Artificial Intelligence for All? Brazilian Teachers on Ethics, Equity, and the Everyday Challenges of AI in Education

This study examines the perceptions of Brazilian K-12 education teachers regarding the use of AI in education, specifically General Purpose AI. This investigation employs a quantitative analysis approach, extracting information from a questionnaire completed by 346 educators from various regions of Brazil regarding their AI literacy and use. Educators vary in their educational level, years of experience, and type of educational institution. The analysis of the questionnaires shows that although most educators had only basic or limited knowledge of AI (80.3\%), they showed a strong interest in its application, particularly for the creation of interactive content (80.6%), lesson planning (80.2%), and personalized assessment (68.6%). The potential of AI to promote inclusion and personalized learning is also widely recognized (65.5%). The participants emphasized the importance of discussing ethics and digital citizenship, reflecting on technological dependence, biases, transparency, and responsible use of AI, aligning with critical education and the development of conscious students. Despite enthusiasm for the pedagogical potential of AI, significant structural challenges were identified, including a lack of training (43.4%), technical support (41.9%), and limitations of infrastructure, such as low access to computers, reliable Internet connections, and multimedia resources in schools. The study shows that Brazil is still in a bottom-up model for AI integration, missing official curricula to guide its implementation and structured training for teachers and students. Furthermore, effective implementation of AI depends on integrated public policies, adequate teacher training, and equitable access to technology, promoting ethical, inclusive, and contextually grounded adoption of AI in Brazilian K-12 education.

A Novel Deep Learning Method for Segmenting the Left Ventricle in Cardiac Cine MRI

This research aims to develop a novel deep learning network, GBU-Net, utilizing a group-batch-normalized U-Net framework, specifically designed for the precise semantic segmentation of the left ventricle in short-axis cine MRI scans. The methodology includes a down-sampling pathway for feature extraction and an up-sampling pathway for detail restoration, enhanced for medical imaging. Key modifications include techniques for better contextual understanding crucial in cardiac MRI segmentation. The dataset consists of 805 left ventricular MRI scans from 45 patients, with comparative analysis using established metrics such as the dice coefficient and mean perpendicular distance. GBU-Net significantly improves the accuracy of left ventricle segmentation in cine MRI scans. Its innovative design outperforms existing methods in tests, surpassing standard metrics like the dice coefficient and mean perpendicular distance. The approach is unique in its ability to capture contextual information, often missed in traditional CNN-based segmentation. An ensemble of the GBU-Net attains a 97% dice score on the SunnyBrook testing dataset. GBU-Net offers enhanced precision and contextual understanding in left ventricle segmentation for surgical robotics and medical analysis.

Multimodal Interpretation of Remote Sensing Images: Dynamic Resolution Input Strategy and Multi-scale Vision-Language Alignment Mechanism

Multimodal fusion of remote sensing images serves as a core technology for overcoming the limitations of single-source data and improving the accuracy of surface information extraction, which exhibits significant application value in fields such as environmental monitoring and urban planning. To address the deficiencies of existing methods, including the failure of fixed resolutions to balance efficiency and detail, as well as the lack of semantic hierarchy in single-scale alignment, this study proposes a Vision-language Model (VLM) framework integrated with two key innovations: the Dynamic Resolution Input Strategy (DRIS) and the Multi-scale Vision-language Alignment Mechanism (MS-VLAM).Specifically, the DRIS adopts a coarse-to-fine approach to adaptively allocate computational resources according to the complexity of image content, thereby preserving key fine-grained features while reducing redundant computational overhead. The MS-VLAM constructs a three-tier alignment mechanism covering object, local-region and global levels, which systematically captures cross-modal semantic consistency and alleviates issues of semantic misalignment and granularity imbalance.Experimental results on the RS-GPT4V dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the accuracy of semantic understanding and computational efficiency in tasks including image captioning and cross-modal retrieval. Compared with conventional methods, it achieves superior performance in evaluation metrics such as BLEU-4 and CIDEr for image captioning, as well as R@10 for cross-modal retrieval. This technical framework provides a novel approach for constructing efficient and robust multimodal remote sensing systems, laying a theoretical foundation and offering technical guidance for the engineering application of intelligent remote sensing interpretation.

CNSight: Evaluation of Clinical Note Segmentation Tools

Clinical notes are often stored in unstructured or semi-structured formats after extraction from electronic medical record (EMR) systems, which complicates their use for secondary analysis and downstream clinical applications. Reliable identification of section boundaries is a key step toward structuring these notes, as sections such as history of present illness, medications, and discharge instructions each provide distinct clinical contexts. In this work, we evaluate rule-based baselines, domain-specific transformer models, and large language models for clinical note segmentation using a curated dataset of 1,000 notes from MIMIC-IV. Our experiments show that large API-based models achieve the best overall performance, with GPT-5-mini reaching a best average F1 of 72.4 across sentence-level and freetext segmentation. Lightweight baselines remain competitive on structured sentence-level tasks but falter on unstructured freetext. Our results provide guidance for method selection and lay the groundwork for downstream tasks such as information extraction, cohort identification, and automated summarization.

A Cascaded Information Interaction Network for Precise Image Segmentation

Visual perception plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous behavior, offering a cost-effective and efficient alternative to complex multi-sensor systems. However, robust segmentation remains a challenge in complex scenarios. To address this, this paper proposes a cascaded convolutional neural network integrated with a novel Global Information Guidance Module. This module is designed to effectively fuse low-level texture details with high-level semantic features across multiple layers, thereby overcoming the inherent limitations of single-scale feature extraction. This architectural innovation significantly enhances segmentation accuracy, particularly in visually cluttered or blurred environments where traditional methods often fail. Experimental evaluations on benchmark image segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior precision, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of the approach and its promising potential for deployment in practical robotic applications.

Measuring Social Media Polarization Using Large Language Models and Heuristic Rules

Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed heuristics to systematically analyze and quantify affective polarization in discussions on divisive topics such as climate change and gun control. Unlike most prior approaches that relied on sentiment analysis or predefined classifiers, our method integrates LLMs to extract stance, affective tone, and agreement patterns from large-scale social media discussions. We then apply a rule-based scoring system capable of quantifying affective polarization even in small conversations consisting of single interactions, based on stance alignment, emotional content, and interaction dynamics. Our analysis reveals distinct polarization patterns that are event dependent: (i) anticipation-driven polarization, where extreme polarization escalates before well-publicized events, and (ii) reactive polarization, where intense affective polarization spikes immediately after sudden, high-impact events. By combining AI-driven content annotation with domain-informed scoring, our framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach to measuring affective polarization. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/llm-social-media-polarization.

Resolving State Ambiguity in Robot Manipulation via Adaptive Working Memory Recoding

State ambiguity is common in robotic manipulation. Identical observations may correspond to multiple valid behavior trajectories. The visuomotor policy must correctly extract the appropriate types and levels of information from the history to identify the current task phase. However, naively extending the history window is computationally expensive and may cause severe overfitting. Inspired by the continuous nature of human reasoning and the recoding of working memory, we introduce PAM, a novel visuomotor Policy equipped with Adaptive working Memory. With minimal additional training cost in a two-stage manner, PAM supports a 300-frame history window while maintaining high inference speed. Specifically, a hierarchical frame feature extractor yields two distinct representations for motion primitives and temporal disambiguation. For compact representation, a context router with range-specific queries is employed to produce compact context features across multiple history lengths. And an auxiliary objective of reconstructing historical information is introduced to ensure that the context router acts as an effective bottleneck. We meticulously design 7 tasks and verify that PAM can handle multiple scenarios of state ambiguity simultaneously. With a history window of approximately 10 seconds, PAM still supports stable training and maintains inference speeds above 20Hz. Project website: https://tinda24.github.io/pam/

Rule-Based Approaches to Atomic Sentence Extraction

Natural language often combines multiple ideas into complex sentences. Atomic sentence extraction, the task of decomposing complex sentences into simpler sentences that each express a single idea, improves performance in information retrieval, question answering, and automated reasoning systems. Previous work has formalized the "split-and-rephrase" task and established evaluation metrics, and machine learning approaches using large language models have improved extraction accuracy. However, these methods lack interpretability and provide limited insight into which linguistic structures cause extraction failures. Although some studies have explored dependency-based extraction of subject-verb-object triples and clauses, no principled analysis has examined which specific clause structures and dependencies lead to extraction difficulties. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how complex sentence structures, including relative clauses, adverbial clauses, coordination patterns, and passive constructions, affect the performance of rule-based atomic sentence extraction. Using the WikiSplit dataset, we implemented dependency-based extraction rules in spaCy, generated 100 gold=standard atomic sentence sets, and evaluated performance using ROUGE and BERTScore. The system achieved ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.6714, ROUGE-2 F1 = 0.478, ROUGE-L F1 = 0.650, and BERTScore F1 = 0.5898, indicating moderate-to-high lexical, structural, and semantic alignment. Challenging structures included relative clauses, appositions, coordinated predicates, adverbial clauses, and passive constructions. Overall, rule-based extraction is reasonably accurate but sensitive to syntactic complexity.

From Model Choice to Model Belief: Establishing a New Measure for LLM-Based Research

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, but common practices to use LLM-generated data are inefficient. Treating an LLM's output ("model choice") as a single data point underutilizes the information inherent to the probabilistic nature of LLMs. This paper introduces and formalizes "model belief," a measure derived from an LLM's token-level probabilities that captures the model's belief distribution over choice alternatives in a single generation run. The authors prove that model belief is asymptotically equivalent to the mean of model choices (a non-trivial property) but forms a more statistically efficient estimator, with lower variance and a faster convergence rate. Analogous properties are shown to hold for smooth functions of model belief and model choice often used in downstream applications. The authors demonstrate the performance of model belief through a demand estimation study, where an LLM simulates consumer responses to different prices. In practical settings with limited numbers of runs, model belief explains and predicts ground-truth model choice better than model choice itself, and reduces the computation needed to reach sufficiently accurate estimates by roughly a factor of 20. The findings support using model belief as the default measure to extract more information from LLM-generated data.

Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation for Pre-Trained Vision Transformers

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved remarkable success in fine-tuning pre-trained vision transformers for various downstream tasks. Existing studies mainly focus on exploring more parameter-efficient strategies or more effective representation learning schemes. However, these methods either sacrifice fine-tuning performance or introduce excessive trainable parameters, failing to strike a balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a novel tuning method named collaborative low-rank adaptation (CLoRA) in this paper. CLoRA consists of base-space sharing and sample-agnostic diversity enhancement (SADE) components. To maintain parameter efficiency while expanding the learning capacity of low-rank modules (LRMs), base-space sharing allows all LRMs to share a set of down/up-projection spaces. In CLoRA, the low-rank matrices obtained from the shared spaces collaboratively construct each LRM. Since the representations extracted by these matrices may contain redundant information, SADE is employed to regularize the similarities among them to encourage diverse representations in the training process. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used image and point cloud datasets to evaluate the performance of CLoRA. Experimental results demonstrate that CLoRA strikes a better balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency, while requiring the fewest GFLOPs for point cloud analysis, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.