Journal Description
AI
AI
is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on artificial intelligence (AI), including broad aspects of cognition and reasoning, perception and planning, machine learning, intelligent robotics, and applications of AI, published monthly online by MDPI.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- High Visibility: indexed within ESCI (Web of Science), Scopus, EBSCO, and other databases.
- Journal Rank: JCR - Q1 (Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications) / CiteScore - Q2 (Artificial Intelligence)
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 20.4 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 5.6 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the first half of 2026).
- Recognition of Reviewers: APC discount vouchers, optional signed peer review, and reviewer names published annually in the journal.
- Journal Cluster of Artificial Intelligence: AI, AI in Medicine, Algorithms, BDCC, MAKE, MTI, Stats, Virtual Worlds, Computers and Journal of Superintelligence.
Impact Factor:
6.5 (2025);
5-Year Impact Factor:
5.6 (2025)
Latest Articles
SmartMM: A Domain-Specific Large Language Model for Medical Microbiology
AI 2026, 7(8), 316; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080316 (registering DOI) - 18 Aug 2026
Abstract
Background: Large language models (LLMs) show considerable promise for medical question answering and reasoning. Their use in medical microbiology, however, remains constrained by limited domain-specific knowledge and the risk of hallucinated outputs. Objective: To develop and evaluate Smart Medical Microbiology (SmartMM), a specialized
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Background: Large language models (LLMs) show considerable promise for medical question answering and reasoning. Their use in medical microbiology, however, remains constrained by limited domain-specific knowledge and the risk of hallucinated outputs. Objective: To develop and evaluate Smart Medical Microbiology (SmartMM), a specialized LLM for accurate, reliable, and context-aware responses in medical microbiology. Methods: SmartMM integrates domain-adaptive continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), knowledge distillation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We constructed a high-quality microbiology corpus from textbooks, clinical guidelines, the scientific literature, case reports, and other authoritative sources. Model performance was assessed using objective examinations, subjective generation tasks, expert review, and real-world user preference evaluation. Results: SmartMM achieved accuracies of 0.897 and 0.563 on true-or-false and fill-in-the-blank questions, respectively. In subjective generation tasks, it obtained the highest ROUGE-L score (0.265) and BERTScore F1 score (0.771) among all compared models. Expert assessment showed excellent inter-rater reliability, with all ICC(C,3) values exceeding 0.970. In a user evaluation involving 20 participants and 100 real-world questions, SmartMM received the largest number of first-place rankings (33), placing it among the top-performing systems overall. Conclusions: SmartMM showed strong domain adaptability in medical microbiology knowledge organization, semantic generation, and retrieval-augmented reasoning. These findings support its potential use in educational support, infectious disease knowledge assistance, and retrieval-enhanced medical question answering.
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Open AccessArticle
Artificial Intelligence Framework for Respiratory Disease Classification Using Multi-Spectral-Feature-Driven and Deep Neural Architectures
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Vijayalakshmi Sankaran, Paramasivam Alagumariappan, Sumendra Yogarayan, Thayananth Caran Varshana and Balaguru Ramana
AI 2026, 7(8), 315; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080315 - 18 Aug 2026
Abstract
Globally, respiratory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia affect populations significantly, requiring early and accurate diagnosis for effective clinical management. Manual auscultation and expert interpretation are the common shortcomings in conventional diagnostic approaches, as they lead to time-consuming
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Globally, respiratory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia affect populations significantly, requiring early and accurate diagnosis for effective clinical management. Manual auscultation and expert interpretation are the common shortcomings in conventional diagnostic approaches, as they lead to time-consuming and inconsistent analysis. To address these limitations, an artificial intelligence-driven framework for respiratory disease classification using multi-spectral feature extraction and deep learning architectures is proposed to classify four different respiratory conditions: Asthma, COPD, Pneumonia and Healthy. The dataset is collected from Kaggle’s respiratory sound database and the COUGHVID V3 database, which together contain 322 Asthma signals, 746 COPD signals, 323 Pneumonia signals and 174 Healthy signals. Subsequently, the features are extracted using four different feature extraction techniques—Constant Q Transform (CQT), a Gammatone spectrogram, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP)—and these extracted spectral representations are provided as inputs to various deep learning models such as a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (Deep CNN), a Temporal Attention Network (TAN) and an Autoencoder for automated feature learning and disease classification. The proposed framework is evaluated using several performance metrics, and the experimental results clearly indicate that the performance of the proposed classification framework strongly depends on the selection of spectral feature extraction techniques and deep learning models. Among all the evaluated combinations, it is evident that the Autoencoder model integrated with CQT features exhibited the best classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.72%, precision of 98.74%, recall of 98.72%, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 98.11%, Cohen’s kappa value of 98.10% and the least log loss of 0.025. The proposed artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled respiratory disease classification framework has demonstrated the ability to produce a reliable computer-aided diagnostic system which is suitable for smart healthcare applications and automated pulmonary disease screening.
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(This article belongs to the Topic Deep Supplement Learning for Healthcare and Biomedical Applications)
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Open AccessReview
Application of Artificial Intelligence in Perinatal Mental Health: A Review
by
Sheikh Mohammed Shariful Islam, Alan W. Gemmill, Yafit Hirshler, Michaela Pascoe and Jeannette Milgrom
AI 2026, 7(8), 314; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080314 - 14 Aug 2026
Abstract
Perinatal mental health remains a critical global challenge, with maternal mortality, preterm birth, and persistent disparities in care contributing to adverse outcomes for mothers. In addition, mental health difficulties in the perinatal period are associated with poorer developmental outcomes for young children and
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Perinatal mental health remains a critical global challenge, with maternal mortality, preterm birth, and persistent disparities in care contributing to adverse outcomes for mothers. In addition, mental health difficulties in the perinatal period are associated with poorer developmental outcomes for young children and impose an economic burden on societies. Addressing these issues requires innovative approaches that can complement traditional clinical practices. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool with the potential to transform perinatal care by enabling early risk prediction, personalised interventions, and scalable support systems. However, there are no existing reviews on use of AI across different stages of perinatal mental health. We conclude with a call to action for clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and technology developers to collaborate on a consensus framework that ensures ethical, safe, and equitable integration of AI into perinatal care.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: AI-Driven Personalized Healthcare and Applications)
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Open AccessArticle
Bidirectional Cross-Level Feature Interaction and Context-Aware Multi-Scale Attention for Crowd Counting
by
Zhifan Jin, Lin Zhou, He Wang, Sijia Chen, Liman Liu and Wenbing Tao
AI 2026, 7(8), 313; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080313 - 13 Aug 2026
Abstract
Crowd counting estimates the number and spatial distribution of people in images and videos, supporting smart city management and public safety. Existing methods often rely on intra-level feature refinement and simple cross-scale fusion, such as concatenation or addition, which limits interaction between fine-grained
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Crowd counting estimates the number and spatial distribution of people in images and videos, supporting smart city management and public safety. Existing methods often rely on intra-level feature refinement and simple cross-scale fusion, such as concatenation or addition, which limits interaction between fine-grained spatial details and high-level semantic representations. In addition, the limited receptive field of convolutional networks restricts global context modeling in scenes with heavy occlusion and extreme scale variation. To address these challenges, we propose a Hierarchical Context-Aware Multi-Scale Attention Network (HCMA). Its bidirectional cross-level interaction is realized through two complementary top-down decoding streams, where an attention-gating stream provides spatial guidance for the counting-oriented representations carried by a density-feature stream. HCMA includes three modules: the Selective Context-Aware Attention Module (SCAM), which performs context-dependent multi-scale filtering; Dynamic Positional Pooling (DPP), which introduces an image-level mean token and stochastic global-relation aggregation; and the Multi-Scale Enhancement Attention Module (MSEA), which refines high-level semantic features under scale variation. Experiments on ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, and NWPU-Crowd show competitive counting accuracy across scenes with different density ranges, scale variation, and occlusion. In particular, HCMA achieves an MAE of 73.2 on NWPU-Crowd, 17.2% lower than that of DM-Count.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI and Computer Vision in Real-World and Industrial Applications)
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iCert-Fair: A Human-Preference-Guided Two-Layer Framework for Multi-Objective Fairness Assessment and Harm Recovery in Credit Scoring
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Rashed Bahlool and Nabil Hewahi
AI 2026, 7(8), 312; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080312 - 13 Aug 2026
Abstract
As regulatory requirements increasingly shape automated lending decisions, fairness remains a critical challenge in high-stakes domains, particularly credit scoring. Although artificial intelligence models can achieve strong predictive performance, they may also reproduce biased outcomes that reduce financial inclusion or transfer harm to overlooked
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As regulatory requirements increasingly shape automated lending decisions, fairness remains a critical challenge in high-stakes domains, particularly credit scoring. Although artificial intelligence models can achieve strong predictive performance, they may also reproduce biased outcomes that reduce financial inclusion or transfer harm to overlooked protected groups. Existing fairness interventions commonly operate at a single stage of the decision-making pipeline, despite bias often propagating across representational and decision layers. This study proposes iCert-Fair, a two-layer framework for technical fairness assessment and harm recovery in credit scoring. The first layer adopts a fairness-through-explainability paradigm, using SHAP-based explanations to identify direct and proxy dependence on protected attributes and guide structural dataset repair, while the second layer applies targeted threshold-policy adjustments to recover residual harm while preserving decision utility. Experiments on the German and Taiwanese credit datasets show that fairness gains are model- and dataset-specific and may be collective, concentrated, transferred, or recovered unevenly across protected attributes. The direct comparison with representative pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods revealed that baseline methods targeting one protected attribute at a time frequently transferred residual harm to other monitored attributes. In contrast, the fairness-focused recommendations generated by iCert-Fair achieved larger collective fairness improvements across all considered protected attributes while avoiding residual harm. These gains were obtained while preserving predictive utility on the German dataset and with utility degradation remaining below 5% across the evaluated performance metrics on the Taiwanese dataset, alongside consistently lower false-negative risk. The empirical findings support the use of complementary structural and policy-level interventions and demonstrate the importance of jointly evaluating aggregate disparity, worst-case attribute-level harm, cross-attribute transfer, and predictive utility.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Centered AI)
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Open AccessArticle
Discourse Structure as an Interpretable Signal for Detecting Hallucinated Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models
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Boris Galitsky
AI 2026, 7(8), 311; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080311 - 11 Aug 2026
Abstract
Large language models can generate fluent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that appears coherent while exhibiting systematic distortions in evidence weighting and hypothesis comparison. This paper studies hallucinated CoT as a discourse-structural phenomenon, not only a factual one. We introduce a diagnostic reasoning benchmark with
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Large language models can generate fluent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that appears coherent while exhibiting systematic distortions in evidence weighting and hypothesis comparison. This paper studies hallucinated CoT as a discourse-structural phenomenon, not only a factual one. We introduce a diagnostic reasoning benchmark with paired grounded and hallucinated explanations, where traces differ in how they organize evidence, alternatives, and defeaters. We extract discourse tree features that summarize evidence allocation, contrast preservation, commitment timing, and evidence integration, and combine them with the Joint Knowledge–Reasoning Hallucination Measure (JKRHM). Experiments on the synthetic diagnostic dataset and preliminary external validation on HaluBench suggest that discourse structure provides an interpretable signal for detecting reasoning hallucinations and complements existing factuality and uncertainty-based hallucination detectors. Because the HaluBench reasoning rationales are generated as an intermediate representation, these results should not be interpreted as definitive external proof of generalization. The results support a cautious conclusion: discourse analysis does not replace factual verification, but it helps expose reasoning paths that are structurally unsupported even when they are fluent and persuasive.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trustworthy Large Language Models: Advancing Reliability, Safety, Fairness, and Transparency)
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Investigation into the Spectral Completion Algorithm Leveraging Dense Connection Autoencoders
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Yepeng Shi, Shengliang Fang, Shunhu Hou, Yuhai Li, You Fu and Qichen Wang
AI 2026, 7(8), 310; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080310 - 11 Aug 2026
Abstract
Radio Environment Map (REM) construction is frequently constrained by sparse and unevenly distributed spectrum measurements. While existing completion methods primarily target Power Spectral Density (PSD) data under random missing patterns, the reconstruction of Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) maps under structured data loss
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Radio Environment Map (REM) construction is frequently constrained by sparse and unevenly distributed spectrum measurements. While existing completion methods primarily target Power Spectral Density (PSD) data under random missing patterns, the reconstruction of Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) maps under structured data loss remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by proposing a fully convolutional densely connected autoencoder(AE) for RSRP map completion. The encoder stacks dense blocks and transition layers, a bottleneck preserves the latent representation, and the decoder restores spatial resolution through transposed convolution. Both global and local skip connections are incorporated to fuse large-scale structure with fine-grained details. A composite loss function supervises observed and missing regions separately, which preserves the fidelity of known measurements while improving inference over unobserved grid points. Experiments on the public DeepREM dataset under random, spatial, and strip-wise missing patterns show that the method achieves the best or comparable completion accuracy in most tested settings, with the most pronounced performance gains over mainstream baselines under the challenging spatial block-missing case.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Technologies and Their Applications in Image Processing, Computer Vision, and Computational Intelligence)
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AI as a Practice Partner: A Feasibility Study of MentaClassAI, a Conversational LLM Tool for Training Educators’ Mentalizing Responses to Child Dysregulation
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Gali Chelouche-Dwek and Peter Fonagy
AI 2026, 7(8), 309; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080309 - 8 Aug 2026
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Background: Teachers routinely encounter children whose behaviour reflects emotional distress and dysregulation, yet they have limited opportunities to practise the relational skills required to respond effectively. These challenges are particularly pronounced in Alternative Provision (AP), which serves children who frequently present with histories
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Background: Teachers routinely encounter children whose behaviour reflects emotional distress and dysregulation, yet they have limited opportunities to practise the relational skills required to respond effectively. These challenges are particularly pronounced in Alternative Provision (AP), which serves children who frequently present with histories of trauma, neurodevelopmental differences, and complex emotional and behavioural needs. Mentalization, the capacity to understand behaviour in terms of underlying mental states, is central to effective relational practice in such contexts. Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) may offer a scalable means of supporting this form of skills development, but its feasibility as a teacher-training modality remains largely unexplored. Methods: This mixed-methods proof-of-concept feasibility study evaluated MentaClassAI, a novel AI-based training tool in which educators engaged in simulated voice conversations with AI child characters portraying classroom dysregulation and subsequently received individualised, mentalization-informed feedback. Eleven staff members from a single AP school (four teachers and seven teaching assistants) completed a single training session and were allocated to either a psychoeducation video condition (n = 6) or a no-video condition (n = 5). The video condition received a brief introduction to mentalization and epistemic trust prior to engaging with the simulation. Pre- and post-engagement measures included the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ-8) and a Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale. Post-engagement measures included an 18-item acceptability questionnaire, a Technology Acceptance Model scale, and open-ended questions analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Acceptability was high, with 84.8% of questionnaire responses falling within the positive range (overall M = 5.60/7). Feedback accuracy (M = 6.55) and clarity (M = 6.36) received the highest ratings. Participants reported higher teacher self-efficacy after the session than before (d = 1.20, p = 0.003), with 10 of 11 participants demonstrating improvement. Self-reported hypomentalizing was lower after the session (d = −0.86, p = 0.017). Between-condition differences (video versus no-video) were not statistically significant. The video condition scored numerically higher on the directional indicators. Qualitative analysis identified five themes: the value of consequence-free rehearsal; the specificity and usefulness of feedback; appreciation of the focus on the child’s emotional experience; limitations in the ecological diversity of AI child characters; and a desire for more naturalistic interaction. Conclusions: These findings provide preliminary support for the feasibility and acceptability of AI-based mentalization practice for AP staff. The principal value of the tool appears to lie not only in the simulation itself but in the quality of the reflective feedback generated. Although based on a small sample, the observed pre–post changes provide an encouraging signal that may justify a controlled trial. The contribution of pre-session psychoeducation to training outcomes remains an important question for future research.
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Reinforcement Learning for Warehouse Management Using a Scenario-Based Simulation Testbed
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Laura Acosta García, Julen Cestero Portu, Ander García Gangoiti and Marco Quartulli
AI 2026, 7(8), 308; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080308 - 8 Aug 2026
Abstract
Warehouse operations involve dynamic item flows, fluctuating demand, and heterogeneous layouts, making adaptive decision-making essential for efficient storage and order fulfillment. In this context, reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach for learning adaptive warehouse control policies under stochastic environments. However, evaluating RL-based
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Warehouse operations involve dynamic item flows, fluctuating demand, and heterogeneous layouts, making adaptive decision-making essential for efficient storage and order fulfillment. In this context, reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach for learning adaptive warehouse control policies under stochastic environments. However, evaluating RL-based solutions in real warehouse settings is often costly and time-consuming, motivating the need for realistic and reproducible simulation environments. In this paper, we introduce a configurable warehouse simulation environment modeling stochastic item arrivals, order generation, and internal logistics operations across diverse layouts and workload conditions. Based on this environment, we construct a reproducible experimental testbed composed of multiple scenarios ranging from low-load to highly congested settings. The testbed is publicly released to support reproducible research and comparative evaluation within the research community. We formulate the warehouse management problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and apply a Maskable Proximal Policy Optimization (Maskable PPO) agent to learn adaptive control policies. The RL-based approach is evaluated across the defined scenarios and compared against heuristic baseline strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed solution achieves performance comparable to a strong greedy first-in, first-out (FIFO) heuristic while improving order fulfillment by up to 13.5 percentage points under challenging workload conditions. These results demonstrate the ability of RL to learn robust warehouse control policies that adaptively optimize performance and maintain operational stability across a wide spectrum of distinct scenarios.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Artificial Intelligence in Industrial Systems: From Data Acquisition to Intelligent Decision-Making)
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Beyond Aggregate Sentiment: Machine Learning-Driven Discourse Indicators for AI News at Scale
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Oleksandra Topal, Inna Novalija, Joao Pita Costa and Dumitru Roman
AI 2026, 7(8), 307; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080307 - 7 Aug 2026
Abstract
This study deploys a scalable machine learning pipeline: combining a transformer-based classifier applied to 2.01 million English-language AI-related news headlines (July 2022–July 2024) with large-language-model and human-annotator validation (three annotators, Fleiss’ ) on stratified subsamples, to extract six interpretable, bias-linked
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This study deploys a scalable machine learning pipeline: combining a transformer-based classifier applied to 2.01 million English-language AI-related news headlines (July 2022–July 2024) with large-language-model and human-annotator validation (three annotators, Fleiss’ ) on stratified subsamples, to extract six interpretable, bias-linked discourse indicators computed at the AI-domain level: evaluative orientation (valence), loss salience, narrative drift, exposure-adjusted sentiment, cross-source divergence, and novelty-phase framing. Each operationalizes an established cognitive-psychology construct as a computable property of the information environment associated with biased risk–benefit reasoning. Results show systematic variation across domains: technical and methodological areas such as deep learning and natural language processing exhibit gain-salient framing, while safety-critical topics such as deepfakes (loss-to-gain headline ratio = 3.17) and facial recognition show strongly loss-salient profiles. Cross-model validation using an LLM on a stratified sample of 1000 headlines confirms that domain-level indicator rankings are robust to classifier choice (Spearman ; ), establishing the rank stability of pipeline outputs independently of the specific classification architecture. As a contextual application, domain-level profiles are mapped to European Union AI governance instruments, documenting parallels between discourse patterns and regulatory risk tiers. The framework provides a scalable, reproducible methodology for monitoring evaluative conditions in technology news across domains, sources, and time.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Machine Learning in Action: Practical Applications and Emerging Trends)
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Open AccessArticle
Diagnostic Performance of an Artificial Intelligence Cervical Spine Fracture Decision Support System at a Non-Trauma Community Hospital Setting
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Genaro Herrera Cano, Michal Dyrda, Youssef Beshay, David Baltrusaitis, Mitch Paro, Rafael Olivieri-Ortiz, Grigoriy Androsov, Antonio Medina Luna and Michael Baldwin
AI 2026, 7(8), 306; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080306 - 7 Aug 2026
Abstract
Traumatic cervical spine fractures (CSFxs) require timely diagnosis due to associated morbidity. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision support systems have been proposed to improve imaging workflow efficiency. However, their performance in non-trauma settings remains unclear. This study evaluated the diagnostic performance of the AIDOC
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Traumatic cervical spine fractures (CSFxs) require timely diagnosis due to associated morbidity. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision support systems have been proposed to improve imaging workflow efficiency. However, their performance in non-trauma settings remains unclear. This study evaluated the diagnostic performance of the AIDOC decision support system (DSS) for detecting CSFxs in a non-trauma academic community hospital using a retrospective analysis of 1812 cervical spine CT scans, with radiologist interpretation as the reference standard. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) were calculated for fracture detection and heatmap-based localization. The AI system demonstrated a sensitivity of 72.2% and specificity of 98.1%, with an accuracy of 97.9%. In the context of low fracture prevalence (0.99%), PPV was low (27.7%), while NPV was high (99.7%). Heatmap-based localization showed reduced sensitivity (43.8%) despite high specificity (97.5%). These findings demonstrate high specificity and NPV, with lower sensitivity for localization and low PPV in a low-prevalence setting. Prospective multi-institutional studies are required to further validate these diagnostic performance metrics and assess generalizability across diverse clinical settings and imaging protocols.
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(This article belongs to the Section Medical & Healthcare AI)
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Open AccessArticle
EcoSortBin: Accuracy–Generalisation Trade-Offs in Open-Vocabulary Campus Waste Detection on Raspberry Pi 4
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Madhini Balasundaram and Supraja Perumal
AI 2026, 7(8), 305; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080305 - 7 Aug 2026
Abstract
Waste management on university campuses is complicated by the constant change in packaging types, which existing waste-sorting systems cannot recognise unless they are retrained. Open-vocabulary object detectors can identify objects from text descriptions instead of a fixed list of categories, offering a possible
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Waste management on university campuses is complicated by the constant change in packaging types, which existing waste-sorting systems cannot recognise unless they are retrained. Open-vocabulary object detectors can identify objects from text descriptions instead of a fixed list of categories, offering a possible solution to this problem. However, it is not known how well this ability survives when such a detector is fine-tuned and deployed on low-power hardware. This paper presents EcoSortBin, a waste-sorting system built on the YOLOE-26 detector and deployed on a Raspberry Pi 4. YOLOE-26 was first fine-tuned on a 1330-image campus waste dataset covering seven classes, with masks generated using the Segment Anything Model, establishing a baseline called WasteYOLOE26-S with 74% top-1 accuracy on known classes; however, this fine-tuning reduces the model’s ability to recognise the same seven classes when they appear in a different dataset or setting. RLPA (RepRTA-Compatible LoRA Prompt Adapters) addresses this by adapting only the text-embedding component of the model using a small set of additional parameters (16,384 parameters, rank 16), leaving the rest of the network unchanged; this restores cross-domain generalisation but reduces top-1 accuracy on known classes to only 15%, which is too low for practical use. To recover this accuracy without losing cross-domain generalisation, frozen-backbone neck fine-tuning (NeckFT) was added, which fine-tunes the feature-combining layers of the network while keeping the main backbone frozen, preserving its pretrained visual–text alignment. Combining RLPA with NeckFT achieved the best balance of the three approaches, with 73.5% top-1 accuracy and a Cross-Domain Generalisation Ratio (CDGR) of 0.2435. To test whether this ability extends to genuinely new categories, the model was further tested on 28 novel categories not seen during training, totalling 840 images. RLPA + NeckFT showed consistent zero-shot generalisation to novel objects with container-like shapes, such as bottles and jars. After quantisation for edge deployment, the model kept its full accuracy ranking and produced a compact 41.8 MB file suitable for the Raspberry Pi 4. These results show that RLPA + NeckFT gives a practical balance of accuracy and generalisation for campus waste detection on low-power hardware.
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(This article belongs to the Section AI in Autonomous Systems)
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Open AccessArticle
GINet-DGC: Structural Inductive Biases and Dynamic Generalization Control for High-Dimensional Small-Sample Tabular Data
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Xinran Zhang, Yang Sheng, Sijie Shen, Dongjie Fan and Lizhuang Liu
AI 2026, 7(8), 304; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080304 - 6 Aug 2026
Abstract
Learning from high-dimensional, low-sample-size (HDLSS) data remains a persistent challenge in machine learning, as models must infer reliable patterns from limited observations while handling an excessive number of variables—a scenario particularly prevalent in biomedical applications. Such data structures render predictive modeling highly vulnerable
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Learning from high-dimensional, low-sample-size (HDLSS) data remains a persistent challenge in machine learning, as models must infer reliable patterns from limited observations while handling an excessive number of variables—a scenario particularly prevalent in biomedical applications. Such data structures render predictive modeling highly vulnerable to erratic optimization and overfitting. To address this challenge, we propose the Global Interaction Network with Dynamic Generalization Control (GINet-DGC), an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that integrates feature-wise structural priors with dynamic generalization monitoring. Rather than directly learning an unconstrained first-layer weight matrix, GINet-DGC generates task-specific weights from multi-view feature descriptors, encompassing latent semantic, global distributional, local topological, and hierarchical representations. This structure-constrained weight generation strategy effectively narrows the feature-interaction search space and acts as an inductive regularizer against noise and redundant molecular features. Furthermore, we introduce an Overfitting-aware Index (OFI) to monitor the training trajectory and effectively identify the generalization saturation point for adaptive termination. Empirical evaluations on eight public real-world biomedical HDLSS gene-expression datasets, using a repeated stratified 5 × 5 cross-validation protocol, demonstrate that GINet-DGC achieves competitive and stable performance against 17 baselines. These findings support the effectiveness of the proposed framework within the evaluated public biomedical HDLSS benchmark setting.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI in Bioinformatics: The Next Frontier in Health Discovery)
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Open AccessArticle
Socratic Mediation Patterns in AI–Student Interactions: A Content Analysis of a Conversational Agent in Distance Higher Education
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Camilo Aurelio Velandia, Nelson Iván Bedoya, Andrés Chiappe and David Muñoz-Ballier
AI 2026, 7(8), 303; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080303 - 6 Aug 2026
Abstract
This study identifies and characterises the Socratic mediation patterns enacted by MIA, an AI-based conversational agent used in distance higher education. A deductive content analysis was conducted on 737 conversations using six categories: exploration of prior knowledge, contextual adjustment, linkage to experiences, autonomy-oriented
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This study identifies and characterises the Socratic mediation patterns enacted by MIA, an AI-based conversational agent used in distance higher education. A deductive content analysis was conducted on 737 conversations using six categories: exploration of prior knowledge, contextual adjustment, linkage to experiences, autonomy-oriented prompts, dialogic progression, and verification prompts. The categorical framework achieved full expert content-validity agreement (S-CVI/Ave = 1.00). Contextual Adjustment (77%), Verification Prompts (76%), and Autonomy-Oriented Prompts (74%) were the most frequently observed categories. Sixty of the 64 theoretically possible category combinations occurred in the corpus, and Linkage to Experiences appeared more frequently in personal conversations (33.7%) than in academic conversations (18.3%). The distribution of categories also varied according to conversation length, with longer exchanges containing a broader range of coded dialogic moves. These findings describe the conversational repertoire through which MIA operationalised features associated with Socratic mediation. Because the study did not include independent measures of student satisfaction, learning, engagement, or self-regulation, the results should not be interpreted as evidence of educational effectiveness or causal effects. The study contributes an operational framework for analysing Socratic features in AI–student interactions and identifies directions for outcome-based research.
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(This article belongs to the Topic AI Trends in Teacher and Student Training)
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ACBE-CroFuseNet: An Optical and SAR Cross-Fusion Semantic Segmentation Network for Paddy Rice Extraction
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Xinru Guo and Linze Bai
AI 2026, 7(8), 302; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080302 - 6 Aug 2026
Abstract
Accurate mapping of paddy rice is essential for agricultural monitoring, yield estimation, and food security assessment. However, optical imagery is often affected by clouds and spectral confusion, while SAR imagery suffers from speckle noise and weak spatial detail representation. Simple optical and SAR
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Accurate mapping of paddy rice is essential for agricultural monitoring, yield estimation, and food security assessment. However, optical imagery is often affected by clouds and spectral confusion, while SAR imagery suffers from speckle noise and weak spatial detail representation. Simple optical and SAR feature concatenation is therefore insufficient for complex agricultural landscapes. To address these limitations, this study proposes ACBE-CroFuseNet, an optical and SAR cross-fusion semantic segmentation network for paddy rice extraction using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical imagery in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province. ACBE-CroFuseNet introduces two task-oriented designs for paddy rice mapping. First, an attention cross-fusion module is developed to adaptively model modality contributions and spatial responses between optical spectral–textural features and SAR scattering–structural features. Second, a boundary enhancement module with boundary supervision is introduced to strengthen the delineation of fragmented paddy fields and field edges. Multimodal feature aggregation and multi-scale deep supervision are further used to improve feature utilization and segmentation stability. Compared with UNet++, Swin-Unet, CroFuseNet, and CMFFNet under five-fold cross-validation, ACBE-CroFuseNet achieves the best overall performance. The extracted paddy rice area in Yancheng in 2025 demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method for large-scale crop mapping.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Powered Remote Sensing for Agriculture)
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Towards Automating Junctional Hemorrhage Control Using AI for Interpretation of Human Tissue
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Sofia I. Hernandez Torres, Jennifer Achay, Scotty Bolleter, James A. Bynum and Eric J. Snider
AI 2026, 7(8), 301; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080301 - 4 Aug 2026
Abstract
Junctional hemorrhage has a high fatality rate due to how difficult it is to control rapid bleeding from major vessels. The available methods to stop junctional blood loss are prone to placement errors as well as failure during transport and during prolonged field
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Junctional hemorrhage has a high fatality rate due to how difficult it is to control rapid bleeding from major vessels. The available methods to stop junctional blood loss are prone to placement errors as well as failure during transport and during prolonged field care. On the battlefield, medical imaging with a portable ultrasound can be leveraged for visualization of the underlying tissue and application of compression at the anatomical junction to effectively stop blood flow. In this work, we developed AI models for anatomical landmark tracking using a perfused human cadaver model. These AI models were paired with an end-user clinical application to guide proper placement and compression, improving junctional hemorrhage control on the future battlefield. The trained U-Net semantic segmentation model demonstrated strong performance across predictions for both validation and hold-out, blind subjects. Overall pixel accuracy across the dataset was 98.9% for training and 98.6% for blind subjects. The artery and vein predictions achieved the highest class-specific training intersection-over-union scores, both at 0.73. This segmentation model trained to interpret human tissue provides evidence that ultrasound visualization can help guide compression at anatomical junctions. Future work will focus on improving blind performance for implementation of this AI model into closed-loop control of hardware prototypes, delivering real-time predictions and control.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine)
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Open AccessArticle
DR-Transformer: A Dual-Regularized Transformer Combining Sparse Attention and Supervised Contrastive Learning for Interpretable Stress Detection in Social Media Text
by
Mehdi Chrifi Alaoui, Nour-Eddine Joudar and Mohamed Ettaouil
AI 2026, 7(8), 300; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080300 - 4 Aug 2026
Abstract
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Automatic detection of stress in social media text holds promise for supporting digital mental health, but most existing Transformer-based approaches are opaque and computationally demanding. This work presents DR-Transformer, a Dual-Regularized Transformer that combines two complementary mechanisms: (i) a group sparsity penalty (
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Automatic detection of stress in social media text holds promise for supporting digital mental health, but most existing Transformer-based approaches are opaque and computationally demanding. This work presents DR-Transformer, a Dual-Regularized Transformer that combines two complementary mechanisms: (i) a group sparsity penalty ( elastic net) applied to the query and key projection matrices of every attention head, which encourages whole-row sparsity, producing more concentrated and inspectable attention patterns; (ii) a supervised contrastive loss on the [CLS] projection, which organizes the latent space according to the stress label. The architecture is intentionally lightweight (six layers, eight heads, 256-dim embeddings; ∼9.5 M parameters) and runs entirely on consumer-grade hardware (NVIDIA GTX 1660, 6 GB). Experiments on the publicly available Dreaddit dataset (binary stress classification, 2838 train/715 test segments) compare DR-Transformer against Logistic Regression, BiLSTM, a Standard Transformer of identical architecture, and MentalBERT. Across five seeded runs, DR-Transformer (Full) reaches (bootstrap 95% CI – ), outperforming the Standard Transformer ( ; McNemar with Bonferroni correction) and performing comparably to the much larger MentalBERT ( ; ). Sparse regularization increases the fraction of near-zero attention weights (below ) from to , while the supervised contrastive loss improves the silhouette score of [CLS] embeddings from to . Dual regularization thus combines accuracy, efficiency, and structurally induced attention concentration in a single model which can be trained without specialized infrastructure. We use the term “interpretable” throughout in this restricted, structural sense—to refer to concentrated and inspectable attention—rather than in the sense of established causal or mechanistic faithfulness; this is only partially and indirectly supported by our token deletion analysis.
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Open AccessReview
Embodied Intelligence for Safer Power-System Field Operations: A Critical Review of Technologies, Applications, and Challenges
by
Yuxin Wen, Peixiao Fan, Zhiyu Mao, Fang Chi, Chenxuan Zhang and Yuhong Lu
AI 2026, 7(8), 299; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080299 - 4 Aug 2026
Abstract
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Modern power grids require safer and more reliable field operations, yet conventional robots often face limitations in unstructured environments because of rigid pre-programming and weak perception–action coupling. This review examines Embodied Intelligence (EI) as an emerging direction for enhancing power-system field operations. We
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Modern power grids require safer and more reliable field operations, yet conventional robots often face limitations in unstructured environments because of rigid pre-programming and weak perception–action coupling. This review examines Embodied Intelligence (EI) as an emerging direction for enhancing power-system field operations. We first evaluate the environmental adaptability of morphological carriers, including quadrupeds, humanoids, and unmanned aerial vehicles, and then define the perception–cognition–execution closed-loop architecture used in this review. Three application domains are then examined. Intelligent inspection focuses on active perception and potential open-vocabulary object detection. Live-line maintenance emphasizes Sim-to-Real methods and shared autonomy, while disaster-response applications involve heterogeneous air–ground robotic coordination. The review also discusses the potential for EI to reduce human exposure to hazardous tasks and influence labor structures, while a regional text-based proxy illustrates differences in policy attention to digital infrastructure. Finally, we analyze major constraints, including hardware endurance under extreme climates, edge-computing latency, foundation-model uncertainty and hallucination, cybersecurity, and safety certification. Overall, EI should not be interpreted as a mature replacement for current utility practice; it is a developing technological direction whose safe deployment will require field validation, standardized evaluation, cybersecurity assurance, and continued human supervisory authority.
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Open AccessReview
Agentic AI Safety: A Structured Review of Open Problems and Their Regulatory Anchoring
by
Tomáš Valenta, Ondřej Rozinek and Josef Horálek
AI 2026, 7(8), 298; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080298 - 4 Aug 2026
Abstract
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The shift from passive predictive models to autonomous agents capable of tool use and multi-step planning moves the AI safety landscape from prediction error to control failure: small misjudgements become irreversible actions, and risks compound across long horizons and populations of interacting systems.
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The shift from passive predictive models to autonomous agents capable of tool use and multi-step planning moves the AI safety landscape from prediction error to control failure: small misjudgements become irreversible actions, and risks compound across long horizons and populations of interacting systems. We present a structured review and taxonomy of open scientific problems in agentic AI safety, mapped explicitly onto the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. The corpus follows a PRISMA-ScR scoping review, assembled through anchor-based citation chaining and curated reading lists across arXiv, the major machine-learning conferences, and selected security and fairness venues, with a primary March 2026 search cut-off (extended to May 2026 during revision for a small number of high-relevance governance and agentic-safety sources), explicit eligibility criteria, and an analytical distinction between open scientific problems and deployment risks. The taxonomy identifies eight problem families spanning reinforcement-learning policies and language-model planners: goal specification, inner alignment, safe learning and robustness, scalable oversight, interpretability, tool-use security, multi-agent safety, and evaluation and assurance. Mapping these onto the two frameworks shows close alignment for some families and notable absences for others, with multi-agent safety surfacing as a regulatory gap. We add a per-family research roadmap with concrete milestones and a practitioner-facing deployment-posture triage, arguing that progress on inner alignment, interpretability for deceptive-alignment detection, and multi-agent safety would most directly reduce compliance uncertainty.
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Open AccessArticle
Cross-LLM Paraphrase Laundering: A Register-Controlled Evaluation of Fake News Detectors
by
Jalal Mehdiyev and Ramiz Aliguliyev
AI 2026, 7(8), 297; https://doi.org/10.3390/ai7080297 - 3 Aug 2026
Abstract
Detectors built on transformer language models report near-perfect accuracy on standard fake news benchmarks, which suggests the task is almost solved. We argue that much of this accuracy reflects a confound between writing register and veracity: in common benchmarks, the real class is
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Detectors built on transformer language models report near-perfect accuracy on standard fake news benchmarks, which suggests the task is almost solved. We argue that much of this accuracy reflects a confound between writing register and veracity: in common benchmarks, the real class is human-written while the fake class is machine-generated or machine-rewritten, so a detector can separate the classes by recognizing AI writing style rather than by judging truth. To evaluate this, we designed a two-regime evaluation. Phase 1 is the laundering regime, comparing untouched human-real articles against laundered fake articles. Phase 2 is register-controlled: the real class is passed through the same cross-LLM laundering chains as the fake class, so both classes are read in one machine register, and the register cue is no longer available to the detector. We train seven detectors on three datasets and evaluate each frozen detector under both regimes. Under Phase 1, detectors appear robust; under Phase 2, detection on WELFake collapses from about 99% to about 62% AUROC and the largest models approach chance. The effect is benchmark dependent, large on WELFake, mild on IFND and near zero on GossipCop, and it is confirmed by bootstrap testing with false discovery rate control. We recommend register-controlled evaluation as standard reporting practice.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Natural Language Processing, Human–Robot Interaction and Quantum Computing)
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