arXiv:2608.26107v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Predicting students’ academic risk in online education is crucial for enabling timely interventions that can improve retention and learning outcomes. However, existing models often suffer from limited early detection capability and insufficient interpretability, leading to a “black-box” trust crisis that hinders their adoption in real-world pedagogical settings. To address these challenges, we propose EduRiskX, a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates a temporal Transformer-based predictor with F-Logic symbolic reasoning. The neural component models longitudinal student activity sequences using temporal attention, class-weighted loss, and dynamic weekly truncation. Acting as a data-driven expert system, an F-Logic rule base — grounded in established educational theories (Engagement Theory and Student Integration Model) to mimic the diagnostic logic of human educators — is constructed exclusively from the training data. The neural risk probability and the symbolic confidence score are then combined through a logistic regression-based fusion mechanism that learns the relative contribution of each signal. Experiments on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD) using a strict 80/10/10 student-level split show that EduRiskX achieves an accuracy of 0.900 and an F1-score of 0.894 at the end of the semester (Week 38), with an average early detection week of 9.32 and a detection rate of 94.30 percent. Compared with state-of-the-art time-series models (PatchTST, iTransformer) and common deep learning baselines (LSTM, CNN), EduRiskX yields improved recall and earlier risk identification under identical conditions. Beyond predictive performance, the F-Logic module provides structured rule-based explanations linking predictions to observable behavioral patterns and educational theories.

arXiv:2608.26109v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine-learning models can predict ICU mortality accurately, but feature-attribution methods alone rarely provide the clinical narrative needed for bedside use. Large language models (LLMs) may bridge this gap, and multi-step agentic pipelines are a plausible extension because they separate data interpretation, guideline checking, and final explanation. This revised feasibility study preserves the original standalone-versus-agentic comparison while making the main clinical findings more explicit. Using the retained local eICU Demo artifact set (2,353 ICU stays; 8.1% mortality), XGBoost achieved an AUROC of 0.855 (95% CI 0.796–0.906) and an AUPRC of 0.332 (95% CI 0.217–0.494). On a stratified 38-case explanation subset, the standalone LLM produced 1 explanation with explicit outcome leakage, whereas the four-step agentic pipeline produced none. Among the 14 cases that overlapped with the SHAP review subset, the standalone LLM showed higher SHAP alignment (mean Jaccard 0.171 versus 0.077) and higher direction consistency (92.9% versus 78.6%), while the agentic pipeline showed higher guideline grounding (0.762 versus 0.143), higher value specificity (0.236 versus 0.143), and slightly higher plausibility (0.700 versus 0.671). Clinically, the results suggest that agentic decomposition may improve safety-relevant grounding and patient-specific detail, but it should be paired with attribution-based checks before use in high-stakes risk explanation.

arXiv:2608.26111v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Battery Prognostics and Health Management (BPHM) is critical for ensuring the safe, reliable, and cost-effective operation of batteries across electric vehicles, grid storage, and consumer electronics. Conventional BPHM approaches, including physics-based models and task-centric deep learning methods, face challenges in computational efficiency and parameterization, cross-domain generalization, dependence on extensive labeled run-to-failure data, and model interpretability. Recent Large Models (LMs), built upon Transformer architectures and self-supervised pre-training, offer a transformative new paradigm to overcome these long-standing bottlenecks. This review provides the first comprehensive survey of LM applications in BPHM, systematically examining how these models address challenges in the field. We begin by elucidating the foundational technologies enabling LMs, including Transformer architectures, self-supervised learning, large-scale multimodal datasets, and PEFT techniques. We then categorize recent progress along four critical dimensions: mitigating data scarcity, enhancing generalization and robustness, integrating domain knowledge for interpretability, and enabling system-level automation. Despite promising results, significant challenges remain across data accessibility, intelligence validation, trustworthiness, and deployment feasibility. To guide future research, we propose a roadmap focused on building collaborative data ecosystems, validating intelligence for industrial applications, enhancing trustworthiness with physics-informed designs, and enabling efficient on-device deployment. This review establishes a systematic approach to understand and advance LM-driven BPHM, providing researchers and practitioners with essential insights for developing next-generation battery management systems capable of safe, reliable, and autonomous operation throughout battery lifecycles.

arXiv:2608.26113v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present PICasso, an AI-assisted framework for automated synthesis, verification, and optimization of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) from natural-language specifications. PICasso couples a structured NL -> YAML -> GDS generation pipeline with PDK aware knowledge injection, automated placement and routing, DRC/LVS validation, and SAX-based photonic simulation. To systematically evaluate AI-driven photonic design, we introduce PIC-Set, a benchmark of 36 parameterized PIC design tasks spanning core photonic primitives and multi-component circuits. Using PIC-Set, we benchmark several state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) under a unified evaluation protocol, including new metrics such as structural and functional $Spec@k$, optimization efficiency, and robustness under perturbations. Across the benchmark, PICasso significantly improves end-to-end specification satisfaction compared to vanilla LLM generation. Structural $Spec@3$ reaches up to 92.7% and functional $Spec@3$ up to 52% on high-complexity circuits. In addition, PICasso consistently reduces circuit insertion loss, lowering the mean loss from 4.98 dB to 3.25 dB (1.74 dB improvement) through simulation-guided optimization. These results demonstrate that structured domain constraints, physical verification, and simulation feedback transform LLMs from brittle netlist generators into practical PIC design agents capable of producing manufacturable layouts with competitive runtimes relative to manual GUI-based workflows.

arXiv:2608.26114v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Calculation-intensive financial question answering requires exact reasoning over structured rates, temporal conditions, numerical formulas, and rule-based constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly on natural language tasks, they often produce numerically incorrect yet plausible answers when solving multi-step financial calculations. To address this limitation, we introduce CIFQA (Calculation-Intensive Financial Query Answering), a deterministic tool-grounded multi-agent LLM framework for financial question answering. CIFQA separates language understanding from numerical execution by assigning specialized agents to query interpretation, routing, parameter extraction, computation planning, and response generation, while deterministic Python-based tools perform financial calculations and rule application. We instantiate CIFQA for fixed deposit query answering and evaluate it on a curated benchmark of fixed deposit queries. CIFQA achieves 95.54% accuracy on calculation-intensive queries and 90.87% overall accuracy, substantially outperforming direct LLM baselines even when provided with complete formulas, rate cards, and benchmark instructions. Ablation studies show that deterministic components such as exact rate lookup, tenure computation, rolling-year adjustment, and premature-withdrawal logic are critical contributors to performance. Notably, a 17B open-source backbone operating within CIFQA outperforms substantially larger frontier models evaluated with the same financial information, demonstrating that architectural design is a more important determinant of numerical reliability than model scale. While evaluated on fixed deposit queries, CIFQA provides a generalizable framework for calculation-intensive financial reasoning tasks.

OpenAI and Thailand’s MHESI launch an eight-week accelerator helping 10 health, wellness, and education startups turn AI prototypes into trusted products.