Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard approach for integrating domain knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs). However, fair comparison of RAG pipelines remains difficult: data preparation is often ad hoc, subsampling methods are opaque, parameters vary across implementations, and evaluation is fragmented. We present In-Situ Eval, a unified and reproducible framework that operationalizes the full RAG pipeline with configurable subsampling strategies and both RAG-specific and generic evaluation metrics. The platform supports two execution modes: an offline Dataset mode for evaluating precomputed outputs, and a live Retrieval mode for benchmarking RAG variants with state-of-the-art LLMs. Users can flexibly select datasets, retrieval techniques, models, and metrics, enabling side-by-side comparisons, ablations, and targeted analyses. This holistic approach reduces computational costs, clarifies the impact of subsampling techniques, and provides actionable insights for real-world deployments. By facilitating transparent, customizable, and interactive benchmarking, In-Situ Eval empowers both researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions in adapting RAG pipelines to domain-specific needs.

Alignment is crucial for text-to-image (T2I) models to ensure that the generated images faithfully capture user intent while maintaining safety and fairness. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a key alignment technique for large language models (LLMs), and its influence is now extending to T2I systems. This paper introduces DPO-Kernels for T2I models, a novel extension of DPO that enhances alignment across three key dimensions: (i) Hybrid Loss, which integrates embedding-based objectives with the traditional probability-based loss to improve optimization; (ii) Kernelized Representations, leveraging Radial Basis Function (RBF), Polynomial, and Wavelet kernels to enable richer feature transformations, ensuring better separation between safe and unsafe inputs; and (iii) Divergence Selection, expanding beyond DPO’s default Kullback–Leibler (KL) regularizer by incorporating alternative divergence measures such as Wasserstein and Rényi divergences to enhance stability and robustness in alignment training. We introduce DETONATE, the first large-scale benchmark of its kind, comprising approximately 100K curated image pairs, categorized as chosen and rejected. This benchmark encapsulates three critical axes of social bias and discrimination: Race, Gender, and Disability. The prompts are sourced from the hate speech datasets, while the images are generated using state-of-the-art T2I models, including Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large (SD-3.5), Stable Diffusion XL (SD-XL), and Midjourney. Furthermore, to evaluate alignment beyond surface metrics, we introduce the Alignment Quality Index (AQI) for T2I systems: a novel geometric measure that quantifies latent space separability of safe/unsafe image activations, revealing hidden model vulnerabilities. While alignment techniques often risk overfitting, we empirically demonstrate that DPO-Kernels preserve strong generalization bounds using the theory of Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR).

Industrial automation increasingly relies on multi-agent AI, yet evaluation remains difficult due to task complexity and data confidentiality. We present AssetOpsBench-Live, a demo of a competition-ready platform for real-time, privacy-preserving evaluation of multi-agent AI in industrial contexts. The platform integrates AssetOpsBench, which measures six dimensions of multi-agent performance and performs automated failure-mode discovery, with Codabench, which supports reproducible, code-oriented competitions. End users first validate agents locally, then submit containerized code for execution on hidden industrial scenarios. Instead of raw trajectories, the system provides quantitative scores and clustered failure modes (e.g., reasoning--action mismatch, step repetition), enabling participants to identify failures, apply targeted improvements, and iteratively resubmit. By combining competition-based engagement with actionable diagnostics, AssetOpsBench-Live delivers reproducible, real-time insights reflecting real-world industrial constraints.

Modern manufacturing systems demand real-time, trustworthy, and interpretable insights into anomalies and their underlying causes. However, conventional pipelines treat anomaly detection, causal inference, and decision-making as siloed tasks, lacking integration, explainability, and adaptability. We present CausalPulse, an intelligent, multi-agent copilot for automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in industrial settings. Built on a modular and extensible architecture, the system leverages standard agentic protocols, including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), and LangGraph for dynamic tool and agent discovery and seamless orchestration of tasks. Agents dynamically interact to perform data preprocessing, anomaly detection, causal discovery, and root cause analysis through a neurosymbolic workflow that combines symbolic reasoning with neural methods. Intelligent postprocessing pipelines enable automatic chaining of agent tasks, enhancing contextual awareness and adaptability. CausalPulse is evaluated using both an academic public dataset (i.e., Future Factories) and an industrial proprietary dataset (i.e., Planar Oxygen Sensor Element) and shows that the system outperforms traditional baselines in interpretability, trustworthiness, and operational utility.

Modern manufacturing environments demand not only accurate predictions but also interpretable insights to process anomalies, root causes, and potential interventions. Existing AI systems often function as isolated black boxes, lacking the seamless integration of prediction, explanation, and causal reasoning required for a unified decision-support solution. This fragmentation limits their trustworthiness and practical utility in high-stakes industrial environments. In this work, we present CausalTrace, a neurosymbolic causal analysis module integrated into the SmartPilot industrial CoPilot. CausalTrace performs data-driven causal analysis enriched by industrial ontologies and knowledge graphs, including advanced functions such as causal discovery, counterfactual reasoning, and root cause analysis (RCA). It supports real-time operator interaction and is designed to complement existing agents by offering transparent, explainable decision support. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of CausalTrace using multiple causal assessment methods and the C3AN framework (i.e. Custom, Compact, Composite AI with Neurosymbolic Integration), which spans principles of robustness, intelligence, and trustworthiness. In an academic rocket assembly testbed, CausalTrace achieved substantial agreement with domain experts (ROUGE-1: 0.91 in ontology QA) and strong RCA performance (MAP@3: 94%, PR@2: 97%, MRR: 0.92, Jaccard: 0.92). It also attained 4.59/5 in the C3AN evaluation, demonstrating precision and reliability for live deployment.

As the demand for healthier, personalized culinary experiences grows, so does the need for advanced food computation models that offer more than basic nutritional insights. However, current food computation models lack the depth to provide actionable insights like ingredient substitution or alternative cooking actions to suit users’ dietary goals. To address this, we introduce and demonstrate Pic2Prep, a multimodal conversational system that generates detailed cooking instructions, actions and ingredient lists from both images and text provided by users. The system is developed using a novel dataset generated through Stable Diffusion, where the input consists of recipe titles and ingredient lists from the Recipe1M dataset to create synthesized food images with variations. This dataset is used to fine-tune the Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training (BLIP) model to extract cooking instructions and ingredients from food images. Pic2Prep also employs the CookGen model, a small-scale custom generative model to derive specific cooking actions from cooking instructions. A custom mapper, trained on the Mistral model, links these actions to the corresponding ingredients, creating a comprehensive understanding of the cooking process. The system features an interactive user interface that allows users to input images and ask targeted questions, receiving real-time responses.

In modern assembly pipelines, identifying anomalies is crucial in ensuring product quality and operational efficiency. Conventional single-modality methods fail to capture the intricate relationships required for precise anomaly prediction in complex predictive environments with abundant data and multiple modalities. This paper proposes a neurosymbolic AI and fusion-based approach for multimodal anomaly prediction in assembly pipelines. We introduce a time series and image-based fusion model that leverages decision-level fusion techniques. Our research builds upon three primary novel approaches in multimodal learning: time series and image-based decision-level fusion modeling, transfer learning for fusion, and knowledge-infused learning. We evaluate the novel method using our derived and publicly available multimodal dataset and conduct comprehensive ablation studies to assess the impact of our preprocessing techniques and fusion model compared to traditional baselines. The results demonstrate that a neurosymbolic AI-based fusion approach that uses transfer learning can effectively harness the complementary strengths of time series and image data, offering a robust and interpretable approach for anomaly prediction in assembly pipelines with enhanced performance. \noindent The datasets, codes to reproduce the results, supplementary materials, and demo are available at https://github.com/ChathurangiShyalika/NSF-MAP.

Anomaly detection in manufacturing pipelines remains a critical challenge, intensified by the complexity and variability of industrial environments. This paper introduces AssemAI, an interpretable image-based anomaly detection system tailored for smart manufacturing pipelines. Utilizing a curated image dataset from an industry-focused rocket assembly pipeline, we address the challenge of imbalanced image data and demonstrate the importance of image-based methods in anomaly detection. Our primary contributions include deriving an image dataset, fine-tuning an object detection model YOLO-FF, and implementing a custom anomaly detection model for assembly pipelines. The proposed approach leverages domain knowledge in data preparation, model development and reasoning. We implement several anomaly detection models on the derived image dataset, including a Convolutional Neural Network, Vision Transformer (ViT), and pretrained versions of these models. Additionally, we incorporate explainability techniques at both user and model levels, utilizing ontology for user-level explanations and SCORE-CAM for indepth feature and model analysis. Finally, the best-performing anomaly detection model and YOLO-FF are deployed in a real-time setting. Our results include ablation studies on the baselines and a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed system. This work highlights the broader impact of advanced image-based anomaly detection in enhancing the reliability and efficiency of smart manufacturing processes. The image dataset, codes to reproduce the results and additional experiments are available at https:/github.com/renjithk4/AssemAI.