Manipulator for people with limited abilities

The topic of this final qualification work was chosen due to the importance of developing robotic systems designed to assist people with disabilities. Advances in robotics and automation technologies have opened up new prospects for creating devices that can significantly improve the quality of life for these people. In this context, designing a robotic hand with a control system adapted to the needs of people with disabilities is a major scientific and practical challenge. This work addresses the problem of developing and manufacturing a four-degree-of-freedom robotic hand suitable for practical manipulation. Addressing this issue requires a comprehensive approach, encompassing the design of the hand's mechanical structure, the development of its control system, and its integration with a technical vision system and software based on the Robot Operating System (ROS).

Advancements in Chinese font generation since deep learning era: A survey

Chinese font generation aims to create a new Chinese font library based on some reference samples. It is a topic of great concern to many font designers and typographers. Over the past years, with the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, various new techniques have achieved flourishing and thriving progress. Nevertheless, how to improve the overall quality of generated Chinese character images remains a tough issue. In this paper, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent Chinese font generation approaches based on deep learning. To be specific, we first illustrate the research background of the task. Then, we outline our literature selection and analysis methodology, and review a series of related fundamentals, including classical deep learning architectures, font representation formats, public datasets, and frequently-used evaluation metrics. After that, relying on the number of reference samples required to generate a new font, we categorize the existing methods into two major groups: many-shot font generation and few-shot font generation methods. Within each category, representative approaches are summarized, and their strengths and limitations are also discussed in detail. Finally, we conclude our paper with the challenges and future directions, with the expectation to provide some valuable illuminations for the researchers in this field.

Vec2Summ: Text Summarization via Probabilistic Sentence Embeddings

We propose Vec2Summ, a novel method for abstractive summarization that frames the task as semantic compression. Vec2Summ represents a document collection using a single mean vector in the semantic embedding space, capturing the central meaning of the corpus. To reconstruct fluent summaries, we perform embedding inversion -- decoding this mean vector into natural language using a generative language model. To improve reconstruction quality and capture some degree of topical variability, we introduce stochasticity by sampling from a Gaussian distribution centered on the mean. This approach is loosely analogous to bagging in ensemble learning, where controlled randomness encourages more robust and varied outputs. Vec2Summ addresses key limitations of LLM-based summarization methods. It avoids context-length constraints, enables interpretable and controllable generation via semantic parameters, and scales efficiently with corpus size -- requiring only $O(d + d^2)$ parameters. Empirical results show that Vec2Summ produces coherent summaries for topically focused, order-invariant corpora, with performance comparable to direct LLM summarization in terms of thematic coverage and efficiency, albeit with less fine-grained detail. These results underscore Vec2Summ's potential in settings where scalability, semantic control, and corpus-level abstraction are prioritized.

CLAP: Coreference-Linked Augmentation for Passage Retrieval

Large Language Model (LLM)-based passage expansion has shown promise for enhancing first-stage retrieval, but often underperforms with dense retrievers due to semantic drift and misalignment with their pretrained semantic space. Beyond this, only a portion of a passage is typically relevant to a query, while the rest introduces noise--an issue compounded by chunking techniques that break coreference continuity. We propose Coreference-Linked Augmentation for Passage Retrieval (CLAP), a lightweight LLM-based expansion framework that segments passages into coherent chunks, resolves coreference chains, and generates localized pseudo-queries aligned with dense retriever representations. A simple fusion of global topical signals and fine-grained subtopic signals achieves robust performance across domains. CLAP yields consistent gains even as retriever strength increases, enabling dense retrievers to match or surpass second-stage rankers such as BM25 + MonoT5-3B, with up to 20.68% absolute nDCG@10 improvement. These improvements are especially notable in out-of-domain settings, where conventional LLM-based expansion methods relying on domain knowledge often falter. CLAP instead adopts a logic-centric pipeline that enables robust, domain-agnostic generalization.

SEADialogues: A Multilingual Culturally Grounded Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset on Southeast Asian Languages

Although numerous datasets have been developed to support dialogue systems, most existing chit-chat datasets overlook the cultural nuances inherent in natural human conversations. To address this gap, we introduce SEADialogues, a culturally grounded dialogue dataset centered on Southeast Asia, a region with over 700 million people and immense cultural diversity. Our dataset features dialogues in eight languages from six Southeast Asian countries, many of which are low-resource despite having sizable speaker populations. To enhance cultural relevance and personalization, each dialogue includes persona attributes and two culturally grounded topics that reflect everyday life in the respective communities. Furthermore, we release a multi-turn dialogue dataset to advance research on culturally aware and human-centric large language models, including conversational dialogue agents.

Conformal Prediction and Trustworthy AI

Conformal predictors are machine learning algorithms developed in the 1990's by Gammerman, Vovk, and their research team, to provide set predictions with guaranteed confidence level. Over recent years, they have grown in popularity and have become a mainstream methodology for uncertainty quantification in the machine learning community. From its beginning, there was an understanding that they enable reliable machine learning with well-calibrated uncertainty quantification. This makes them extremely beneficial for developing trustworthy AI, a topic that has also risen in interest over the past few years, in both the AI community and society more widely. In this article, we review the potential for conformal prediction to contribute to trustworthy AI beyond its marginal validity property, addressing problems such as generalization risk and AI governance. Experiments and examples are also provided to demonstrate its use as a well-calibrated predictor and for bias identification and mitigation.

Adaptive Backtracking for Privacy Protection in Large Language Models

The preservation of privacy has emerged as a critical topic in the era of artificial intelligence. However, current work focuses on user-oriented privacy, overlooking severe enterprise data leakage risks exacerbated by the Retrieval-Augmented Generation paradigm. To address this gap, our paper introduces a novel objective: enterprise-oriented privacy concerns. Achieving this objective requires overcoming two fundamental challenges: existing methods such as data sanitization severely degrade model performance, and the field lacks public datasets for evaluation. We address these challenges with several solutions. (1) To prevent performance degradation, we propose ABack, a training-free mechanism that leverages a Hidden State Model to pinpoint the origin of a leakage intention and rewrite the output safely. (2) To solve the lack of datasets, we construct PriGenQA, a new benchmark for enterprise privacy scenarios in healthcare and finance. To ensure a rigorous evaluation, we move beyond simple static attacks by developing a powerful adaptive attacker with Group Relative Policy Optimization. Experiments show that against this superior adversary, ABack improves the overall privacy utility score by up to 15\% over strong baselines, avoiding the performance trade-offs of prior methods.

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challenging benchmarks. Previous studies on fine-tuning MLLMs with synthetic charts are often restricted by their inadequate similarity to the real charts, which could compromise model training and performance on complex real-world charts. In this study, we show that modularizing chart generation and diversifying visual details improves chart understanding capabilities. In particular, we design a five-step data synthesis pipeline, where we separate data and function creation for single plot generation, condition the generation of later subplots on earlier ones for multi-subplot figures, visually diversify the generated figures, filter out low quality data, and finally generate the question-answer (QA) pairs with GPT-4o. This approach allows us to streamline the generation of fine-tuning datasets and introduce the effective chart dataset (ECD), which contains 10k+ chart images and 300k+ QA pairs, covering 25 topics and featuring 250+ chart type combinations with high visual complexity. We show that ECD consistently improves the performance of various MLLMs on a range of real-world and synthetic test sets. Code, data and models are available at: https://github.com/yuweiyang-anu/ECD.

Learning the Topic, Not the Language: How LLMs Classify Online Immigration Discourse Across Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming social-science research by enabling scalable, precise analysis. Their adaptability raises the question of whether knowledge acquired through fine-tuning in a few languages can transfer to unseen languages that only appeared during pre-training. To examine this, we fine-tune lightweight LLaMA 3.2-3B models on monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual data sets to classify immigration-related tweets from X/Twitter across 13 languages, a domain characterised by polarised, culturally specific discourse. We evaluate whether minimal language-specific fine-tuning enables cross-lingual topic detection and whether adding targeted languages corrects pre-training biases. Results show that LLMs fine-tuned in one or two languages can reliably classify immigration-related content in unseen languages. However, identifying whether a tweet expresses a pro- or anti-immigration stance benefits from multilingual fine-tuning. Pre-training bias favours dominant languages, but even minimal exposure to under-represented languages during fine-tuning (as little as $9.62\times10^{-11}$ of the original pre-training token volume) yields significant gains. These findings challenge the assumption that cross-lingual mastery requires extensive multilingual training: limited language coverage suffices for topic-level generalisation, and structural biases can be corrected with lightweight interventions. By releasing 4-bit-quantised, LoRA fine-tuned models, we provide an open-source, reproducible alternative to proprietary LLMs that delivers 35 times faster inference at just 0.00000989% of the dollar cost of the OpenAI GPT-4o model, enabling scalable, inclusive research.

Whose Truth? Pluralistic Geo-Alignment for (Agentic) AI

AI (super) alignment describes the challenge of ensuring (future) AI systems behave in accordance with societal norms and goals. While a quickly evolving literature is addressing biases and inequalities, the geographic variability of alignment remains underexplored. Simply put, what is considered appropriate, truthful, or legal can differ widely across regions due to cultural norms, political realities, and legislation. Alignment measures applied to AI/ML workflows can sometimes produce outcomes that diverge from statistical realities, such as text-to-image models depicting balanced gender ratios in company leadership despite existing imbalances. Crucially, some model outputs are globally acceptable, while others, e.g., questions about Kashmir, depend on knowing the user's location and their context. This geographic sensitivity is not new. For instance, Google Maps renders Kashmir's borders differently based on user location. What is new is the unprecedented scale and automation with which AI now mediates knowledge, expresses opinions, and represents geographic reality to millions of users worldwide, often with little transparency about how context is managed. As we approach Agentic AI, the need for spatio-temporally aware alignment, rather than one-size-fits-all approaches, is increasingly urgent. This paper reviews key geographic research problems, suggests topics for future work, and outlines methods for assessing alignment sensitivity.