New AI research, sorted by topic.

Language models handle text well, and rule engines give conclusions with proofs. Systems that combine the two are usually described by example, and the same coupling turns up under different names in agent frameworks, guardrail toolkits and neuro-symbolic research. This document defines thirteen patterns for coupling a language model with an executable rule language, in the catalogue form introduced for object-oriented design: intent, motivation, applicability, participants, collaborations, consequences, implementation, known uses and related patterns. Four patterns concern what crosses the boundary between model and rules, five who controls whom, three how the model takes part in the reasoning, and one how knowledge is kept over time. Five invariants hold for every combination, and five failure patterns name the couplings that break them. We relate the catalogue to published pattern catalogues and taxonomies of hybrid and neuro-symbolic systems and show where they overlap with it. A decision guide leads from a problem to a pattern. It rests on our measurements, including the cases in which a model alone did as well as the hybrid or better, and it reports what each design cost.

Large language models (LLMs) can improve task performance during learning, yet these gains do not necessarily reflect learners' ability to thereafter apply the knowledge and skills independently. We present AI Cosmos, an agentic infrastructure for situated learning that organizes learning around two complementary principles: scenario-based participation and cumulative assets of practice. AI Cosmos organizes learners and role-specialized agents within learning scenarios that integrate task-relevant knowledge and, when needed, executable workbenches. An asset-memory loop preserves the processes and outcomes of practice as reusable assets with explicit provenance and dependencies. We evaluate scenario-based interaction through two preregistered randomized controlled studies examining the acquisition of legal reasoning and programming competence, holding the same underlying LLM across conditions. AI Cosmos achieves greater learning gains than a conventional LLM in legal reasoning and higher mastery of unseen programming problems than an LLM-as-Teacher baseline.

Memory in reinforcement learning raises two problems. Attention finds the relevant item by scoring the whole store, which is costly for robots under latency and energy limits. When a retrieved memory pays off, credit for acquiring it must cross the whole sequence. We argue that both are governed by one quantity, the value of information, and propose to estimate it from archived rollouts with a learned world model. We obtain that, when read at the observation, it yields a provable lower bound on the optimal value of the acquiring action, which floors its TD target and attributes this floor to the observation that earned it. Read at the decision, it defines the optimal retrieval set. A pilot retrieval system, to be trained and improved with this signal, solves a memory task with reduced context.

Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, requiring both global contextual understanding and fine-grained structural precision. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, its direct application to medical images often lacks domain-specific adaptability. Meanwhile, State Space Models (SSMs)-based methods, such as Mamba, efficiently capture long-range dependencies but may struggle with preserving fine anatomical details. To address these challenges, we propose a segment anything model based context guided mamba unet, SAMBA-UNet, a novel framework that integrates SAM's context knowledge with Mamba's hierarchical feature learning to enhance both global representation and local detail refinement. Specifically, we introduce the Hierarchical Context Enhancement Module (HCEM), an attention-based fusion module that deeply incorporates the multi-level features of SAM and Mamba to improve detail perception and segmentation precision. Additionally, we employ LoRA and Adapter-based fine-tuning to adapt SAM to medical imaging tasks, further enhancing its domain-specific segmentation capability and robustness. We conducted a comprehensive study on several medical segmentation datasets, including Synapse, ISIC17, and ISIC18, evaluating our method across multiple metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that SAMBA-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing generalization, segmentation accuracy, and computational efficiency. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

Choosing a robot action model requires evidence about task capability, adaptation cost, deployment requirements, and the reliability of reported conclusions. Success rates alone offer limited guidance to researchers with different computing budgets and goals. We propose RoboSeed, a multidimensional evaluation framework for vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAM), within a continuing program to train, evaluate, and openly release robot models with verifiable evidence for model selection. The framework defines five dimensions: capability, downstream training affordability, deployment affordability, locally verified research value, and reproduction evidence. It maps empirical measurements and audit criteria to 0-100 profiles using fixed normalization anchors, with balanced, training-constrained, and deployment-constrained preference settings. Interface and protocol checks establish when comparisons are appropriate. Missing measurements remain explicit, incomplete aggregate scores are withheld, and weighted input coverage identifies evidence gaps. We apply the framework to representative VLA and WAM models, drawing on local training, released-weight evaluation, task-level audits, and an evaluation-system study. The results reveal budget-dependent backbone choices, sensitivity to adaptation recipes, and differences between language and visual task interfaces. Reproducible scoring code and machine-readable evidence support extension to additional models. The study provides dimension-level assessments and priorities for further measurement, while incomplete serving traces and heterogeneous protocols preclude overall numerical rankings.

Automatic operator design (AOD) has increasingly adopted large language models (LLMs) to generate problem-specific search and variation operators for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO). Yet most methods evolve the operators while leaving the process that discovers them fixed. This limits adaptation as new Pareto trade-offs and operator interactions change where and how the search should proceed. We introduce HEMO, which makes the AOD harness itself a self-evolving optimization target. HEMO maintains a persistent harness state and updates one module at a time, revising the logic that determines which experience to retrieve, which operators to improve, which parents to select, and how to formulate the orchestration of search steps. Downstream solution quality and runtime guide these updates, while a discounted UCB scheduler directs adaptation toward promising modules as their utility changes. A persistent memory filesystem preserves candidate outcomes and diagnostic feedback across harness states, enabling successive states to build on accumulated optimization experience. Experiments across eight MOCO tasks and two structurally distinct evolutionary backbones demonstrate strong performance against conventional evolutionary, neural, and LLM-based AOD baselines, together with effective transfer to related tasks. HEMO extends automatic operator design beyond evolving individual operators to improving the search process that discovers them.