We present ARCTraj, a dataset and methodological framework for modeling human reasoning through complex visual tasks in the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). While ARC has inspired extensive research on abstract reasoning, most existing approaches rely on static input-output supervision, which limits insight into how reasoning unfolds over time. ARCTraj addresses this gap by recording temporally ordered, object-level actions that capture how humans iteratively transform inputs into outputs, revealing intermediate reasoning steps that conventional datasets overlook. Collected via the O2ARC web interface, it contains around 10,000 trajectories annotated with task identifiers, timestamps, and success labels across 400 training tasks from the ARC-AGI-1 benchmark. It further defines a unified reasoning pipeline encompassing data collection, action abstraction, Markov decision process (MDP) formulation, and downstream learning, enabling integration with reinforcement learning, generative modeling, and sequence modeling methods such as PPO, World Models, GFlowNets, Diffusion agents, and Decision Transformers. Analyses of spatial selection, color attribution, and strategic convergence highlight the structure and diversity of human reasoning. Together, these contributions position ARCTraj as a structured and interpretable foundation for studying human-like reasoning, advancing explainability, alignment, and generalizable intelligence.

The existing methods for evaluating the inference abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been predominantly results-centric, making it challenging to assess the inference process comprehensively. We introduce a novel approach using the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) benchmark to evaluate the inference and contextual understanding abilities of LLMs in a process-centric manner, focusing on three key components from the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH): Logical Coherence, Compositionality, and Productivity. Our carefully designed experiments reveal that while LLMs demonstrate some inference capabilities, they still significantly lag behind human-level reasoning in these three aspects. The main contribution of this article lies in introducing the LoTH perspective, which provides a method for evaluating the reasoning process that conventional results-oriented approaches fail to capture, thereby offering new insights into the development of human-level reasoning in artificial intelligence systems.

The task of assigning internationally accepted commodity codes (aka HS codes) to traded goods is a critical function of customs offices. Like court decisions made by judges, this task follows the doctrine of precedent and can be nontrivial even for experienced officers. Together with the Korea Customs Service (KCS), we propose a first-ever explainable decision supporting model that suggests the most likely subheadings (i.e., the first six digits) of the HS code. The model also provides reasoning for its suggestion in the form of a document that is interpretable by customs officers. We evaluated the model using 5,000 cases that recently received a classification request. The results showed that the top-3 suggestions made by our model had an accuracy of 93.9% when classifying 925 challenging subheadings. A user study with 32 customs experts further confirmed that our algorithmic suggestions accompanied by explainable reasonings, can substantially reduce the time and effort taken by customs officers for classification reviews.

Federated learning is used to train a shared model in a decentralized way without clients sharing private data with each other. Federated learning systems are susceptible to poisoning attacks when malicious clients send false updates to the central server. Existing defense strategies are ineffective under non-IID data settings. This paper proposes a new defense strategy, FedCPA (Federated learning with Critical Parameter Analysis). Our attack-tolerant aggregation method is based on the observation that benign local models have similar sets of top-k and bottom-k critical parameters, whereas poisoned local models do not. Experiments with different attack scenarios on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing defense strategies in defending against poisoning attacks.

This paper explores how machine learning can help classify aid activities by sector using the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS). The CRS is a key source of data for monitoring and evaluating aid flows in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG17 which calls for global partnership and data sharing. To address the challenges of current labor-intensive practices of assigning the code and the related human inefficiencies, we propose a machine learning solution that uses ELECTRA to suggest relevant five-digit purpose codes in CRS for aid activities, achieving an accuracy of 0.9575 for the top-3 recommendations. We also conduct qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with SDG experts who assess the model results and provide feedback. We discuss the policy, practical, and methodological implications of our work and highlight the potential of AI applications to improve routine tasks in the public sector and foster partnerships for achieving the SDGs.

Federated learning enables learning from decentralized data sources without compromising privacy, which makes it a crucial technique. However, it is vulnerable to model poisoning attacks, where malicious clients interfere with the training process. Previous defense mechanisms have focused on the server-side by using careful model aggregation, but this may not be effective when the data is not identically distributed or when attackers can access the information of benign clients. In this paper, we propose a new defense mechanism that focuses on the client-side, called FedDefender, to help benign clients train robust local models and avoid the adverse impact of malicious model updates from attackers, even when a server-side defense cannot identify or remove adversaries. Our method consists of two main components: (1) attack-tolerant local meta update and (2) attack-tolerant global knowledge distillation. These components are used to find noise-resilient model parameters while accurately extracting knowledge from a potentially corrupted global model. Our client-side defense strategy has a flexible structure and can work in conjunction with any existing server-side strategies. Evaluations of real-world scenarios across multiple datasets show that the proposed method enhances the robustness of federated learning against model poisoning attacks.

Algorithmic fairness has become an important machine learning problem, especially for mission-critical Web applications. This work presents a self-supervised model, called DualFair, that can debias sensitive attributes like gender and race from learned representations. Unlike existing models that target a single type of fairness, our model jointly optimizes for two fairness criteria—group fairness and counterfactual fairness—and hence makes fairer predictions at both the group and individual levels. Our model uses contrastive loss to generate embeddings that are indistinguishable for each protected group, while forcing the embeddings of counterfactual pairs to be similar. It then uses a self-knowledge distillation method to maintain the quality of representation for the downstream tasks. Extensive analysis over multiple datasets confirms the model’s validity and further shows the synergy of jointly addressing two fairness criteria, suggesting the model’s potential value in fair intelligent Web applications.

We study the human-in-the-loop customs inspection scenario, where an AI-assisted algorithm supports customs officers by recommending a set of imported goods to be inspected. If the inspected items are fraudulent, the officers can levy extra duties. These logs are then used as additional training data for the next iterations. Choosing to inspect suspicious items first leads to an immediate gain in customs revenue, yet such inspections may not bring new insights for learning dynamic traffic patterns. On the other hand, inspecting uncertain items can help acquire new knowledge, which will be used as a supplementary training resource to update the selection systems. Based on multiyear customs datasets from three countries, we demonstrate that some degree of exploration is necessary to cope with domain shifts in the trade data. The results show that a hybrid strategy of selecting likely fraudulent and uncertain items will eventually outperform the exploitation-only strategy.

Knowledge of the changing traffic is critical in risk management. Customs offices worldwide have traditionally relied on local resources to accumulate such knowledge and detect tax frauds. This naturally poses countries with weak infrastructure to become tax havens of potentially illicit trades. The current paper proposes DAS, a memory bank platform to facilitate knowledge sharing across multi-national customs administrations to support each other. We propose a domain adaptation method to share transferable knowledge of frauds as prototypes while safeguarding the local trade information. Data encompassing over 8 million import declarations have been used to test the feasibility of this new system, which shows that participating countries may benefit up to 2-11 times in fraud detection with the help of shared knowledge. We discuss implications for substantial tax revenue potential and strengthened policy against illicit trades.

Unsupervised image clustering methods often introduce alternative objectives to indirectly train the model and are subject to faulty predictions and overconfident results. To overcome these challenges, the current research proposes an innovative model RUC that is inspired by robust learning. RUC’s novelty is at utilizing pseudo-labels of existing image clustering models as a noisy dataset that may include misclassified samples. Its retraining process can revise misaligned knowledge and alleviate the overconfidence problem in predictions. The model’s flexible structure makes it possible to be used as an add-on module to other clustering methods and helps them achieve better performance on multiple datasets. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model can adjust the model confidence with better calibration and gain additional robustness against adversarial noise.

The accuracy of deep neural networks is significantly affected by how well mini-batches are constructed during the training step. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive batch selection algorithm called Recency Bias that exploits the uncertain samples predicted inconsistently in recent iterations. The historical label predictions of each training sample are used to evaluate its predictive uncertainty within a sliding window. Then, the sampling probability for the next mini-batch is assigned to each training sample in proportion to its predictive uncertainty. By taking advantage of this design, Recency Bias not only accelerates the training step but also achieves a more accurate network. We demonstrate the superiority of Recency Bias by extensive evaluation on two independent tasks. Compared with existing batch selection methods, the results showed that Recency Bias reduced the test error by up to 20.97% in a fixed wall-clock training time. At the same time, it improved the training time by up to 59.32% to reach the same test error.

Intentional manipulation of invoices that lead to undervaluation of trade goods is the most common type of customs fraud to avoid ad valorem duties and taxes. To secure government revenue without interrupting legitimate trade flows, customs administrations around the world strive to develop ways to detect illicit trades. This paper proposes DATE, a model of Dual-task Attentive Tree-aware Embedding, to classify and rank illegal trade flows that contribute the most to the overall customs revenue when caught. The strength of DATE comes from combining a tree-based model for interpretability and transaction-level embeddings with dual attention mechanisms. To accurately identify illicit transactions and predict tax revenue, DATE learns simultaneously from illicitness and surtax of each transaction. With a five-year amount of customs import data with a test illicit ratio of 2.24%, DATE shows a remarkable precision of 92.7% on illegal cases and a recall of 49.3% on revenue after inspecting only 1% of all trade flows. We also discuss issues on deploying DATE in Nigeria Customs Service, in collaboration with the World Customs Organization.

Predicting revisit intention is very important for the retail industry. Converting first-time visitors to repeating customers is of prime importance for high profitability. However, revisit analyses for offline retail businesses have been conducted on a small scale in previous studies, mainly because their methodologies have mostly relied on manually collected data. With the help of noninvasive monitoring, analyzing a customer's behavior inside stores has become possible, and revisit statistics are available from the large portion of customers who turn on their Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices. Using Wi-Fi fingerprinting data from ZOYI, we propose a systematic framework to predict the revisit intention of customers using only signals received from their mobile devices. Using data collected from seven flagship stores in downtown Seoul, we achieved 67-80% prediction accuracy for all customers and 64-72% prediction accuracy for first-time visitors. The performance improvement by considering customer mobility was 4.7-24.3%. Our framework showed a feasibility to predict revisits using customer mobility from Wi-Fi signals, that have not been considered in previous marketing studies. Toward this goal, we examine the effect of data collection period on the prediction performance and present the robustness of our model on missing customers. Finally, we discuss the difficulties of securing prediction accuracy with the features that look promising but turn out to be unsatisfactory.