Makoto Itoh

Hailong Liu, Junya Wada, Toshihiro Hiraoka et al.

Drivers with peripheral visual field defects may fail to notice pedestrians in their peripheral visual field, leading to delayed hazard awareness and increased collision risk. This study explores hanger reflex cue (HRC) as a driving assistance method for drivers with peripheral visual field defects, in which mechanical pressure is applied to specific regions of the head to facilitate anticipatory orientation toward potentially risky pedestrians and support safer driving. In a driving simulator experiment with 15 participants, we compared driving behavior with and without HRC during pedestrian encounters under simulated peripheral visual field defect. The results showed that HRC significantly shifted drivers' modal head rotation angle toward the risky pedestrian and significantly increased gaze duration toward that pedestrian. Collision occurrence was lower in the w/ HRC condition than in the w/o HRC condition, although the direct effect of HRC on collision occurrence showed only a marginal trend. A piecewise structural equation modeling analysis further suggested that HRC may contribute to collision reduction through a sequential pathway from head rotation to gaze allocation and then to collision occurrence. These findings provide preliminary evidence that HRC can support anticipatory attention allocation toward peripheral hazards and may offer a promising driving assistance method for drivers with visual field impairment.

Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Hélène Fournier, Piper Jackson et al.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used in healthcare to support complex decision-making through collaboration among specialized agents. Because these systems act as collective decision-makers, they raise challenges for trust, accountability, and human oversight. Existing approaches to trustworthy AI largely rely on explainability, but explainability alone is insufficient in multi-agent settings, as it does not enable care partners to challenge or correct system outputs. To address this limitation, Contestable AI (CAI) characterizes systems that support effective human challenge throughout the decision-making lifecycle by providing transparency, structured opportunities for intervention, and mechanisms for review, correction, or override. This position paper argues that contestability is a necessary design requirement for trustworthy multi-agent algorithmic care systems. We identify key limitations in current MAS and Explainable AI (XAI) research and present a human-in-the-loop framework that integrates structured argumentation and role-based contestation to preserve human agency, clinical responsibility, and trust in high-stakes care contexts.

Keisuke Fujii, Kazushi Tsutsui, Yu Teshima et al.

Simulators of animal movements play a valuable role in studying behavior. Advances in imitation learning for robotics have expanded possibilities for reproducing human and animal movements. A key challenge for realistic multi-animal simulation in biology is bridging the gap between unknown real-world transition models and their simulated counterparts. Because locomotion dynamics are seldom known, relying solely on mathematical models is insufficient; constructing a simulator that both reproduces real trajectories and supports reward-driven optimization remains an open problem. We introduce a data-driven simulator for multi-animal behavior based on deep reinforcement learning and counterfactual simulation. We address the ill-posed nature of the problem caused by high degrees of freedom in locomotion by estimating movement variables of an incomplete transition model as actions within an RL framework. We also employ a distance-based pseudo-reward to align and compare states between cyber and physical spaces. Validated on artificial agents, flies, newts, and silkmoth, our approach achieves higher reproducibility of species-specific behaviors and improved reward acquisition compared with standard imitation and RL methods. Moreover, it enables counterfactual behavior prediction in novel experimental settings and supports multi-individual modeling for flexible what-if trajectory generation, suggesting its potential to simulate and elucidate complex multi-animal behaviors.

Makoto Itoh

In this paper, we introduce some interesting features of a memristor CNN (Cellular Neural Network). We first show that there is the similarity between the dynamics of memristors and neurons. That is, some kind of flux-controlled memristors can not respond to the sinusoidal voltage source quickly, namely, they can not switch `on' rapidly. Furthermore, these memristors have refractory period after switch `on', which means that it can not respond to further sinusoidal inputs until the flux is decreased. We next show that the memristor-coupled two-cell CNN can exhibit chaotic behavior. In this system, the memristors switch `off' and `on' at irregular intervals, and the two cells are connected when either or both of the memristors switches `on'. We then propose the modified CNN model, which can hold a binary output image, even if all cells are disconnected and no signal is supplied to the cell after a certain point of time. However, the modified CNN requires power to maintain the output image, that is, it is volatile. We next propose a new memristor CNN model. It can also hold a binary output state (image), even if all cells are disconnected, and no signal is supplied to the cell, by memristor's switching behavior. Furthermore, even if we turn off the power of the system during the computation, it can resume from the previous average output state, since the memristor CNN has functions of both short-term (volatile) memory and long-term (non-volatile) memory. The above suspend and resume feature are useful when we want to save the current state, and continue work later from the previous state. Finally, we show that the memristor CNN can exhibit interesting two-dimensional waves, if an inductor is connected to each memristor CNN cell.