A Guide for Manual Annotation of Scientific Imagery: How to Prepare for Large Projects

Despite the high demand for manually annotated image data, managing complex and costly annotation projects remains under-discussed. This is partly due to the fact that leading such projects requires dealing with a set of diverse and interconnected challenges which often fall outside the expertise of specific domain experts, leaving practical guidelines scarce. These challenges range widely from data collection to resource allocation and recruitment, from mitigation of biases to effective training of the annotators. This paper provides a domain-agnostic preparation guide for annotation projects, with a focus on scientific imagery. Drawing from the authors' extensive experience in managing a large manual annotation project, it addresses fundamental concepts including success measures, annotation subjects, project goals, data availability, and essential team roles. Additionally, it discusses various human biases and recommends tools and technologies to improve annotation quality and efficiency. The goal is to encourage further research and frameworks for creating a comprehensive knowledge base to reduce the costs of manual annotation projects across various fields.

Benefiting from Negative yet Informative Feedback by Contrasting Opposing Sequential Patterns

We consider the task of learning from both positive and negative feedback in a sequential recommendation scenario, as both types of feedback are often present in user interactions. Meanwhile, conventional sequential learning models usually focus on considering and predicting positive interactions, ignoring that reducing items with negative feedback in recommendations improves user satisfaction with the service. Moreover, the negative feedback can potentially provide a useful signal for more accurate identification of true user interests. In this work, we propose to train two transformer encoders on separate positive and negative interaction sequences. We incorporate both types of feedback into the training objective of the sequential recommender using a composite loss function that includes positive and negative cross-entropy as well as a cleverly crafted contrastive term, that helps better modeling opposing patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in terms of increasing true-positive metrics compared to state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods while reducing the number of wrongly promoted negative items.

Multi-view Graph Condensation via Tensor Decomposition

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in various real-world applications, including drug discovery, object detection, social media analysis, recommender systems, and text classification. In contrast to their vast potential, training them on large-scale graphs presents significant computational challenges due to the resources required for their storage and processing. Graph Condensation has emerged as a promising solution to reduce these demands by learning a synthetic compact graph that preserves the essential information of the original one while maintaining the GNN's predictive performance. Despite their efficacy, current graph condensation approaches frequently rely on a computationally intensive bi-level optimization. Moreover, they fail to maintain a mapping between synthetic and original nodes, limiting the interpretability of the model's decisions. In this sense, a wide range of decomposition techniques have been applied to learn linear or multi-linear functions from graph data, offering a more transparent and less resource-intensive alternative. However, their applicability to graph condensation remains unexplored. This paper addresses this gap and proposes a novel method called Multi-view Graph Condensation via Tensor Decomposition (GCTD) to investigate to what extent such techniques can synthesize an informative smaller graph and achieve comparable downstream task performance. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that GCTD effectively reduces graph size while preserving GNN performance, achieving up to a 4.0\ improvement in accuracy on three out of six datasets and competitive performance on large graphs compared to existing approaches. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/gctd-345A.

Collab-REC: An LLM-based Agentic Framework for Balancing Recommendations in Tourism

We propose Collab-REC, a multi-agent framework designed to counteract popularity bias and enhance diversity in tourism recommendations. In our setting, three LLM-based agents -- Personalization, Popularity, and Sustainability generate city suggestions from complementary perspectives. A non-LLM moderator then merges and refines these proposals via multi-round negotiation, ensuring each agent's viewpoint is incorporated while penalizing spurious or repeated responses. Experiments on European city queries show that Collab-REC improves diversity and overall relevance compared to a single-agent baseline, surfacing lesser-visited locales that often remain overlooked. This balanced, context-aware approach addresses over-tourism and better aligns with constraints provided by the user, highlighting the promise of multi-stakeholder collaboration in LLM-driven recommender systems.

Diverse Negative Sampling for Implicit Collaborative Filtering

Implicit collaborative filtering recommenders are usually trained to learn user positive preferences. Negative sampling, which selects informative negative items to form negative training data, plays a crucial role in this process. Since items are often clustered in the latent space, existing negative sampling strategies normally oversample negative items from the dense regions. This leads to homogeneous negative data and limited model expressiveness. In this paper, we propose Diverse Negative Sampling (DivNS), a novel approach that explicitly accounts for diversity in negative training data during the negative sampling process. DivNS first finds hard negative items with large preference scores and constructs user-specific caches that store unused but highly informative negative samples. Then, its diversity-augmented sampler selects a diverse subset of negative items from the cache while ensuring dissimilarity from the user's hard negatives. Finally, a synthetic negatives generator combines the selected diverse negatives with hard negatives to form more effective training data. The resulting synthetic negatives are both informative and diverse, enabling recommenders to learn a broader item space and improve their generalisability. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DivNS in improving recommendation quality while maintaining computational efficiency.

Incident Analysis for AI Agents

As AI agents become more widely deployed, we are likely to see an increasing number of incidents: events involving AI agent use that directly or indirectly cause harm. For example, agents could be prompt-injected to exfiltrate private information or make unauthorized purchases. Structured information about such incidents (e.g., user prompts) can help us understand their causes and prevent future occurrences. However, existing incident reporting processes are not sufficient for understanding agent incidents. In particular, such processes are largely based on publicly available data, which excludes useful, but potentially sensitive, information such as an agent's chain of thought or browser history. To inform the development of new, emerging incident reporting processes, we propose an incident analysis framework for agents. Drawing on systems safety approaches, our framework proposes three types of factors that can cause incidents: system-related (e.g., CBRN training data), contextual (e.g., prompt injections), and cognitive (e.g., misunderstanding a user request). We also identify specific information that could help clarify which factors are relevant to a given incident: activity logs, system documentation and access, and information about the tools an agent uses. We provide recommendations for 1) what information incident reports should include and 2) what information developers and deployers should retain and make available to incident investigators upon request. As we transition to a world with more agents, understanding agent incidents will become increasingly crucial for managing risks.

The Maximum Coverage Model and Recommendation System for UAV Vertiports Location Planning

As urban aerial mobility (UAM) infrastructure development accelerates globally, cities like Shenzhen are planning large-scale vertiport networks (e.g., 1,200+ facilities by 2026). Existing planning frameworks remain inadequate for this complexity due to historical limitations in data granularity and real-world applicability. This paper addresses these gaps by first proposing the Capacitated Dynamic Maximum Covering Location Problem (CDMCLP), a novel optimization framework that simultaneously models urban-scale spatial-temporal demand, heterogeneous user behaviors, and infrastructure capacity constraints. Building on this foundation, we introduce an Integrated Planning Recommendation System that combines CDMCLP with socio-economic factors and dynamic clustering initialization. This system leverages adaptive parameter tuning based on empirical user behavior to generate practical planning solutions. Validation in a Chinese center city demonstrates the effectiveness of the new optimization framework and recommendation system. Under the evaluation and optimization of CDMCLP, the quantitative performance of traditional location methods are exposed and can be improved by 38\%--52\%, while the recommendation system shows user-friendliness and the effective integration of complex elements. By integrating mathematical rigor with practical implementation considerations, this hybrid approach bridges the gap between theoretical location modeling and real-world UAM infrastructure planning, offering municipalities a pragmatic tool for vertiport network design.

Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization for LLM-based User Simulators in Sequential Recommendation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled realistic user simulators for developing and evaluating recommender systems (RSs). However, existing LLM-based simulators for RSs face two major limitations: (1) static and single-step prompt-based inference that leads to inaccurate and incomplete user profile construction; (2) unrealistic and single-round recommendation-feedback interaction pattern that fails to capture real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose DGDPO (Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization), a novel framework that constructs user profile through a dynamic and iterative optimization process to enhance the simulation fidelity. Specifically, DGDPO incorporates two core modules within each optimization loop: firstly, a specialized LLM-based diagnostic module, calibrated through our novel training strategy, accurately identifies specific defects in the user profile. Subsequently, a generalized LLM-based treatment module analyzes the diagnosed defect and generates targeted suggestions to refine the profile. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM-based user simulators that are limited to single-round interactions, we are the first to integrate DGDPO with sequential recommenders, enabling a bidirectional evolution where user profiles and recommendation strategies adapt to each other over multi-round interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Signal and Noise: A Framework for Reducing Uncertainty in Language Model Evaluation

Developing large language models is expensive and involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we analyze specific properties which make a benchmark more reliable for such decisions, and interventions to design higher-quality evaluation benchmarks. We introduce two key metrics that show differences in current benchmarks: signal, a benchmark's ability to separate better models from worse models, and noise, a benchmark's sensitivity to random variability between training steps. We demonstrate that benchmarks with a better signal-to-noise ratio are more reliable when making decisions at small scale, and those with less noise have lower scaling law prediction error. These results suggest that improving signal or noise will lead to more useful benchmarks, so we introduce three interventions designed to directly affect signal or noise. For example, we propose that switching to a metric that has better signal and noise (e.g., perplexity rather than accuracy) leads to better reliability and improved scaling law error. We also find that filtering noisy subtasks, to improve an aggregate signal-to-noise ratio, leads to more reliable multi-task evaluations. We also find that averaging the output of a model's intermediate checkpoints to reduce noise leads to consistent improvements. We conclude by recommending that those creating new benchmarks, or selecting which existing benchmarks to use, aim for high signal and low noise. We use 30 benchmarks for these experiments, and 375 open-weight language models from 60M to 32B parameters, resulting in a new, publicly available dataset of 900K evaluation benchmark results, totaling 200M instances.

Data-driven Trust Bootstrapping for Mobile Edge Computing-based Industrial IoT Services

We propose a data-driven and context-aware approach to bootstrap trustworthiness of homogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) services in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) based industrial IoT (IIoT) systems. The proposed approach addresses key limitations in adapting existing trust bootstrapping approaches into MEC-based IIoT systems. These key limitations include, the lack of opportunity for a service consumer to interact with a lesser-known service over a prolonged period of time to get a robust measure of its trustworthiness, inability of service consumers to consistently interact with their peers to receive reliable recommendations of the trustworthiness of a lesser-known service as well as the impact of uneven context parameters in different MEC environments causing uneven trust environments for trust evaluation. In addition, the proposed approach also tackles the problem of data sparsity via enabling knowledge sharing among different MEC environments within a given MEC topology. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation on two real-world datasets suitably adjusted to exhibit the context-dependent trust information accumulated in MEC environments within a given MEC topology. The experimental results affirmed the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability to bootstrap trustworthiness of services in MEC-based IIoT systems.