift and fuse cues from text and 2D vision foundation models directly into 3D, without any manual input. We introduce an unsupervised multi-modal pseudo-labeling method relying on strong geometric priors learned from temporally accumulated LiDAR maps, alongside with a novel iterative update rule that enforces joint geometric-semantic consistency, and vice-versa detecting moving objects from inconsistencies. Our method simultaneously produces 3D semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes, and dense LiDAR scans, demonstrating robust generalization across three datasets. We experimentally validate that our method compares favorably to existing semantic segmentation and object detection pseudo-labeling methods, which often require additional manual supervision. We confirm that even a small fraction of our geometrically consistent, densified LiDAR improves depth prediction by 51.5% and 22.0% MAE in the 80-150 and 150-250 meters range, respectively.

From Understanding to Engagement: Personalized pharmacy Video Clips via Vision Language Models (VLMs)

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are poised to revolutionize the digital transformation of pharmacyceutical industry by enabling intelligent, scalable, and automated multi-modality content processing. Traditional manual annotation of heterogeneous data modalities (text, images, video, audio, and web links), is prone to inconsistencies, quality degradation, and inefficiencies in content utilization. The sheer volume of long video and audio data further exacerbates these challenges, (e.g. long clinical trial interviews and educational seminars). Here, we introduce a domain adapted Video to Video Clip Generation framework that integrates Audio Language Models (ALMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) to produce highlight clips. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reproducible Cut & Merge algorithm with fade in/out and timestamp normalization, ensuring smooth transitions and audio/visual alignment; (ii) a personalization mechanism based on role definition and prompt injection for tailored outputs (marketing, training, regulatory); (iii) a cost efficient e2e pipeline strategy balancing ALM/VLM enhanced processing. Evaluations on Video MME benchmark (900) and our proprietary dataset of 16,159 pharmacy videos across 14 disease areas demonstrate 3 to 4 times speedup, 4 times cost reduction, and competitive clip quality. Beyond efficiency gains, we also report our methods improved clip coherence scores (0.348) and informativeness scores (0.721) over state of the art VLM baselines (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro), highlighting the potential of transparent, custom extractive, and compliance supporting video summarization for life sciences.

Publishing FAIR and Machine-actionable Reviews in Materials Science: The Case for Symbolic Knowledge in Neuro-symbolic Artificial Intelligence

Scientific reviews are central to knowledge integration in materials science, yet their key insights remain locked in narrative text and static PDF tables, limiting reuse by humans and machines alike. This article presents a case study in atomic layer deposition and etching (ALD/E) where we publish review tables as FAIR, machine-actionable comparisons in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), turning them into structured, queryable knowledge. Building on this, we contrast symbolic querying over ORKG with large language model-based querying, and argue that a curated symbolic layer should remain the backbone of reliable neurosymbolic AI in materials science, with LLMs serving as complementary, symbolically grounded interfaces rather than standalone sources of truth.