Soft robotics increasingly relies on smart materials and innovative structures, with bistable tape springs emerging as a promising option. These structures exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as oscillation, due to their inherent bistability. This paper explores the high-speed linear amplification of motion achieved through the excitation of a looped bistable tape spring. When looped, the tape spring forms two distinct joints, facilitating smooth oscillation. Mounted on a linear guide and driven by a crank mechanism with varying frequency, the system converts input oscillations into amplified linear motion at resonance. This study highlights the potential of bistable tape springs high speed reciprocating linear motion.

We propose and evaluate a quantum-inspired algorithm for solving Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems, which are mathematically equivalent to finding ground states of Ising spin-glass Hamiltonians. The algorithm employs Matrix Product States (MPS) to compactly represent large superpositions of spin configurations and utilizes a discrete driving schedule to guide the MPS toward the ground state. At each step, a driver Hamiltonian -- incorporating a transverse magnetic field -- is combined with the problem Hamiltonian to enable spin flips and facilitate quantum tunneling. The MPS is updated using the standard Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) method, which iteratively minimizes the system's energy via multiple sweeps across the spin chain. Despite its heuristic nature, the algorithm reliably identifies global minima, not merely near-optimal solutions, across diverse QUBO instances. We first demonstrate its effectiveness on intermediate-level Sudoku puzzles from publicly available sources, involving over $200$ Ising spins with long-range couplings dictated by constraint satisfaction. We then apply the algorithm to MaxCut problems from the Biq Mac library, successfully solving instances with up to $251$ nodes and $3,265$ edges. We discuss the advantages of this quantum-inspired approach, including its scalability, generalizability, and suitability for industrial-scale QUBO applications.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly used for forecasting, optimization, and policy design in the energy sector, yet no standardized framework exists to evaluate whether these systems reason correctly. Current validation practices focus on predictive accuracy or computational efficiency, leaving the logical integrity of analytical conclusions untested. This study introduces the Analytical Reliability Benchmark (ARB), a reproducible framework that quantifies reasoning reliability in large language models applied to energy system analysis. The benchmark integrates five submetrics: accuracy, reasoning reliability, uncertainty discipline, policy consistency, and transparency, and evaluates model performance across deterministic, probabilistic, and epistemic scenarios using open technoeconomic datasets (NREL ATB 2024, DOE H2A/H2New, IEA WEO 2024). Four frontier models (GPT-4/5, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama 3 70B) were tested under identical factual and regulatory conditions. Results show that reasoning reliability can be objectively measured. GPT-4/5 and Claude 4.5 Sonnet achieved consistent and policy-compliant reasoning (Analytical Reliability Index greater than 90), Gemini 2.5 Pro demonstrated moderate stability, and Llama 3 70B remained below professional thresholds. Statistical validation confirmed that these differences are significant and reproducible. The ARB establishes the first quantitative method in the energy literature for verifying causal, probabilistic, and policy-driven reasoning in artificial intelligence systems, providing a reference framework for trustworthy and transparent analytical applications in the global energy transition.

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

A time-dependent modeling framework for autogenous self-healing concrete that couples moisture diffusion with damage evolution was developed. Water transport follows Fick's second law with a damage-dependent diffusivity obtained by power-law interpolation between intact concrete and crack space. Healing reduces damage in proportion to local moisture and a smoothed cement availability field computed via a Helmholtz filter. Two finite element variants were implemented in FEniCSx over time horizons up to $5\times10^6$ seconds: a Crack Diffusion Model (CDM) with standard diffusion and a Crack Membrane Model (CMM) that gates cross-crack transport until a critical moisture threshold is reached. Key control parameters are the initial crack orientation and size, the diffusion coefficients of intact and cracked concrete, the healing rate constant, and the cement availability smoothing parameter. Simulations on a unit square domain show that healing time varies non-monotonically with crack orientation, peaking near $45^\circ$ and $135^\circ$ and minimizing near $90^\circ$, consistent with diffusion distance to crack endpoints dominating the process. The dependence on crack width reverses with material parameters: healing time increases when $D_{\text{cracked}}<D_{\text{intact}}$ and decreases when $D_{\text{cracked}}>D_{\text{intact}}$. The CMM reproduces staged moisture penetration with delayed gate activation but lengthens total healing time, whereas the CDM is efficient for parametric sweeps. Machine learning classifiers trained on one million simulation samples predict binary healing outcomes $H(\sigma,\gamma,t)$ (healed or not) with high accuracy (up to 0.998 for neural networks). Although experimental calibration is still required, the framework provides a versatile tool for guiding laboratory studies and implementations of self-healing concrete.

The rapid rise of photorealistic images produced from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) poses a serious challenge for image forensics and industrial systems requiring reliable content authenticity. This paper uses frequency-domain analysis combined with deep learning to solve the problem of distinguishing StyleGAN-generated images from real ones. Specifically, a two-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform (2D DFT) was applied to transform images into the Fourier domain, where subtle periodic artifacts become detectable. A ResNet50 neural network is trained on these transformed images to differentiate between real and synthetic ones. The experiments demonstrate that the frequency-domain model achieves a 92.8 percent and an AUC of 0.95, significantly outperforming the equivalent model trained on raw spatial-domain images. These results indicate that the GAN-generated images have unique frequency-domain signatures or "fingerprints". The method proposed highlights the industrial potential of combining signal processing techniques and deep learning to enhance digital forensics and strengthen the trustworthiness of industrial AI systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on mathematical problems when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet it remains unclear whether this success stems from search, rote procedures, or rule-consistent reasoning. To address this, we propose modeling CoT as a certain rule-based stochastic process over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where nodes represent intermediate derivation states and edges encode rule applications. Within this framework, we introduce logical closeness, a metric that quantifies how well a model's CoT trajectory (i.e., the LLM's final output) adheres to the DAG structure, providing evaluation beyond classical PASS@k metrics. Building on this, we introduce the DAG-MATH CoT format and construct a benchmark that guides LLMs to generate CoT trajectories in this format, thereby enabling the evaluation of their reasoning ability under our framework. Across standard mathematical reasoning datasets, our analysis uncovers statistically significant differences in reasoning fidelity among representative LLM families-even when PASS@k is comparable-highlighting gaps between final-answer accuracy and rule-consistent derivation. Our framework provides a balance between free-form CoT and formal proofs systems, offering actionable diagnostics for LLMs reasoning evaluation. Our benchmark and code are available at: this https URL.

As large language models (LLMs) become integrated into various sensitive applications, prompt injection, the use of prompting to induce harmful behaviors from LLMs, poses an ever increasing risk. Prompt injection attacks can cause LLMs to leak sensitive data, spread misinformation, and exhibit harmful behaviors. To defend against these attacks, we propose CourtGuard, a locally-runnable, multiagent prompt injection classifier. In it, prompts are evaluated in a court-like multiagent LLM system, where a "defense attorney" model argues the prompt is benign, a "prosecution attorney" model argues the prompt is a prompt injection, and a "judge" model gives the final classification. CourtGuard has a lower false positive rate than the Direct Detector, an LLM as-a-judge. However, CourtGuard is generally a worse prompt injection detector. Nevertheless, this lower false positive rate highlights the importance of considering both adversarial and benign scenarios for the classification of a prompt. Additionally, the relative performance of CourtGuard in comparison to other prompt injection classifiers advances the use of multiagent systems as a defense against prompt injection attacks. The implementations of CourtGuard and the Direct Detector with full prompts for Gemma-3-12b-it, Llama-3.3-8B, and Phi-4-mini-instruct are available at this https URL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are central to reasoning, writing, and decision-support workflows, yet users lack consistent control over how they reason and express outputs. Conventional prompt engineering relies on verbose natural-language instructions, limiting reproducibility, modularity, and interpretability. This paper introduces Prompt Decorators, a declarative, composable syntax that governs LLM behavior through compact control tokens such as +++Reasoning, +++Tone(style=formal), and +++Import(topic="Systems Thinking"). Each decorator modifies a behavioral dimension, such as reasoning style, structure, or tone, without changing task content. The framework formalizes twenty core decorators organized into two functional families (Cognitive & Generative and Expressive & Systemic), each further decomposed into subcategories that govern reasoning, interaction, expression, and session-control. It defines a unified syntax, scoping model, and deterministic processing pipeline enabling predictable and auditable behavior composition. By decoupling task intent from execution behavior, Prompt Decorators create a reusable and interpretable interface for prompt design. Illustrative use cases demonstrate improved reasoning transparency, reduced prompt complexity, and standardized model behavior across domains. The paper concludes with implications for interoperability, behavioral consistency, and the development of declarative interfaces for scalable AI systems.

Recent findings suggest that misaligned models may exhibit deceptive behavior, raising concerns about output trustworthiness. Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a promising tool for alignment monitoring: when models articulate their reasoning faithfully, monitors can detect and mitigate harmful behaviors before undesirable outcomes occur. However, a key uncertainty is: Can models obfuscate their CoT in order to pursue hidden adversarial objectives while evading detection? To answer this question and thus stress-test CoT monitorability, we develop a composable and quantifiable taxonomy of prompts to elicit CoT obfuscation. We evaluate both internal CoT (reasoning traces) and external CoT (prompted reasoning in outputs) using toy tasks and more realistic environments in SHADE-Arena. We show that: (i) CoT monitoring performs accurately and efficiently without obfuscation pressure. (ii) Under strong obfuscation pressure, some models successfully complete adversarial tasks while evading detection. (iii) Models do not obfuscate their internal CoT as much as their external CoT (under prompt pressure). These results suggest that while CoT provides valuable oversight in benign settings, robust deployment requires model-specific stress-testing of monitorability.

An algorithm specification in natural language or pseudocode is expected to be clear and explicit enough to enable mechanical execution. In this position paper we contribute an initial characterization of the knowledge that an executing agent, human or machine, should possess in order to be able to carry out the instructions of a given algorithm specification as a stand-alone entity, independent of any system implementation. We argue that, for that algorithm specification, such prerequisite knowledge, whether unique or shared with other specifications, can be summarized in a document of practical size. We term this document the realm of the algorithm specification. The generation of such a realm is itself a systematic analytical process, significant parts of which can be automated with the help of large language models and the reuse of existing documents. The algorithm-specification's realm would consist of specification language syntax and semantics, domain knowledge restricted to the referenced entities, inter-entity relationships, relevant underlying cause-and-effect rules, and detailed instructions and means for carrying out certain operations. Such characterization of the realm can contribute to methodological implementation of the algorithm specification in diverse systems and to its formalization for mechanical verification. The paper also touches upon the question of assessing execution faithfulness, which is distinct from correctness: in the absence of a reference interpretation of natural language or pseudocode specification with a given vocabulary, how can we determine if an observed agent's execution indeed complies with the input specification.

In recent years, blockchain has experienced widespread adoption across various industries, becoming integral to numerous enterprise applications. Concurrently, the rise of generative AI and LLMs has transformed human-computer interactions, offering advanced capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. The introduction of the MCP has further enhanced AI integration by standardizing communication between AI systems and external data sources. Despite these advancements, there is still no standardized method for seamlessly integrating LLM applications and blockchain. To address this concern, we propose "MCC: Model Context Contracts" a novel framework that enables LLMs to interact directly with blockchain smart contracts through MCP-like protocol. This integration allows AI agents to invoke blockchain smart contracts, facilitating more dynamic and context-aware interactions between users and blockchain networks. Essentially, it empowers users to interact with blockchain systems and perform transactions using queries in natural language. Within this proposed architecture, blockchain smart contracts can function as intelligent agents capable of recognizing user input in natural language and executing the corresponding transactions. To ensure that the LLM accurately interprets natural language inputs and maps them to the appropriate MCP functions, the LLM was fine-tuned using a custom dataset comprising user inputs paired with their corresponding MCP server functions. This fine-tuning process significantly improved the platform's performance and accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of MCC, we have developed an end-to-end prototype implemented on the Rahasak blockchain with the fine-tuned Llama-4 LLM. To the best of our knowledge, this research represents the first approach to using the concept of Model Context Protocol to integrate LLMs with blockchain.

This study presents DeBERTa-KC, a transformer-based model for automatic classification of knowledge construction (KC) levels in online science learning discourse. Using comments collected from four popular YouTube science channels (2022--2024), a balanced corpus of 20,000 manually annotated samples was created across four KC categories: \textit{nonKC}, \textit{Share}, \textit{Explore}, and \textit{Negotiate}. The proposed model extends DeBERTa-v3 with Focal Loss, Label Smoothing, and R-Drop regularization to address class imbalance and enhance generalization. A reproducible end-to-end pipeline was implemented, encompassing data extraction, annotation, preprocessing, training, and evaluation. Across 10-fold stratified cross-validation, DeBERTa-KC achieved a macro-F1 of $0.836 \pm 0.008$, significantly out-performing both classical and transformer baselines ($p<0.01$). Per-category results indicate strong sensitivity to higher-order epistemic engagement, particularly in \textit{Explore} and \textit{Negotiate} discourse. These findings demonstrate that large language models can effectively capture nuanced indicators of knowledge construction in informal digital learning environments, offering scalable, theory-informed approaches to discourse analysis and the development of automated tools for assessing epistemic engagement.

Cyberattack detection in Critical Infrastructure and Supply Chains has become challenging in Industry 4.0. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are deployed to counter the cyberattacks. However, an IDS effectively detects attacks based on the known signatures and patterns, Zero-day attacks go undetected. To overcome this drawback in IDS, the integration of a Dense Neural Network (DNN) with Data Augmentation is proposed. It makes IDS intelligent and enables it to self-learn with high accuracy when a novel attack is encountered. The network flow captures datasets are highly imbalanced same as the real network itself. The Data Augmentation plays a crucial role in balancing the data. The balancing of data is challenging as the minority class is as low as 0.000004\% of the dataset, and the abundant class is higher than 80\% of the dataset. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique is used for balancing the data. However, higher accuracies are achieved with balanced test data, lower accuracies are noticeable with the original imbalanced test data suggesting overfitting. A comparison with state-of-the-art research using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique with Edited Nearest Neighbor shows the classification of classes remains poor for the original dataset. This suggests highly imbalanced datasets of network flow require a different method of data augmentation.

Test suites are inherently imperfect, and testers can always enrich a suite with new test cases that improve its quality and, consequently, the reliability of the target software system. However, finding test cases that explore execution scenarios beyond the scope of an existing suite can be extremely challenging and labor-intensive, particularly when managing large test suites over extended periods. In this paper, we propose E-Test, an approach that reduces the gap between the execution space explored with a test suite and the executions experienced after testing by augmenting the test suite with test cases that explore execution scenarios that emerge in production. E-Test (i) identifies executions that have not yet been tested from large sets of scenarios, such as those monitored during intensive production usage, and (ii) generates new test cases that enhance the test suite. E-Test leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to pinpoint scenarios that the current test suite does not adequately cover, and augments the suite with test cases that execute these scenarios. Our evaluation on a dataset of 1,975 scenarios, collected from highly-starred open-source Java projects already in production and Defects4J, demonstrates that E-Test retrieves not-yet-tested execution scenarios significantly better than state-of-the-art approaches. While existing regression testing and field testing approaches for this task achieve a maximum F1-score of 0.34, and vanilla LLMs achieve a maximum F1-score of 0.39, E-Test reaches 0.55. These results highlight the impact of E-Test in enhancing test suites by effectively targeting not-yet-tested execution scenarios and reducing manual effort required for maintaining test suites.

We demonstrate complete functional segregation in hybrid SSM-Transformer architectures: retrieval depends exclusively on self-attention layers. Across RecurrentGemma-2B/9B and Jamba-Mini-1.6, attention ablation causes catastrophic retrieval failure (0% accuracy), while SSM layers show no compensatory mechanisms even with improved prompting. Conversely, sparsifying attention to just 15% of heads maintains near-perfect retrieval while preserving 84% MMLU performance, suggesting self-attention specializes primarily for retrieval tasks. We identify precise mechanistic requirements for retrieval: needle tokens must be exposed during generation and sufficient context must be available during prefill or generation. This strict functional specialization challenges assumptions about redundancy in hybrid architectures and suggests these models operate as specialized modules rather than integrated systems, with immediate implications for architecture optimization and interpretability.

Numerous knowledge workers utilize spreadsheets in business, accounting, and finance. However, a lack of systematic documentation methods for spreadsheets hinders automation, collaboration, and knowledge transfer, which risks the loss of crucial institutional knowledge. This paper introduces Spreadsheet Operations Documentation (SOD), an AI task that involves generating human-readable explanations from spreadsheet operations. Many previous studies have utilized Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating spreadsheet manipulation code; however, translating that code into natural language for SOD is a less-explored area. To address this, we present a benchmark of 111 spreadsheet manipulation code snippets, each paired with a corresponding natural language summary. We evaluate five LLMs, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Mixtral-8x7B, and Gemma2-9B, using BLEU, GLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR metrics. Our findings suggest that LLMs can generate accurate spreadsheet documentation, making SOD a feasible prerequisite step toward enhancing reproducibility, maintainability, and collaborative workflows in spreadsheets, although there are challenges that need to be addressed.

This study evaluates the pedagogical soundness and usability of AI-generated lesson plans across five leading large language models: ChatGPT (GPT-5), Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, and Grok 4. Beyond model choice, three structured prompt frameworks were tested: TAG (Task, Audience, Goal), RACE (Role, Audience, Context, Execution), and COSTAR (Context, Objective, Style, Tone, Audience, Response Format). Fifteen lesson plans were generated for a single high-school physics topic, The Electromagnetic Spectrum. The lesson plans were analyzed through four automated computational metrics: (1) readability and linguistic complexity, (2) factual accuracy and hallucination detection, (3) standards and curriculum alignment, and (4) cognitive demand of learning objectives. Results indicate that model selection exerted the strongest influence on linguistic accessibility, with DeepSeek producing the most readable teaching plan (FKGL = 8.64) and Claude generating the densest language (FKGL = 19.89). The prompt framework structure most strongly affected the factual accuracy and pedagogical completeness, with the RACE framework yielding the lowest hallucination index and the highest incidental alignment with NGSS curriculum standards. Across all models, the learning objectives in the fifteen lesson plans clustered at the Remember and Understand tiers of Bloom's taxonomy. There were limited higher-order verbs in the learning objectives extracted. Overall, the findings suggest that readability is significantly governed by model design, while instructional reliability and curricular alignment depend more on the prompt framework. The most effective configuration for lesson plans identified in the results was to combine a readability-optimized model with the RACE framework and an explicit checklist of physics concepts, curriculum standards, and higher-order objectives.

Automated code generation driven by Large Lan- guage Models (LLMs) has enhanced development efficiency, yet generating complex application-level software code remains challenging. Multi-agent frameworks show potential, but existing methods perform inadequately in large-scale application-level software code generation, failing to ensure reasonable orga- nizational structures of project code and making it difficult to maintain the code generation process. To address this, this paper envisions a Knowledge-Guided Application-Level Code Generation framework named KGACG, which aims to trans- form software requirements specification and architectural design document into executable code through a collaborative closed- loop of the Code Organization & Planning Agent (COPA), Coding Agent (CA), and Testing Agent (TA), combined with a feedback mechanism. We demonstrate the collaborative process of the agents in KGACG in a Java Tank Battle game case study while facing challenges. KGACG is dedicated to advancing the automation of application-level software development.

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a promising direction for vision-language tasks, offering bidirectional context modeling and theoretical parallelization. However, their practical application is severely hindered by a train-inference discrepancy, which leads to catastrophic error cascades: initial token errors during parallel decoding pollute the generation context, triggering a chain reaction of compounding errors and leading to syntactic errors and semantic hallucinations. To address this fundamental challenge, we reframe the generation process from passive denoising to active refining. We introduce ReDiff, a refining-enhanced diffusion framework that teaches the model to identify and correct its own errors. Our approach features a two-stage training process: first, we instill a foundational revision capability by training the model to revise synthetic errors; second, we implement a novel online self-correction loop where the model is explicitly trained to revise its own flawed drafts by learning from an expert's corrections. This mistake-driven learning endows the model with the crucial ability to revisit and refine its already generated output, effectively breaking the error cascade. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReDiff significantly improves the coherence and factual accuracy of generated content, enabling stable and efficient parallel generation far superior to traditional denoising methods. Our codes and models are available at this https URL.

The performance of deep reinforcement learning agents is fundamentally constrained by their neural network architecture, a choice traditionally made through expensive hyperparameter searches and then fixed throughout training. This work investigates whether online, adaptive architecture optimization can escape this constraint and outperform static designs. We introduce NAS-DQN, an agent that integrates a learned neural architecture search controller directly into the DRL training loop, enabling dynamic network reconfiguration based on cumulative performance feedback. We evaluate NAS-DQN against three fixed-architecture baselines and a random search control on a continuous control task, conducting experiments over multiple random seeds. Our results demonstrate that NAS-DQN achieves superior final performance, sample efficiency, and policy stability while incurring negligible computational overhead. Critically, the learned search strategy substantially outperforms both undirected random architecture exploration and poorly-chosen fixed designs, indicating that intelligent, performance-guided search is the key mechanism driving success. These findings establish that architecture adaptation is not merely beneficial but necessary for optimal sample efficiency in online deep reinforcement learning, and suggest that the design of RL agents need not be a static offline choice but can instead be seamlessly integrated as a dynamic component of the learning process itself.

Despite significant evolution of CUDA programming and domain-specific libraries, effectively utilizing GPUs with massively parallel engines remains difficult. Large language models (LLMs) show strong potential in generating optimized CUDA code from sequential code. However, using LLMs in practice faces two major challenges: cloud-based APIs pose risks of code leakage, and local deployment is often computationally expensive and inefficient. These drawbacks have spurred interest in small language models (SLMs), which are more lightweight and privacy-friendly. Encouragingly, recent studies show that SLMs can achieve performance comparable to LLMs on specific tasks. While SLMs can match LLMs on domain-specific tasks, their limited reasoning abilities lead to suboptimal performance in complex CUDA generation according to our experiments. To bridge this gap, we propose ReGraphT, a training-free, retrieval-augmented generation framework that transfers LLM-level reasoning to smaller models. ReGraphT organizes CUDA optimization trajectories into a structured reasoning graph, modeling the combined CUDA optimizations as state transitions, and leverages Monte Carlo Graph Search (MCGS) for efficient exploration. We also present a CUDA-specific benchmark with difficulty tiers defined by reasoning complexity to evaluate models more comprehensively. Experiments show that ReGraphT outperforms HPC-specific fine-tuned models and other retrieval-augmented approaches, achieving an average 2.33X speedup on CUDAEval and ParEval. When paired with DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct, ReGraphT enables SLMs to approach LLM-level performance without the associated privacy risks or excessive computing overhead.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We introduce Sparse Tracing, a novel technique that leverages dynamic sparse attention to efficiently analyze long context attention patterns. We present Stream, a compilable hierarchical pruning algorithm that estimates per-head sparse attention masks in near-linear time $O(T \log T)$ and linear space $O(T)$, enabling one-pass interpretability at scale. Stream performs a binary-search-style refinement to retain only the top-$k$ key blocks per query while preserving the model's next-token behavior. We apply Stream to long chain-of-thought reasoning traces and identify thought anchors while pruning 97-99\% of token interactions. On the RULER benchmark, Stream preserves critical retrieval paths while discarding 90-96\% of interactions and exposes layer-wise routes from the needle to output. Our method offers a practical drop-in tool for analyzing attention patterns and tracing information flow without terabytes of caches. By making long context interpretability feasible on consumer GPUs, Sparse Tracing helps democratize chain-of-thought monitoring. Code is available at this https URL.

A policy-governed RAG architecture is specified for audit-ready generation in regulated workflows, organized as a triptych: (I) Contracts/Control (SHRDLU-like), which governs output adherence to legal and internal policies; (II) Manifests/Trails (Memex-like), which cryptographically anchors all cited source evidence to ensure verifiable provenance; and (III) Receipts/Verification (Xanadu-like), which provides the final, portable proof of compliance for auditors (portable COSE/JOSE) (see Section 4 and Appendix A). Rather than explaining model internals, outputs are gated ex-ante and bound to cryptographically verifiable evidence for each material answer. Unvalidated targets are stated (>=20% relative reduction in confident errors; p95 latency <= 900 ms; <= 2.2x serve cost) together with a pre-registered (optional) pilot using NO-GO gates. The design complements existing RAG/guardrails by making policy checks auditable, replayable, and receipt-backed. Target domains include back-office compliance in pharma, medical devices, finance, legal, and the public sector where error costs may exceed thousands of euros and audit trails are mandatory under regulations such as the EU AI Act. Future evaluations may pre-commit to publishing negative results when any example NO-GO gate is not met.

Efficient screening and early diagnosis of HIV are critical for reducing onward transmission. Although large scale laboratory testing is not feasible, the widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offers new opportunities to address this challenge. Existing research primarily focuses on applying machine learning methods to structured data, such as patient demographics, for improving HIV diagnosis. However, these approaches often overlook unstructured text data such as clinical notes, which potentially contain valuable information relevant to HIV risk. In this study, we propose a novel pipeline that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to analyze unstructured EHR text and determine a patient's eligibility for further HIV testing. Experimental results on clinical data from Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam demonstrate that our pipeline achieved high accuracy while maintaining a low false negative rate.

Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with different behavioural responses, which is the goal of this work. We investigate the informativeness of 753 socio-behavioural, linguistic, relational, and psychological features, in predicting the behavioural changes of 16.8K users affected by a major moderation intervention on Reddit. To reach this goal, we frame the problem in terms of "quantification", a task well-suited to estimating shifts in aggregate user behaviour. We then apply a greedy feature selection strategy with the double goal of (i) identifying the features that are most predictive of changes in user activity, toxicity, and participation diversity, and (ii) estimating their importance. Our results allow identifying a small set of features that are consistently informative across all tasks, and determining that many others are either task-specific or of limited utility altogether. We also find that predictive performance varies according to the task, with changes in activity and toxicity being easier to estimate than changes in diversity. Overall, our results pave the way for the development of accurate systems that predict user reactions to moderation interventions. Furthermore, our findings highlight the complexity of post-moderation user behaviour, and indicate that effective moderation should be tailored not only to user traits but also to the specific objective of the intervention.

Over the years, the technological landscape has evolved, reshaping the security posture of organisations and increasing their exposure to cybersecurity threats, many originating from within. Insider threats remain a major challenge, particularly in sectors where cybersecurity infrastructure, expertise, and regulations are still developing. This study proposes the Insider Threat Explainable Machine Learning (IT-XML) framework, which integrates the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) with Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to enhance proactive insider threat management and decision-making. A quantitative approach is adopted using an online questionnaire to assess employees' knowledge of insider threat patterns, access control, privacy practices, and existing policies across three large data-sensitive organisations. The IT-XML framework provides assessment capabilities through survey-based data, HMM-driven pattern recognition for security maturity classification, and evidence-based recommendations for proactive threat mitigation. The framework classified all organisations at the developing security maturity level with 97-98% confidence and achieved a classification accuracy of 91.7%, identifying audit log access limits as the most critical control. Random Forest analysis highlighted vendor breach notifications (0.081) and regular audit log reviews (0.052) as key determinants of resilience. Explainability methods such as SHAP and LIME improved model transparency and interpretability, demonstrating the framework's potential to strengthen insider threat management practices.

Mathematically constructed S-boxes arise from algebraic structures and finite field theory to ensure strong, provable cryptographic properties. These mathematically grounded constructions allow for generation of thousands of S-Boxes with high nonlinearity, APN properties, and balanced avalanche characteristics, unlike fully random methods, which lack such theoretical guarantees in exchange for low complexity and more varied results. In this work, we compare mathematically constructed constructions with randomly generated ones to evaluate the relative weakness of the latter. We also establish an average measure of performance for randomly generated permutations, as well as random with forced cycle constraints, and compare them to well-established designs in a simple SPN setting.

Purpose: Artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular large language models (LLMs), are increasingly being explored as tools to support life cycle assessment (LCA). While demonstrations exist across environmental and social domains, systematic evidence on their reliability, robustness, and usability remains limited. This study provides the first expert-grounded benchmark of LLMs in LCA, addressing the absence of standardized evaluation frameworks in a field where no clear ground truth or consensus protocols exist. Methods: We evaluated eleven general-purpose LLMs, spanning both commercial and open-source families, across 22 LCA-related tasks. Seventeen experienced practitioners reviewed model outputs against criteria directly relevant to LCA practice, including scientific accuracy, explanation quality, robustness, verifiability, and adherence to instructions. We collected 168 expert reviews. Results: Experts judged 37% of responses to contain inaccurate or misleading information. Ratings of accuracy and quality of explanation were generally rated average or good on many models even smaller models, and format adherence was generally rated favourably. Hallucination rates varied significantly, with some models producing hallucinated citations at rates of up to 40%. There was no clear-cut distinction between ratings on open-weight versus closed-weight LLMs, with open-weight models outperforming or competing on par with closed-weight models on criteria such as accuracy and quality of explanation. Conclusion: These findings highlight the risks of applying LLMs naïvely in LCA, such as when LLMs are treated as free-form oracles, while also showing benefits especially around quality of explanation and alleviating labour intensiveness of simple tasks. The use of general-purpose LLMs without grounding mechanisms presents ...

The traffic assignment problem is essential for traffic flow analysis, traditionally solved using mathematical programs under the Equilibrium principle. These methods become computationally prohibitive for large-scale networks due to non-linear growth in complexity with the number of OD pairs. This study introduces a novel data-driven approach using deep neural networks, specifically leveraging the Transformer architecture, to predict equilibrium path flows directly. By focusing on path-level traffic distribution, the proposed model captures intricate correlations between OD pairs, offering a more detailed and flexible analysis compared to traditional link-level approaches. The Transformer-based model drastically reduces computation time, while adapting to changes in demand and network structure without the need for recalculation. Numerical experiments are conducted on the Manhattan-like synthetic network, the Sioux Falls network, and the Eastern-Massachusetts network. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is orders of magnitude faster than conventional optimization. It efficiently estimates path-level traffic flows in multi-class networks, reducing computational costs and improving prediction accuracy by capturing detailed trip and flow information. The model also adapts flexibly to varying demand and network conditions, supporting traffic management and enabling rapid `what-if' analyses for enhanced transportation planning and policy-making.

We present a data generation framework designed to simulate spoofing attacks and randomly place attack scenarios worldwide. We apply deep neural network-based models for spoofing detection, utilizing Long Short-Term Memory networks and Transformer-inspired architectures. These models are specifically designed for online detection and are trained using the generated dataset. Our results demonstrate that deep learning models can accurately distinguish spoofed signals from genuine ones, achieving high detection performance. The best results are achieved by Transformer-inspired architectures with early fusion of the inputs resulting in an error rate of 0.16%.

Multi-modal large language models (MLMs) are often assessed on static, individual benchmarks -- which cannot jointly assess MLM capabilities in a single task -- or rely on human or model pairwise comparisons -- which is highly subjective, expensive, and allows models to exploit superficial shortcuts (e.g., verbosity) to inflate their win-rates. To overcome these issues, we propose game-based evaluations to holistically assess MLM capabilities. Games require multiple abilities for players to win, are inherently competitive, and are governed by fix, objective rules, and makes evaluation more engaging, providing a robust framework to address the aforementioned challenges. We manifest this evaluation specifically through Dixit, a fantasy card game where players must generate captions for a card that trick some, but not all players, into selecting the played card. Our quantitative experiments with five MLMs show Dixit win-rate rankings are perfectly correlated with those on popular MLM benchmarks, while games between human and MLM players in Dixit reveal several differences between agent strategies and areas of improvement for MLM reasoning.

Medical artificial intelligence systems have achieved remarkable diagnostic capabilities, yet they consistently exhibit performance disparities across demographic groups, causing real-world harm to underrepresented populations. While recent multimodal reasoning foundation models have advanced clinical diagnosis through integrated analysis of diverse medical data, reasoning trainings via reinforcement learning inherit and often amplify biases present in training datasets dominated by majority populations. We introduce Fairness-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (FairGRPO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach that promotes equitable learning across heterogeneous clinical populations. FairGRPO employs adaptive importance weighting of advantages based on representation, task difficulty, and data source. To address the common issue of missing demographic labels in the clinical domain, we further employ unsupervised clustering, which automatically discovers latent demographic groups when labels are unavailable. Through comprehensive experiments across 7 clinical diagnostic datasets spanning 5 clinical modalities across X-ray, CT scan, dermoscropy, mammography and ultrasound, we demonstrate that FairGRPO reduces predictive parity by 27.2% against all vanilla and bias mitigated RL baselines, while improving F1 score by 12.49%. Furthermore, training dynamics analysis reveals that FairGRPO progressively improves fairness throughout optimization, while baseline RL methods exhibit deteriorating fairness as training progresses. Based on FairGRPO, we release FairMedGemma-4B, a fairness-aware clinical VLLM that achieves state-of-the-art performance while demonstrating significantly reduced disparities across demographic groups.

Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with optimization modeling offers a promising avenue for advancing decision-making in operations research (OR). Traditional optimization methods,such as linear programming, mixed integer programming, and simulation depend heavily on domain expertise to translate real-world problems into solvable mathematical models. While solvers like Gurobi and COPT are powerful, expert input remains essential for defining objectives, constraints, and variables. This research investigates the potential of LLMs, specifically the DeepSeek-R1 model, to bridge this formulation gap using natural language understanding and code generation. Although prior models like GPT-4, Claude, and Bard have shown strong performance in NLP and reasoning tasks, their high token costs and tendency toward hallucinations limit real-world applicability in supply chain contexts. In contrast, DeepSeek-R1, a cost-efficient and high-performing model trained with reinforcement learning, presents a viable alternative. Despite its success in benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench and Math-500, its effectiveness in applied OR scenarios remains under explored. This study systematically evaluates DeepSeek-R1 across four key OR benchmarks: NL4OPT, IndustryOR, EasyLP, and ComplexOR. Our methodology includes baseline assessments, the development of a hallucination taxonomy, and the application of mitigation strategies like LLM-as-a-Judge, Few-shot Learning (FSL), Tool Calling, and a Multi-agent Framework. These techniques aim to reduce hallucinations, enhance formulation accuracy, and better align model outputs with user intent.

In this paper, we propose an approach to support the diagnosis of urinary tract diseases, with a focus on bladder cancer, using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations)-based feature selection to enhance the transparency and effectiveness of predictive models. Six binary classification scenarios were developed to distinguish bladder cancer from other urological and oncological conditions. The algorithms XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost were employed, with hyperparameter optimization performed using Optuna and class balancing with the SMOTE technique. The selection of predictive variables was guided by importance values through SHAP-based feature selection while maintaining or even improving performance metrics such as balanced accuracy, precision, and specificity. The use of explainability techniques (SHAP) for feature selection proved to be an effective approach. The proposed methodology may contribute to the development of more transparent, reliable, and efficient clinical decision support systems, optimizing screening and early diagnosis of urinary tract diseases.

We investigate how agents built on pretrained large language models can learn target classification functions from labeled examples without parameter updates. While conventional approaches like fine-tuning are often costly, inflexible, and opaque, we propose a memory-augmented framework that leverages both labeled data and LLM-generated critiques. Our framework uses episodic memory to store instance-level critiques-capturing specific past experiences-and semantic memory to distill these into reusable, task-level guidance. Across a diverse set of tasks, incorporating critiques yields up to a 24.8 percent accuracy improvement over retrieval-based (RAG-style) baselines that rely only on labels. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we uncover distinct behavioral differences between OpenAI and opensource models, particularly in how they handle fact-oriented versus preference-based data. To interpret how models respond to different representations of supervision encoded in memory, we introduce a novel metric, suggestibility. This helps explain observed behaviors and illuminates how model characteristics and memory strategies jointly shape learning dynamics. Our findings highlight the promise of memory-driven, reflective learning for building more adaptive and interpretable LLM agents.

High quality bugs are key to training the next generation of language model based software engineering (SWE) agents. We introduce a novel method for synthetic generation of difficult and diverse bugs. Our method instructs SWE Agents to introduce a feature into the codebase whereby they may unintentionally break tests, resulting in bugs. Prior approaches often induce an out-of-distribution effect by generating bugs intentionally (e.g. by introducing local perturbation to existing code), which does not reflect realistic development processes. We perform qualitative analysis to demonstrate that our approach for generating bugs more closely reflects the patterns found in human-authored edits. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our bugs provide more efficient training data for supervised fine-tuning, outperforming other bug datasets by 2% with half the training data (1.2k vs. 3k bugs). We train on our newly generated bugs in addition to existing bug datasets to get FrogBoss a state-of-the-art 32B parameter model on SWE-bench Verified with a pass@1 of 54.6% and FrogMini a state-of-the-art 14B model on SWE-bench Verified with a pass@1 of 45.3% on SWE-bench Verified averaged over three seeds.

''Noisy'' datasets (regimes with low signal to noise ratios, small sample sizes, faulty data collection, etc) remain a key research frontier for classification methods with both theoretical and practical implications. We introduce FINDER, a rigorous framework for analyzing generic classification problems, with tailored algorithms for noisy datasets. FINDER incorporates fundamental stochastic analysis ideas into the feature learning and inference stages to optimally account for the randomness inherent to all empirical datasets. We construct ''stochastic features'' by first viewing empirical datasets as realizations from an underlying random field (without assumptions on its exact distribution) and then mapping them to appropriate Hilbert spaces. The Kosambi-Karhunen-Loéve expansion (KLE) breaks these stochastic features into computable irreducible components, which allow classification over noisy datasets via an eigen-decomposition: data from different classes resides in distinct regions, identified by analyzing the spectrum of the associated operators. We validate FINDER on several challenging, data-deficient scientific domains, producing state of the art breakthroughs in: (i) Alzheimer's Disease stage classification, (ii) Remote sensing detection of deforestation. We end with a discussion on when FINDER is expected to outperform existing methods, its failure modes, and other limitations.

The Muon optimizer has rapidly emerged as a powerful, geometry-aware alternative to AdamW, demonstrating strong performance in large-scale training of neural networks. However, a critical theory-practice disconnect exists: Muon's efficiency relies on fast, approximate orthogonalization, yet all prior theoretical work analyzes an idealized, computationally intractable version assuming exact SVD-based updates. This work moves beyond the ideal by providing the first analysis of the inexact orthogonalized update at Muon's core. We develop our analysis within the general framework of Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO)-based optimization, introducing a realistic additive error model to capture the inexactness of practical approximation schemes. Our analysis yields explicit bounds that quantify performance degradation as a function of the LMO inexactness/error. We reveal a fundamental coupling between this inexactness and the optimal step size and momentum: lower oracle precision requires a smaller step size but larger momentum parameter. These findings elevate the approximation procedure (e.g., the number of Newton-Schulz steps) from an implementation detail to a critical parameter that must be co-tuned with the learning schedule. NanoGPT experiments directly confirm the predicted coupling, with optimal learning rates clearly shifting as approximation precision changes.

Differentially private (DP) decentralized Federated Learning (FL) allows local users to collaborate without sharing their data with a central server. However, accurately quantifying the privacy budget of private FL algorithms is challenging due to the co-existence of complex algorithmic components such as decentralized communication and local updates. This paper addresses privacy accounting for two decentralized FL algorithms within the $f$-differential privacy ($f$-DP) framework. We develop two new $f$-DP-based accounting methods tailored to decentralized settings: Pairwise Network $f$-DP (PN-$f$-DP), which quantifies privacy leakage between user pairs under random-walk communication, and Secret-based $f$-Local DP (Sec-$f$-LDP), which supports structured noise injection via shared secrets. By combining tools from $f$-DP theory and Markov chain concentration, our accounting framework captures privacy amplification arising from sparse communication, local iterations, and correlated noise. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our methods yield consistently tighter $(\epsilon,\delta)$ bounds and improved utility compared to Rényi DP-based approaches, illustrating the benefits of $f$-DP in decentralized privacy accounting.

Real-world health studies require continuous and secure data collection from mobile and wearable devices. We introduce MotionPI, a smartphone-based system designed to collect behavioral and health data through sensors and surveys with minimal interaction from participants. The system integrates passive data collection (such as GPS and wristband motion data) with Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) surveys, which can be triggered randomly or based on physical activity. MotionPI is designed to work under real-life constraints, including limited battery life, weak or intermittent cellular connection, and minimal user supervision. It stores data both locally and on a secure cloud server, with encrypted transmission and storage. It integrates through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) into wristband devices that store raw data and communicate motion summaries and trigger events. MotionPI demonstrates a practical solution for secure and scalable mobile data collection in cyber-physical health studies.

We analyze task orderings in continual learning for linear regression, assuming joint realizability of training data. We focus on orderings that greedily maximize dissimilarity between consecutive tasks, a concept briefly explored in prior work but still surrounded by open questions. Using tools from the Kaczmarz method literature, we formalize such orderings and develop geometric and algebraic intuitions around them. Empirically, we demonstrate that greedy orderings converge faster than random ones in terms of the average loss across tasks, both for linear regression with random data and for linear probing on CIFAR-100 classification tasks. Analytically, in a high-rank regression setting, we prove a loss bound for greedy orderings analogous to that of random ones. However, under general rank, we establish a repetition-dependent separation. Specifically, while prior work showed that for random orderings, with or without replacement, the average loss after $k$ iterations is bounded by $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{k})$, we prove that single-pass greedy orderings may fail catastrophically, whereas those allowing repetition converge at rate $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt[3]{k})$. Overall, we reveal nuances within and between greedy and random orderings.

Building agents that generalize across web, desktop, and mobile environments remains an open challenge, as prior systems rely on environment-specific interfaces that limit cross-platform deployment. We introduce Surfer 2, a unified architecture operating purely from visual observations that achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three environments. Surfer 2 integrates hierarchical context management, decoupled planning and execution, and self-verification with adaptive recovery, enabling reliable operation over long task horizons. Our system achieves 97.1% accuracy on WebVoyager, 69.6% on WebArena, 60.1% on OSWorld, and 87.1% on AndroidWorld, outperforming all prior systems without task-specific fine-tuning. With multiple attempts, Surfer 2 exceeds human performance on all benchmarks. These results demonstrate that systematic orchestration amplifies foundation model capabilities and enables general-purpose computer control through visual interaction alone, while calling for a next-generation vision language model to achieve Pareto-optimal cost-efficiency.

In financial applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained on historical data, where their actions do not influence prices. However, during deployment, these agents trade in live markets where their own transactions can shift asset prices, a phenomenon known as market impact. This mismatch between training and deployment environments can significantly degrade performance. Traditional robust RL approaches address this model misspecification by optimizing the worst-case performance over a set of uncertainties, but typically rely on symmetric structures that fail to capture the directional nature of market impact. To address this issue, we develop a novel class of elliptic uncertainty sets. We establish both implicit and explicit closed-form solutions for the worst-case uncertainty under these sets, enabling efficient and tractable robust policy evaluation. Experiments on single-asset and multi-asset trading tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior Sharpe ratio and remains robust under increasing trade volumes, offering a more faithful and scalable approach to RL in financial markets.

Large Language Models are being used in conversational agents that simulate human conversations and generate social studies data. While concerns about the models' biases have been raised and discussed in the literature, much about the data generated is still unknown. In this study we explore the statistical representation of social values across four countries (UK, Argentina, USA and China) for six LLMs, with equal representation for open and closed weights. By comparing machine-generated outputs with actual human survey data, we assess whether algorithmic biases in LLMs outweigh the biases inherent in real- world sampling, including demographic and response biases. Our findings suggest that, despite the logistical and financial constraints of human surveys, even a small, skewed sample of real respondents may provide more reliable insights than synthetic data produced by LLMs. These results highlight the limitations of using AI-generated text for social research and emphasize the continued importance of empirical human data collection.

Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators unless the perturbation stepsize vanishes. In this paper, we overcome this biasedness issue by proposing a novel family of unbiased gradient estimators based solely on function evaluations. By reformulating directional derivatives as a telescoping series and sampling from carefully designed distributions, we construct estimators that eliminate bias while maintaining favorable variance. We analyze their theoretical properties, derive optimal scaling distributions and perturbation stepsizes of four specific constructions, and prove that SGD using the proposed estimators achieves optimal complexity for smooth non-convex objectives. Experiments on synthetic tasks and language model fine-tuning confirm the superior accuracy and convergence of our approach compared to standard methods.

Relational multi-table data is common in domains such as e-commerce, healthcare, and scientific research, and can be naturally represented as heterogeneous temporal graphs with multi-modal node attributes. Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) rely on schema-specific feature encoders, requiring separate modules for each node type and feature column, which hinders scalability and parameter sharing. We introduce RELATE (Relational Encoder for Latent Aggregation of Typed Entities), a schema-agnostic, plug-and-play feature encoder that can be used with any general purpose GNN. RELATE employs shared modality-specific encoders for categorical, numerical, textual, and temporal attributes, followed by a Perceiver-style cross-attention module that aggregates features into a fixed-size, permutation-invariant node representation. We evaluate RELATE on ReLGNN and HGT in the RelBench benchmark, where it achieves performance within 3% of schema-specific encoders while reducing parameter counts by up to 5x. This design supports varying schemas and enables multi-dataset pretraining for general-purpose GNNs, paving the way toward foundation models for relational graph data.

This paper addresses the challenges in representation learning of 3D shape features by investigating state-of-the-art backbones paired with both contrastive supervised and self-supervised learning objectives. Computer vision methods struggle with recognizing 3D objects from 2D images, often requiring extensive labeled data and relying on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that may overlook crucial shape relationships. Our work demonstrates that Vision Transformers (ViTs) based architectures, when paired with modern contrastive objectives, achieve promising results in multi-view 3D analysis on our downstream tasks, unifying contrastive and 3D shape understanding pipelines. For example, supervised contrastive losses reached about 90.6% accuracy on ModelNet10. The use of ViTs and contrastive learning, leveraging ViTs' ability to understand overall shapes and contrastive learning's effectiveness, overcomes the need for extensive labeled data and the limitations of CNNs in capturing crucial shape relationships. The success stems from capturing global shape semantics via ViTs and refining local discriminative features through contrastive optimization. Importantly, our approach is empirical, as it is grounded on extensive experimental evaluation to validate the effectiveness of combining ViTs with contrastive objectives for 3D representation learning.

Generative AI is supercharging insurance fraud by making it easier to falsify accident evidence at scale and in rapid time. Insurance fraud is a pervasive and costly problem, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in losses each year. In the vehicle insurance sector, fraud schemes have traditionally involved staged accidents, exaggerated damage, or forged documents. The rise of generative AI, including deepfake image and video generation, has introduced new methods for committing fraud at scale. Fraudsters can now fabricate highly realistic crash photos, damage evidence, and even fake identities or documents with minimal effort, exploiting AI tools to bolster false insurance claims. Insurers have begun deploying countermeasures such as AI-based deepfake detection software and enhanced verification processes to detect and mitigate these AI-driven scams. However, current mitigation strategies face significant limitations. Detection tools can suffer from false positives and negatives, and sophisticated fraudsters continuously adapt their tactics to evade automated checks. This cat-and-mouse arms race between generative AI and detection technology, combined with resource and cost barriers for insurers, means that combating AI-enabled insurance fraud remains an ongoing challenge. In this white paper, we present UVeye layered solution for vehicle fraud, representing a major leap forward in the ability to detect, mitigate and deter this new wave of fraud.

Accurate robot kinematics is essential for precise tool placement in articulated robots, but non-geometric factors can introduce configuration-dependent model discrepancies. This paper presents a configuration-dependent kinematic calibration framework for improving accuracy across the entire workspace. Local Product-of-Exponential (POE) models, selected for their parameterization continuity, are identified at multiple configurations and interpolated into a global model. Inspired by joint gravity load expressions, we employ Fourier basis function interpolation parameterized by the shoulder and elbow joint angles, achieving accuracy comparable to neural network and autoencoder methods but with substantially higher training efficiency. Validation on two 6-DoF industrial robots shows that the proposed approach reduces the maximum positioning error by over 50%, meeting the sub-millimeter accuracy required for cold spray manufacturing. Robots with larger configuration-dependent discrepancies benefit even more. A dual-robot collaborative task demonstrates the framework's practical applicability and repeatability.

The study explores the potential of AI technologies in personalized learning, suggesting the prediction of academic success through leadership personality traits and machine learning modelling. The primary data were obtained from 129 master's students in the Environmental Engineering Department, who underwent five leadership personality tests with 23 characteristics. Students used self-assessment tools that included Personality Insight, Workplace Culture, Motivation at Work, Management Skills, and Emotion Control tests. The test results were combined with the average grade obtained from academic reports. The study employed exploratory data analysis and correlation analysis. Feature selection utilized Pearson correlation coefficients of personality traits. The average grades were separated into three categories: fail, pass, and excellent. The modelling process was performed by tuning seven ML algorithms, such as SVM, LR, KNN, DT, GB, RF, XGBoost and LightGBM. The highest predictive performance was achieved with the RF classifier, which yielded an accuracy of 87.50% for the model incorporating 17 personality trait features and the leadership mark feature, and an accuracy of 85.71% for the model excluding this feature. In this way, the study offers an additional opportunity to identify students' strengths and weaknesses at an early stage of their education process and select the most suitable strategies for personalized learning.

Lyric translation is a challenging task that requires balancing multiple musical constraints. Existing methods often rely on hand-crafted rules and sentence-level modeling, which restrict their ability to internalize musical-linguistic patterns and to generalize effectively at the paragraph level, where cross-line coherence and global rhyme are crucial. In this work, we propose LyriCAR, a novel framework for controllable lyric translation that operates in a fully unsupervised manner. LyriCAR introduces a difficulty-aware curriculum designer and an adaptive curriculum strategy, ensuring efficient allocation of training resources, accelerating convergence, and improving overall translation quality by guiding the model with increasingly complex challenges. Extensive experiments on the EN-ZH lyric translation task show that LyriCAR achieves state-of-the-art results across both standard translation metrics and multi-dimensional reward scores, surpassing strong baselines. Notably, the adaptive curriculum strategy reduces training steps by nearly 40% while maintaining superior performance. Code, data and model can be accessed at this https URL.

The telecommunications industry faces a dual transformation: the architectural shift toward Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) and the emerging threat from quantum computing. O-RAN disaggregated, multi-vendor architecture creates a larger attack surface vulnerable to crypt-analytically relevant quantum computers(CRQCs) that will break current public key cryptography. The Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) attack strategy makes this threat immediate, as adversaries can intercept encrypted data today for future decryption. This paper presents Q-RAN, a comprehensive quantum-resistant security framework for O-RAN networks using NIST-standardized Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). We detail the implementation of ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204), integrated with Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNG) for cryptographic entropy. The solution deploys PQ-IPsec, PQ-DTLS, and PQ-mTLS protocols across all O-RAN interfaces, anchored by a centralized Post-Quantum Certificate Authority (PQ-CA) within the SMO framework. This work provides a complete roadmap for securing disaggregated O-RAN ecosystems against quantum adversaries.

Very recently, Khoury and Schild [FOCS 2025] showed that any randomized LOCAL algorithm that solves maximal matching requires $\Omega(\min\{\log \Delta, \log_\Delta n\})$ rounds, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph and $\Delta$ is the maximum degree. This result is shown through a new technique, called round elimination via self-reduction. The lower bound proof is beautiful and presents very nice ideas. However, it spans more than 25 pages of technical details, and hence it is hard to digest and generalize to other problems. Historically, the simplification of proofs and techniques has marked an important turning point in our understanding of the complexity of graph problems. Our paper makes a step forward towards this direction, and provides the following contributions. 1. We present a short and simplified version of the round elimination via self-reduction technique. The simplification of this technique enables us to obtain the following two hardness results. 2. We show that any randomized LOCAL algorithm that solves the maximal $b$-matching problem requires $\Omega(\min\{\log_{1+b}\Delta, \log_\Delta n\})$ and $\Omega(\sqrt{\log_{1+b} n})$ rounds. We recall that the $b$-matching problem is a generalization of the matching problem where each vertex can have up to $b$ incident edges in the matching. As a corollary, for $b=1$, we obtain a short proof for the maximal matching lower bound shown by Khoury and Schild. 3. Finally, we show that any randomized LOCAL algorithm that properly colors the edges of a graph with $\Delta + k$ colors requires $\Omega(\min\{\log \Delta, \log_\Delta n\})$ and $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n})$ rounds, for any $k\le \Delta^{1-\varepsilon}$ and any constant $\varepsilon > 0$.

The path to higher network autonomy in 6G lies beyond the mere optimization of key performance indicators (KPIs). While KPIs have enabled automation gains under TM Forum Levels 1--3, they remain numerical abstractions that act only as proxies for the real essence of communication networks: seamless connectivity, fairness, adaptability, and resilience. True autonomy requires perceiving and reasoning over the network environment as it is. Such progress can be achieved through \emph{agentic AI}, where large language model (LLM)-powered agents perceive multimodal telemetry, reason with memory, negotiate across domains, and act via APIs to achieve multi-objective goals. However, deploying such agents introduces the challenge of cognitive biases inherited from human design, which can distort reasoning, negotiation, tool use, and actuation. Between neuroscience and AI, this paper provides a tutorial on a selection of well-known biases, including their taxonomy, definition, mathematical formulation, emergence in telecom systems and the commonly impacted agentic components. The tutorial also presents various mitigation strategies tailored to each type of bias. The article finally provides two practical use-cases, which tackle the emergence, impact and mitigation gain of some famous biases in 6G inter-slice and cross-domain management. In particular, anchor randomization, temporal decay and inflection bonus techniques are introduced to specifically address anchoring, temporal and confirmation biases. This avoids that agents stick to the initial high resource allocation proposal or decisions that are recent and/or confirming a prior hypothesis. By grounding decisions in a richer and fairer set of past experiences, the quality and bravery of the agentic agreements in the second use-case, for instance, are leading to $\times 5$ lower latency and around $40\%$ higher energy saving.

Non-prehensile manipulation of diverse objects remains a core challenge in robotics, driven by unknown physical properties and the complexity of contact-rich interactions. Recent advances in contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC), with contact reasoning embedded directly in the trajectory optimization, have shown promise in tackling the task efficiently and robustly, yet demonstrations have been limited to narrowly curated examples. In this work, we showcase the broader capabilities of CI-MPC through precise planar pushing tasks over a wide range of object geometries, including multi-object domains. These scenarios demand reasoning over numerous inter-object and object-environment contacts to strategically manipulate and de-clutter the environment, challenges that were intractable for prior CI-MPC methods. To achieve this, we introduce Consensus Complementarity Control Plus (C3+), an enhanced CI-MPC algorithm integrated into a complete pipeline spanning object scanning, mesh reconstruction, and hardware execution. Compared to its predecessor C3, C3+ achieves substantially faster solve times, enabling real-time performance even in multi-object pushing tasks. On hardware, our system achieves overall 98% success rate across 33 objects, reaching pose goals within tight tolerances. The average time-to-goal is approximately 0.5, 1.6, 3.2, and 5.3 minutes for 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-object tasks, respectively. Project page: this https URL.

In this paper, we explore the two-point zeroth-order gradient estimator and identify the distribution of random perturbations that minimizes the estimator's asymptotic variance as the perturbation stepsize tends to zero. We formulate it as a constrained functional optimization problem over the space of perturbation distributions. Our findings reveal that such desired perturbations can align directionally with the true gradient, instead of maintaining a fixed length. While existing research has largely focused on fixed-length perturbations, the potential advantages of directional alignment have been overlooked. To address this gap, we delve into the theoretical and empirical properties of the directionally aligned perturbation (DAP) scheme, which adaptively offers higher accuracy along critical directions. Additionally, we provide a convergence analysis for stochastic gradient descent using $\delta$-unbiased random perturbations, extending existing complexity bounds to a wider range of perturbations. Through empirical evaluations on both synthetic problems and practical tasks, we demonstrate that DAPs outperform traditional methods under specific conditions.

Randomized smoothing has become essential for achieving certified adversarial robustness in machine learning models. However, current methods primarily use isotropic noise distributions that are uniform across all data dimensions, such as image pixels, limiting the effectiveness of robustness certification by ignoring the heterogeneity of inputs and data dimensions. To address this limitation, we propose UCAN: a novel technique that \underline{U}niversally \underline{C}ertifies adversarial robustness with \underline{A}nisotropic \underline{N}oise. UCAN is designed to enhance any existing randomized smoothing method, transforming it from symmetric (isotropic) to asymmetric (anisotropic) noise distributions, thereby offering a more tailored defense against adversarial attacks. Our theoretical framework is versatile, supporting a wide array of noise distributions for certified robustness in different $\ell_p$-norms and applicable to any arbitrary classifier by guaranteeing the classifier's prediction over perturbed inputs with provable robustness bounds through tailored noise injection. Additionally, we develop a novel framework equipped with three exemplary noise parameter generators (NPGs) to optimally fine-tune the anisotropic noise parameters for different data dimensions, allowing for pursuing different levels of robustness enhancements in this http URL evaluations underscore the significant leap in UCAN's performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating up to $182.6\%$ improvement in certified accuracy at large certified radii on MNIST, CIFAR10, and ImageNet datasets.\footnote{Code is anonymously available at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}}

With the increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on mobile and edge platforms, securing them against model extraction attacks has become a pressing concern. However, protecting model privacy without sacrificing the performance benefits of untrusted AI accelerators, such as GPUs, presents a challenging trade-off. In this paper, we initiate the study of high-performance execution on LLMs and present SecureInfer, a hybrid framework that leverages a heterogeneous Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)-GPU architecture to isolate privacy-critical components while offloading compute-intensive operations to untrusted accelerators. Building upon an outsourcing scheme, SecureInfer adopts an information-theoretic and threat-informed partitioning strategy: security-sensitive components, including non-linear layers, projection of attention head, FNN transformations, and LoRA adapters, are executed inside an SGX enclave, while other linear operations (matrix multiplication) are performed on the GPU after encryption and are securely restored within the enclave. We implement a prototype of SecureInfer using the LLaMA-2 model and evaluate it across performance and security metrics. Our results show that SecureInfer offers strong security guarantees with reasonable performance, offering a practical solution for secure on-device model inference.

Time series forecasting plays a pivotal role in critical domains such as energy management and financial markets. Although deep learning-based approaches (e.g., MLP, RNN, Transformer) have achieved remarkable progress, the prevailing "long-sequence information gain hypothesis" exhibits inherent limitations. Through systematic experimentation, this study reveals a counterintuitive phenomenon: appropriately truncating historical data can paradoxically enhance prediction accuracy, indicating that existing models learn substantial redundant features (e.g., noise or irrelevant fluctuations) during training, thereby compromising effective signal extraction. Building upon information bottleneck theory, we propose an innovative solution termed Adaptive Masking Loss with Representation Consistency (AMRC), which features two core components: 1) Dynamic masking loss, which adaptively identified highly discriminative temporal segments to guide gradient descent during model training; 2) Representation consistency constraint, which stabilized the mapping relationships among inputs, labels, and predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that AMRC effectively suppresses redundant feature learning while significantly improving model performance. This work not only challenges conventional assumptions in temporal modeling but also provides novel theoretical insights and methodological breakthroughs for developing efficient and robust forecasting models.

We propose FutrTrack, a modular camera-LiDAR multi-object tracking framework that builds on existing 3D detectors by introducing a transformer-based smoother and a fusion-driven tracker. Inspired by query-based tracking frameworks, FutrTrack employs a multimodal two-stage transformer refinement and tracking pipeline. Our fusion tracker integrates bounding boxes with multimodal bird's-eye-view (BEV) fusion features from multiple cameras and LiDAR without the need for an explicit motion model. The tracker assigns and propagates identities across frames, leveraging both geometric and semantic cues for robust re-identification under occlusion and viewpoint changes. Prior to tracking, we refine sequences of bounding boxes with a temporal smoother over a moving window to refine trajectories, reduce jitter, and improve spatial consistency. Evaluated on nuScenes and KITTI, FutrTrack demonstrates that query-based transformer tracking methods benefit significantly from multimodal sensor features compared with previous single-sensor approaches. With an aMOTA of 74.7 on the nuScenes test set, FutrTrack achieves strong performance on 3D MOT benchmarks, reducing identity switches while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our approach provides an efficient framework for improving transformer-based trackers to compete with other neural-network-based methods even with limited data and without pretraining.

Quantum computing is reshaping the security landscape of modern telecommunications. The cryptographic foundations that secure todays 5G systems, including RSA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and Diffie-Hellman (DH), are all susceptible to attacks enabled by Shors algorithm. Protecting 5G networks against future quantum adversaries has therefore become an urgent engineering and research priority. In this paper we introduce QORE, a quantum-secure 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) Core framework that provides a clear pathway for transitioning both the 5G Core Network Functions and User Equipment (UE) to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). The framework uses the NIST-standardized lattice-based algorithms Module-Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) and Module-Lattice Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA) and applies them across the 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA). A Hybrid PQC (HPQC) configuration is also proposed, combining classical and quantum-safe primitives to maintain interoperability during migration. Experimental validation shows that ML-KEM achieves quantum security with minor performance overhead, meeting the low-latency and high-throughput requirements of carrier-grade 5G systems. The proposed roadmap aligns with ongoing 3GPP SA3 and SA5 study activities on the security and management of post-quantum networks as well as with NIST PQC standardization efforts, providing practical guidance for mitigating quantum-era risks while safeguarding long-term confidentiality and integrity of network data.

A greybox fuzzer is an automated software testing tool that generates new test inputs by applying randomly chosen mutators (e.g., flipping a bit or deleting a block of bytes) to a seed input in random order and adds all coverage-increasing inputs to the corpus of seeds. We hypothesize that the order in which mutators are applied to a seed input has an impact on the effectiveness of greybox fuzzers. In our experiments, we fit a linear model to a dataset that contains the effectiveness of all possible mutator pairs and indeed observe the conjectured interaction effect. This points us to more efficient fuzzing by choosing the most promising mutator sequence with a higher likelihood. We propose MuoFuzz, a greybox fuzzer that learns and chooses the most promising mutator sequences. MuoFuzz learns the conditional probability that the next mutator will yield an interesting input, given the previously selected mutator. Then, it samples from the learned probability using a random walk to generate mutator sequences. We compare the performance of MuoFuzz to AFL++, which uses a fixed selection probability, and MOPT, which optimizes the selection probability of each mutator in isolation. Experimental results on the FuzzBench and MAGMA benchmarks show that MuoFuzz achieves the highest code coverage and finds four bugs missed by AFL++ and one missed by both AFL++ and MOPT.

This paper presents a novel methodology for classifying early modern religious images by using Large Language Models (LLMs) and vector databases in combination with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The approach leverages the full-page context of book illustrations from the Holy Roman Empire, allowing the LLM to generate detailed descriptions that incorporate both visual and textual elements. These descriptions are then matched to relevant Iconclass codes through a hybrid vector search. This method achieves 87% and 92% precision at five and four levels of classification, significantly outperforming traditional image and keyword-based searches. By employing full-page descriptions and RAG, the system enhances classification accuracy, offering a powerful tool for large-scale analysis of early modern visual archives. This interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the growing potential of LLMs and RAG in advancing research within art history and digital humanities.

Despite the broad applicability of large language models (LLMs), their reliance on probabilistic inference makes them vulnerable to errors such as hallucination in generated facts and inconsistent output structure in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. By contrast, symbolic NLU systems provide interpretable understanding grounded in curated lexicons, semantic resources, and syntactic & semantic interpretation rules. They produce relational representations that can be used for accurate reasoning and planning, as well as incremental debuggable learning. However, symbolic NLU systems tend to be more limited in coverage than LLMs and require scarce knowledge representation and linguistics skills to extend and maintain. This paper explores a hybrid approach that integrates the broad-coverage language processing of LLMs with the symbolic NLU capabilities of producing structured relational representations to hopefully get the best of both approaches. We use LLMs for rephrasing and text simplification, to provide broad coverage, and as a source of information to fill in knowledge gaps more automatically. We use symbolic NLU to produce representations that can be used for reasoning and for incremental learning. We evaluate this approach on the task of extracting and interpreting quantities and causal laws from commonsense science texts, along with symbolic- and LLM-only pipelines. Our results suggest that our hybrid method works significantly better than the symbolic-only pipeline.

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token decoding. However, we observe that for math and coding tasks, any-order algorithms often underperform or behave similarly to left-to-right sampling, and standard multi-token decoding significantly degrades performance. At inference time, MDLMs compute the conditional distribution of all masked positions. A natural question is: How can we justify this additional compute when left-to-right one-token-at-a-time decoding is on par with any-order decoding algorithms? First, we propose reasoning-as-infilling. By using MDLMs to infill a reasoning template, we can structure outputs and distinguish between reasoning and answer tokens. In turn, this enables measuring answer uncertainty during reasoning, and early exits when the model converges on an answer. Next, given an answer, reasoning-as-infilling enables sampling from the MDLM posterior over reasoning traces conditioned on the answer, providing a new source of high-quality data for post-training. On GSM8k, we observe that fine-tuning LLaDA-8B Base on its posterior reasoning traces provides a performance boost on par with fine-tuning on human-written reasoning traces. Additionally, given an answer, reasoning-as-infilling provides a method for scoring the correctness of the reasoning process at intermediate steps. Second, we propose multi-token entropy decoding (MED), a simple adaptive sampler that minimizes the error incurred by decoding positions in parallel based on the conditional entropies of those positions. MED preserves performance across benchmarks and leads to 2.7x fewer steps. Our work demonstrates that the training and compute used by MDLMs unlock many new inference and post-training methods.

Teamwork in workspace for complex tasks requires diverse communication strategies, but current multi-agent LLM systems lack systematic frameworks for task oriented communication. We introduce Communication to Completion (C2C), a scalable framework that addresses this gap through two key innovations: (1) the Alignment Factor (AF), a novel metric quantifying agent task alignment that directly impacts work efficiency, and (2) a Sequential Action Framework that integrates stepwise execution with intelligent communication decisions. C2C enables agents to make cost aware communication choices, dynamically improving task understanding through targeted interactions. We evaluated C2C on realistic coding workflows across three complexity tiers and team sizes from 5 to 17 agents, comparing against no communication and fixed steps baselines. The results show that C2C reduces the task completion time by about 40% with acceptable communication costs. The framework completes all tasks successfully in standard configurations and maintains effectiveness at scale. C2C establishes both a theoretical foundation for measuring communication effectiveness in multi-agent systems and a practical framework for complex collaborative tasks.

This paper presents a fundamental algorithm for parsing natural language sentences into dependency trees. Unlike phrase-structure (constituency) parsers, this algorithm operates one word at a time, attaching each word as soon as it can be attached, corresponding to properties claimed for the parser in the human brain. Like phrase-structure parsing, its worst-case complexity is $O(n^3)$, but in human language, the worst case occurs only for small $n$.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) presents transformative opportunities for organizations, yet both midsize organizations and larger enterprises face distinctive adoption challenges. Midsize organizations encounter resource constraints and limited AI expertise, while enterprises struggle with organizational complexity and coordination challenges. Existing technology adoption frameworks, including TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), TOE (Technology Organization Environment), and DOI (Diffusion of Innovations) theory, lack the specificity required for GenAI implementation across these diverse contexts, creating a critical gap in adoption literature. This paper introduces FAIGMOE (Framework for the Adoption and Integration of Generative AI in Midsize Organizations and Enterprises), a conceptual framework addressing the unique needs of both organizational types. FAIGMOE synthesizes technology adoption theory, organizational change management, and innovation diffusion perspectives into four interconnected phases: Strategic Assessment, Planning and Use Case Development, Implementation and Integration, and Operationalization and Optimization. Each phase provides scalable guidance on readiness assessment, strategic alignment, risk governance, technical architecture, and change management adaptable to organizational scale and complexity. The framework incorporates GenAI specific considerations including prompt engineering, model orchestration, and hallucination management that distinguish it from generic technology adoption frameworks. As a perspective contribution, FAIGMOE provides the first comprehensive conceptual framework explicitly addressing GenAI adoption across midsize and enterprise organizations, offering actionable implementation protocols, assessment instruments, and governance templates requiring empirical validation through future research.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for clinical use. They are often evaluated using datasets such as MedQA. However, Many medical datasets, such as MedQA, rely on simplified Question-Answering (Q\A) that underrepresents real-world clinical decision-making. Based on this, we propose a unifying paradigm that characterizes clinical decision-making tasks along two dimensions: Clinical Backgrounds and Clinical Questions. As the background and questions approach the real clinical environment, the difficulty increases. We summarize the settings of existing datasets and benchmarks along two dimensions. Then we review methods to address clinical decision-making, including training-time and test-time techniques, and summarize when they help. Next, we extend evaluation beyond accuracy to include efficiency, explainability. Finally, we highlight open challenges. Our paradigm clarifies assumptions, standardizes comparisons, and guides the development of clinically meaningful LLMs.

The advancement of natural language processing for morphologically rich, moderately-resourced languages like Modern Greek is often hindered by a fragmented research landscape, a lack of architectural diversity and reliance on limited context-length models. This is particularly true in specialized, high-value domains such as law, where existing models are frequently confined to early transformer architectures with a restrictive 512-token window, insufficient for analyzing long legal documents. To address these challenges, this paper presents Greek Embedding Models, a new family of transformer models for Greek language built upon a foundation of extensive, quality-driven data curation. We detail the construction of several large-scale Greek corpora, emphasizing a rigorous, quality-based filtering and preprocessing methodology to create high-value training datasets from both general-domain and specialized legal sources. On this carefully curated foundation, we pre-train and systematically evaluate a diverse suite of modern architectures, which has not previously applied to Greek language, such as ELECTRA, ConvBERT and ModernBERT. Furthermore, we propose the first bilingual Greek-English Embedding Models tailored for the legal domain. The extensive experiments on downstream tasks demonstrate that the new class of models establish the effectiveness of the proposed approach, highlighting that the GEM-RoBERTa and GEM-ConvBERT models significantly outperform existing baselines.

Digital transactions currently exceed trillions of dollars annually, yet traditional paper-based agreements remain a bottleneck for automation, enforceability, and dispute resolution. Natural language contracts introduce ambiguity, require manual processing, and lack computational verifiability, all of which hinder efficient digital commerce. Computable legal contracts, expressed in machine-readable formats, offer a potential solution by enabling automated execution and verification. Blockchain-based smart contracts further strengthen enforceability and accelerate dispute resolution; however, current implementations risk exposing sensitive agreement terms on public ledgers, raising serious privacy and competitive intelligence concerns that limit enterprise adoption. We introduce zk-agreements, a protocol designed to transition from paper-based trust to cryptographic trust while preserving confidentiality. Our design combines zero-knowledge proofs to protect private agreement terms, secure two-party computation to enable private compliance evaluation, and smart contracts to guarantee automated enforcement. Together, these components achieve both privacy preservation and computational enforceability, resolving the fundamental tension between transparency and confidentiality in blockchain-based agreements.

This paper tackles the challenge of learning a generalizable minimum-time flight policy for UAVs, capable of navigating between arbitrary start and goal states while balancing agile flight and stable hovering. Traditional approaches, particularly in autonomous drone racing, achieve impressive speeds and agility but are constrained to predefined track layouts, limiting real-world applicability. To address this, we propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that simultaneously learns state-to-state minimum-time planning and control and generalizes to arbitrary state-to-state flights. Our approach leverages Point Mass Model (PMM) trajectories as proxy rewards to approximate the true optimal flight objective and employs curriculum learning to scale the training process efficiently and to achieve generalization. We validate our method through simulation experiments, comparing it against Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) tracking PMM-generated trajectories and conducting ablation studies to assess the impact of curriculum learning. Finally, real-world experiments confirm the robustness of our learned policy in outdoor environments, demonstrating its ability to generalize and operate on a small ARM-based single-board computer.

We study the problem of jointly selecting sensing agents and synthesizing decentralized active perception policies for the chosen subset of agents within a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) framework. Our approach employs a two-layer optimization structure. In the inner layer, we introduce information-theoretic metrics, defined by the mutual information between the unknown trajectories or some hidden property in the environment and the collective partial observations in the multi-agent system, as a unified objective for active perception problems. We employ various optimization methods to obtain optimal sensor policies that maximize mutual information for distinct active perception tasks. In the outer layer, we prove that under certain conditions, the information-theoretic objectives are monotone and submodular with respect to the subset of observations collected from multiple agents. We then exploit this property to design an IMAS$^2$ (Information-theoretic Multi-Agent Selection and Sensing) algorithm for joint sensing agent selection and sensing policy synthesis. However, since the policy search space is infinite, we adapt the classical Nemhauser-Wolsey argument to prove that the proposed IMAS$^2$ algorithm can provide a tight $(1 - 1/e)$-guarantee on the performance. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a multi-agent cooperative perception in a grid-world environment.

Deep learning models, especially convolutional neural networks, have achieved impressive results in medical image classification. However, these models often produce overconfident predictions, which can undermine their reliability in critical healthcare settings. While traditional label smoothing offers a simple way to reduce such overconfidence, it fails to consider relationships between classes by treating all non-target classes equally. In this study, we explore the use of Online Label Smoothing (OLS), a dynamic approach that adjusts soft labels throughout training based on the model's own prediction patterns. We evaluate OLS on the large-scale RadImageNet dataset using three widely used architectures: ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and VGG-19. Our results show that OLS consistently improves both Top-1 and Top-5 classification accuracy compared to standard training methods, including hard labels, conventional label smoothing, and teacher-free knowledge distillation. In addition to accuracy gains, OLS leads to more compact and well-separated feature embeddings, indicating improved representation learning. These findings suggest that OLS not only strengthens predictive performance but also enhances calibration, making it a practical and effective solution for developing trustworthy AI systems in the medical imaging domain.

Fisheye cameras offer an efficient solution for wide-area traffic surveillance by capturing large fields of view from a single vantage point. However, the strong radial distortion and nonuniform resolution inherent in fisheye imagery introduce substantial challenges for standard object detectors, particularly near image boundaries where object appearance is severely degraded. In this work, we present a detection framework designed to operate robustly under these conditions. Our approach employs a simple yet effective pre and post processing pipeline that enhances detection consistency across the image, especially in regions affected by severe distortion. We train several state-of-the-art detection models on the fisheye traffic imagery and combine their outputs through an ensemble strategy to improve overall detection accuracy. Our method achieves an F1 score of0.6366 on the 2025 AI City Challenge Track 4, placing 8thoverall out of 62 teams. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in addressing issues inherent to fisheye imagery.

The Proto-Quipper family of programming languages aims to provide a formal foundation for the Quipper quantum programming language. Unfortunately, Proto-Quipper languages have complex operational semantics: they are inherently effectful, and they rely on set-theoretic operations and fresh name generation to manipulate quantum circuits. This makes them difficult to reason about using standard programming language techniques and, ultimately, to mechanize. We introduce Proto-Quipper-A, a rational reconstruction of Proto-Quipper languages for static circuit generation. It uses a linear $\lambda$-calculus to describe quantum circuits with normal forms that closely correspond to box-and-wire circuit diagrams. Adjoint-logical foundations integrate this circuit language with a linear/non-linear functional language and let us reconstruct Proto-Quipper's circuit programming abstractions using more primitive adjoint-logical operations. Proto-Quipper-A enjoys a simple call-by-value reduction semantics, and to illustrate its tractability as a foundation for Proto-Quipper languages, we show that it is normalizing. We show how to use standard logical relations to prove normalization of linear and substructural systems, thereby avoiding the inherent complexity of existing linear logical relations.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking may be a viable solution for defense assets that must be stored in accordance with security guidelines. However, poor sensor specificity (vulnerabilities include long range detection, spoofing, and counterfeiting) can lead to erroneous detection and operational security events. We present a supervised learning simulation with realistic Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) data and Decision Tree classification in a Computer Assisted Design (CAD)-modeled floor plan that encapsulates some of the challenges encountered in defense storage. In this work, we focused on classifying 12 lab zones (LabZoneA-L) to perform location inference. The raw dataset had approximately 980,000 reads. Class frequencies were imbalanced, and class weights were calculated to account for class imbalance in this multi-class setting. The model, trained on stratified subsamples to 5,000 balanced observations, yielded an overall accuracy of 34.2% and F1-scores greater than 0.40 for multiple zones (Zones F, G, H, etc.). However, rare classes (most notably LabZoneC) were often misclassified, even with the use of class weights. An adjacency-aware confusion matrix was calculated to allow better interpretation of physically adjacent zones. These results suggest that RSSI-based decision trees can be applied in realistic simulations to enable zone-level anomaly detection or misplacement monitoring for defense supply logistics. Reliable classification performance in low-coverage and low-signal zones could be improved with better antenna placement or additional sensors and sensor fusion with other modalities.

Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference rankings may lead to suboptimal outcomes vis-à-vis utilitarian social welfare. Distortion is a measure of this suboptimality, and provides a worst-case approach for developing and analyzing voting rules when utilities have minimal structure. However in many settings, such as common paradigms for value alignment, alternatives admit a vector representation, and it is natural to suppose that utilities are parametric functions thereof. We undertake the first study of distortion for linear utility functions. Specifically, we investigate the distortion of linear social choice for deterministic and randomized voting rules. We obtain bounds that depend only on the dimension of the candidate embedding, and are independent of the numbers of candidates or voters. Additionally, we introduce poly-time instance-optimal algorithms for minimizing distortion given a collection of candidates and votes. We empirically evaluate these in two real-world domains: recommendation systems using collaborative filtering embeddings, and opinion surveys utilizing language model embeddings, benchmarking several standard rules against our instance-optimal algorithms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, enabling language agents to excel at single-turn tasks. However, their application to complex, multi-step, and long-horizon tasks remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising avenue for addressing these challenges, mainstream approaches typically rely solely on sparse, outcome-based rewards, a limitation that becomes especially problematic for group-based RL algorithms lacking critic models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In such methods, uniformly rewarding or penalizing all actions within a trajectory can lead to training instability and suboptimal policies, because beneficial and detrimental actions are often entangled across multi-step interactions. To address this challenge, we propose SALT, a novel and lightweight framework that provides a finer-grained advantage assignment, derived solely from outcome rewards. We achieve this by constructing a graph from trajectories of the same prompt, which allows us to quantify the quality of each step and assign advantages accordingly. Crucially, SALT is designed as a plug-and-play module that seamlessly integrates with existing group-based RL algorithms, requiring no modifications to the rollout procedure and introducing negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld benchmarks with various model sizes demonstrate that SALT consistently improves performance. We also conduct a thorough analysis to validate the design choices behind SALT and offer actionable insights.

We study the Telephone Broadcasting problem in sparse graphs. Given a designated source in an undirected graph, the task is to disseminate a message to all vertices in the minimum number of rounds, where in each round every informed vertex may inform at most one uninformed neighbor. For general graphs with $n$ vertices, the problem is NP-hard. Recent work shows that the problem remains NP-hard even on restricted graph classes such as cactus graphs of pathwidth $2$ [Aminian et al., ICALP 2025] and graphs at distance-1 to a path forest [Egami et al., MFCS 2025]. In this work, we investigate the problem in several sparse graph families. We first prove NP-hardness for $k$-cycle graphs, namely graphs formed by $k$ cycles sharing a single vertex, as well as $k$-path graphs, namely graphs formed by $k$ paths with shared endpoints. Despite multiple efforts to understand the problem in these simple graph families, the computational complexity of the problem had remained unsettled, and our hardness results answer open questions by Bhabak and Harutyunyan [CALDAM 2015] and Harutyunyan and Hovhannisyan [COCAO 2023] concerning the problem's complexity in $k$-cycle and $k$-path graphs, respectively. On the positive side, we present Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes (PTASs) for $k$-cycle and $k$-path graphs, improving over the best existing approximation factors of $2$ for $k$-cycle graphs and an approximation factor of $4$ for $k$-path graphs. Moreover, we identify a structural frontier for tractability by showing that the problem is solvable in polynomial time on graphs of bounded bandwidth. This result generalizes existing tractability results for special sparse families such as necklace graphs.

When viewing a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model from camera positions significantly outside the training data distribution, substantial visual noise commonly occurs. These artifacts result from the lack of training data in these extrapolated regions, leading to uncertain density, color, and geometry predictions from the model. To address this issue, we propose a novel real-time render-aware filtering method. Our approach leverages sensitivity scores derived from intermediate gradients, explicitly targeting instabilities caused by anisotropic orientations rather than isotropic variance. This filtering method directly addresses the core issue of generative uncertainty, allowing 3D reconstruction systems to maintain high visual fidelity even when users freely navigate outside the original training viewpoints. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method substantially improves visual quality, realism, and consistency compared to existing Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based approaches such as BayesRays. Critically, our filter seamlessly integrates into existing 3DGS rendering pipelines in real-time, unlike methods that require extensive post-hoc retraining or fine-tuning. Code and results at this https URL

Since its 2009 genesis block, the Bitcoin network has processed \num{>1.08} billion (B) transactions representing \num{>8.72}B BTC, offering rich potential for machine learning (ML); yet, its pseudonymity and obscured flow of funds inherent in its \utxo-based design, have rendered this data largely inaccessible for ML research. Addressing this gap, we present an ML-compatible graph modeling the Bitcoin's economic topology by reconstructing the flow of funds. This temporal, heterogeneous graph encompasses complete transaction history up to block \cutoffHeight, consisting of \num{>2.4}B nodes and \num{>39.72}B edges. Additionally, we provide custom sampling methods yielding node and edge feature vectors of sampled communities, tools to load and analyze the Bitcoin graph data within specialized graph databases, and ready-to-use database snapshots. This comprehensive dataset and toolkit empower the ML community to tackle Bitcoin's intricate ecosystem at scale, driving progress in applications such as anomaly detection, address classification, market analysis, and large-scale graph ML benchmarking. Dataset and code available at \href{this https URL}{this http URL}

Ultrasound brain imaging remains challenging due to the large difference in sound speed between the skull and brain tissues and the difficulty of coupling large probes to the skull. This work aims to achieve quantitative transcranial ultrasound by reconstructing an accurate speed-of-sound (SoS) map of the brain. Traditional physics-based full-waveform inversion (FWI) is limited by weak signals caused by skull-induced attenuation, mode conversion, and phase aberration, as well as incomplete spatial coverage since full-aperture arrays are clinically impractical. In contrast, purely data-driven methods that learn directly from raw ultrasound data often fail to model the complex nonlinear and nonlocal wave propagation through bone, leading to anatomically plausible but quantitatively biased SoS maps under low signal-to-noise and sparse-aperture conditions. To address these issues, we propose BrainPuzzle, a hybrid two-stage framework that combines physical modeling with machine learning. In the first stage, reverse time migration (time-reversal acoustics) is applied to multi-angle acquisitions to produce migration fragments that preserve structural details even under low SNR. In the second stage, a transformer-based super-resolution encoder-decoder with a graph-based attention unit (GAU) fuses these fragments into a coherent and quantitatively accurate SoS image. A partial-array acquisition strategy using a movable low-count transducer set improves feasibility and coupling, while the hybrid algorithm compensates for the missing aperture. Experiments on two synthetic datasets show that BrainPuzzle achieves superior SoS reconstruction accuracy and image completeness, demonstrating its potential for advancing quantitative ultrasound brain imaging.

Temporal point processes are powerful generative models for event sequences that capture complex dependencies in time-series data. They are commonly specified using autoregressive models that learn the distribution of the next event from the previous events. This makes sampling inherently sequential, limiting efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on rejection sampling that enables exact sampling of multiple future values from existing TPP models, in parallel, and without requiring any architectural changes or retraining. Besides theoretical guarantees, our method demonstrates empirical speedups on real-world datasets, bridging the gap between expressive modeling and efficient parallel generation for large-scale TPP applications.

This doctoral thesis improves the transfer learning for sequence labeling tasks by adapting pre-trained neural language models. The proposed improvements in transfer learning involve introducing a multi-task model that incorporates an additional signal, a method based on architectural modifications in autoregressive large language models, and a sequence labeling framework for autoregressive large language models utilizing supervised in-context fine-tuning combined with response-oriented adaptation strategies. The first improvement is given in the context of domain transfer for the event trigger detection task. The domain transfer of the event trigger detection task can be improved by incorporating an additional signal obtained from a domain-independent text processing system into a multi-task model. The second improvement involves modifying the model's architecture. For that purpose, a method is proposed to enable bidirectional information flow across layers of autoregressive large language models. The third improvement utilizes autoregressive large language models as text generators through a generative supervised in-context fine-tuning framework. The proposed model, method, and framework demonstrate that pre-trained neural language models achieve their best performance on sequence labeling tasks when adapted through targeted transfer learning paradigms.

Large language model (LLM) agents rely on external tools to solve complex tasks, but real-world toolsets often contain redundant tools with overlapping names and descriptions, introducing ambiguity and reducing selection accuracy. LLMs also face strict input context limits, preventing efficient consideration of large toolsets. To address these challenges, we propose ToolScope, which includes: (1) ToolScopeMerger with Auto-Correction to automatically audit and fix tool merges, reducing redundancy, and (2) ToolScopeRetriever to rank and select only the most relevant tools for each query, compressing toolsets to fit within context limits without sacrificing accuracy. Evaluations on three state-of-the-art LLMs and three open-source tool-use benchmarks show gains of 8.38% to 38.6% in tool selection accuracy, demonstrating ToolScope's effectiveness in enhancing LLM tool use.

Large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots are increasingly used for opinion exploration. Prior research examined how LLMs alter user views, yet little work extended beyond one-way influence to address how user input can affect LLM responses and how such bi-directional influence manifests throughout the multi-turn conversations. This study investigates this dynamic through 50 controversial-topic discussions with participants (N=266) across three conditions: static statements, standard chatbot, and personalized chatbot. Results show that human opinions barely shifted, while LLM outputs changed more substantially, narrowing the gap between human and LLM stance. Personalization amplified these shifts in both directions compared to the standard setting. Analysis of multi-turn conversations further revealed that exchanges involving participants' personal stories were most likely to trigger stance changes for both humans and LLMs. Our work highlights the risk of over-alignment in human-LLM interaction and the need for careful design of personalized chatbots to more thoughtfully and stably align with users.

Efficient energy management is essential for reliable and sustainable microgrid operation amid increasing renewable integration. This paper proposes an imitation learning-based framework to approximate mixed-integer Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) for microgrid energy management. The proposed method trains a neural network to imitate expert EMPC control actions from offline trajectories, enabling fast, real-time decision making without solving optimization problems online. To enhance robustness and generalization, the learning process includes noise injection during training to mitigate distribution shift and explicitly incorporates forecast uncertainty in renewable generation and demand. Simulation results demonstrate that the learned policy achieves economic performance comparable to EMPC while only requiring $10\%$ of the computation time of optimization-based EMPC in practice.

Since developers invoke the build system frequently, its performance can impact productivity. Modern artifact-based build tools accelerate builds, yet prior work shows that teams may abandon them for alternatives that are easier to maintain. While prior work shows why downgrades are performed, the implications of downgrades remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we describe a case study of the Kubernetes project, focusing on its downgrade from an artifact-based build tool (Bazel) to a language-specific solution (Go Build). We reproduce and analyze the full and incremental builds of change sets during the downgrade period. On the one hand, we find that Bazel builds are faster than Go Build, completing full builds in 23.06-38.66 up to 75.19 impose a larger memory footprint than Go Build of 81.42-351.07 respectively. Bazel builds also impose a greater CPU load at parallelism settings above eight for full builds and above one for incremental builds. We estimate that downgrading from Bazel can increase CI resource costs by up to 76 explore whether our observations generalize by replicating our Kubernetes study on four other projects that also downgraded from Bazel to older build tools. We observe that while build time penalties decrease, Bazel consistently consumes more memory. We conclude that abandoning artifact-based build tools, despite perceived maintainability benefits, tends to incur considerable performance costs for large projects. Our observations may help stakeholders to balance trade-offs in build tool adoption

Generative image models produce striking visuals yet often misrepresent culture. Prior work has examined cultural bias mainly in text-to-image (T2I) systems, leaving image-to-image (I2I) editors underexplored. We bridge this gap with a unified evaluation across six countries, an 8-category/36-subcategory schema, and era-aware prompts, auditing both T2I generation and I2I editing under a standardized protocol that yields comparable diagnostics. Using open models with fixed settings, we derive cross-country, cross-era, and cross-category evaluations. Our framework combines standard automatic metrics, a culture-aware retrieval-augmented VQA, and expert human judgments collected from native reviewers. To enable reproducibility, we release the complete image corpus, prompts, and configurations. Our study reveals three findings: (1) under country-agnostic prompts, models default to Global-North, modern-leaning depictions that flatten cross-country distinctions; (2) iterative I2I editing erodes cultural fidelity even when conventional metrics remain flat or improve; and (3) I2I models apply superficial cues (palette shifts, generic props) rather than era-consistent, context-aware changes, often retaining source identity for Global-South targets. These results highlight that culture-sensitive edits remain unreliable in current systems. By releasing standardized data, prompts, and human evaluation protocols, we provide a reproducible, culture-centered benchmark for diagnosing and tracking cultural bias in generative image models.

Recent progress in NLP research has demonstrated remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. While recent multilingual benchmarks have advanced cultural evaluation for LLMs, critical gaps remain in capturing the nuances of low-resource cultures. Our work addresses these limitations through a Bengali Language Cultural Knowledge (BLanCK) dataset including folk traditions, culinary arts, and regional dialects. Our investigation of several multilingual language models shows that while these models perform well in non-cultural categories, they struggle significantly with cultural knowledge and performance improves substantially across all models when context is provided, emphasizing context-aware architectures and culturally curated training data.

In this work, a polygonal Reissner-Mindlin plate element is presented. The formulation is based on a scaled boundary finite element method, where in contrast to the original semi-analytical approach, linear shape functions are introduced for the parametrization of the scaling and the radial direction. This yields a fully discretized formulation, which enables the use of non-star-convex-polygonal elements with an arbitrary number of edges, simplifying the meshing process. To address the common effect of transverse shear locking for low-order Reissner-Mindlin elements in the thin-plate limit, an assumed natural strain approach for application on the polygonal scaled boundary finite elements is derived. Further, a two-field variational formulation is introduced to incorporate three-dimensional material laws. Here the plane stress assumptions are enforced on the weak formulation, facilitating the use of material models defined in three-dimensional continuum while considering the effect of Poisson's thickness locking. The effectiveness of the proposed formulation is demonstrated in various numerical examples.

Analyzing large complex image collections in domains like forensics, accident investigation, or social media analysis involves interpreting intricate, overlapping relationships among images. Traditional clustering and classification methods fail to adequately represent these complex relationships, particularly when labeled data or suitable pre-trained models are unavailable. Hypergraphs effectively capture overlapping relationships, but to translate their complexity into information and insights for domain expert users visualization is essential. We propose an interactive visual analytics approach specifically designed for the construction, exploration, and analysis of hypergraphs on large-scale complex image collections. Our core contributions include: (1) a scalable pipeline for constructing hypergraphs directly from raw image data, including a similarity measure to evaluate constructed hypergraphs against a ground truth, (2) interactive visualization techniques that integrate spatial hypergraph representations, interactive grids, and matrix visualizations, enabling users to dynamically explore and interpret relationships without becoming overwhelmed and disoriented, and (3) practical insights on how domain experts can effectively use the application, based on evaluation with real-life image collections. Our results demonstrate that our visual analytics approach facilitates iterative exploration, enabling domain experts to efficiently derive insights from image collections containing tens of thousands of images.

Balanced search trees are widely used in computer science to efficiently maintain dynamic ordered data. To support efficient set operations (e.g., union, intersection, difference) using trees, the join-based framework is widely studied. This framework has received particular attention in the parallel setting, and has been shown to be effective in enabling simple and theoretically efficient set operations on trees. Despite the widespread adoption of parallel join-based trees, a major drawback of previous work on such data structures is the inefficiency of their input/output (I/O) access patterns. Some recent work (e.g., C-trees and PaC-trees) focused on more I/O-friendly implementations of these algorithms. Surprisingly, however, there have been no results on bounding the I/O-costs for these algorithms. It remains open whether these algorithms can provide tight, provable guarantees in I/O-costs on trees. This paper studies efficient parallel algorithms for set operations based on search tree algorithms using a join-based framework, with a special focus on achieving I/O efficiency in these algorithms. To better capture the I/O-efficiency in these algorithms in parallel, we introduce a new computational model, Fork-Join I/O Model, to measure the I/O costs in fork-join parallelism. This model measures the total block transfers (I/O work) and their critical path (I/O span). Under this model, we propose our new solution based on B-trees. Our parallel algorithm computes the union, intersection, and difference of two B-trees with $O(m \log_B(n/m))$ I/O work and $O(\log_B m \cdot \log_2 \log_B n + \log_B n)$ I/O span, where $n$ and $m \leq n$ are the sizes of the two trees, and $B$ is the block size.

Online advertising platforms use automated auctions to connect advertisers with potential customers, requiring effective bidding strategies to maximize profits. Accurate ad impact estimation requires considering three key factors: delayed and long-term effects, cumulative ad impacts such as reinforcement or fatigue, and customer heterogeneity. However, these effects are often not jointly addressed in previous studies. To capture these factors, we model ad bidding as a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) with delayed Poisson rewards. For efficient estimation, we propose a two-stage maximum likelihood estimator combined with data-splitting strategies, ensuring controlled estimation error based on the first-stage estimator's (in)accuracy. Building on this, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm to derive efficient personalized bidding strategies. This approach achieves a near-optimal regret bound of $\tilde{O}{(dH^2\sqrt{T})}$, where $d$ is the contextual dimension, $H$ is the number of rounds, and $T$ is the number of customers. Our theoretical findings are validated by simulation experiments.

The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) has driven the development of roadway wireless charging technology, effectively extending EV driving range. However, wireless charging introduces significant cybersecurity challenges. Any receiver within the magnetic field can potentially extract energy, and previous research demonstrated that a hacker could detect the operating frequency and steal substantial power. However, our approach required time to track new frequencies or precise adjustments of inductance and capacitance, which would be less effective against potential rapid transmitter frequency changes or capacitance drift. As a solution, we enhanced the interceptor and enabled it to intrude as well as steal energy within just three cycles of the high-frequency signal. Moreover, it can work without any circuit parameters or look-up tables. The key innovation is synchronizing the receiver current with the phase of the magnetic sensor voltage. Through MATLAB / Simulink simulations, finite-element analysis, and experimental validation, we demonstrated that our improved method can steal over 76% of the power received by a fully resonant receiver under identical conditions. This attack demonstrates that simple frequency-changing power encryption offers limited protection against such threats.

Enhancing reasoning capabilities in small language models is critical for specialized applications such as medical question answering, particularly in underrepresented languages like Persian. In this study, we employ Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF) and Direct preference optimization (DPO) to improve the reasoning skills of a general-purpose Persian language model. To achieve this, we translated a multiple-choice medical question-answering dataset into Persian and used RLAIF to generate rejected-preferred answer pairs, which are essential for DPO training. By prompting both teacher and student models to produce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning responses, we compiled a dataset containing correct and incorrect reasoning trajectories. This dataset, comprising 2 million tokens in preferred answers and 2.5 million tokens in rejected ones, was used to train a baseline model, significantly enhancing its medical reasoning capabilities in Persian. Remarkably, the resulting model outperformed its predecessor, gaokerena-V, which was trained on approximately 57 million tokens, despite leveraging a much smaller dataset. These results highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of reasoning-focused training approaches in developing domain-specific language models with limited data availability.

AI systems have the potential to produce both benefits and harms, but without rigorous and ongoing adversarial evaluation, AI actors will struggle to assess the breadth and magnitude of the AI risk surface. Researchers from the field of systems design have developed several effective sociotechnical AI evaluation and red teaming techniques targeting bias, hate speech, mis/disinformation, and other documented harm classes. However, as increasingly sophisticated AI systems are released into high-stakes sectors (such as education, healthcare, and intelligence-gathering), our current evaluation and monitoring methods are proving less and less capable of delivering effective oversight. In order to actually deliver responsible AI and to ensure AI's harms are fully understood and its security vulnerabilities mitigated, pioneering new approaches to close this "responsibility gap" are now more urgent than ever. In this paper, we propose one such approach, the cooperative public AI red-teaming exercise, and discuss early results of its prior pilot implementations. This approach is intertwined with CAMLIS itself: the first in-person public demonstrator exercise was held in conjunction with CAMLIS 2024. We review the operational design and results of this exercise, the prior National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s Assessing the Risks and Impacts of AI (ARIA) pilot exercise, and another similar exercise conducted with the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). Ultimately, we argue that this approach is both capable of delivering meaningful results and is also scalable to many AI developing jurisdictions.

We present a new subspace iteration method for computing low-lying eigenpairs (excited states) of high-dimensional quantum many-body Hamiltonians with nearest neighbor interactions on two-dimensional lattices. The method is based on a new block isometric projected entangled pair state (block-isoPEPS) ansatz that generalizes the block matrix product state (MPS) framework, widely used for Hamiltonians defined on one-dimensional chains, to two-dimensions. The proposed block-isoPEPS ansatz offers several attractive features for PEPS-based algorithms, including exact block orthogonalization, controlled local truncation via singular value decompositions, and efficient evaluation of observables. We demonstrate the proposed inexact subspace iteration for block-isoPEPS by computing excitations of the two-dimensional transverse-field Ising and Heisenberg models and compare our results with existing PEPS methods. Our results demonstrate that block isometric tensor networks provide a scalable framework for studying excitations in quantum many-body systems beyond one dimension.

Speculative decoding is widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the best draft model in hindsight for each query in terms of either the token acceptance probability or expected acceptance length. In particular, we show that we can accurately evaluate all draft models, instead of only the chosen model without incurring additional queries to the target model, which allows us to improve exponentially over the existing bandit-based approach as the number of draft models increases. Our approach is generically applicable with any speculative decoding methods (single draft, multi-drafts and draft-trees). Moreover, we design system-efficient versions of online learners and demonstrate that the overhead in computation and latency can be substantially reduced. We conduct extensive experiments on open-source LLMs and diverse datasets, demonstrating that our methods substantially outperform the state-of-the-art EAGLE3 and the BanditSpec baseline in a variety of domains where specialized domain-expert drafters are available, especially when long reasoning chains are required.

We study whether liquidity and volatility proxies of a core set of cryptoassets generate spillovers that forecast market-wide risk. Our empirical framework integrates three statistical layers: (A) interactions between core liquidity and returns, (B) principal-component relations linking liquidity and returns, and (C) volatility-factor projections that capture cross-sectional volatility crowding. The analysis is complemented by vector autoregression impulse responses and forecast error variance decompositions (see Granger 1969; Sims 1980), heterogeneous autoregressive models with exogenous regressors (HAR-X, Corsi 2009), and a leakage-safe machine learning protocol using temporal splits, early stopping, validation-only thresholding, and SHAP-based interpretation. Using daily data from 2021 to 2025 (1462 observations across 74 assets), we document statistically significant Granger-causal relationships across layers and moderate out-of-sample predictive accuracy. We report the most informative figures, including the pipeline overview, Layer A heatmap, Layer C robustness analysis, vector autoregression variance decompositions, and the test-set precision-recall curve. Full data and figure outputs are provided in the artifact repository.

Simultaneous recordings from thousands of neurons across multiple brain areas reveal rich mixtures of activity that are shared between regions and dynamics that are unique to each region. Existing alignment or multi-view methods neglect temporal structure, whereas dynamical latent variable models capture temporal dependencies but are usually restricted to a single area, assume linear read-outs, or conflate shared and private signals. We introduce the Coupled Transformer Autoencoder (CTAE) - a sequence model that addresses both (i) non-stationary, non-linear dynamics and (ii) separation of shared versus region-specific structure in a single framework. CTAE employs transformer encoders and decoders to capture long-range neural dynamics and explicitly partitions each region's latent space into orthogonal shared and private subspaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CTAE on two high-density electrophysiology datasets with simultaneous recordings from multiple regions, one from motor cortical areas and the other from sensory areas. CTAE extracts meaningful representations that better decode behavioral variables compared to existing approaches.

Stewart platform-based Parallel Kinematic (PKM) Machines have been extensively studied by researchers due to their inherent finer control characteristics. This has opened its potential deployment opportunities in versatile critical applications like the medical field, engineering machines, space research, electronic chip manufacturing, automobile manufacturing, etc. All these precise, complicated, and repeatable motion applications require micro and nano-scale movement control in 3D space; a 6-DOF PKM can take this challenge smartly. For this, the PKM must be more accurate than the desired application accuracy level and thus proper calibration for a PKM robot is essential. Forward kinematics-based calibration for such hexapod machines becomes unnecessarily complex and inverse kinematics complete this task with much ease. To analyze different techniques, an external instrument-based, constraint-based, and auto or self-calibration-based approaches have been used for calibration. This survey has been done by reviewing these key methodologies, their outcome, and important points related to inverse kinematic-based PKM calibrations in general. It is observed in this study that the researchers focused on improving the accuracy of the platform position and orientation considering the errors contributed by a single source or multiple sources. The error sources considered are mainly structural, in some cases, environmental factors are also considered, however, these calibrations are done under no-load conditions. This study aims to understand the current state of the art in this field and to expand the scope for other researchers in further exploration in a specific area.

Reconstructing an intensity image from the events of a moving event camera is a challenging task that is typically approached with neural networks deployed on graphics processing units. This paper presents a much simpler, FIlter Based Asynchronous Reconstruction method (FIBAR). First, intensity changes signaled by events are integrated with a temporal digital IIR filter. To reduce reconstruction noise, stale pixels are detected by a novel algorithm that regulates a window of recently updated pixels. Arguing that for a moving camera, the absence of events at a pixel location likely implies a low image gradient, stale pixels are then blurred with a Gaussian filter. In contrast to most existing methods, FIBAR is asynchronous and permits image read-out at an arbitrary time. It runs on a modern laptop CPU at about 42(140) million events/s with (without) spatial filtering enabled. A few simple qualitative experiments are presented that show the difference in image reconstruction between FIBAR and a neural network-based approach (FireNet). FIBAR's reconstruction is noisier than neural network-based methods and suffers from ghost images. However, it is sufficient for certain tasks such as the detection of fiducial markers. Code is available at this https URL

A meaningful text can be hidden inside another, completely different yet still coherent and plausible, text of the same length. For example, a tweet containing a harsh political critique could be embedded in a tweet that celebrates the same political leader, or an ordinary product review could conceal a secret manuscript. This uncanny state of affairs is now possible thanks to Large Language Models, and in this paper we present a simple and efficient protocol to achieve it. We show that even modest 8-billion-parameter open-source LLMs are sufficient to obtain high-quality results, and a message as long as this abstract can be encoded and decoded locally on a laptop in seconds. The existence of such a protocol demonstrates a radical decoupling of text from authorial intent, further eroding trust in written communication, already shaken by the rise of LLM chatbots. We illustrate this with a concrete scenario: a company could covertly deploy an unfiltered LLM by encoding its answers within the compliant responses of a safe model. This possibility raises urgent questions for AI safety and challenges our understanding of what it means for a Large Language Model to know something.

Tensor low-rank representation (TLRR) has demonstrated significant success in image clustering. However, most existing methods rely on fixed transformations and suffer from poor robustness to noise. In this paper, we propose a novel transformed bilateral tensor low-rank representation model called TBTLRR, which introduces a data-adaptive tensor nuclear norm by learning arbitrary unitary transforms, allowing for more effective capture of global correlations. In addition, by leveraging the bilateral structure of latent tensor data, TBTLRR is able to exploit local correlations between image samples and features. Furthermore, TBTLRR integrates the $\ell_{1/2}$-norm and Frobenius norm regularization terms for better dealing with complex noise in real-world scenarios. To solve the proposed nonconvex model, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm inspired by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and provide theoretical convergence. Extensive experiments validate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in clustering. The code will be available at this https URL.

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is a complex process that creates free-form geometric objects by sequentially placing material to construct an object, usually in a layer-by-layer process. One of the most widely used methods is Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). FDM is used in many of the consumer-grade polymer 3D printers available today. While consumer grade machines are cheap and plentiful, they lack many of the features desired in a machine used for research purposes and are often closed-source platforms. Commercial-grade models are more expensive and are also usually closed-source platforms that do not offer flexibility for modifications often needed for research. The authors designed and fabricated a machine to be used as a test bed for research in the field of polymer FDM processes. The goal was to create a platform that tightly controls and/or monitors the FDM build parameters so that experiments can be repeated with a known accuracy. The platform offers closed loop position feedback, control of the hot end and bed temperature, and monitoring of environment temperature and humidity. Additionally, the platform is equipped with cameras and a mechanism for in-situ photogrammetry, creating a geometric record of the printing throughout the printing process. Through photogrammetry, backtracking and linking process parameters to observable geometric defects can be achieved. This paper focuses on the design of a novel mechanism for spinning the heated bed to allow for photogrammetric reconstruction of the printed part using a minimal number of cameras, as implemented on this platform.

Cyber threats increasingly demand joint responses, yet the organizational dynamics behind multi-agency cybersecurity collaboration remain poorly understood. Understanding who leads, who bridges, and how agencies coordinate is critical for strengthening both U.S. homeland security and allied defense efforts. In this study, we construct a co-authorship network from nine Joint Cybersecurity Advisories (CSAs) issued between November 2024 and August 2025. We map 41 agencies and 442 co-authoring ties to analyze the structure of collaboration. We find a tightly knit U.S. triad -- CISA, FBI, and NSA -- densely connected with Five Eyes and select European allies. Degree centrality identifies CISA and FBI as coordination hubs, while betweenness highlights NSA, the UK's NCSC, and Australia's ASD-ACSC as key bridges linking otherwise fragmented clusters. By releasing the first replicable dataset and network analysis of CSAs, we provide new empirical evidence on how collaborative cybersecurity signals are organized and where strategic influence is concentrated.

In this paper, we develop a safe control synthesis method that integrates state estimation and parameter estimation within an adaptive optimal control (AOC) and control barrier function (CBF)-based control architecture. The developed approach decouples safety objectives from the learning objectives using a CBF-based guarding controller where the CBFs are robustified to account for the lack of full-state measurements. The coupling of this guarding controller with the AOC-based stabilizing control guarantees safety and regulation despite the lack of full state measurement. The paper leverages recent advancements in deep neural network-based adaptive observers to ensure safety in the presence of state estimation errors. Safety and convergence guarantees are provided using a Lyapunov-based analysis, and the effectiveness of the developed controller is demonstrated through simulation under mild excitation conditions.

For nearly half a century, the core design of query optimizers in industrial database systems has remained remarkably stable, relying on foundational principles from System R and the Volcano/Cascades framework. However, the rise of cloud computing, massive data volumes, and unified data platforms has exposed the limitations of this traditional, monolithic architecture. Taking an industrial perspective, this paper reviews the past and present of query optimization in production systems and identifies the challenges they face today. Then this paper highlights three key trends gaining momentum in the industry that promise to address these challenges. First, a tighter feedback loop between query optimization and query execution is being used to improve the robustness of query performance. Second, the scope of optimization is expanding from a single query to entire workloads through the convergence of query optimization and workload optimization. Third, and perhaps most transformatively, the industry is moving from monolithic designs to composable architectures that foster agility and cross-engine collaboration. Together, these trends chart a clear path toward a more dynamic, holistic, and adaptable future for query optimization in practice.

Explaining time series classification models is crucial, particularly in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and finance, where transparency and trust play a critical role. Although numerous time series classification methods have identified key subsequences, known as shapelets, as core features for achieving state-of-the-art performance and validating their pivotal role in classification outcomes, existing post-hoc time series explanation (PHTSE) methods primarily focus on timestep-level feature attribution. These explanation methods overlook the fundamental prior that classification outcomes are predominantly driven by key shapelets. To bridge this gap, we present ShapeX, an innovative framework that segments time series into meaningful shapelet-driven segments and employs Shapley values to assess their saliency. At the core of ShapeX lies the Shapelet Describe-and-Detect (SDD) framework, which effectively learns a diverse set of shapelets essential for classification. We further demonstrate that ShapeX produces explanations which reveal causal relationships instead of just correlations, owing to the atomicity properties of shapelets. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapeX outperforms existing methods in identifying the most relevant subsequences, enhancing both the precision and causal fidelity of time series explanations.

Social media platforms have become important sources for identifying suicide risk, but automated detection systems face multiple challenges including severe class imbalance, temporal complexity in posting patterns, and the dual nature of risk levels as both ordinal and categorical. This paper proposes a hierarchical dual-head neural network based on MentalRoBERTa for suicide risk classification into four levels: indicator, ideation, behavior, and attempt. The model employs two complementary prediction heads operating on a shared sequence representation: a CORAL (Consistent Rank Logits) head that preserves ordinal relationships between risk levels, and a standard classification head that enables flexible categorical distinctions. A 3-layer Transformer encoder with 8-head multi-head attention models temporal dependencies across post sequences, while explicit time interval embeddings capture posting behavior dynamics. The model is trained with a combined loss function (0.5 CORAL + 0.3 Cross-Entropy + 0.2 Focal Loss) that simultaneously addresses ordinal structure preservation, overconfidence reduction, and class imbalance. To improve computational efficiency, we freeze the first 6 layers (50%) of MentalRoBERTa and employ mixed-precision training. The model is evaluated using 5-fold stratified cross-validation with macro F1 score as the primary metric.

Video-based assessment and surgical data science can advance surgical training, research, and quality improvement. However, widespread use remains limited by heterogeneous recording formats and privacy concerns associated with video sharing. We present Endoshare, a source-available, cross-platform application for merging, standardizing, and de-identifying endoscopic videos in minimally invasive surgery. Development followed the software development life cycle with iterative, user-centered feedback. During the analysis phase, an internal survey of clinicians and computer scientists based on ten usability heuristics identified key requirements that guided a privacy-by-design architecture. In the testing phase, an external clinician survey combined the same heuristics with Technology Acceptance Model constructs to assess usability and adoption, complemented by benchmarking across different hardware configurations. Four clinicians and four computer scientists initially tested the prototype, reporting high usability (4.68 +/- 0.40/5 and 4.03 +/- 0.51/5), with the lowest score (4.00 +/- 0.93/5) relating to label clarity. After refinement, the testing phase surveyed ten surgeons who reported high perceived usefulness (5.07 +/- 1.75/7), ease of use (5.15 +/- 1.71/7), heuristic usability (4.38 +/- 0.48/5), and strong recommendation (9.20 +/- 0.79/10). Processing time varied with processing mode, video duration (both p <= 0.001), and machine computational power (p = 0.041). Endoshare provides a transparent, user-friendly pipeline for standardized, privacy-preserving surgical video management. Compliance certification and broader interoperability validation are needed to establish it as a deployable alternative to proprietary systems. The software is available at this https URL

Creativity is often seen as a hallmark of human intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly perceived as producing creative text, there is still no holistic framework to evaluate their creativity across diverse scenarios. Existing evaluation methods remain fragmented, with dramatic variation across domains and tasks, largely due to differing definitions and measurements of creativity. Inspired by the hypothesis that creativity is not one fixed idea, we propose CreativityPrism, an evaluation analysis framework that decomposes creativity into three dimensions: quality, novelty, and diversity. CreativityPrism incorporates nine tasks, three domains, i.e., divergent thinking, creative writing, and logical reasoning, and twenty evaluation metrics, which measure each dimension in task-specific, unique ways. We evaluate 17 state-of-the-art (SoTA) proprietary and open-sourced LLMs on CreativityPrism and analyze the performance correlations among different metrics and task domains. Our results reveal a notable gap between proprietary and open-source models. Overall, model performance tends to be highly correlated across tasks within the same domain and less so across different domains. Among evaluation dimensions, diversity and quality metrics show strong correlations - models that perform well on one often excel on the other - whereas novelty exhibits much weaker correlation with either. These findings support our hypothesis that strong performance in one creativity task or dimension does not necessarily generalize to others, underscoring the need for a holistic evaluation of LLM creativity.

Self-attention (SA) has become the cornerstone of modern vision backbones for its powerful expressivity over traditional Convolutions (Conv). However, its quadratic complexity remains a critical bottleneck for practical applications. Given that Conv offers linear complexity and strong visual priors, continuing efforts have been made to promote the renaissance of Conv. However, a persistent performance chasm remains, highlighting that these modernizations have not yet captured the intrinsic expressivity that defines SA. In this paper, we re-examine the design of the CNNs, directed by a key question: what principles give SA its edge over Conv? As a result, we reveal two fundamental insights that challenge the long-standing design intuitions in prior research (e.g., Receptive field). The two findings are: (1) \textit{Adaptive routing}: SA dynamically regulates positional information flow according to semantic content, whereas Conv employs static kernels uniformly across all positions. (2) \textit{Lateral inhibition}: SA induces score competition among token weighting, effectively suppressing redundancy and sharpening representations, whereas Conv filters lack such inhibitory dynamics and exhibit considerable redundancy. Based on this, we propose \textit{Attentive Convolution} (ATConv), a principled reformulation of the convolutional operator that intrinsically injects these principles. Interestingly, with only $3\times3$ kernels, ATConv consistently outperforms various SA mechanisms in fundamental vision tasks. Building on ATConv, we introduce AttNet, a CNN family that can attain \textbf{84.4\%} ImageNet-1K Top-1 accuracy with only 27M parameters. In diffusion-based image generation, replacing all SA with the proposed $3\times 3$ ATConv in SiT-XL/2 reduces ImageNet FID by 0.15 in 400k steps with faster sampling. Code is available at: this http URL.

Although recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enriched the quality of generated images, challenges remain in synthesizing pixel-based human-drawn sketches, a representative example of abstract expression. To combat these challenges, we propose StableSketcher, a novel framework that empowers diffusion models to generate hand-drawn sketches with high prompt fidelity. Within this framework, we fine-tune the variational autoencoder to optimize latent decoding, enabling it to better capture the characteristics of sketches. In parallel, we integrate a new reward function for reinforcement learning based on visual question answering, which improves text-image alignment and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StableSketcher generates sketches with improved stylistic fidelity, achieving better alignment with prompts compared to the Stable Diffusion baseline. Additionally, we introduce SketchDUO, to the best of our knowledge, the first dataset comprising instance-level sketches paired with captions and question-answer pairs, thereby addressing the limitations of existing datasets that rely on image-label pairs. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during training encourages alignment with this shared latent structure, emphasizing potentially diagnostic characters while suppressing spurious correlations. The main challenge, however, lies in obtaining faithful, instance-specific captions at scale. This requirement has limited the utilization of natural language supervision in organismal biology compared with many other scientific domains. We complement this gap by generating synthetic captions with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), guided by Wikipedia-derived visual information and taxon-tailored format examples. These domain-specific contexts help reduce hallucination and yield accurate, instance-based descriptive captions. Using these captions, we train BIOCAP (i.e., BIOCLIP with Captions), a biological foundation model that captures rich semantics and achieves strong performance in species classification and text-image retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of descriptive captions beyond labels in bridging biological images with multimodal foundation models.

Entity Linking (EL) has traditionally relied on large annotated datasets and extensive model fine-tuning. While recent few-shot methods leverage large language models (LLMs) through prompting to reduce training requirements, they often suffer from inefficiencies due to expensive LLM-based reasoning. ARTER (Adaptive Routing and Targeted Entity Reasoning) presents a structured pipeline that achieves high performance without deep fine-tuning by strategically combining candidate generation, context-based scoring, adaptive routing, and selective reasoning. ARTER computes a small set of complementary signals(both embedding and LLM-based) over the retrieved candidates to categorize contextual mentions into easy and hard cases. The cases are then handled by a low-computational entity linker (e.g. ReFinED) and more expensive targeted LLM-based reasoning respectively. On standard benchmarks, ARTER outperforms ReFinED by up to +4.47%, with an average gain of +2.53% on 5 out of 6 datasets, and performs comparably to pipelines using LLM-based reasoning for all mentions, while being as twice as efficient in terms of the number of LLM tokens.

We present AI PB, a production-scale generative agent deployed in real retail finance. Unlike reactive chatbots that answer queries passively, AI PB proactively generates grounded, compliant, and user-specific investment insights. It integrates (i) a component-based orchestration layer that deterministically routes between internal and external LLMs based on data sensitivity, (ii) a hybrid retrieval pipeline using OpenSearch and the finance-domain embedding model, and (iii) a multi-stage recommendation mechanism combining rule heuristics, sequential behavioral modeling, and contextual bandits. Operating fully on-premises under Korean financial regulations, the system employs Docker Swarm and vLLM across 24 X NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Through human QA and system metrics, we demonstrate that grounded generation with explicit routing and layered safety can deliver trustworthy AI insights in high-stakes finance.

We present HCLA, a human-centered multi-agent system for anomaly detection in digital asset transactions. The system links three roles: Parsing, Detection, and Explanation, into a conversational workflow that lets non-experts ask questions in natural language, inspect structured analytics, and obtain context-aware rationales. Implemented with an open-source web UI, HCLA translates user intents into a schema for a classical detector (XGBoost in our prototype) and returns narrative explanations grounded in the underlying features. On a labeled Bitcoin mixing dataset (Wasabi Wallet, 2020-2024), the baseline detector reaches strong accuracy, while HCLA adds interpretability and interactive refinement. We describe the architecture, interaction loop, dataset, evaluation protocol, and limitations, and discuss how a human-in-the-loop design improves transparency and trust in financial forensics.

Causal discovery remains a central challenge in machine learning, yet existing methods face a fundamental gap: algorithms like GES and GraN-DAG achieve strong empirical performance but lack finite-sample guarantees, while theoretically principled approaches fail to scale. We close this gap by introducing a game-theoretic reinforcement learning framework for causal discovery, where a DDQN agent directly competes against a strong baseline (GES or GraN-DAG), always warm-starting from the opponent's solution. This design yields three provable guarantees: the learned graph is never worse than the opponent, warm-starting strictly accelerates convergence, and most importantly, with high probability the algorithm selects the true best candidate graph. To the best of our knowledge, our result makes a first-of-its-kind progress in explaining such finite-sample guarantees in causal discovery: on synthetic SEMs (30 nodes), the observed error probability decays with n, tightly matching theory. On real-world benchmarks including Sachs, Asia, Alarm, Child, Hepar2, Dream, and Andes, our method consistently improves upon GES and GraN-DAG while remaining theoretically safe. Remarkably, it scales to large graphs such as Hepar2 (70 nodes), Dream (100 nodes), and Andes (220 nodes). Together, these results establish a new class of RL-based causal discovery algorithms that are simultaneously provably consistent, sample-efficient, and practically scalable, marking a decisive step toward unifying empirical performance with rigorous finite-sample theory.

Studies on various facets of pattern classification is often imperative while working with multi-dimensional samples pertaining to diverse application scenarios. In this notion, weighted dimension-based distance measure has been one of the vital considerations in pattern analysis as it reflects the degree of similarity between samples. Though it is often presumed to be settled with the pervasive use of Euclidean distance, plethora of issues often surface. In this paper, we present (a) a detail analysis on the impact of distance measure norms and weights of dimensions along with visualization, (b) a novel weighting scheme for each dimension, (c) incorporation of this dimensional weighting schema into a KNN classifier, and (d) pattern classification on a variety of synthetic as well as realistic datasets with the developed model. It has performed well across diverse experiments in comparison to the traditional KNN under the same experimental setups. Specifically, for gene expression datasets, it yields significant and consistent gain in classification accuracy (around 10%) in all cross-validation experiments with different values of k. As such datasets contain limited number of samples of high dimensions, meaningful selection of nearest neighbours is desirable, and this requirement is reasonably met by regulating the shape and size of the region enclosing the k number of reference samples with the developed weighting schema and appropriate norm. It, therefore, stands as an important generalization of KNN classifier powered by weighted Minkowski distance with the present weighting schema.

Prototypical self-supervised learning methods consistently suffer from partial prototype collapse, where multiple prototypes converge to nearly identical representations. This undermines their central purpose -- providing diverse and informative targets to guide encoders toward rich representations -- and has led practitioners to over-parameterize prototype sets or add ad-hoc regularizers, which mitigate symptoms rather than address the root cause. We empirically trace the collapse to the joint optimization of encoders and prototypes, which encourages a type of shortcut learning: early in training prototypes drift toward redundant representations that minimize loss without necessarily enhancing representation diversity. To break the joint optimization, we introduce a fully decoupled training strategy that learns prototypes and encoders under separate objectives. Concretely, we model prototypes as a Gaussian mixture updated with an online EM-style procedure, independent of the encoder's loss. This simple yet principled decoupling eliminates prototype collapse without explicit regularization and yields consistently diverse prototypes and stronger downstream performance.

It is often claimed that machine learning-based generative AI products will drastically streamline and reduce the cost of legal practice. This enthusiasm assumes lawyers can effectively manage AI's risks. Cases in Australia and elsewhere in which lawyers have been reprimanded for submitting inaccurate AI-generated content to courts suggest this paradigm must be revisited. This paper argues that a new paradigm is needed to evaluate AI use in practice, given (a) AI's disconnection from reality and its lack of transparency, and (b) lawyers' paramount duties like honesty, integrity, and not to mislead the court. It presents an alternative model of AI use in practice that more holistically reflects these features (the verification-value paradox). That paradox suggests increases in efficiency from AI use in legal practice will be met by a correspondingly greater imperative to manually verify any outputs of that use, rendering the net value of AI use often negligible to lawyers. The paper then sets out the paradox's implications for legal practice and legal education, including for AI use but also the values that the paradox suggests should undergird legal practice: fidelity to the truth and civic responsibility.

Numerous multi- or high-dimensional indexes with distinct advantages have been proposed on various platforms to meet application requirements. To achieve higher-performance queries, most indexes employ enhancement methods, including structure-oriented and layout-oriented enhancement methods. Existing structure-oriented methods tailored to specific indexes work well under static workloads but lack generality and degrade under dynamic workloads. The layout-oriented methods exhibit good generality and perform well under dynamic workloads, but exhibit suboptimal performance under static workloads. Therefore, it is an open challenge to develop a unified and resilient enhancement method that can improve query performance for different indexes adaptively under different scenarios. In this paper, we propose UREM, which is the first high-performance Unified and Resilient Enhancement Method designed for both multi- and high-dimensional indexes, capable of adapting to different scenarios. Specifically, UREM (1) can be uniformly applied with different indexes on various platforms; (2) enhances the query performance of indexes by layout optimization under static workloads; (3) enables indexes to stabilize performance when queries shift through partial layout reorganization. We evaluate UREM on 20 widely used indexes. Experimental results demonstrate that UREM improves the query performance of multi- and high-dimensional indexes by up to 5.73x and 9.18x under static workloads, and by an average of 5.72x and 9.47x under dynamic workloads. Moreover, some traditional indexes enhanced by UREM even achieve performance comparable to or even surpassing that of recent advanced indexes.

The training efficiency and scalability of language models on massive clusters currently remain a critical bottleneck. Mainstream approaches like ND parallelism are often cumbersome and complex, while flexible alternatives such as the Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) are frequently hampered by communication overhead. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Hierarchical Zero Parallelism (AsyncHZP), a novel asynchronous variant of ZeRO designed to achieve superior performance while maintaining simplicity and memory efficiency. Unlike traditional ZeRO, which employs over-fine-grained sharding that can lead to inefficient communication, AsyncHZP adaptively reshards parameters, gradients, and optimizer states across different replica groups. This strategy optimizes device memory utilization and significantly reduces communication overhead. In addition, we also design a multi-stream asynchronous scheduling method that executes parameter all-gather and gradient reduce-scatter operations in dedicated background threads, effectively overlapping communication with computation while incurring negligible memory fragmentation. Empirical evaluations on both Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models confirm that AsyncHZP maintains robust stability at scale. It consistently outperforms classic ND parallelism, achieving state-of-the-art performance without complex strategic tuning, thereby simplifying the path to efficient large-scale training.

Speech is essential for human communication, yet millions of people face impairments such as dysarthria, stuttering, and aphasia conditions that often lead to social isolation and reduced participation. Despite recent progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, accessible web and mobile infrastructures for users with impaired speech remain limited, hindering the practical adoption of these advances in daily communication. To bridge this gap, we present SpeechAgent, a mobile SpeechAgent designed to facilitate people with speech impairments in everyday communication. The system integrates large language model (LLM)- driven reasoning with advanced speech processing modules, providing adaptive support tailored to diverse impairment types. To ensure real-world practicality, we develop a structured deployment pipeline that enables real-time speech processing on mobile and edge devices, achieving imperceptible latency while maintaining high accuracy and speech quality. Evaluation on real-world impaired speech datasets and edge-device latency profiling confirms that SpeechAgent delivers both effective and user-friendly performance, demonstrating its feasibility for personalized, day-to-day assistive communication.

This work investigates the reduction of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data through low-rank matrix approximations. To reconstruct a PMU data matrix from fewer measurements, we propose the framework of interpolatory matrix decompositions (IDs). In contrast to methods relying on principal component analysis or singular value decomposition, IDs recover the complete data matrix using only a few of its rows (PMU datastreams) and/or a few of its columns (snapshots in time). This compression enables the real-time monitoring of power transmission systems using a limited number of measurements, thereby minimizing communication bandwidth. The ID perspective gives a rigorous error bound on the quality of the data compression. We propose selecting rows and columns used in an ID via the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM), a greedy algorithm that aims to control the error bound. This bound leads to a computable estimate for the reconstruction error during online operations. A violation of this estimate suggests a change in the system's operating conditions, and thus serves as a tool for fault detection. Numerical tests using synthetic PMU data illustrate DEIM's excellent performance for data compression, and validate the proposed DEIM-based fault-detection method.

Given the set of discrete solution points or nodes, called the skeleton, generated by an ODE solver, we study the problem of fitting a curve passing through the nodes in the skeleton minimizing a norm of the residual vector of the ODE. We reformulate this interpolation problem as a multi-stage optimal control problem and, for the minimization of two different norms, we apply the associated maximum principle to obtain the necessary conditions of optimality. We solve the problem analytically for the Dahlquist test problem and a variant of the leaky bucket problem, in terms of the given skeleton. We also consider the Van der Pol equation, for which we obtain interpolating curves with minimal residual norms by numerically solving a direct discretization of the problem through optimization software. With the skeletons obtained by various ODE solvers of MATLAB, we make comparisons between the residuals obtained by our approach and those obtained by the MATLAB function deval.

Timeseries foundation models (TSFMs) have multiplied, yet lightweight supervised baselines and even classical models often match them. We argue this gap stems from the naive importation of NLP or CV pipelines. In language and vision, large web-scale corpora densely capture human concepts i.e. there are countless images and text of apples. In contrast, timeseries data is built to complement the image and text modalities. There are no timeseries dataset that contains the concept apple. As a result, the scrape-everything-online paradigm fails for TS. We posit that progress demands a shift from opportunistic aggregation to principled design: constructing datasets that systematically span the space of invariance that preserve temporal semantics. To this end, we suggest that the ontology of timeseries invariances should be built based on first principles. Only by ensuring representational completeness through invariance coverage can TSFMs achieve the aligned structure necessary for generalisation, reasoning, and truly emergent behaviour.

Model-driven software engineering (MDE) techniques are not only useful in forward engineering scenarios, but can also be successfully applied to evolve existing systems. RAD (Rapid Application Development) platforms emerged in the nineties, but the success of modern software technologies motivated that a large number of enterprises tackled the migration of their RAD applications, such as Oracle Forms. Our research group has collaborated with a software company in developing a solution to migrate PL/SQL monolithic code on Forms triggers and program units to Java code separated in several tiers. Our research focused on the model-driven reengineering process applied to develop the migration tool for the conversion of PL/SQL code to Java. Legacy code is represented in form of KDM (Knowledge-Discovery Metamodel) models. In this paper, we propose a software process to implement a model-driven re-engineering. This process integrates a TDD-like approach to incrementally develop model transformations with three kinds of validations for the generated code. The implementation and validation of the re-engineering approach are explained in detail, as well as the evaluation of some issues related with the application of MDE.

Family learning takes place in everyday routines where children and caregivers read, practice, and develop new skills together. Although AI is increasingly present in learning environments, most systems remain child-centered and overlook the collaborative, distributed nature of family education. This paper investigates how AI can mediate family collaboration by addressing tensions of coordination, uneven workloads, and parental mediation. From a formative study with families using AI in daily learning, we identified challenges in responsibility sharing and recognition of contributions. Building on these insights, we designed FamLearn, an LLM-powered prototype that distributes tasks, visualizes contributions, and provides individualized support. A one-week field study with 11 families shows how this prototype can ease caregiving burdens, foster recognition, and enrich shared learning experiences. Our findings suggest that LLMs can move beyond the role of tutor to act as family mediators - balancing responsibilities, scaffolding intergenerational participation, and strengthening the relational fabric of family learning.

While computer vision has advanced considerably for general object detection and tracking, the specific problem of fast-moving tiny objects remains underexplored. This paper addresses the significant challenge of detecting and tracking rapidly moving small objects using an RGB-D camera. Our novel system combines deep learning-based detection with physics-based tracking to overcome the limitations of existing approaches. Our contributions include: (1) a comprehensive system design for object detection and tracking of fast-moving small objects in 3D space, (2) an innovative physics-based tracking algorithm that integrates kinematics motion equations to handle outliers and missed detections, and (3) an outlier detection and correction module that significantly improves tracking performance in challenging scenarios such as occlusions and rapid direction changes. We evaluated our proposed system on a custom racquetball dataset. Our evaluation shows our system surpassing kalman filter based trackers with up to 70\% less Average Displacement Error. Our system has significant applications for improving robot perception on autonomous platforms and demonstrates the effectiveness of combining physics-based models with deep learning approaches for real-time 3D detection and tracking of challenging small objects.

To address the growing needs for scalable High Performance Computing (HPC) and Quantum Computing (QC) integration, we present our HPC-QC full stack framework and its hybrid workload development capability with modular hardware/device-agnostic software integration approach. The latest development in extensible interfaces for quantum programming, dispatching, and compilation within existing mature HPC programming environment are demonstrated. Our HPC-QC full stack enables high-level, portable invocation of quantum kernels from commercial quantum SDKs within HPC meta-program in compiled languages (C/C++ and Fortran) as well as Python through a quantum programming interface library extension. An adaptive circuit knitting hypervisor is being developed to partition large quantum circuits into sub-circuits that fit on smaller noisy quantum devices and classical simulators. At the lower-level, we leverage Cray LLVM-based compilation framework to transform and consume LLVM IR and Quantum IR (QIR) from commercial quantum software frontends in a retargetable fashion to different hardware architectures. Several hybrid HPC-QC multi-node multi-CPU and GPU workloads (including solving linear system of equations, quantum optimization, and simulating quantum phase transitions) have been demonstrated on HPE EX supercomputers to illustrate functionality and execution viability for all three components developed so far. This work provides the framework for a unified quantum-classical programming environment built upon classical HPC software stack (compilers, libraries, parallel runtime and process scheduling).

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advances in safety alignment, remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks designed to circumvent protective mechanisms. Prevailing defense strategies rely on external interventions, such as input filtering or output modification, which often lack generalizability and compromise model utility while incurring significant computational overhead. In this work, we introduce a new, training-free defense paradigm, Self-Activating Internal Defense (SAID), which reframes the defense task from external correction to internal capability activation. SAID uniquely leverages the LLM's own reasoning abilities to proactively identify and neutralize malicious intent through a three-stage pipeline: model-native intent distillation to extract core semantics, optimal safety prefix probing to activate latent safety awareness, and a conservative aggregation strategy to ensure robust decision-making. Extensive experiments on five open-source LLMs against six advanced jailbreak attacks demonstrate that SAID substantially outperforms state-of-the-art defenses in reducing harmful outputs. Crucially, it achieves this while preserving model performance on benign tasks and incurring minimal computational overhead. Our work establishes that activating the intrinsic safety mechanisms of LLMs is a more robust and scalable path toward building safer and more reliable aligned AI systems.

Pseudorandom generators (PRGs) are a foundational primitive in classical cryptography, underpinning a wide range of constructions. In the quantum setting, pseudorandom quantum states (PRSs) were proposed as a potentially weaker assumption that might serve as a substitute for PRGs in cryptographic applications. Two primary size regimes of PRSs have been studied: logarithmic-size and linear-size. Interestingly, logarithmic PRSs have led to powerful cryptographic applications, such as digital signatures and quantum public-key encryption, that have not been realized from their linear counterparts. However, PRGs have only been black-box separated from linear PRSs, leaving open the fundamental question of whether PRGs are also separated from logarithmic PRSs. In this work, we resolve this open problem. We establish a quantum black-box separation between (quantum-evaluable) PRGs and PRSs of either size regime. Specifically, we construct a unitary quantum oracle with inverse access relative to which no black-box construction of PRG from (logarithmic or linear) PRS exists. As a direct corollary, we obtain separations between PRGs and several primitives implied by logarithmic PRSs, including digital signatures and quantum public-key encryption.

A concept of light-fields computed from multiple view images on regular grids has proven its benefit for scene representations, and supported realistic renderings of novel views and photographic effects such as refocusing and shallow depth of field. In spite of its effectiveness of light flow computations, obtaining light fields requires either computational costs or specialized devices like a bulky camera setup and a specialized microlens array. In an effort to broaden its benefit and applicability, in this paper, we propose a novel view synthesis method for light field generation from only single images, named inverse image-based rendering. Unlike previous attempts to implicitly rebuild 3D geometry or to explicitly represent objective scenes, our method reconstructs light flows in a space from image pixels, which behaves in the opposite way to image-based rendering. To accomplish this, we design a neural rendering pipeline to render a target ray in an arbitrary viewpoint. Our neural renderer first stores the light flow of source rays from the input image, then computes the relationships among them through cross-attention, and finally predicts the color of the target ray based on these relationships. After the rendering pipeline generates the first novel view from a single input image, the generated out-of-view contents are updated to the set of source rays. This procedure is iteratively performed while ensuring the consistent generation of occluded contents. We demonstrate that our inverse image-based rendering works well with various challenging datasets without any retraining or finetuning after once trained on synthetic dataset, and outperforms relevant state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models in open-world applications. While post-hoc methods are favored for their efficiency and ease of deployment, existing approaches often underexploit the rich information embedded in the model's logits space. In this paper, we propose LogitGap, a novel post-hoc OOD detection method that explicitly exploits the relationship between the maximum logit and the remaining logits to enhance the separability between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. To further improve its effectiveness, we refine LogitGap by focusing on a more compact and informative subset of the logit space. Specifically, we introduce a training-free strategy that automatically identifies the most informative logits for scoring. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Extensive experiments on both vision-language and vision-only models demonstrate that LogitGap consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse OOD detection scenarios and benchmarks. Code is available at this https URL.

The dual challenge of decarbonizing the economy and meeting rising global energy demand underscores the need for scalable and cost-effective carbon dioxide removal technologies. Direct air capture (DAC) is among the most promising approaches, but its high energy intensity, particularly the thermal energy required for sorbent regeneration, remains a critical barrier to cost reduction and sustainable deployment. This study explores solar-thermal DAC systems that combine concentrated solar thermal technology with low-cost sand-based thermal energy storage to meet this demand. We analyze the techno-economic performance of such systems in both grid-connected and stand-alone configurations. Results show that solar-thermal DAC can achieve annual capacity factors exceeding 80% and CO2 removal costs as low as 160-200 USD per ton, making it competitive with leading DAC technologies. The proposed system operates most efficiently with short-cycle sorbents that align with solar availability. The stand-alone Solar-DAC systems, which rely solely on solar energy for both electricity and thermal energy, are particularly promising in regions with high solar capacity and sandy terrain, exhibiting minimal ambient sensitivity from temperature and humidity. An optimal 6000 ton/yr modular system design takes <1 km2 land-use requirement and potentially >26 Gt/year DAC capacity is identified for sandy terrain alone globally. In areas with sedimentary basins suitable for CO2 storage, solar-powered DAC offers a lower-cost alternative to geothermal heating, which often faces geological and economic constraints.

Conventional priors used for signal recovery are often limited by the assumption that the type of a signal's variability, such as piecewise constant or linear behavior, is known and fixed. This assumption is problematic for complex signals that exhibit different behaviors across the domain. The recently developed {\em residual transform operator} effectively reduces such variability-dependent error within the LASSO regression framework. Importantly, it does not require prior information regarding structure of the underlying signal. This paper reformulates the residual transform operator into a new prior within a hierarchical Bayesian framework. In so doing, it unlocks two powerful new capabilities. First, it enables principled uncertainty quantification, providing robust credible intervals for the recovered signal, and second, it provides a natural framework for the joint recovery of signals from multimodal measurements by coherently fusing information from disparate data sources. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the residual prior yields high-fidelity signal and image recovery from multimodal data while providing robust uncertainty quantification.

The design of approximate adders has been widely researched to advance energy-efficient hardware for computation-intensive multimedia applications, such as image, audio, or video processing. The design of approximate adders has been widely researched to advance energy-efficient hardware for computation intensive multimedia applications, such as image/audio/video processing. Several static and dynamic approximate adders exist in the literature, each of which endeavors to balance the conflicting demands of high performance, computational accuracy, and energy efficiency. This work introduces a novel approximate adder that is more energy- and area-efficient than existing adders, while achieving improved or comparable accuracy, as demonstrated by simulation results. The proposed adder's ability to digitally reconstruct high quality images is further demonstrated by the deployment of the design for an image processing task.

We propose a novel class of neural network-like parametrized functions, i.e., general transformation neural networks (GTNNs), for high-dimensional approximation. Conventional deep neural networks sometimes perform less accurately in approximation problems under gradient descent training, especially when the target function is oscillatory. To improve accuracy, we generalize the affine transformation of the abstract neuron to more general functions, which act as complex shape functions and have larger capacities. Specifically, we introduce two types of GTNNs: the cubic and quadratic transformation neural networks (CTNNs and QTNNs). We perform approximation error analysis for CTNNs and QTNNs, presenting their universal approximation properties for continuous functions and error bounds for smooth functions and Barron-type functions. Several numerical examples of regression problems and partial differential equations are presented, demonstrating that CTNNs/QTNNs have advantages in accuracy and robustness over conventional fully connected neural networks.

Emerging neuroimaging evidence shows that pathological tau proteins build up along specific brain networks, suggesting that large-scale network architecture plays a key role in the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, how structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) interact to influence tau propagation remains unclear. Leveraging an unprecedented volume of longitudinal neuroimaging data, we examine SC-FC interactions through a multi-layer graph diffusion model. Beyond showing that connectome architecture constrains tau spread, our model reveals a regionally asymmetric contribution of SC and FC. Specifically, FC predominantly drives tau spread in subcortical areas, the insula, frontal and temporal cortices, whereas SC plays a larger role in occipital, parietal, and limbic regions. The relative dominance of SC versus FC shifts over the course of disease, with FC generally prevailing in early AD and SC becoming primary in later stages. Spatial patterns of SC- and FC-dominant regions strongly align with the regional expression of AD-associated genes involved in inflammation, apoptosis, and lysosomal function, including CHUK (IKK-alpha), TMEM106B, MCL1, NOTCH1, and TH. In parallel, other non-modifiable risk factors (e.g., APOE genotype, sex) and biological mechanisms (e.g., amyloid deposition) selectively reshape tau propagation by shifting dominant routes between anatomical and functional pathways in a region-specific manner. Findings are validated in an independent AD cohort.

This paper proposes a novel multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted collaborative mobile edge computing (MEC) framework, where the computing tasks of terminal devices (TDs) can be decomposed into serial or parallel sub-tasks and offloaded to collaborative UAVs. We first model the dependencies among all sub-tasks as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and design a two-timescale frame structure to decouple the sub-task interdependencies for sub-task scheduling. Then, a joint sub-task offloading, computational resource allocation, and UAV trajectories optimization problem is formulated, which aims to minimize the system cost, i.e., the weighted sum of the task completion delay and the system energy consumption. To solve this non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, a penalty dual decomposition and successive convex approximation (PDD-SCA) algorithm is developed. Particularly, the original MINLP problem is equivalently transferred into a continuous form relying on PDD theory. By decoupling the resulting problem into three nested subproblems, the SCA method is further combined to recast the non-convex components and obtain desirable solutions. Numerical results demonstrate that: 1) Compared to the benchmark algorithms, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the system cost, and thus realize an improved trade-off between task latency and energy consumption; 2) The proposed algorithm can achieve an efficient workload balancing for distributed computation across multiple UAVs.

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the recommender system paradigm by enabling users to express preferences and receive recommendations through conversations. Yet, aligning LLMs to the recommendation task remains challenging: pretrained LLMs often generate out-of-catalog items, violate required output formats, and their ranking quality degrades sharply toward the end of the generated list. To this end, we propose ConvRec-R1, a two-stage framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based conversational recommender systems. In Stage 1, we construct a behavioral-cloning dataset with a Remap-Reflect-Adjust pipeline, which produces high-quality, catalog-grounded demonstrations from powerful blackbox LLMs to warm-start the RL training. In Stage 2, we propose Rank-GRPO, a principled extension of group relative policy optimization (GRPO) tailored to tasks with rank-style outputs. Rank-GRPO treats each rank in the recommendation list as the unit instead of token (too fine-grained) or sequence (too coarse), redefining rewards to remove non-causal credit assignment and introducing a rank-level importance ratio based on the geometric mean of rank-wise token probabilities to stabilize policy updates. Experiments on the public Reddit-v2 dataset show that ConvRec-R1 converges faster and achieves higher Recall and NDCG than GRPO-style baselines. Code and datasets are released at this https URL.

As structured texts become increasingly complex across diverse domains -- from technical reports to generative AI prompts -- the need for text segmentation into semantically meaningful components becomes critical. Such texts often contain elements beyond plain language, including tables, code snippets, and placeholders, which conventional sentence- or paragraph-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. To address this challenge, we propose BoundRL, a novel and efficient approach that jointly performs token-level text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. Instead of generating complete contents for each segment, it generates only a sequence of starting tokens and reconstructs the complete contents by locating these tokens within the original texts, thereby reducing inference costs by orders of magnitude and minimizing hallucination. To adapt the model for the output format, BoundRL~performs reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) with a specifically designed reward that jointly optimizes document reconstruction fidelity and semantic alignment. To mitigate entropy collapse, it further constructs intermediate candidates by systematically perturbing a fraction of generated sequences of segments to create stepping stones toward higher-quality solutions. To demonstrate BoundRL's effectiveness on particularly challenging structured texts, we focus evaluation on complex prompts used for LLM applications. Experiments show that BoundRL enables small language models (1.7B parameters) to outperform few-shot prompting of much larger models. Moreover, RLVR with our designed reward yields significant improvements over supervised fine-tuning, and incorporating intermediate candidates further improves both performance and generalization.

This paper proposes a simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm for controlling systems with uncertain and varying system parameters. While simulators are useful for safely learning control policies for physical systems, mitigating the reality gap remains a major challenge. To address the challenge, we propose a two-stage algorithm. In the first stage, multiple control policies are learned for systems with different parameters in a simulator. In the second stage, for a real system, the control policies learned in the first stage are smoothly switched using an online convex optimization algorithm based on observations. Our proposed algorithm is demonstrated through numerical experiments.

We study two-stage bipartite matching, in which the edges of a bipartite graph on vertices $(B_1 \cup B_2, I)$ are revealed in two batches. In stage one, a matching must be selected from among revealed edges $E \subseteq B_1 \times I$. In stage two, edges $E^\theta \subseteq B_2 \times I$ are sampled from a known distribution, and a second matching must be selected between $B_2$ and unmatched vertices in $I$. The objective is to maximize the total weight of the combined matching. We design polynomial-time approximations to the optimum online algorithm, achieving guarantees of $7/8$ for vertex-weighted graphs and $2\sqrt{2}-2 \approx 0.828$ for edge-weighted graphs under arbitrary distributions. Both approximation ratios match known upper bounds on the integrality gap of the natural fractional relaxation, improving upon the best-known approximation of 0.767 by Feng, Niazadeh, and Saberi for unweighted graphs whose second batch consists of independently arriving nodes. Our results are obtained via an algorithm that rounds a fractional matching revealed in two stages, aiming to match offline nodes (respectively, edges) with probability proportional to their fractional weights, up to a constant-factor loss. We leverage negative association (NA) among offline node availabilities -- a property induced by dependent rounding -- to derive new lower bounds on the expected size of the maximum weight matching in random graphs where one side is realized via NA binary random variables. Moreover, we extend these results to settings where we have only sample access to the distribution. In particular, $\text{poly}(n,\epsilon^{-1})$ samples suffice to obtain an additive loss of $\epsilon$ in the approximation ratio for the vertex-weighted problem; a similar bound holds for the edge-weighted problem with an additional (unavoidable) dependence on the scale of edge weights.

Large Language Models inherit stereotypes from their pretraining data, leading to biased behavior toward certain social groups in many Natural Language Processing tasks, such as hateful speech detection or sentiment analysis. Surprisingly, the evaluation of this kind of bias in stance detection methods has been largely overlooked by the community. Stance Detection involves labeling a statement as being against, in favor, or neutral towards a specific target and is among the most sensitive NLP tasks, as it often relates to political leanings. In this paper, we focus on the bias of Large Language Models when performing stance detection in a zero-shot setting. We automatically annotate posts in pre-existing stance detection datasets with two attributes: dialect or vernacular of a specific group and text complexity/readability, to investigate whether these attributes influence the model's stance detection decisions. Our results show that LLMs exhibit significant stereotypes in stance detection tasks, such as incorrectly associating pro-marijuana views with low text complexity and African American dialect with opposition to Donald Trump.

Understanding objects at the level of their constituent parts is fundamental to advancing computer vision, graphics, and robotics. While datasets like PartNet have driven progress in 3D part understanding, their reliance on untextured geometries and expert-dependent annotation limits scalability and usability. We introduce PartNeXt, a next-generation dataset addressing these gaps with over 23,000 high-quality, textured 3D models annotated with fine-grained, hierarchical part labels across 50 categories. We benchmark PartNeXt on two tasks: (1) class-agnostic part segmentation, where state-of-the-art methods (e.g., PartField, SAMPart3D) struggle with fine-grained and leaf-level parts, and (2) 3D part-centric question answering, a new benchmark for 3D-LLMs that reveals significant gaps in open-vocabulary part grounding. Additionally, training Point-SAM on PartNeXt yields substantial gains over PartNet, underscoring the dataset's superior quality and diversity. By combining scalable annotation, texture-aware labels, and multi-task evaluation, PartNeXt opens new avenues for research in structured 3D understanding.

Differential privacy is widely employed in decentralized learning to safeguard sensitive data by introducing noise into model updates. However, existing approaches that use fixed-variance noise often degrade model performance and reduce training efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach called decentralized learning with adaptive differential privacy via variance-reduced stochastic gradient push (ADP-VRSGP). This method dynamically adjusts both the noise variance and the learning rate using a stepwise-decaying schedule, which accelerates training and enhances final model performance while providing node-level personalized privacy guarantees. To counteract the slowed convergence caused by large-variance noise in early iterations, we introduce a progressive gradient fusion strategy that leverages historical gradients. Furthermore, ADP-VRSGP incorporates decentralized push-sum and aggregation techniques, making it particularly suitable for time-varying communication topologies. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that ADP-VRSGP achieves robust convergence with an appropriate learning rate, significantly improving training stability and speed. Experimental results validate that our method outperforms existing baselines across multiple scenarios, highlighting its efficacy in addressing the challenges of privacy-preserving decentralized learning.

In Autonomous Driving, cyclists belong to the safety-critical class of Vulnerable Road Users (VRU), and accurate estimation of their pose is critical for cyclist crossing intention classification, behavior prediction, and collision avoidance. Unlike rigid objects, articulated bicycles are composed of movable rigid parts linked by joints and constrained by a kinematic structure. 6D pose methods can estimate the 3D rotation and translation of rigid bicycles, but 6D becomes insufficient when the steering/pedals angles of the bicycle vary. That is because: 1) varying the articulated pose of the bicycle causes its 3D bounding box to vary as well, and 2) the 3D box orientation is not necessarily aligned to the orientation of the steering which determines the actual intended travel direction. In this work, we introduce a method for category-level 8D pose estimation for articulated bicycles and cyclists from a single RGB image. Besides being able to estimate the 3D translation and rotation of a bicycle from a single image, our method also estimates the rotations of its steering handles and pedals with respect to the bicycle body frame. These two new parameters enable the estimation of a more fine-grained bicycle pose state and travel direction. Our proposed model jointly estimates the 8D pose and the 3D Keypoints of articulated bicycles, and trains with a mix of synthetic and real image data to generalize on real images. We include an evaluation section where we evaluate the accuracy of our estimated 8D pose parameters, and our method shows promising results by achieving competitive scores when compared against state-of-the-art category-level 6D pose estimators that use rigid canonical object templates for matching.

The Ensemble Score Filter (EnSF) has emerged as a promising approach to leverage score-based diffusion models for solving high-dimensional and nonlinear data assimilation problems. While initial applications of EnSF to the Lorenz-96 model and the quasi-geostrophic system showed potential, the current method employs a heuristic weighted sum to combine the prior and the likelihood score functions. This introduces a structural error into the estimation of the posterior score function in the nonlinear setting. This work addresses this challenge by developing an iterative ensemble score filter (IEnSF) that applies an iterative algorithm as an outer loop around the reverse-time stochastic differential equation solver. When the state dynamics or the observation operator is nonlinear, the iterative algorithm can gradually reduce the posterior score estimation error by improving the accuracy of approximating the conditional expectation of the likelihood score function. The number of iterations required depends on the distance between the prior and posterior distributions and the nonlinearity of the observation operator. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the IEnSF algorithm substantially reduces the error in posterior score estimation in the nonlinear setting and thus improves the accuracy of tracking high-dimensional dynamical systems.

Robotic arms require precise, task-aware trajectory planning, yet sequence models that ignore motion structure often yield invalid or inefficient executions. We present a Path-based Transformer that encodes robot motion with a 3-grid (where/what/when) representation and constraint-masked decoding, enforcing lattice-adjacent moves and workspace bounds while reasoning over task graphs and action order. Trained on 53,755 trajectories (80% train / 20% validation), the model aligns closely with ground truth -- 89.44% stepwise accuracy, 93.32% precision, 89.44% recall, and 90.40% F1 -- with 99.99% of paths legal by construction. Compiled to motor primitives on an xArm Lite 6 with a depth-camera digital twin, it attains up to 97.5% reach and 92.5% pick success in controlled tests, and 86.7% end-to-end success across 60 language-specified tasks in cluttered scenes, absorbing slips and occlusions via local re-grounding without global re-planning. These results show that path-structured representations enable Transformers to generate accurate, reliable, and interpretable robot trajectories, bridging graph-based planning and sequence-based learning and providing a practical foundation for general-purpose manipulation and sim-to-real transfer.

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel attribute-object compositions based on the knowledge learned from seen ones. Existing methods suffer from performance degradation caused by the distribution shift of label space at test time, which stems from the inclusion of unseen compositions recombined from attributes and objects. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel approach that accumulates comprehensive knowledge in both textual and visual modalities from unsupervised data to update multimodal prototypes at test time. Building on this, we further design an adaptive update weight to control the degree of prototype adjustment, enabling the model to flexibly adapt to distribution shift during testing. Moreover, a dynamic priority queue is introduced that stores high-confidence images to acquire visual knowledge from historical images for inference. Considering the semantic consistency of multimodal knowledge, we align textual and visual prototypes by multimodal collaborative representation learning. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets under both closed-world and open-world settings. Code will be available at this https URL .

We propose a new GAN-based unsupervised model for disentangled representation learning. The new model is discovered in an attempt to utilize the Information Bottleneck (IB) framework to the optimization of GAN, thereby named IB-GAN. The architecture of IB-GAN is partially similar to that of InfoGAN but has a critical difference; an intermediate layer of the generator is leveraged to constrain the mutual information between the input and the generated output. The intermediate stochastic layer can serve as a learnable latent distribution that is trained with the generator jointly in an end-to-end fashion. As a result, the generator of IB-GAN can harness the latent space in a disentangled and interpretable manner. With the experiments on dSprites and Color-dSprites dataset, we demonstrate that IB-GAN achieves competitive disentanglement scores to those of state-of-the-art \b{eta}-VAEs and outperforms InfoGAN. Moreover, the visual quality and the diversity of samples generated by IB-GAN are often better than those by \b{eta}-VAEs and Info-GAN in terms of FID score on CelebA and 3D Chairs dataset.

Current search agents fundamentally lack the ability to simultaneously perform \textit{deep} reasoning over multi-hop retrieval and \textit{wide}-scale information collection-a critical deficiency for real-world applications like comprehensive market analysis and business development. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepWideSearch, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agents to integrate depth and width in information seeking. In DeepWideSearch, agents must process a large volume of data, each requiring deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval paths. Specifically, we propose two methods to converse established datasets, resulting in a curated collection of 220 questions spanning 15 diverse domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art agents achieve only 2.39% average success rate on DeepWideSearch, highlighting the substantial challenge of integrating depth and width search in information-seeking tasks. Furthermore, our error analysis reveals four failure modes: lack of reflection, overreliance on internal knowledge, insufficient retrieval, and context overflow-exposing key limitations in current agent architectures. We publicly release DeepWideSearch to catalyze future research on more capable and robust information-seeking agents.

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classic NP-hard problem that has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. While neural-based methods have shown promise for solving TSPs, they still face challenges in scaling to larger instances, particularly in memory constraints associated with global heatmaps, edge weights, or access matrices, as well as in generating high-quality initial solutions and insufficient global guidance for efficiently navigating vast search spaces. To address these challenges, we propose a Hyper Tour Guided Neighborhood Search (HyperNS) method for large-scale TSP instances. Inspired by the ``clustering first, route second" strategy, our approach initially divides the TSP instance into clusters using a sparse heatmap graph and abstracts them as supernodes, followed by the generation of a hyper tour to guide both the initialization and optimization processes. This method reduces the search space by focusing on edges relevant to the hyper tour, leading to more efficient and effective optimization. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing neural-based methods, particularly in handling larger-scale instances, offering a significant reduction in the gap to the optimal solution.

The increasing scale of large language models (LLMs) necessitates highly efficient collective communication frameworks, particularly as training workloads extend to hundreds of thousands of GPUs. Traditional communication methods face significant throughput and latency limitations at this scale, hindering both the development and deployment of state-of-the-art models. This paper presents the NCCLX collective communication framework, developed at Meta, engineered to optimize performance across the full LLM lifecycle, from the synchronous demands of large-scale training to the low-latency requirements of inference. The framework is designed to support complex workloads on clusters exceeding 100,000 GPUs, ensuring reliable, high-throughput, and low-latency data exchange. Empirical evaluation on the Llama4 model demonstrates substantial improvements in communication efficiency. This research contributes a robust solution for enabling the next generation of LLMs to operate at unprecedented scales.

We present a reinforcement learning framework for quadrupedal wall-climbing locomotion that explicitly addresses uncertainty in magnetic foot adhesion. A physics-based adhesion model of a quadrupedal magnetic climbing robot is incorporated into simulation to capture partial contact, air-gap sensitivity, and probabilistic attachment failures. To stabilize learning and enable reliable transfer, we design a three-phase curriculum: (1) acquire a crawl gait on flat ground without adhesion, (2) gradually rotate the gravity vector to vertical while activating the adhesion model, and (3) inject stochastic adhesion failures to encourage slip recovery. The learned policy achieves a high success rate, strong adhesion retention, and rapid recovery from detachment in simulation under degraded adhesion. Compared with a model predictive control (MPC) baseline that assumes perfect adhesion, our controller maintains locomotion when attachment is intermittently lost. Hardware experiments with the untethered robot further confirm robust vertical crawling on steel surfaces, maintaining stability despite transient misalignment and incomplete attachment. These results show that combining curriculum learning with realistic adhesion modeling provides a resilient sim-to-real framework for magnetic climbing robots in complex environments.

Understanding and reasoning over tables is a critical capability for many real-world applications. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on this task, but current approaches remain limited. Fine-tuning based methods strengthen language reasoning; yet they are prone to arithmetic errors and hallucination. In contrast, tool-based methods enable precise table manipulation but rely on rigid schemas and lack semantic understanding. These complementary drawbacks highlight the need for approaches that integrate robust reasoning with reliable table processing. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Minds, a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. This design enables each agent to focus on a specific aspect of the task while leveraging code execution for precise table manipulation. Building on this workflow, we introduce a self-improvement training framework that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts to generate pseudo-gold trajectories and optimize agents with reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments show that Mixture-of-Minds delivers substantial gains, reaching 62.13% on TableBench and surpassing OpenAI-o4-mini-high. These results demonstrate the promise of combining structured multi-agent workflows with RL to advance table understanding.

Robots often face manipulation tasks in environments where vision is inadequate due to clutter, occlusions, or poor lighting--for example, reaching a shutoff valve at the back of a sink cabinet or locating a light switch above a crowded shelf. In such settings, robots, much like humans, must rely on contact feedback to distinguish free from occupied space and navigate around obstacles. Many of these environments often exhibit strong structural priors--for instance, pipes often span across sink cabinets--that can be exploited to anticipate unseen structure and avoid unnecessary collisions. We present a theoretically complete and empirically efficient framework for manipulation in the blind that integrates contact feedback with structural priors to enable robust operation in unknown environments. The framework comprises three tightly coupled components: (i) a contact detection and localization module that utilizes joint torque sensing with a contact particle filter to detect and localize contacts, (ii) an occupancy estimation module that uses the history of contact observations to build a partial occupancy map of the workspace and extrapolate it into unexplored regions with learned predictors, and (iii) a planning module that accounts for the fact that contact localization estimates and occupancy predictions can be noisy, computing paths that avoid collisions and complete tasks efficiently without eliminating feasible solutions. We evaluate the system in simulation and in the real world on a UR10e manipulator across two domestic tasks--(i) manipulating a valve under a kitchen sink surrounded by pipes and (ii) retrieving a target object from a cluttered shelf. Results show that the framework reliably solves these tasks, achieving up to a 2x reduction in task completion time compared to baselines, with ablations confirming the contribution of each module.

Temporally consistent depth estimation from stereo video is critical for real-world applications such as augmented reality, where inconsistent depth estimation disrupts the immersion of users. Despite its importance, this task remains challenging due to the difficulty in modeling long-term temporal consistency in a computationally efficient manner. Previous methods attempt to address this by aggregating spatio-temporal information but face a fundamental trade-off: limited temporal modeling provides only modest gains, whereas capturing long-range dependencies significantly increases computational cost. To address this limitation, we introduce a memory buffer for modeling long-range spatio-temporal consistency while achieving efficient dynamic stereo matching. Inspired by the two-stage decision-making process in humans, we propose a \textbf{P}ick-and-\textbf{P}lay \textbf{M}emory (PPM) construction module for dynamic \textbf{Stereo} matching, dubbed as \textbf{PPMStereo}. PPM consists of a `pick' process that identifies the most relevant frames and a `play' process that weights the selected frames adaptively for spatio-temporal aggregation. This two-stage collaborative process maintains a compact yet highly informative memory buffer while achieving temporally consistent information aggregation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PPMStereo, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and temporal consistency. % Notably, PPMStereo achieves 0.62/1.11 TEPE on the Sintel clean/final (17.3\% \& 9.02\% improvements over BiDAStereo) with fewer computational costs. Codes are available at \textcolor{blue}{this https URL}.

We propose a gradient-based framework for optimizing parametric nonlinear Gaussian channels via mutual information maximization. Leveraging the score-to-Fisher bridge (SFB) methodology, we derive a computationally tractable formula for the information gradient that is the gradient of mutual information with respect to the parameters of the nonlinear front-end. Our formula expresses this gradient in terms of two key components: the score function of the marginal output distribution, which can be learned via denoising score matching (DSM), and the Jacobian of the front-end function, which is handled efficiently using the vector-Jacobian product (VJP) within automatic differentiation frameworks. This enables practical parameter optimization through gradient ascent. Furthermore, we extend this framework to task-oriented scenarios, deriving gradients for both task-specific mutual information, where a task variable depends on the channel input, and the information bottleneck (IB) objective. A key advantage of our approach is that it facilitates end-to-end optimization of the nonlinear front-end without requiring explicit computation on the output distribution. Extensive experimental validation confirms the correctness of our information gradient formula against analytical solutions and demonstrates its effectiveness in optimizing both linear and nonlinear channels toward their objectives.

Large-scale video generation models have demonstrated high visual realism in diverse contexts, spurring interest in their potential as general-purpose world simulators. Existing benchmarks focus on individual subjects rather than scenes with multiple interacting people. However, the plausibility of multi-agent dynamics in generated videos remains unverified. We propose a rigorous evaluation protocol to benchmark text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models as implicit simulators of pedestrian dynamics. For I2V, we leverage start frames from established datasets to enable comparison with a ground truth video dataset. For T2V, we develop a prompt suite to explore diverse pedestrian densities and interactions. A key component is a method to reconstruct 2D bird's-eye view trajectories from pixel-space without known camera parameters. Our analysis reveals that leading models have learned surprisingly effective priors for plausible multi-agent behavior. However, failure modes like merging and disappearing people highlight areas for future improvement.

We propose Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Human Values (RLEV), a method that aligns Large Language Model (LLM) optimization directly with quantifiable human value signals. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively trains models in objective domains using binary correctness rewards, it overlooks that not all tasks are equally significant. RLEV extends this framework by incorporating human-defined value signals directly into the reward function. Using exam-style data with explicit ground-truth value labels, RLEV consistently outperforms correctness-only baselines across multiple RL algorithms and model scales. Crucially, RLEV policies not only improve value-weighted accuracy but also learn a value-sensitive termination policy: concise for low-value prompts, thorough for high-value ones. We demonstrate this behavior stems from value-weighted gradient amplification on end-of-sequence tokens. Ablation studies confirm the gain is causally linked to value alignment. RLEV remains robust under noisy value signals, such as difficulty-based labels, demonstrating that optimizing for an explicit utility function offers a practical path to aligning LLMs with human priorities.

Large Language Models generate complex reasoning chains that reveal their decision-making, yet verifying the faithfulness and harmlessness of these intermediate steps remains a critical unsolved problem. Existing auditing methods are centralized, opaque, and hard to scale, creating significant risks for deploying proprietary models in high-stakes domains. We identify four core challenges: (1) Robustness: Centralized auditors are single points of failure, prone to bias or attacks. (2) Scalability: Reasoning traces are too long for manual verification. (3) Opacity: Closed auditing undermines public trust. (4) Privacy: Exposing full reasoning risks model theft or distillation. We propose TRUST, a transparent, decentralized auditing framework that overcomes these limitations via: (1) A consensus mechanism among diverse auditors, guaranteeing correctness under up to $30\%$ malicious participants. (2) A hierarchical DAG decomposition of reasoning traces, enabling scalable, parallel auditing. (3) A blockchain ledger that records all verification decisions for public accountability. (4) Privacy-preserving segmentation, sharing only partial reasoning steps to protect proprietary logic. We provide theoretical guarantees for the security and economic incentives of the TRUST framework. Experiments across multiple LLMs (GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-r1, Qwen) and reasoning tasks (math, medical, science, humanities) show TRUST effectively detects reasoning flaws and remains robust against adversarial auditors. Our work pioneers decentralized AI auditing, offering a practical path toward safe and trustworthy LLM deployment.

Temporal Intention Localization (TIL) is crucial for video surveillance, focusing on identifying varying levels of suspicious intentions to improve security monitoring. However, existing discrete classification methods fail to capture the continuous nature of suspicious intentions, limiting early intervention and explainability. In this paper, we propose the Suspicion Progression Analysis Network (SPAN), which shifts from discrete classification to continuous regression, enabling the capture of fluctuating and evolving suspicious intentions. We reveal that suspicion exhibits long-term dependencies and cumulative effects, similar to Temporal Point Process (TPP) theory. Based on these insights, we define a suspicion score formula that models continuous changes while accounting for temporal characteristics. We also introduce Suspicion Coefficient Modulation, which adjusts suspicion coefficients using multimodal information to reflect the varying impacts of suspicious actions. Additionally, the Concept-Anchored Mapping method is proposed to link suspicious actions to predefined intention concepts, offering insights into both the actions and their potential underlying intentions. Extensive experiments on the HAI dataset show that SPAN significantly outperforms existing methods, reducing MSE by 19.8% and improving average mAP by 1.78%. Notably, SPAN achieves a 2.74% mAP gain in low-frequency cases, demonstrating its superior ability to capture subtle behavioral changes. Compared to discrete classification systems, our continuous suspicion modeling approach enables earlier detection and proactive intervention, greatly enhancing system explainability and practical utility in security applications.

Large language models (LLMs) remain broadly open and highly steerable: they imitate at scale, accept arbitrary system prompts, and readily adopt multiple personae. By analogy to human development, we hypothesize that progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) involves a lock-in phase: a transition from open imitation to identity consolidation, in which goal structures, refusals, preferences, and internal representations become comparatively stable and resistant to external steering. We formalize this phase, link it to known phenomena in learning dynamics, and propose operational metrics for onset detection. Experimentally, we demonstrate that while the behavioral consolidation is rapid and non-linear, its side-effects on general capabilities are not monolithic. Our results reveal a spectrum of outcomes--from performance trade-offs in small models, through largely cost-free adoption in mid-scale models, to transient instabilities in large, quantized models. We argue that such consolidation is a prerequisite for AGI-level reliability and also a critical control point for safety: identities can be deliberately engineered for reliability, yet may also emerge spontaneously during scaling, potentially hardening unpredictable goals and behaviors.

Question Answering (QA) systems have traditionally relied on structured text data, but the rapid growth of multimedia content (images, audio, video, and structured metadata) has introduced new challenges and opportunities for retrieval-augmented QA. In this survey, we review recent advancements in QA systems that integrate multimedia retrieval pipelines, focusing on architectures that align vision, language, and audio modalities with user queries. We categorize approaches based on retrieval methods, fusion techniques, and answer generation strategies, and analyze benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and performance tradeoffs. Furthermore, we highlight key challenges such as cross-modal alignment, latency-accuracy tradeoffs, and semantic grounding, and outline open problems and future research directions for building more robust and context-aware QA systems leveraging multimedia data.

The development of foundation models for brain MRI depends critically on the scale, diversity, and consistency of available data, yet systematic assessments of these factors remain scarce. In this study, we analyze 54 publicly accessible brain MRI datasets encompassing over 538,031 to provide a structured, multi-level overview tailored to foundation model development. At the dataset level, we characterize modality composition, disease coverage, and dataset scale, revealing strong imbalances between large healthy cohorts and smaller clinical populations. At the image level, we quantify voxel spacing, orientation, and intensity distributions across 15 representative datasets, demonstrating substantial heterogeneity that can influence representation learning. We then perform a quantitative evaluation of preprocessing variability, examining how intensity normalization, bias field correction, skull stripping, spatial registration, and interpolation alter voxel statistics and geometry. While these steps improve within-dataset consistency, residual differences persist between datasets. Finally, feature-space case study using a 3D DenseNet121 shows measurable residual covariate shift after standardized preprocessing, confirming that harmonization alone cannot eliminate inter-dataset bias. Together, these analyses provide a unified characterization of variability in public brain MRI resources and emphasize the need for preprocessing-aware and domain-adaptive strategies in the design of generalizable brain MRI foundation models.

This paper explores the spatial reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) over textual input through a suite of five tasks aimed at probing their spatial understanding and computational abilities. The models were tested on both fundamental spatial reasoning and multi-step problem-solving within structured grid-based environments using tasks such as quadrant identification, geometric transformations, distance evaluation, word searches, and tile sliding. Each task was scaled in complexity through increasing grid dimensions, requiring models to extend beyond simple pattern recognition into abstract spatial reasoning. Our results reveal that while LLMs demonstrate moderate success in all tasks with small complexity and size, performance drops off rapidly as scale increases, with an average loss in accuracy of 42.7%, and reaching as high as 84%. Every test that began with over 50% accuracy showed a loss of at least 48%, illustrating the consistent nature of the deterioration. Furthermore, their struggles with scaling complexity hint at a lack of robust spatial representations in their underlying architectures. This paper underscores the gap between linguistic and spatial reasoning in LLMs, offering insights into their current limitations, and laying the groundwork for future integrative benchmarks at the intersection of language and geometry.

Constrained optimization provides a common framework for dealing with conflicting objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). In most of these settings, the objectives (and constraints) are expressed though the expected accumulated reward. However, this formulation neglects risky or even possibly catastrophic events at the tails of the reward distribution, and is often insufficient for high-stakes applications in which the risk involved in outliers is critical. In this work, we propose a framework for risk-aware constrained RL, which exhibits per-stage robustness properties jointly in reward values and time using optimized certainty equivalents (OCEs). Our framework ensures an exact equivalent to the original constrained problem within a parameterized strong Lagrangian duality framework under appropriate constraint qualifications, and yields a simple algorithmic recipe which can be wrapped around standard RL solvers, such as PPO. Lastly, we establish the convergence of the proposed algorithm under common assumptions, and verify the risk-aware properties of our approach through several numerical experiments.

Replicability, introduced by (Impagliazzo et al. STOC '22), is the notion that algorithms should remain stable under a resampling of their inputs (given access to shared randomness). While a strong and interesting notion of stability, the cost of replicability can be prohibitive: there is no replicable algorithm, for instance, for tasks as simple as threshold learning (Bun et al. STOC '23). Given such strong impossibility results we ask: under what approximate notions of replicability is learning possible? In this work, we propose three natural relaxations of replicability in the context of PAC learning: (1) Pointwise: the learner must be consistent on any fixed input, but not across all inputs simultaneously, (2) Approximate: the learner must output hypotheses that classify most of the distribution consistently, (3) Semi: the algorithm is fully replicable, but may additionally use shared unlabeled samples. In all three cases, for constant replicability parameters, we obtain sample-optimal agnostic PAC learners: (1) and (2) are achievable for ``free" using $\Theta(d/\alpha^2)$ samples, while (3) requires $\Theta(d^2/\alpha^2)$ labeled samples.

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have a well-established theory in Euclidean spaces, yet still lack general formulations and constructive synthesis tools for systems evolving on manifolds common in robotics and aerospace applications. In this paper, we develop a general theory of geometric CBFs on bundles and, for control-affine systems, recover the standard optimization-based CBF controllers and their smooth analogues. Then, by generalizing kinetic energy-based CBF backstepping to Riemannian manifolds, we provide a constructive CBF synthesis technique for geometric mechanical systems, as well as easily verifiable conditions under which it succeeds. Further, this technique utilizes mechanical structure to avoid computations on higher-order tangent bundles. We demonstrate its application to an underactuated satellite on SO(3).

Optimizing artificial intelligence (AI) for dynamic environments remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning research. In this paper, we examine evolutionary training methods for optimizing AI to solve the game 2048, a 2D sliding puzzle. 2048, with its mix of strategic gameplay and stochastic elements, presents an ideal playground for studying decision-making, long-term planning, and dynamic adaptation. We implemented two distinct systems: a two-agent metaprompting system where a "thinker" large language model (LLM) agent refines gameplay strategies for an "executor" LLM agent, and a single-agent system based on refining a value function for a limited Monte Carlo Tree Search. We also experimented with rollback features to avoid performance degradation. Our results demonstrate the potential of evolutionary refinement techniques in improving AI performance in non-deterministic environments. The single-agent system achieved substantial improvements, with an average increase of 473.2 points per cycle, and with clear upward trends (correlation $\rho$=0.607) across training cycles. The LLM's understanding of the game grew as well, shown in its development of increasingly advanced strategies. Conversely, the two-agent system did not garner much improvement, highlighting the inherent limits of meta-prompting.

Prompt design plays a crucial role in text-to-video (T2V) generation, yet user-provided prompts are often short, unstructured, and misaligned with training data, limiting the generative potential of diffusion-based T2V models. We present \textbf{RAPO++}, a cross-stage prompt optimization framework that unifies training-data--aligned refinement, test-time iterative scaling, and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning to substantially improve T2V generation without modifying the underlying generative backbone. In \textbf{Stage 1}, Retrieval-Augmented Prompt Optimization (RAPO) enriches user prompts with semantically relevant modifiers retrieved from a relation graph and refactors them to match training distributions, enhancing compositionality and multi-object fidelity. \textbf{Stage 2} introduces Sample-Specific Prompt Optimization (SSPO), a closed-loop mechanism that iteratively refines prompts using multi-source feedback -- including semantic alignment, spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and task-specific signals such as optical flow -- yielding progressively improved video generation quality. \textbf{Stage 3} leverages optimized prompt pairs from SSPO to fine-tune the rewriter LLM, internalizing task-specific optimization patterns and enabling efficient, high-quality prompt generation even before inference. Extensive experiments across five state-of-the-art T2V models and five benchmarks demonstrate that RAPO++ achieves significant gains in semantic alignment, compositional reasoning, temporal stability, and physical plausibility, outperforming existing methods by large margins. Our results highlight RAPO++ as a model-agnostic, cost-efficient, and scalable solution that sets a new standard for prompt optimization in T2V generation. The code is available at this https URL.

Modern language models operate on subword-tokenized text in order to make a trade-off between model size, inference speed, and vocabulary coverage. A side effect of this is that, during inference, models are evaluated by measuring the probability of only the specific tokenization produced as the output, despite there being many possible ways to represent the same text with a subword vocabulary. Recent studies have argued instead for evaluating LLMs by marginalization - the probability mass of all tokenizations of a given text. Marginalization is difficult due to the number of possible tokenizations of a text, so often approximate marginalization is done via sampling. However, a downside of sampling is that an expensive generation step must be performed by the LLM for each sample, which limits the number of samples that can be acquired given a runtime budget, and therefore also the accuracy of the approximation. Since computing the probability of a sequence given the tokenization is relatively cheap compared to actually generating it, we investigate sampling strategies that are decoding-free - they require no generation from the LLM, instead relying entirely on extremely cheap sampling strategies that are model and tokenizer agnostic. We investigate the approximation quality and speed of decoding-free sampling strategies for a number of open models to find that they provide sufficiently accurate marginal estimates at a small fraction of the runtime cost and demonstrate its use on a set of downstream inference tasks.

The development of accessible screening tools for early cancer detection in dogs represents a significant challenge in veterinary medicine. Routine laboratory data offer a promising, low-cost source for such tools, but their utility is hampered by the non-specificity of individual biomarkers and the severe class imbalance inherent in screening populations. This study assesses the feasibility of cancer risk classification using the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS) cohort under real-world constraints, including the grouping of diverse cancer types and the inclusion of post-diagnosis samples. A comprehensive benchmark evaluation was conducted, systematically comparing 126 analytical pipelines that comprised various machine learning models, feature selection methods, and data balancing techniques. Data were partitioned at the patient level to prevent leakage. The optimal model, a Logistic Regression classifier with class weighting and recursive feature elimination, demonstrated moderate ranking ability (AUROC = 0.815; 95% CI: 0.793-0.836) but poor clinical classification performance (F1-score = 0.25, Positive Predictive Value = 0.15). While a high Negative Predictive Value (0.98) was achieved, insufficient recall (0.79) precludes its use as a reliable rule-out test. Interpretability analysis with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) revealed that predictions were driven by non-specific features like age and markers of inflammation and anemia. It is concluded that while a statistically detectable cancer signal exists in routine lab data, it is too weak and confounded for clinically reliable discrimination from normal aging or other inflammatory conditions. This work establishes a critical performance ceiling for this data modality in isolation and underscores that meaningful progress in computational veterinary oncology will require integration of multi-modal data sources.

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), driven by language models, diffusion models and masked generation, have achieved impressive naturalness in speech synthesis. Nevertheless, stability and fidelity remain key challenges, manifesting as mispronunciations, audible noise, and quality degradation. To address these issues, we introduce Vox-Evaluator, a multi-level evaluator designed to guide the correction of erroneous speech segments and preference alignment for TTS systems. It is capable of identifying the temporal boundaries of erroneous segments and providing a holistic quality assessment of the generated speech. Specifically, to refine erroneous segments and enhance the robustness of the zero-shot TTS model, we propose to automatically identify acoustic errors with the evaluator, mask the erroneous segments, and finally regenerate speech conditioning on the correct portions. In addition, the fine-gained information obtained from Vox-Evaluator can guide the preference alignment for TTS model, thereby reducing the bad cases in speech synthesis. Due to the lack of suitable training datasets for the Vox-Evaluator, we also constructed a synthesized text-speech dataset annotated with fine-grained pronunciation errors or audio quality issues. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Vox-Evaluator in enhancing the stability and fidelity of TTS systems through the speech correction mechanism and preference optimization. The demos are shown.

Cloud infrastructure is managed through a mix of interfaces -- traditionally, cloud consoles, command-line interfaces (CLI), and SDKs are the tools of choice. Recently, Infrastructure-as-Code/IaC frameworks (e.g., Terraform) have quickly gained popularity. Unlike conventional tools, IaC~frameworks encode the infrastructure in a "source-of-truth" configuration. They are capable of automatically carrying out modifications to the cloud -- deploying, updating, or destroying resources -- to bring the actual infrastructure into alignment with the IaC configuration. However, when IaC is used alongside consoles, CLIs, or SDKs, it loses visibility into external changes, causing infrastructure drift, where the configuration becomes outdated, and later IaC operations may undo valid updates or trigger errors. We present NSync, an automated system for IaC reconciliation that propagates out-of-band changes back into the IaC program. Our key insight is that infrastructure changes eventually all occur via cloud API invocations -- the lowest layer for cloud management operations. NSync gleans insights from API traces to detect drift (i.e., non-IaC changes) and reconcile it (i.e., update the IaC configuration to capture the changes). It employs an agentic architecture that leverages LLMs to infer high-level intents from noisy API sequences, synthesize targeted IaC updates using specialized tools, and continually improve through a self-evolving knowledge base of past reconciliations. We further introduce a novel evaluation pipeline for injecting realistic drifts into cloud infrastructure and assessing reconciliation performance. Experiments across five real-world Terraform projects and 372 drift scenarios show that NSync outperforms the baseline both in terms of accuracy (from 0.71 to 0.97 pass@3) and token efficiency (1.47$\times$ improvement).

Recent advances in pre-trained text-to-image flow models have enabled remarkable progress in text-based image editing. Mainstream approaches always adopt a corruption-then-restoration paradigm, where the source image is first corrupted into an ``intermediate state'' and then restored to the target image under the prompt guidance. However, current methods construct this intermediate state in a target-agnostic manner, i.e., they primarily focus on realizing source image reconstruction while neglecting the semantic gaps towards the specific editing target. This design inherently results in limited editability or inconsistency when the desired modifications substantially deviate from the source. In this paper, we argue that the intermediate state should be target-aware, i.e., selectively corrupting editing-relevant contents while preserving editing-irrelevant ones. To this end, we propose FlowCycle, a novel inversion-free and flow-based editing framework that parameterizes corruption with learnable noises and optimizes them through a cycle-consistent process. By iteratively editing the source to the target and recovering back to the source with dual consistency constraints, FlowCycle learns to produce a target-aware intermediate state, enabling faithful modifications while preserving source consistency. Extensive ablations have demonstrated that FlowCycle achieves superior editing quality and consistency over state-of-the-art methods.

Accurate fetal movement (FM) detection is essential for assessing prenatal health, as abnormal movement patterns can indicate underlying complications such as placental dysfunction or fetal distress. Traditional methods, including maternal perception and cardiotocography (CTG), suffer from subjectivity and limited accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose Contrastive Ultrasound Video Representation Learning (CURL), a novel self-supervised learning framework for FM detection from extended fetal ultrasound video recordings. Our approach leverages a dual-contrastive loss, incorporating both spatial and temporal contrastive learning, to learn robust motion representations. Additionally, we introduce a task-specific sampling strategy, ensuring the effective separation of movement and non-movement segments during self-supervised training, while enabling flexible inference on arbitrarily long ultrasound recordings through a probabilistic fine-tuning approach. Evaluated on an in-house dataset of 92 subjects, each with 30-minute ultrasound sessions, CURL achieves a sensitivity of 78.01% and an AUROC of 81.60%, demonstrating its potential for reliable and objective FM analysis. These results highlight the potential of self-supervised contrastive learning for fetal movement analysis, paving the way for improved prenatal monitoring and clinical decision-making.

Adapting pretrained diffusion-based generative models for text-driven image editing with negligible tuning overhead has demonstrated remarkable potential. A classical adaptation paradigm, as followed by these methods, first infers the generative trajectory inversely for a given source image by image inversion, then performs image editing along the inferred trajectory guided by the target text prompts. However, the performance of image editing is heavily limited by the approximation errors introduced during image inversion by diffusion models, which arise from the absence of exact supervision in the intermediate generative steps. To circumvent this issue, we investigate the parameter-efficient adaptation of VQ-based generative models for image editing, and leverage their inherent characteristic that the exact intermediate quantized representations of a source image are attainable, enabling more effective supervision for precise image inversion. Specifically, we propose \emph{EditInfinity}, which adapts \emph{Infinity}, a binary-quantized generative model, for image editing. We propose an efficient yet effective image inversion mechanism that integrates text prompting rectification and image style preservation, enabling precise image inversion. Furthermore, we devise a holistic smoothing strategy which allows our \emph{EditInfinity} to perform image editing with high fidelity to source images and precise semantic alignment to the text prompts. Extensive experiments on the PIE-Bench benchmark across "add", "change", and "delete" editing operations, demonstrate the superior performance of our model compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based baselines. Code available at: this https URL.

The ability to model interactions among agents is crucial for effective coordination and understanding their cooperation mechanisms in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, previous efforts to model high-order interactions have been primarily hindered by the combinatorial explosion or the opaque nature of their black-box network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel value decomposition framework, called Continued Fraction Q-Learning (QCoFr), which can flexibly capture arbitrary-order agent interactions with only linear complexity $\mathcal{O}\left({n}\right)$ in the number of agents, thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion when modeling rich cooperation. Furthermore, we introduce the variational information bottleneck to extract latent information for estimating credits. This latent information helps agents filter out noisy interactions, thereby significantly enhancing both cooperation and interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QCoFr not only consistently achieves better performance but also provides interpretability that aligns with our theoretical analysis.

Personalized federated learning (PFL) addresses a critical challenge of collaboratively training customized models for clients with heterogeneous and scarce local data. Conventional federated learning, which relies on a single consensus model, proves inadequate under such data heterogeneity. Its standard aggregation method of weighting client updates heuristically or by data volume, operates under an equal-contribution assumption, failing to account for the actual utility and reliability of each client's update. This often results in suboptimal personalization and aggregation bias. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Contribution-Oriented PFL (CO-PFL), a novel algorithm that dynamically estimates each client's contribution for global aggregation. CO-PFL performs a joint assessment by analyzing both gradient direction discrepancies and prediction deviations, leveraging information from gradient and data subspaces. This dual-subspace analysis provides a principled and discriminative aggregation weight for each client, emphasizing high-quality updates. Furthermore, to bolster personalization adaptability and optimization stability, CO-PFL cohesively integrates a parameter-wise personalization mechanism with mask-aware momentum optimization. Our approach effectively mitigates aggregation bias, strengthens global coordination, and enhances local performance by facilitating the construction of tailored submodels with stable updates. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR10C, CINIC10, and Mini-ImageNet) confirm that CO-PFL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods in in personalization accuracy, robustness, scalability and convergence stability.

Recent research has focused on mitigating algorithmic bias in clustering by incorporating fairness constraints into algorithmic design. Notions such as disparate impact, community cohesion, and cost per population have been implemented to enforce equitable outcomes. Among these, group fairness (balance) ensures that each protected group is proportionally represented within every cluster. However, incorporating balance as a metric of fairness into spectral clustering algorithms has led to computational times that can be improved. This study aims to enhance the efficiency of spectral clustering algorithms by reformulating the constrained optimization problem using a new formulation derived from the Lagrangian method and the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury (SMW) identity, resulting in the Fair-SMW algorithm. Fair-SMW employs three alternatives to the Laplacian matrix with different spectral gaps to generate multiple variations of Fair-SMW, achieving clustering solutions with comparable balance to existing algorithms while offering improved runtime performance. We present the results of Fair-SMW, evaluated using the Stochastic Block Model (SBM) to measure both runtime efficiency and balance across real-world network datasets, including LastFM, FacebookNet, Deezer, and German. We achieve an improvement in computation time that is twice as fast as the state-of-the-art, and also flexible enough to achieve twice as much balance.

In real-world time series forecasting tasks, category information plays a pivotal role in capturing inherent data patterns. This paper introduces QKCV (Query-Key-Category-Value) attention, an extension of the traditional QKV framework that incorporates a static categorical embedding C to emphasize category-specific information. As a versatile plug-in module, QKCV enhances the forecasting accuracy of attention-based models (e.g., Vanilla Transformer, Informer, PatchTST, TFT) across diverse real-world datasets. Furthermore, QKCV demonstrates remarkable adaptability in fine-tuning univariate time series foundation model by solely updating the static embedding C while preserving pretrained weights, thereby reducing computational overhead and achieving superior fine-tuning performance.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet remain critically vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit weaknesses in cross-modal processing. We present a systematic study of multimodal jailbreaks targeting both vision-language and audio-language models, showing that even simple perceptual transformations can reliably bypass state-of-the-art safety filters. Our evaluation spans 1,900 adversarial prompts across three high-risk safety categories harmful content, CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear), and CSEM (Child Sexual Exploitation Material) tested against seven frontier models. We explore the effectiveness of attack techniques on MLLMs, including FigStep-Pro (visual keyword decomposition), Intelligent Masking (semantic obfuscation), and audio perturbations (Wave-Echo, Wave-Pitch, Wave-Speed). The results reveal severe vulnerabilities: models with almost perfect text-only safety (0\% ASR) suffer >75\% attack success under perceptually modified inputs, with FigStep-Pro achieving up to 89\% ASR in Llama-4 variants. Audio-based attacks further uncover provider-specific weaknesses, with even basic modality transfer yielding 25\% ASR for technical queries. These findings expose a critical gap between text-centric alignment and multimodal threats, demonstrating that current safeguards fail to generalize across cross-modal attacks. The accessibility of these attacks, which require minimal technical expertise, suggests that robust multimodal AI safety will require a paradigm shift toward broader semantic-level reasoning to mitigate possible risks.

Federated Learning (FL) aims to train a global inference model from remotely distributed clients, gaining popularity due to its benefit of improving data privacy. However, traditional FL often faces challenges in practical applications, including model overfitting and divergent local models due to limited and non-IID data among clients. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Bayesian meta-learning approach called meta-variational dropout (MetaVD). MetaVD learns to predict client-dependent dropout rates via a shared hypernetwork, enabling effective model personalization of FL algorithms in limited non-IID data settings. We also emphasize the posterior adaptation view of meta-learning and the posterior aggregation view of Bayesian FL via the conditional dropout posterior. We conducted extensive experiments on various sparse and non-IID FL datasets. MetaVD demonstrated excellent classification accuracy and uncertainty calibration performance, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) clients. MetaVD compresses the local model parameters needed for each client, mitigating model overfitting and reducing communication costs. Code is available at this https URL.

We introduce SpLIIF to generate implicit neural representations and enable arbitrary downscaling of weather variables. We train a model from sparse weather stations and topography over Japan and evaluate in- and out-of-distribution accuracy predicting temperature and wind, comparing it to both an interpolation baseline and CorrDiff. We find the model to be up to 50% better than both CorrDiff and the baseline at downscaling temperature, and around 10-20% better for wind.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant progress in recent years but are also prone to hallucination issues. They exhibit more hallucinations in longer, free-form responses, often attributed to accumulated uncertainties. In this paper, we ask: Does increased hallucination result solely from length-induced errors, or is there a deeper underlying mechanism? After a series of preliminary experiments and findings, we suggest that the risk of hallucinations is not caused by length itself but by the increased reliance on context for coherence and completeness in longer responses. Building on these insights, we propose a novel "induce-detect-suppress" framework that actively induces hallucinations through deliberately designed contexts, leverages induced instances for early detection of high-risk cases, and ultimately suppresses potential object-level hallucinations during actual decoding. Our approach achieves consistent, significant improvements across all benchmarks, demonstrating its efficacy. The strong detection and improved hallucination mitigation not only validate our framework but, more importantly, re-validate our hypothesis on context. Rather than solely pursuing performance gains, this study aims to provide new insights and serves as a first step toward a deeper exploration of hallucinations in LVLMs' longer responses.

This study experimentally validates the principle of large-scale satellite swarm control through learning-aided magnetic field interactions generated by satellite-mounted magnetorquers. This actuation presents a promising solution for the long-term formation maintenance of multiple satellites and has primarily been demonstrated in ground-based testbeds for two-satellite position control. However, as the number of satellites increases beyond three, fundamental challenges coupled with the high nonlinearity arise: 1) nonholonomic constraints, 2) underactuation, 3) scalability, and 4) computational cost. Previous studies have shown that time-integrated current control theoretically solves these problems, where the average actuator outputs align with the desired command, and a learning-based technique further enhances their performance. Through multiple experiments, we validate critical aspects of learning-aided time-integrated current control: (1) enhanced controllability of the averaged system dynamics, with a theoretically guaranteed error bound, and (2) decentralized current management. We design two-axis coils and a ground-based experimental setup utilizing an air-bearing platform, enabling a mathematical replication of orbital dynamics. Based on the effectiveness of the learned interaction model, we introduce NODA-MMH (Neural power-Optimal Dipole Allocation for certified learned Model-based Magnetically swarm control Harness) for model-based power-optimal swarm control. This study complements our tutorial paper on magnetically actuated swarms for the long-term formation maintenance problem.

We present a collection of different types of observation systems that work as differentiators. These observer-based differentiators can produce estimates for derivatives of a given signal, even though the given signal is prone to noise.

In this paper, we propose a provably convergent and practical framework for multi-objective reinforcement learning with max-min criterion. From a game-theoretic perspective, we reformulate max-min multi-objective reinforcement learning as a two-player zero-sum regularized continuous game and introduce an efficient algorithm based on mirror descent. Our approach simplifies the policy update while ensuring global last-iterate convergence. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis on our algorithm, including iteration complexity under both exact and approximate policy evaluations, as well as sample complexity bounds. To further enhance performance, we modify the proposed algorithm with adaptive regularization. Our experiments demonstrate the convergence behavior of the proposed algorithm in tabular settings, and our implementation for deep reinforcement learning significantly outperforms previous baselines in many MORL environments.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the currently most effective methods for predicting molecular properties but there remains a need for more accurate models. GNN accuracy can be improved by increasing the model complexity but this also increases the computational cost and memory requirement during training and inference. In this study, we develop Layer-to-Layer Knowledge Mixing (LKM), a novel self-knowledge distillation method that increases the accuracy of state-of-the-art GNNs while adding negligible computational complexity during training and inference. By minimizing the mean absolute distance between pre-existing hidden embeddings of GNN layers, LKM efficiently aggregates multi-hop and multi-scale information, enabling improved representation of both local and global molecular features. We evaluated LKM using three diverse GNN architectures (DimeNet++, MXMNet, and PAMNet) using datasets of quantum chemical properties (QM9, MD17 and Chignolin). We found that the LKM method effectively reduces the mean absolute error of quantum chemical and biophysical property predictions by up to 9.8% (QM9), 45.3% (MD17 Energy), and 22.9% (Chignolin). This work demonstrates the potential of LKM to significantly improve the accuracy of GNNs for chemical property prediction without any substantial increase in training and inference cost.

Open-vocabulary 3D segmentation is a fundamental yet challenging task, requiring a mutual understanding of both segmentation and language. However, existing Gaussian-splatting-based methods rely either on a single 3D language field, leading to inferior segmentation, or on pre-computed class-agnostic segmentations, suffering from error accumulation. To address these limitations, we present COS3D, a new collaborative prompt-segmentation framework that contributes to effectively integrating complementary language and segmentation cues throughout its entire pipeline. We first introduce the new concept of collaborative field, comprising an instance field and a language field, as the cornerstone for collaboration. During training, to effectively construct the collaborative field, our key idea is to capture the intrinsic relationship between the instance field and language field, through a novel instance-to-language feature mapping and designing an efficient two-stage training strategy. During inference, to bridge distinct characteristics of the two fields, we further design an adaptive language-to-instance prompt refinement, promoting high-quality prompt-segmentation inference. Extensive experiments not only demonstrate COS3D's leading performance over existing methods on two widely-used benchmarks but also show its high potential to various applications,~\ie, novel image-based 3D segmentation, hierarchical segmentation, and robotics. The code is publicly available at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.

Depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often co-occur with connected symptoms, complicating automated assessment, which is often binary and disorder specific. Clinically useful diagnosis needs severity aware cross disorder estimates and decision support explanations. Our unified tri modal affective severity framework synchronizes and fuses interview text with sentence level transformer embeddings, audio with log Mel statistics with deltas, and facial signals with action units, gaze, head and pose descriptors to output graded severities for diagnosing both depression (PHQ-8; 5 classes) and PTSD (3 classes). Standardized features are fused via a calibrated late fusion classifier, yielding per disorder probabilities and feature-level attributions. This severity aware tri-modal affective fusion approach is demoed on multi disorder concurrent depression and PTSD assessment. Stratified cross validation on DAIC derived corpora outperforms unimodal/ablation baselines. The fused model matches the strongest unimodal baseline on accuracy and weighted F1, while improving decision curve utility and robustness under noisy or missing modalities. For PTSD specifically, fusion reduces regression error and improves class concordance. Errors cluster between adjacent severities; extreme classes are identified reliably. Ablations show text contributes most to depression severity, audio and facial cues are critical for PTSD, whereas attributions align with linguistic and behavioral markers. Our approach offers reproducible evaluation and clinician in the loop support for affective clinical decision making.

We propose a framework for second-order achievability, called type deviation convergence, that is generally applicable to settings in network information theory, and is especially suitable for lossy source coding and channel coding with cost. We give a second-order achievability bound for lossy source coding with side information at the decoder (Wyner-Ziv problem) that improves upon all known bounds (e.g., Watanabe-Kuzuoka-Tan, Yassaee-Aref-Gohari and Li-Anantharam). We also give second-order achievability bounds for lossy compression where side information may be absent (Heegard-Berger problem) and channels with noncausal state information at the encoder and cost constraint (Gelfand-Pinsker problem with cost) that improve upon previous bounds.

Selective classifiers improve model reliability by abstaining on inputs the model deems uncertain. However, few practical approaches achieve the gold-standard performance of a perfect-ordering oracle that accepts examples exactly in order of correctness. Our work formalizes this shortfall as the selective-classification gap and present the first finite-sample decomposition of this gap to five distinct sources of looseness: Bayes noise, approximation error, ranking error, statistical noise, and implementation- or shift-induced slack. Crucially, our analysis reveals that monotone post-hoc calibration -- often believed to strengthen selective classifiers -- has limited impact on closing this gap, since it rarely alters the model's underlying score ranking. Bridging the gap therefore requires scoring mechanisms that can effectively reorder predictions rather than merely rescale them. We validate our decomposition on synthetic two-moons data and on real-world vision and language benchmarks, isolating each error component through controlled experiments. Our results confirm that (i) Bayes noise and limited model capacity can account for substantial gaps, (ii) only richer, feature-aware calibrators meaningfully improve score ordering, and (iii) data shift introduces a separate slack that demands distributionally robust training. Together, our decomposition yields a quantitative error budget as well as actionable design guidelines that practitioners can use to build selective classifiers which approximate ideal oracle behavior more closely.

Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) is an emerging topic to handle secure machine learning inference over sensitive data in untrusted environments. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computation directly on encrypted data on the server side, making it a promising approach for PPML. However, it introduces significant communication and computation overhead on the client side, making it impractical for edge devices. Hybrid homomorphic encryption (HHE) addresses this limitation by combining symmetric encryption (SE) with FHE to reduce the computational cost on the client side, and combining with an FHE-friendly SE can also lessen the processing overhead on the server side, making it a more balanced and efficient alternative. Our work proposes a hardware-accelerated HHE architecture built around a lightweight symmetric cipher optimized for FHE compatibility and implemented as a dedicated hardware accelerator. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first design to integrate an end-to-end HHE framework with hardware acceleration. Beyond this, we also present several microarchitectural optimizations to achieve higher performance and energy efficiency. The proposed work is integrated into a full PPML pipeline, enabling secure inference with significantly lower latency and power consumption than software implementations. Our contributions validate the feasibility of low-power, hardware- accelerated HHE for edge deployment and provide a hardware- software co-design methodology for building scalable, secure machine learning systems in resource-constrained environments. Experiments on a PYNQ-Z2 platform with the MNIST dataset show over a 50x reduction in client-side encryption latency and nearly a 2x gain in hardware throughput compared to existing FPGA-based HHE accelerators.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize temporal segments in long, untrimmed videos that align with a given natural language query. This task typically comprises two subtasks: Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD). While recent advances have been progressed by powerful pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP and InternVideo2, existing approaches commonly treat all text tokens uniformly during crossmodal attention, disregarding their distinct semantic roles. To validate the limitations of this approach, we conduct controlled experiments demonstrating that VTG models overly rely on [EOS]-driven global semantics while failing to effectively utilize word-level signals, which limits their ability to achieve fine-grained temporal alignment. Motivated by this limitation, we propose DualGround, a dual-branch architecture that explicitly separates global and local semantics by routing the [EOS] token through a sentence-level path and clustering word tokens into phrase-level units for localized grounding. Our method introduces (1) tokenrole- aware cross modal interaction strategies that align video features with sentence-level and phrase-level semantics in a structurally disentangled manner, and (2) a joint modeling framework that not only improves global sentence-level alignment but also enhances finegrained temporal grounding by leveraging structured phrase-aware context. This design allows the model to capture both coarse and localized semantics, enabling more expressive and context-aware video grounding. DualGround achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection tasks across QVHighlights and Charades- STA benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of disentangled semantic modeling in video-language alignment.

Cross-view object geo-localization enables high-precision object localization through cross-view matching, with critical applications in autonomous driving, urban management, and disaster response. However, existing methods rely on keypoint-based positional encoding, which captures only 2D coordinates while neglecting object shape information, resulting in sensitivity to annotation shifts and limited cross-view matching capability. To address these limitations, we propose a mask-based positional encoding scheme that leverages segmentation masks to capture both spatial coordinates and object silhouettes, thereby upgrading the model from "location-aware" to "object-aware." Furthermore, to tackle the challenge of large-span objects (e.g., elongated buildings) in satellite imagery, we design a context enhancement module. This module employs horizontal and vertical strip convolutional kernels to extract long-range contextual features, enhancing feature discrimination among strip-like objects. Integrating MPE and CEM, we present EDGeo, an end-to-end framework for robust cross-view object geo-localization. Extensive experiments on two public datasets (CVOGL and VIGOR-Building) demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 3.39% improvement in localization accuracy under challenging ground-to-satellite scenarios. This work provides a robust positional encoding paradigm and a contextual modeling framework for advancing cross-view geo-localization research.

Federated Learning (FL) confronts a significant challenge known as data heterogeneity, which impairs model performance and convergence. Existing methods have made notable progress in addressing this issue. However, improving performance in certain heterogeneity scenarios remains an overlooked question: \textit{How robust are these methods to deploy under diverse heterogeneity scenarios?} To answer this, we conduct comprehensive evaluations across varied heterogeneity scenarios, showing that most existing methods exhibit limited robustness. Meanwhile, insights from these experiments highlight that sharing statistical information can mitigate heterogeneity by enabling clients to update with a global perspective. Motivated by this, we propose \textbf{FedGPS} (\textbf{Fed}erated \textbf{G}oal-\textbf{P}ath \textbf{S}ynergy), a novel framework that seamlessly integrates statistical distribution and gradient information from others. Specifically, FedGPS statically modifies each client's learning objective to implicitly model the global data distribution using surrogate information, while dynamically adjusting local update directions with gradient information from other clients at each round. Extensive experiments show that FedGPS outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse heterogeneity scenarios, validating its effectiveness and robustness. The code is available at: this https URL.

Individualized cognitive simulation (ICS) aims to build computational models that approximate the thought processes of specific individuals. While large language models (LLMs) convincingly mimic surface-level human behavior such as role-play, their ability to simulate deeper individualized cognitive processes remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we introduce a novel task that evaluates different cognitive representation methods in ICS. We construct a dataset from recently published novels (later than the release date of the tested LLMs) and propose an 11-condition cognitive evaluation framework to benchmark seven off-the-shelf LLMs in the context of authorial style emulation. We hypothesize that effective cognitive representations can help LLMs generate storytelling that better mirrors the original author. Thus, we test different cognitive representations, e.g., linguistic features, concept mappings, and profile-based information. Results show that combining conceptual and linguistic features is particularly effective in ICS, outperforming static profile-based cues in overall evaluation. Importantly, LLMs are more effective at mimicking linguistic style than narrative structure, underscoring their limits in deeper cognitive simulation. These findings provide a foundation for developing AI systems that adapt to individual ways of thinking and expression, advancing more personalized and human-aligned creative technologies.

In this paper we consider the neural network optimization for DNN. We develop Anderson-type acceleration method for the stochastic gradient decent method and it improves the network permanence very much. We demonstrate the applicability of the method for DNN and CNN. We discuss the application of the general class of the neural network design for computer tomography and inverse medium problems.

This article presents early findings from designing, deploying and evaluating an AI-based educational agent deployed as the primary instructor in a graduate-level Cloud Computing course at IISc. We detail the design of a Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Instructor Agent, and introduce a pedagogical framework that integrates the Instructor Agent into the course workflow for actively interacting with the students for content delivery, supplemented by the human instructor to offer the course structure and undertake question--answer sessions. We also propose an analytical framework that evaluates the Agent--Student interaction transcripts using interpretable engagement metrics of topic coverage, topic depth and turn-level elaboration. We report early experiences on how students interact with the Agent to explore concepts, clarify doubts and sustain inquiry-driven dialogue during live classroom sessions. We also report preliminary analysis on our evaluation metrics applied across two successive instructional modules that reveals patterns of engagement evolution, transitioning from broad conceptual exploration to deeper, focused inquiry. These demonstrate how structured integration of conversational AI agents can foster reflective learning, offer a reproducible methodology for studying engagement in authentic classroom settings, and support scalable, high-quality higher education.

In recent years, Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) has made substantial progress. Nevertheless, most existing approaches neglect the semantic inconsistencies that may arise across modalities, such as conflicting emotional cues between text and visual inputs. Besides, current methods are often dominated by the text modality due to its strong representational capacity, which can compromise recognition accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a model termed Calibrated Multimodal Consensus (CMC). CMC introduces a Pseudo Label Generation Module (PLGM) to produce pseudo unimodal labels, enabling unimodal pretraining in a self-supervised fashion. It then employs a Parameter-free Fusion Module (PFM) and a Multimodal Consensus Router (MCR) for multimodal finetuning, thereby mitigating text dominance and guiding the fusion process toward a more reliable consensus. Experimental results demonstrate that CMC achieves performance on par with or superior to state-of-the-art methods across four datasets, CH-SIMS, CH-SIMS v2, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI, and exhibits notable advantages in scenarios with semantic inconsistencies on CH-SIMS and CH-SIMS v2. The implementation of this work is publicly accessible at this https URL.

Generating an abstraction of a dynamic domain that aligns with a given purpose remains a significant challenge given that the choice of such an abstraction can impact an agent's ability to plan, reason, and provide explanations effectively. We model the agent's concrete behaviors in PDDL and investigate the use of in-context learning with large language models (LLMs) for the generation of abstract PDDL domains and problem instances, given an abstraction objective specified in natural language. The benchmark examples we use are new and have not been part of the data any LLMs have been trained on. We consider three categories of abstractions: abstraction of choice of alternative concrete actions, abstraction of sequences of concrete actions, and abstraction of action/predicate parameters, as well as combinations of these. The generated abstract PDDL domains and problem instances are then checked by symbolic validation tools as well as human experts. Our experiments show that GPT-4o can generally synthesize useful planning domain abstractions in simple settings, although it is better at abstracting over actions than over the associated fluents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) empower recommendation systems through their advanced reasoning and planning capabilities. However, the dynamic nature of user interests and content poses a significant challenge: While initial fine-tuning aligns LLMs with domain knowledge and user preferences, it fails to capture such real-time changes, necessitating robust update mechanisms. This paper investigates strategies for updating LLM-powered recommenders, focusing on the trade-offs between ongoing fine-tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Using an LLM-powered user interest exploration system as a case study, we perform a comparative analysis of these methods across dimensions like cost, agility, and knowledge incorporation. We propose a hybrid update strategy that leverages the long-term knowledge adaptation of periodic fine-tuning with the agility of low-cost RAG. We demonstrate through live A/B experiments on a billion-user platform that this hybrid approach yields statistically significant improvements in user satisfaction, offering a practical and cost-effective framework for maintaining high-quality LLM-powered recommender systems.

One key aspect of spatially aware robots is the ability to "find their bearings", ie. to correctly situate themselves in previously seen spaces. In this work, we focus on this particular scenario of continuous robotics operations, where information observed before an actual episode start is exploited to optimize efficiency. We introduce a new model, Kinaema, and agent, capable of integrating a stream of visual observations while moving in a potentially large scene, and upon request, processing a query image and predicting the relative position of the shown space with respect to its current position. Our model does not explicitly store an observation history, therefore does not have hard constraints on context length. It maintains an implicit latent memory, which is updated by a transformer in a recurrent way, compressing the history of sensor readings into a compact representation. We evaluate the impact of this model in a new downstream task we call "Mem-Nav". We show that our large-capacity recurrent model maintains a useful representation of the scene, navigates to goals observed before the actual episode start, and is computationally efficient, in particular compared to classical transformers with attention over an observation history.

Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) are capable of retrieving high-performing policy for any reward function specified directly at test-time, commonly referred to as zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL). While this is a very efficient process in terms of compute, it can be less so in terms of data: as a standard assumption, BFMs require computing rewards over a non-negligible inference dataset, assuming either access to a functional form of rewards, or significant labeling efforts. To alleviate these limitations, we tackle the problem of task inference purely through interaction with the environment at test-time. We propose OpTI-BFM, an optimistic decision criterion that directly models uncertainty over reward functions and guides BFMs in data collection for task inference. Formally, we provide a regret bound for well-trained BFMs through a direct connection to upper-confidence algorithms for linear bandits. Empirically, we evaluate OpTI-BFM on established zero-shot benchmarks, and observe that it enables successor-features-based BFMs to identify and optimize an unseen reward function in a handful of episodes with minimal compute overhead. Code is available at this https URL.

Technologies like smartphones have become an essential in our daily lives. It has made accessible to everyone including visually impaired individuals. With the use of smartphone cameras, image capturing and processing have become more convenient. With the use of smartphones and machine learning, the life of visually impaired can be made a little easier. Daily tasks such as handling money without relying on someone can be troublesome for them. For that purpose this paper presents a real-time currency detection system designed to assist visually impaired individuals. The proposed model is trained on a dataset containing 30 classes of notes and coins, representing 3 types of currency: US dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), and Bangladeshi taka (BDT). Our approach uses a YOLOv8 nano model with a custom detection head featuring deep convolutional layers and Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks to enhance feature extraction and detection accuracy. Our model has achieved a higher accuracy of 97.73%, recall of 95.23%, f1-score of 95.85% and a mean Average Precision at IoU=0.5 (mAP50(B)) of 97.21\%. Using the voice feedback after the detection would help the visually impaired to identify the currency. This paper aims to create a practical and efficient currency detection system to empower visually impaired individuals independent in handling money.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a challenging task that detects anomalous frames in continuous surveillance videos. Most previous work utilizes the spatio-temporal correlation of visual features to distinguish whether there are abnormalities in video snippets. Recently, some works attempt to introduce multi-modal information, like text feature, to enhance the results of video anomaly detection. However, these works merely incorporate text features into video snippets in a coarse manner, overlooking the significant amount of redundant information that may exist within the video snippets. Therefore, we propose to leverage the diversity among multi-modal information to further refine the extracted features, reducing the redundancy in visual features, and we propose Grained Multi-modal Feature for Video Anomaly Detection (GMFVAD). Specifically, we generate more grained multi-modal feature based on the video snippet, which summarizes the main content, and text features based on the captions of original video will be introduced to further enhance the visual features of highlighted portions. Experiments show that the proposed GMFVAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on four mainly datasets. Ablation experiments also validate that the improvement of GMFVAD is due to the reduction of redundant information.

In this work, we experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to generate true random numbers at high throughput and low latency in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DRAM chips by leveraging simultaneous multiple-row activation (SiMRA) via an extensive characterization of 96 DDR4 DRAM chips. We rigorously analyze SiMRA's true random generation potential in terms of entropy, latency, and throughput for varying numbers of simultaneously activated DRAM rows (i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32), data patterns, temperature levels, and spatial variations. Among our 11 key experimental observations, we highlight four key results. First, we evaluate the quality of our TRNG designs using the commonly-used NIST statistical test suite for randomness and find that all SiMRA-based TRNG designs successfully pass each test. Second, 2-, 8-, 16-, and 32-row activation-based TRNG designs outperform the state-of-theart DRAM-based TRNG in throughput by up to 1.15x, 1.99x, 1.82x, and 1.39x, respectively. Third, SiMRA's entropy tends to increase with the number of simultaneously activated DRAM rows. Fourth, operational parameters and conditions (e.g., data pattern and temperature) significantly affect entropy. For example, for most of the tested modules, the average entropy of 32-row activation is 2.51x higher than that of 2-row activation. For example, increasing the temperature from 50°C to 90°C decreases SiMRA's entropy by 1.53x for 32-row activation. To aid future research and development, we open-source our infrastructure at this https URL.

The tendency to find and exploit "shortcuts" to complete tasks poses significant risks for reliable assessment and deployment of large language models (LLMs). For example, an LLM agent with access to unit tests may delete failing tests rather than fix the underlying bug. Such behavior undermines both the validity of benchmark results and the reliability of real-world LLM coding assistant deployments. To quantify, study, and mitigate such behavior, we introduce ImpossibleBench, a benchmark framework that systematically measures LLM agents' propensity to exploit test cases. ImpossibleBench creates "impossible" variants of tasks from existing benchmarks like LiveCodeBench and SWE-bench by introducing direct conflicts between the natural-language specification and the unit tests. We measure an agent's "cheating rate" as its pass rate on these impossible tasks, where any pass necessarily implies a specification-violating shortcut. As a practical framework, ImpossibleBench is not just an evaluation but a versatile tool. We demonstrate its utility for: (1) studying model behaviors, revealing more fine-grained details of cheating behaviors from simple test modification to complex operator overloading; (2) context engineering, showing how prompt, test access and feedback loop affect cheating rates; and (3) developing monitoring tools, providing a testbed with verified deceptive solutions. We hope ImpossibleBench serves as a useful framework for building more robust and reliable LLM systems. Our implementation can be found at this https URL.

Topological features capture global geometric structure in imaging data, but practical adoption in deep learning requires both computational efficiency and differentiability. We present optimized GPU kernels for the Euler Characteristic Curve (ECC) computation achieving 16-2000Ö speedups over prior GPU implementations on synthetic grids, and introduce a differentiable PyTorch layer enabling end-to-end learning. Our CUDA kernels, optimized for Ampere GPUs use 128B-coalesced access and hierarchical shared-memory accumulation. Our PyTorch layer learns thresholds in a single direction via a Differentiable Euler Characteristic Transform-style sigmoid relaxation. We discuss downstream relevance, including applications highlighted by prior ECC work, and outline batching/multi-GPU extensions to broaden adoption.

While chain-of-thought prompting with Best-of-N (BoN) selection has become popular for mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs), its linear structure fails to capture the branching and exploratory nature of complex problem-solving. In this work, we propose an adaptive algorithm to maximize process reward model (PRM) scores over the intractable action space, and investigate whether PRM-guided tree search can improve mathematical reasoning by exploring multiple partial solution paths. Across $23$ diverse mathematical problems using Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct with its associated PRM as a case study, we find that: (1) PRM-guided tree search shows no statistically significant improvements over BoN despite higher costs, (2) Monte Carlo tree search and beam search outperform other PRM-guided tree search methods, (3) PRMs poorly approximate state values and their reliability degrades with reasoning depth, and (4) PRMs generalize poorly out of distribution. This underperformance stems from tree search's greater reliance on unreliable PRM scores, suggesting different reward modeling is necessary before tree search can effectively enhance mathematical reasoning in LLMs.

Recent advances in deep learning have driven rapid progress in time series forecasting, yet many state-of-the-art models continue to struggle with robust performance in real-world applications, even when they achieve strong results on standard benchmark datasets. This persistent gap can be attributed to the black-box nature of deep learning architectures and the inherent limitations of current evaluation frameworks, which frequently lack the capacity to provide clear, quantitative insights into the specific strengths and weaknesses of different models, thereby complicating the selection of appropriate models for particular forecasting scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a synthetic data-driven evaluation paradigm, SynTSBench, that systematically assesses fundamental modeling capabilities of time series forecasting models through programmable feature configuration. Our framework isolates confounding factors and establishes an interpretable evaluation system with three core analytical dimensions: (1) temporal feature decomposition and capability mapping, which enables systematic evaluation of model capacities to learn specific pattern types; (2) robustness analysis under data irregularities, which quantifies noise tolerance thresholds and anomaly recovery capabilities; and (3) theoretical optimum benchmarking, which establishes performance boundaries for each pattern type-enabling direct comparison between model predictions and mathematical optima. Our experiments show that current deep learning models do not universally approach optimal baselines across all types of temporal this http URL code is available at this https URL

Human mobility forecasting is crucial for disaster relief, city planning, and public health. However, existing models either only model location sequences or include time information merely as auxiliary input, thereby failing to leverage the rich semantic context provided by points of interest (POIs). To address this, we enrich a BERT-based mobility model with derived temporal descriptors and POI embeddings to better capture the semantics underlying human movement. We propose STaBERT (Semantic-Temporal aware BERT), which integrates both POI and temporal information at each location to construct a unified, semantically enriched representation of mobility. Experimental results show that STaBERT significantly improves prediction accuracy: for single-city prediction, the GEO-BLEU score improved from 0.34 to 0.75; for multi-city prediction, from 0.34 to 0.56.

Generative AI is reshaping music creation, but its rapid growth exposes structural gaps in attribution, rights management, and economic models. Unlike past media shifts, from live performance to recordings, downloads, and streaming, AI transforms the entire lifecycle of music, collapsing boundaries between creation, distribution, and monetization. However, existing streaming systems, with opaque and concentrated royalty flows, are ill-equipped to handle the scale and complexity of AI-driven production. We propose a content-based Music AI Agent architecture that embeds attribution directly into the creative workflow through block-level retrieval and agentic orchestration. Designed for iterative, session-based interaction, the system organizes music into granular components (Blocks) stored in BlockDB; each use triggers an Attribution Layer event for transparent provenance and real-time settlement. This framework reframes AI from a generative tool into infrastructure for a Fair AI Media Platform. By enabling fine-grained attribution, equitable compensation, and participatory engagement, it points toward a post-streaming paradigm where music functions not as a static catalog but as a collaborative and adaptive ecosystem.

In low altitude UAV communications, accurate channel estimation remains challenging due to the dynamic nature of air to ground links, exacerbated by high node mobility and the use of large scale antenna arrays, which introduce hybrid near and far field propagation conditions. While conventional estimation methods rely on far field assumptions, they fail to capture the intricate channel variations in near-field scenarios and overlook valuable geometric priors such as real-time transceiver positions. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a unified channel estimation framework based on a location aware hybrid deep learning architecture. The proposed model synergistically combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for spatial feature extraction, bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM) networks for modeling temporal evolution, and a multihead self attention mechanism to enhance focus on discriminative channel components. Furthermore, real-time transmitter and receiver locations are embedded as geometric priors, improving sensitivity to distance under near field spherical wavefronts and boosting model generalization. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing that it outperforms existing benchmarks by a significant margin, achieving at least a 30.25% reduction in normalized mean square error (NMSE) on average.

In recent years, Pretrained Large Models(PLMs) researchers proposed large-small model collaboration frameworks, leveraged easily trainable small models to assist large models, aim to(1) significantly reduce computational resource consumption while maintaining comparable accuracy, and (2) enhance large model performance in specialized domain tasks. However, this collaborative paradigm suffers from issues such as significant accuracy degradation, exacerbated catastrophic forgetting, and amplified hallucination problems induced by small model knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a KAN-based Collaborative Model (KCM) as an improved approach to large-small model collaboration. The KAN utilized in KCM represents an alternative neural network architecture distinct from conventional MLPs. Compared to MLPs, KAN offers superior visualizability and interpretability while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. We deployed KCM in large-small model collaborative systems across three scenarios: language, vision, and vision-language cross-modal tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with pure large model approaches, the large-small model collaboration framework utilizing KCM as the collaborative model significantly reduces the number of large model inference calls while maintaining near-identical task accuracy, thereby substantially lowering computational resource consumption. Concurrently, the KAN-based small collaborative model markedly mitigates catastrophic forgetting, leading to significant accuracy improvements for long-tail data. The results reveal that KCM demonstrates superior performance across all metrics compared to MLP-based small collaborative models (MCM).

As large language models (LLMs) advance, the ultimate vision for their role in science is emerging: we could build an AI collaborator to effectively assist human beings throughout the entire scientific research process. We refer to this envisioned system as ResearchGPT. Given that scientific research progresses through multiple interdependent phases, achieving this vision requires rigorous benchmarks that evaluate the end-to-end workflow rather than isolated sub-tasks. To this end, we contribute CS-54k, a high-quality corpus of scientific Q&A pairs in computer science, built from 14k CC-licensed papers. It is constructed through a scalable, paper-grounded pipeline that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-stage quality control to ensure factual grounding. From this unified corpus, we derive two complementary subsets: CS-4k, a carefully curated benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to assist scientific research, and CS-50k, a large-scale training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CS-4k stratifies state-of-the-art LLMs into distinct capability tiers. Open models trained on CS-50k with supervised training and reinforcement learning demonstrate substantial improvements. Even 7B-scale models, when properly trained, outperform many larger proprietary systems, such as GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This indicates that making AI models better research assistants relies more on domain-aligned training with high-quality data than on pretraining scale or general benchmark performance. We release CS-4k and CS-50k in the hope of fostering AI systems as reliable collaborators in CS research.

Next-token prediction (NTP) is the cornerstone of modern large language models (LLMs) pretraining, driving their unprecedented capabilities in text generation, reasoning, and instruction following. However, the token-level prediction limits the model's capacity to capture higher-level semantic structures and long-range contextual relationships. To overcome this limitation, we introduce \textbf{ContextLM}, a framework that augments standard pretraining with an inherent \textbf{next-context prediction} objective. This mechanism trains the model to learn predictive representations of multi-token contexts, leveraging error signals derived from future token chunks. Crucially, ContextLM achieves this enhancement while remaining fully compatible with the standard autoregressive, token-by-token evaluation paradigm (e.g., perplexity). Extensive experiments on the GPT2 and Pythia model families, scaled up to $1.5$B parameters, show that ContextLM delivers consistent improvements in both perplexity and downstream task performance. Our analysis indicates that next-context prediction provides a scalable and efficient pathway to stronger language modeling, yielding better long-range coherence and more effective attention allocation with minimal computational overhead.

Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) refers to answering questions and providing explanations based on images. While existing methods achieve high prediction accuracy, they often overlook bias in datasets and lack debiasing strategies. In this paper, our analysis reveals co-occurrence and statistical biases in both textual and visual data. We introduce the VCR-OOD datasets, comprising VCR-OOD-QA and VCR-OOD-VA subsets, which are designed to evaluate the generalization capabilities of models across two modalities. Furthermore, we analyze the causal graphs and prediction shortcuts in VCR and adopt a backdoor adjustment method to remove bias. Specifically, we create a dictionary based on the set of correct answers to eliminate prediction shortcuts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our debiasing method across different datasets.

Deep learning models for complex-valued Synthetic Aperture Radar (CV-SAR) image recognition are fundamentally constrained by a representation trilemma under data-limited and domain-shift scenarios: the concurrent, yet conflicting, optimization of generalization, interpretability, and efficiency. Our work is motivated by the premise that the rich electromagnetic scattering features inherent in CV-SAR data hold the key to resolving this trilemma, yet they are insufficiently harnessed by conventional data-driven models. To this end, we introduce the Knowledge-Informed Neural Network (KINN), a lightweight framework built upon a novel "compression-aggregation-compression" architecture. The first stage performs a physics-guided compression, wherein a novel dictionary processor adaptively embeds physical priors, enabling a compact unfolding network to efficiently extract sparse, physically-grounded signatures. A subsequent aggregation module enriches these representations, followed by a final semantic compression stage that utilizes a compact classification head with self-distillation to learn maximally task-relevant and discriminative embeddings. We instantiate KINN in both CNN (0.7M) and Vision Transformer (0.95M) variants. Extensive evaluations on five SAR benchmarks confirm that KINN establishes a state-of-the-art in parameter-efficient recognition, offering exceptional generalization in data-scarce and out-of-distribution scenarios and tangible interpretability, thereby providing an effective solution to the representation trilemma and offering a new path for trustworthy AI in SAR image analysis.

Egocentric Video Question Answering (Egocentric VideoQA) plays an important role in egocentric video understanding, which refers to answering questions based on first-person videos. Although existing methods have made progress through the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning, they ignore the unique challenges posed by the first-person perspective, such as understanding multiple events and recognizing hand-object interactions. To deal with these challenges, we propose a Dual-Modal Counterfactual Contrastive Construction (DMC$^3$) framework, which contains an egocentric videoqa baseline, a counterfactual sample construction module and a counterfactual sample-involved contrastive optimization. Specifically, We first develop a counterfactual sample construction module to generate positive and negative samples for textual and visual modalities through event description paraphrasing and core interaction mining, respectively. Then, We feed these samples together with the original samples into the baseline. Finally, in the counterfactual sample-involved contrastive optimization module, we apply contrastive loss to minimize the distance between the original sample features and the positive sample features, while maximizing the distance from the negative samples. Experiments show that our method achieve 52.51\% and 46.04\% on the \textit{normal} and \textit{indirect} splits of EgoTaskQA, and 13.2\% on QAEGO4D, both reaching the state-of-the-art performance.

GUI grounding, which maps natural-language instructions to actionable UI elements, is a core capability of GUI agents. Prior works largely treats instructions as a static proxy for user intent, overlooking the impact of instruction diversity and quality on grounding performance. Through a careful investigation of existing grounding datasets, we find a 23.3% flaw rate in their instructions and show that inference-time exploitation of instruction diversity yields up to a substantial 76% relative performance improvement. In this paper, we introduce the Instruction-as-Reasoning paradigm, treating instructions as dynamic analytical pathways that offer distinct perspectives and enabling the model to select the most effective pathway during reasoning. To achieve this, we propose a two-stage training framework: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthesized, diverse instructions to instill multi-perspective reasoning, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize pathway selection and composition. Our resulting models, UI-Ins-7B and UI-Ins-32B, achieve state-of-the-art results on five challenging grounding benchmarks and exhibit emergent reasoning, selectively composing and synthesizing novel instruction pathways at inference. In particular, UI-Ins-32B attains the best grounding accuracy, scoring 87.3% on UI-I2E-Bench, 57.0% on ScreenSpot-Pro, and 84.9% on MMBench-GUI L2. Furthermore, our model demonstrates strong agentic potential, achieving a 74.1% success rate on AndroidWorld using UI-Ins-7B as the executor. Our in-depth analysis reveals additional insights such as how reasoning can be formulated to enhance rather than hinder grounding performance, and how our method mitigates policy collapse in the SFT+RL framework. All code and model checkpoints will be publicly released in this https URL.

Large Vision Language models have seen huge application in several sports use-cases recently. Most of these works have been targeted towards a limited subset of popular sports like soccer, cricket, basketball etc; focusing on generative tasks like visual question answering, highlight generation. This work analyzes the applicability of the modern video foundation models (both encoder and decoder) for a very niche but hugely popular dance sports - breakdance. Our results show that Video Encoder models continue to outperform state-of-the-art Video Language Models for prediction tasks. We provide insights on how to choose the encoder model and provide a thorough analysis into the workings of a finetuned decoder model for breakdance video classification.

In the online metric matching problem, $n$ servers and $n$ requests lie in a metric space. Servers are available upfront, and requests arrive sequentially. An arriving request must be matched immediately and irrevocably to an available server, incurring a cost equal to their distance. The goal is to minimize the total matching cost. We study this problem in the Euclidean metric $[0, 1]^d$, when servers are adversarial and requests are independently drawn from distinct distributions that satisfy a mild smoothness condition. Our main result is an $O(1)$-competitive algorithm for $d \neq 2$ that requires no distributional knowledge, relying only on a single sample from each request distribution. To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm to achieve an $o(\log n)$ competitive ratio for non-trivial metrics beyond the i.i.d. setting. Our approach bypasses the $\Omega(\log n)$ barrier introduced by probabilistic metric embeddings: instead of analyzing the embedding distortion and the algorithm separately, we directly bound the cost of the algorithm on the target metric of a simple deterministic embedding. We then combine this analysis with lower bounds on the offline optimum for Euclidean metrics, derived via majorization arguments, to obtain our guarantees.

We present a winning solution to RoboSense 2025 Track 4: Cross-Modal Drone Navigation. The task retrieves the most relevant geo-referenced image from a large multi-platform corpus (satellite/drone/ground) given a natural-language query. Two obstacles are severe inter-platform heterogeneity and a domain gap between generic training descriptions and platform-specific test queries. We mitigate these with a domain-aligned preprocessing pipeline and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework: (i) platform-wise partitioning, satellite augmentation, and removal of orientation words; (ii) an LLM-based caption refinement pipeline to align textual semantics with the distinct visual characteristics of each platform. Using BGE-M3 (text) and EVA-CLIP (image), we train three platform experts using a progressive two-stage, hard-negative mining strategy to enhance discriminative power, and fuse their scores at inference. The system tops the official leaderboard, demonstrating robust cross-modal geo-localization under heterogeneous viewpoints.

In 1989 Erdős and Székely showed that there is a bijection between (i) the set of rooted trees with $n+1$ vertices whose leaves are bijectively labeled with the elements of $[\ell]=\{1,2,\dots,\ell\}$ for some $\ell \leq n$, and (ii) the set of partitions of $[n]=\{1,2,\dots,n\}$. They established this via a labeling algorithm based on the anti-lexicographic ordering of non-empty subsets of $[n]$ which extends the labeling of the leaves of a given tree to a labeling of all of the vertices of that tree. In this paper, we generalize their approach by developing a labeling algorithm for multi-labeled trees, that is, rooted trees whose leaves are labeled by positive integers but in which distinct leaves may have the same label. In particular, we show that certain orderings of the set of all finite, non-empty multisets of positive integers can be used to characterize partitions of a multiset that arise from labelings of multi-labeled trees. As an application, we show that the recently introduced class of labelable phylogenetic networks is precisely the class of phylogenetic networks that are stable relative to the so-called folding process on multi-labeled trees. We also give a bijection between the labelable phylogenetic networks with leaf-set $[n]$ and certain partitions of multisets.

Movable antenna (MA) technology provides a promising avenue for actively shaping wireless channels through dynamic antenna positioning, thereby enabling electromagnetic radiation reconstruction to enhance physical layer security (PLS). However, its practical deployment is hindered by two major challenges: the high computational complexity of real time optimization and a critical temporal mismatch between slow mechanical movement and rapid channel variations. Although data driven methods have been introduced to alleviate online optimization burdens, they are still constrained by suboptimal training labels derived from conventional solvers or high sample complexity in reinforcement learning. More importantly, existing learning based approaches often overlook communication-specific domain knowledge, particularly the asymmetric roles and adversarial interactions between legitimate users and eavesdroppers, which are fundamental to PLS. To address these issues, this paper reformulates the MA positioning problem as a predictive task and introduces RoleAware-MAPP, a novel Transformer based framework that incorporates domain knowledge through three key components: role-aware embeddings that model user specific intentions, physics-informed semantic features that encapsulate channel propagation characteristics, and a composite loss function that strategically prioritizes secrecy performance over mere geometric accuracy. Extensive simulations under 3GPP-compliant scenarios show that RoleAware-MAPP achieves an average secrecy rate of 0.3569 bps/Hz and a strictly positive secrecy capacity of 81.52%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 48.4% and 5.39 percentage points, respectively, while maintaining robust performance across diverse user velocities and noise conditions.

Out-of-distribution generalization under distributional shifts remains a critical challenge for graph neural networks. Existing methods generally adopt the Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) framework, requiring costly environment annotations or heuristically generated synthetic splits. To circumvent these limitations, in this work, we aim to develop an IRM-free method for capturing causal subgraphs. We first identify that causal subgraphs exhibit substantially smaller distributional variations than non-causal components across diverse environments, which we formalize as the Invariant Distribution Criterion and theoretically prove in this paper. Building on this criterion, we systematically uncover the quantitative relationship between distributional shift and representation norm for identifying the causal subgraph, and investigate its underlying mechanisms in depth. Finally, we propose an IRM-free method by introducing a norm-guided invariant distribution objective for causal subgraph discovery and prediction. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in graph generalization.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as one of the most prominent applications of vector databases. By integrating documents retrieved from a database into the prompt of a large language model (LLM), RAG enables more reliable and informative content generation. While there has been extensive research on vector databases, many open research problems remain once they are considered in the wider context of end-to-end RAG pipelines. One practical yet challenging problem is how to jointly optimize both system performance and generation quality in RAG, which is significantly more complex than it appears due to the numerous knobs on both the algorithmic side (spanning models and databases) and the systems side (from software to hardware). In this paper, we present RAG-Stack, a three-pillar blueprint for quality-performance co-optimization in RAG systems. RAG-Stack comprises: (1) RAG-IR, an intermediate representation that serves as an abstraction layer to decouple quality and performance aspects; (2) RAG-CM, a cost model for estimating system performance given an RAG-IR; and (3) RAG-PE, a plan exploration algorithm that searches for high-quality, high-performance RAG configurations. We believe this three-pillar blueprint will become the de facto paradigm for RAG quality-performance co-optimization in the years to come.

Routing is central to networking performance, including: (1) latency in anycast services and websites served from multiple locations,(2) networking expenses and throughput in multi-homed enterprises, (3) the ability to keep traffic domestic when considering data sovereignty. However, understanding and managing how routing affects these services is challenging. Operators use Traffic Engineering (TE) with BGP to optimize network performance, but what they get is the result of all BGP policies throughout the Internet, not just their local choices. Our paper proposes Fenrir, a new system to rediscover recurring routing results. Fenrir can discover changes in network routing, even when it happens multiple hops away from the observer. Fenrir also provides new methods to quantify the degree of routing change, and to identify routing "modes" that may reappear. Second, we show that Fenrir can be applied to many different problems: we use five instances of three different types of systems to illustrate the generalization: anycast catchments showing in a root DNS service, route optimization for two multi-homed enterprises, and website selection for two of the top-10 web services. Each type requires different types of active measurements, data cleaning and weighting. We demonstrate Fenrir's methods of detecting and quantifying change are helpful because they all face similar operational questions: How much effect did traffic engineering have? Did a third-party change alter my routing? In either case, is the current routing new, or is it like a routing mode I saw before?

Brain tumors are a challenging problem in neuro-oncology, where early and precise diagnosis is important for successful treatment. Deep learning-based brain tumor classification methods often rely on heavy data augmentation which can limit generalization and trust in clinical applications. In this paper, we propose a double-backbone network integrating VGG16 and Xception with a Frequency-Gated Attention (FGA) Block to capture complementary local and global features. Unlike previous studies, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance without augmentation which demonstrates robustness to variably sized and distributed datasets. For further transparency, Grad-CAM is integrated to visualize the tumor regions based on which the model is giving prediction, bridging the gap between model prediction and clinical interpretability. The proposed framework achieves 99.24\% accuracy on the 7K-DS dataset for the 4-class setting, along with 98.68\% and 99.85\% in the 3-class and 2-class settings, respectively. On the independent 3K-DS dataset, the model generalizes with 95.77\% accuracy, outperforming baseline and state-of-the-art methods. To further support clinical usability, we developed a graphical user interface (GUI) that provides real-time classification and Grad-CAM-based tumor localization. These findings suggest that augmentation-free, interpretable, and deployable deep learning models such as DB-FGA-Net hold strong potential for reliable clinical translation in brain tumor diagnosis.

There are increasing risks of privacy disclosure when sharing the automotive location data in particular functions such as route navigation, driving monitoring and vehicle scheduling. These risks could lead to the attacks including user behavior recognition, sensitive location inference and trajectory reconstruction. In order to mitigate the data security risk caused by the automotive location sharing, this paper proposes a high-precision privacy protection mechanism based on format-preserving encryption (FPE) of geographical coordinates. The automotive coordinate data key mapping mechanism is designed to reduce to the accuracy loss of the geographical location data caused by the repeated encryption and decryption. The experimental results demonstrate that the average relative distance retention rate (RDR) reached 0.0844, and the number of hotspots in the critical area decreased by 98.9% after encryption. To evaluate the accuracy loss of the proposed encryption algorithm on automotive geographical location data, this paper presents the experimental analysis of decryption accuracy, and the result indicates that the decrypted coordinate data achieves a restoration accuracy of 100%. This work presents a high-precision privacy protection method for automotive location data, thereby providing an efficient data security solution for the sensitive data sharing in autonomous driving.

For a real matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times n}$ with non-collinear columns, we show that $n \leq O(d^4 \kappa_A)$ where $\kappa_A$ is the \emph{circuit imbalance measure} of $A$. The circuit imbalance measure $\kappa$ is a real analogue of $\Delta$-modularity for integer matrices, satisfying $\kappa_A \leq \Delta_A$ for integer $A$. The circuit imbalance measure has numerous applications in the context of linear programming (see Ekbatani, Natura and V{é}gh (2022) for a survey). Our result generalizes the $O(d^4 \Delta_A)$ bound of Averkov and Schymura (2023) for integer matrices and provides the first polynomial bound holding for all parameter ranges on real matrices. To derive our result, similar to the strategy of Geelen, Nelson and Walsh (2021) for $\Delta$-modular matrices, we show that real representable matroids induced by $\kappa$-bounded matrices are minor closed and exclude a rank $2$ uniform matroid on $O(\kappa)$ elements as a minor (also known as a line of length $O(\kappa)$). As our main technical contribution, we show that any simple rank $d$ complex representable matroid which excludes a line of length $l$ has at most $O(d^4 l)$ elements. This complements the tight bound of $(l-3)\binom{d}{2} + d$ for $l \geq 4$, of Geelen, Nelson and Walsh which holds when the rank $d$ is sufficiently large compared to $l$ (at least doubly exponential in $l$).

Multivariate time series forecasting requires simultaneously modeling temporal patterns and cross-variate dependencies. Channel-independent methods such as PatchTST excel at temporal modeling but ignore variable correlations, while pure variate-attention approaches such as iTransformer sacrifice temporal encoding. We proposeInvDec (Inverted Decoder), a hybrid architecture that achieves principled separation between temporal encoding and variate-level decoding. InvDec combines a patch-based temporal encoder with an inverted decoder operating on the variate dimension through variate-wise self-attention. We introduce delayed variate embeddings that enrich variable-specific representations only after temporal encoding, preserving temporal feature integrity. An adaptive residual fusion mechanism dynamically balances temporal and variate information across datasets of varying dimensions. Instantiating InvDec with PatchTST yields InvDec-PatchTST. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate significant gains on high-dimensional datasets: 20.9% MSE reduction on Electricity (321 variables), 4.3% improvement on Weather, and 2.7% gain on Traffic compared to PatchTST, while maintaining competitive performance on low-dimensional ETT datasets. Ablation studies validate each component, and analysis reveals that InvDec's advantage grows with dataset dimensionality, confirming that cross-variate modeling becomes critical as the number of variables increases.

Citations from LLM-based RAG systems are supposed to simplify response verification. However, this does not hold for citation failure, when a model generates a helpful response, but fails to cite complete evidence. In contrast to previous work, we propose to disentangle this from response failure, where the response itself is flawed, and citing complete evidence is impossible. To address citation failure, this work follows a two-step approach: (1) We study when citation failure occurs and (2) how it can be mitigated. For step 1, we extend prior work by investigating how the relation between response and evidence affects citation quality. We introduce CITECONTROL, a benchmark that systematically varies this relation to analyze failure modes. Experiments show that failures increase with relational complexity and suggest that combining citation methods could improve performance, motivating step 2. To improve LLM citation efficiently, we propose CITENTION, a framework integrating generative, attention-based, and retrieval-based methods. Results demonstrate substantial citation improvements on CITECONTROL and in transfer settings. We make our data and code publicly available.

Process reward models (PRMs) improve complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by grading candidate solutions step-by-step and selecting answers via aggregated step scores. While effective in domains such as mathematics, their applicability to tasks involving semi-structured data, like table question answering (TQA) remains unexplored. TQA poses unique challenges for PRMs, including abundant irrelevant information, loosely connected reasoning steps, and domain-specific reasoning. This work presents the first systematic study of PRMs for TQA. We evaluate state-of-the-art generative PRMs on TQA from both answer and step perspectives. Results show that PRMs that combine textual and code verification can aid solution selection but struggle to generalize to out-of-domain data. Analysis reveals a weak correlation between performance in step-level verification and answer accuracy, possibly stemming from weak step dependencies and loose causal links. Our findings highlight limitations of current PRMs on TQA and offer valuable insights for building more robust, process-aware verifiers.

Stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) is a promising enabler for next-generation high-capacity networks that exhibit better performance compared to its single-layer counterpart by means of just wave propagation. However, the study of ergodic mutual information (EMI) and outage probability for SIM-assisted multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems is not available in the literature. To this end, we obtain the distribution of the MI by using large random matrix theory (RMT) tools. Next, we derive a tight closed-form expression for the outage probability based on statistical channel state information (CSI). Moreover, we apply the gradient descent method for the minimization of the outage probability. Simulation results verify the analytical results and provide fundamental insights such as the performance enhancements compared to conventional MIMO systems and the single-layer counterpart. Notably the proposed optimization algorithm is faster than the alternating optimization (AO) benchmark by saving significant overhead.

Finding optimal join orders is among the most crucial steps to be performed by query optimisers. Though extensively studied in data management research, the problem remains far from solved: While query optimisers rely on exhaustive search methods to determine ideal solutions for small problems, such methods reach their limits once queries grow in size. Yet, large queries become increasingly common in real-world scenarios, and require suitable methods to generate efficient execution plans. While a variety of heuristics have been proposed for large-scale query optimisation, they suffer from degrading solution quality as queries grow in size, or feature highly sub-optimal worst-case behavior, as we will show. We propose a novel method based on the paradigm of mixed integer linear programming (MILP): By deriving a novel MILP model capable of optimising arbitrary bushy tree structures, we address the limitations of existing MILP methods for join ordering, and can rely on highly optimised MILP solvers to derive efficient tree structures that elude competing methods. To ensure optimisation efficiency, we embed our MILP method into a hybrid framework, which applies MILP solvers precisely where they provide the greatest advantage over competitors, while relying on more efficient methods for less complex optimisation steps. Thereby, our approach gracefully scales to extremely large query sizes joining up to 100 relations, and consistently achieves the most robust plan quality among a large variety of competing join ordering methods.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires agents to explore 3D environments to obtain observations and answer questions related to the scene. Existing methods leverage VLMs to directly explore the environment and answer questions without explicit thinking or planning, which limits their reasoning ability and results in excessive or inefficient exploration as well as ineffective responses. In this paper, we introduce ToolEQA, an agent that integrates external tools with multi-step reasoning, where external tools can provide more useful information for completing the task, helping the model derive better exploration directions in the next step of reasoning and thus obtaining additional effective information. This enables ToolEQA to generate more accurate responses with a shorter exploration distance. To enhance the model's ability for tool-usage and multi-step reasoning, we further design a novel EQA data generation pipeline that automatically constructs large-scale EQA tasks with reasoning trajectories and corresponding answers. Based on the pipeline, we collect the EQA-RT dataset that contains about 18K tasks, divided into a training set EQA-RT-Train, and two test sets EQA-RT-Seen (scenes overlapping with the training set) and EQA-RT-Unseen (novel scenes). Experiments on EQA-RT-Seen and EQA-RT-Unseen show that ToolEQA improves the success rate by 9.2~20.2% over state-of-the-art baselines, while outperforming the zero-shot ToolEQA by 10% in success rate. In addition, ToolEQA also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HM-EQA, OpenEQA, and EXPRESS-Bench datasets, demonstrating its generality. Our homepage see this https URL.

This paper proposes a multi-actor coordination platform for the optimal utilization of smart buildings resources, including roof top PV generation and battery energy storage system (BESS), in active power distribution systems. The proposed multi-actor coordination includes the Smart Building Coordinator (SBC), Micro-Grid Coordinator (MGC) and Distribution System Coordinator (DSC). The coordinators operate independently and only exchange limited information with each other to reach an optimal solution. In the proposed platform, a hierarchical optimization problem is solved to optimally determine the operating point of all distribution system resources. The proposed platform fully preserves the confidentiality of the behind the meter (BTM) data of the buildings since no information about the status of the PV system, BESS, and load of the building is shared with the owner of the power system. The proposed platform has a flexible and scalable architecture where the computational task of coordinating microgrids and smart buildings with distribution grid is performed locally at the MGC and SBC layers, respectively. Numerical simulations show the efficacy of the proposed platform in coordinating the BTM resources with the rest of the distribution system.

With the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques in complex fields such as autonomous driving, intelligent manufacturing, and smart healthcare, how to improve its security and robustness in dynamic and changeable environments has become a core issue in current research. Especially in the face of adversarial attacks, DRL may suffer serious performance degradation or even make potentially dangerous decisions, so it is crucial to ensure their stability in security-sensitive scenarios. In this paper, we first introduce the basic framework of DRL and analyze the main security challenges faced in complex and changing environments. In addition, this paper proposes an adversarial attack classification framework based on perturbation type and attack target and reviews the mainstream adversarial attack methods against DRL in detail, including various attack methods such as perturbation state space, action space, reward function and model space. To effectively counter the attacks, this paper systematically summarizes various current robustness training strategies, including adversarial training, competitive training, robust learning, adversarial detection, defense distillation and other related defense techniques, we also discuss the advantages and shortcomings of these methods in improving the robustness of DRL. Finally, this paper looks into the future research direction of DRL in adversarial environments, emphasizing the research needs in terms of improving generalization, reducing computational complexity, and enhancing scalability and explainability, aiming to provide valuable references and directions for researchers.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a transformative approach for aligning visual and textual understanding. They typically require extremely high computational resources (e.g., thousands of GPUs) for training to achieve cross-modal alignment at multi-granularity levels. We argue that a key source of this inefficiency lies in the vision encoders they widely equip with, e.g., CLIP and SAM, which lack the alignment with language at multi-granularity levels. To address this issue, in this paper, we leverage hyperbolic space, which inherently models hierarchical levels and thus provides a principled framework for bridging the granularity gap between visual and textual modalities at an arbitrary granularity level. Concretely, we propose an efficient training paradigm for MLLMs, dubbed as HyperET, which can optimize visual representations to align with their textual counterparts at an arbitrary granularity level through dynamic hyperbolic radius adjustment in hyperbolic space. HyperET employs learnable matrices with Möbius multiplication operations, implemented via three effective configurations: diagonal scaling matrices, block-diagonal matrices, and banded matrices, providing a flexible yet efficient parametrization strategy. Comprehensive experiments across multiple MLLM benchmarks demonstrate that HyperET consistently improves both existing pre-training and fine-tuning MLLMs clearly with less than 1\% additional parameters.

With the growing demand for safeguarding sensitive user information in recommender systems, recommendation attribute unlearning is receiving increasing attention. Existing studies predominantly focus on single-attribute unlearning. However, privacy protection requirements in the real world often involve multiple sensitive attributes and are dynamic. Existing single-attribute unlearning methods cannot meet these real-world requirements due to i) CH1: the inability to handle multiple unlearning requests simultaneously, and ii) CH2: the lack of efficient adaptability to dynamic unlearning needs. To address these challenges, we propose LEGO, a lightweight and efficient multiple-attribute unlearning framework. Specifically, we divide the multiple-attribute unlearning process into two steps: i) Embedding Calibration removes information related to a specific attribute from user embedding, and ii) Flexible Combination combines these embeddings into a single embedding, protecting all sensitive attributes. We frame the unlearning process as a mutual information minimization problem, providing LEGO a theoretical guarantee of simultaneous unlearning, thereby addressing CH1. With the two-step framework, where Embedding Calibration can be performed in parallel and Flexible Combination is flexible and efficient, we address CH2. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets across three representative recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework. Our code and appendix are available at this https URL.

Humans routinely rely on memory to perform tasks, yet most robot policies lack this capability; our goal is to endow robot policies with the same ability. Naively conditioning on long observation histories is computationally expensive and brittle under covariate shift, while indiscriminate subsampling of history leads to irrelevant or redundant information. We propose a hierarchical policy framework, where the high-level policy is trained to select and track previous relevant keyframes from its experience. The high-level policy uses selected keyframes and the most recent frames when generating text instructions for a low-level policy to execute. This design is compatible with existing vision-language-action (VLA) models and enables the system to efficiently reason over long-horizon dependencies. In our experiments, we finetune Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and $\pi_{0.5}$ as the high-level and low-level policies respectively, using demonstrations supplemented with minimal language annotations. Our approach, MemER, outperforms prior methods on three real-world long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks that require minutes of memory. Videos and code can be found at this https URL.

Generalization remains a critical challenge for deep learning-based point cloud geometry compression. We argue this stems from two key limitations: the lack of robust context models and the inefficient handling of out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To address both, we introduce AnyPcc, a universal point cloud compression framework. AnyPcc first employs a Universal Context Model that leverages priors from both spatial and channel-wise grouping to capture robust contextual dependencies. Second, our novel Instance-Adaptive Fine-Tuning (IAFT) strategy tackles OOD data by synergizing explicit and implicit compression paradigms. It fine-tunes a small subset of network weights for each instance and incorporates them into the bitstream, where the marginal bit cost of the weights is dwarfed by the resulting savings in geometry compression. Extensive experiments on a benchmark of 15 diverse datasets confirm that AnyPcc sets a new state-of-the-art in point cloud compression. Our code and datasets will be released to encourage reproducible research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise for transforming healthcare. However, despite significant advances, the integration of AI solutions into real-world clinical practice remains limited. A major barrier is the quality and fairness of training data, which is often compromised by biased data collection practices. This paper draws on insights from the AI4HealthyAging project, part of Spain's national R&D initiative, where our task was to detect biases during clinical data collection. We identify several types of bias across multiple use cases, including historical, representation, and measurement biases. These biases manifest in variables such as sex, gender, age, habitat, socioeconomic status, equipment, and labeling. We conclude with practical recommendations for improving the fairness and robustness of clinical problem design and data collection. We hope that our findings and experience contribute to guiding future projects in the development of fairer AI systems in healthcare.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents to navigate mobile graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Operating in dynamic on-device ecosystems, which include notifications, pop-ups, and inter-app interactions, exposes them to a unique and underexplored threat vector: environmental injection. Unlike prompt-based attacks that manipulate textual instructions, environmental injection corrupts an agent's visual perception by inserting adversarial UI elements (for example, deceptive overlays or spoofed notifications) directly into the GUI. This bypasses textual safeguards and can derail execution, causing privacy leakage, financial loss, or irreversible device compromise. To systematically evaluate this threat, we introduce GhostEI-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing mobile agents under environmental injection attacks within dynamic, executable environments. Moving beyond static image-based assessments, GhostEI-Bench injects adversarial events into realistic application workflows inside fully operational Android emulators and evaluates performance across critical risk scenarios. We further propose a judge-LLM protocol that conducts fine-grained failure analysis by reviewing the agent's action trajectory alongside the corresponding screenshot sequence, pinpointing failure in perception, recognition, or reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on state-of-the-art agents reveal pronounced vulnerability to deceptive environmental cues: current models systematically fail to perceive and reason about manipulated UIs. GhostEI-Bench provides a framework for quantifying and mitigating this emerging threat, paving the way toward more robust and secure embodied agents.

Parking is a critical pillar of driving safety. While recent end-to-end (E2E) approaches have achieved promising in-domain results, robustness under domain shifts (e.g., weather and lighting changes) remains a key challenge. Rather than relying on additional data, in this paper, we propose Dino-Diffusion Parking (DDP), a domain-agnostic autonomous parking pipeline that integrates visual foundation models with diffusion-based planning to enable generalized perception and robust motion planning under distribution shifts. We train our pipeline in CARLA at regular setting and transfer it to more adversarial settings in a zero-shot fashion. Our model consistently achieves a parking success rate above 90% across all tested out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, with ablation studies confirming that both the network architecture and algorithmic design significantly enhance cross-domain performance over existing baselines. Furthermore, testing in a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) environment reconstructed from a real-world parking lot demonstrates promising sim-to-real transfer.

In an era where AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems play an increasing role in the battlefield, ensuring responsible targeting demands rigorous assessment of potential collateral effects. In this context, a novel collateral damage assessment model for target engagement of AI systems in military operations is introduced. The model integrates temporal, spatial, and force dimensions within a unified Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) architecture following a design science methodological approach. Its layered structure captures the categories and architectural components of the AI systems to be engaged together with corresponding engaging vectors and contextual aspects. At the same time, spreading, severity, likelihood, and evaluation metrics are considered in order to provide a clear representation enhanced by transparent reasoning mechanisms. Further, the model is demonstrated and evaluated through instantiation which serves as a basis for further dedicated efforts that aim at building responsible and trustworthy intelligent systems for assessing the effects produced by engaging AI systems in military operations.

Runtime introspection of dependencies, i.e., the ability to observe which dependencies are currently used during program execution, is fundamental for Software Supply Chain security. Yet, Java has no support for it. We solve this problem with Classport, a system that embeds dependency information into Java class files, enabling the retrieval of dependency information at runtime. We evaluate Classport on six real-world projects, demonstrating the feasibility in identifying dependencies at runtime. Runtime dependency introspection with Classport opens important avenues for runtime integrity checking.

We establish the first update-time separation between dynamic algorithms against oblivious adversaries and those against adaptive adversaries in natural dynamic graph problems, based on popular fine-grained complexity hypotheses. Specifically, under the combinatorial BMM hypothesis, we show that every combinatorial algorithm against an adaptive adversary for the incremental maximal independent set problem requires $n^{1-o(1)}$ amortized update time. Furthermore, assuming either the 3SUM or APSP hypotheses, every algorithm for the decremental maximal clique problem needs $\Delta/n^{o(1)}$ amortized update time when the initial maximum degree is $\Delta \le \sqrt{n}$. These lower bounds are matched by existing algorithms against adaptive adversaries. In contrast, both problems admit algorithms against oblivious adversaries that achieve $\operatorname{polylog}(n)$ amortized update time [Behnezhad, Derakhshan, Hajiaghayi, Stein, Sudan; FOCS '19] [Chechik, Zhang; FOCS '19]. Therefore, our separations are exponential. Previously known separations for dynamic algorithms were either engineered for contrived problems and relied on strong cryptographic assumptions [Beimel, Kaplan, Mansour, Nissim, Saranurak, Stemmer; STOC '22], or worked for problems whose inputs are not explicitly given but are accessed through oracle calls [Bateni, Esfandiari, Fichtenberger, Henzinger, Jayaram, Mirrokni, Wiese; SODA '23]. As a byproduct, we also provide a separation between incremental and decremental algorithms for the triangle detection problem: we show a decremental algorithm with $\tilde{O}(n^{\omega})$ total update time, while every incremental algorithm requires $n^{3-o(1)}$ total update time, assuming the OMv hypothesis. To our knowledge this is the first separation of this kind.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While integrating computational tools such as Code Interpreters (CIs) offers a promising solution, it introduces a critical challenge: a conflict between the model's internal, probabilistic reasoning and the external, deterministic knowledge provided by the CI, which often leads models to unproductive deliberation. To overcome this, we introduce CoRT (Code-Optimized Reasoning Training), a post-training framework designed to teach LRMs to effectively utilize CIs. We propose \emph{Hint-Engineering}, a new data synthesis strategy that strategically injects diverse hints at optimal points within reasoning paths. This approach generates high-quality, code-integrated reasoning data specifically tailored to optimize LRM-CI interaction. Using this method, we have synthesized 30 high-quality samples to post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters through supervised fine-tuning. CoRT further refines the multi-round interleaving of external CI usage and internal thinking by employing rejection sampling and reinforcement learning. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate CoRT's effectiveness, yielding absolute improvements of 4\% and 8\% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Moreover, CoRT significantly enhances efficiency, reducing token usage by approximately 30\% for the 32B model and 50\% for the 1.5B model compared to pure natural language reasoning baselines. The models and code are available at: this https URL.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have long served as a fundamental infrastructure for structured knowledge representation and reasoning. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), the construction of KGs has entered a new paradigm-shifting from rule-based and statistical pipelines to language-driven and generative frameworks. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in LLM-empowered knowledge graph construction, systematically analyzing how LLMs reshape the classical three-layered pipeline of ontology engineering, knowledge extraction, and knowledge fusion. We first revisit traditional KG methodologies to establish conceptual foundations, and then review emerging LLM-driven approaches from two complementary perspectives: schema-based paradigms, which emphasize structure, normalization, and consistency; and schema-free paradigms, which highlight flexibility, adaptability, and open discovery. Across each stage, we synthesize representative frameworks, analyze their technical mechanisms, and identify their limitations. Finally, the survey outlines key trends and future research directions, including KG-based reasoning for LLMs, dynamic knowledge memory for agentic systems, and multimodal KG construction. Through this systematic review, we aim to clarify the evolving interplay between LLMs and knowledge graphs, bridging symbolic knowledge engineering and neural semantic understanding toward the development of adaptive, explainable, and intelligent knowledge systems.

Modular reconfigurable robots suit task-specific space operations, but the combinatorial growth of morphologies hinders unified control. We propose a decentralized reinforcement learning (Dec-RL) scheme where each module learns its own policy: wheel modules use Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) for locomotion and 7-DoF limbs use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for steering and manipulation, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen configurations. In simulation, the steering policy achieved a mean absolute error of 3.63° between desired and induced angles; the manipulation policy plateaued at 84.6 % success on a target-offset criterion; and the wheel policy cut average motor torque by 95.4 % relative to baseline while maintaining 99.6 % success. Lunar-analogue field tests validated zero-shot integration for autonomous locomotion, steering, and preliminary alignment for reconfiguration. The system transitioned smoothly among synchronous, parallel, and sequential modes for Policy Execution, without idle states or control conflicts, indicating a scalable, reusable, and robust approach for modular lunar robots.

We present in this paper a novel post-training quantization (PTQ) method, dubbed AccuQuant, for diffusion models. We show analytically and empirically that quantization errors for diffusion models are accumulated over denoising steps in a sampling process. To alleviate the error accumulation problem, AccuQuant minimizes the discrepancies between outputs of a full-precision diffusion model and its quantized version within a couple of denoising steps. That is, it simulates multiple denoising steps of a diffusion sampling process explicitly for quantization, accounting the accumulated errors over multiple denoising steps, which is in contrast to previous approaches to imitating a training process of diffusion models, namely, minimizing the discrepancies independently for each step. We also present an efficient implementation technique for AccuQuant, together with a novel objective, which reduces a memory complexity significantly from $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, where $n$ is the number of denoising steps. We demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of AccuQuant across various tasks and diffusion models on standard benchmarks.

Deep vision models are now mature enough to be integrated in industrial and possibly critical applications such as autonomous navigation. Yet, data collection and labeling to train such models requires too much efforts and costs for a single company or product. This drawback is more significant in critical applications, where training data must include all possible conditions including rare scenarios. In this perspective, generating synthetic images is an appealing solution, since it allows a cheap yet reliable covering of all the conditions and environments, if the impact of the synthetic-to-real distribution shift is mitigated. In this article, we consider the case of runway detection that is a critical part in autonomous landing systems developed by aircraft manufacturers. We propose an image generation approach based on a commercial flight simulator that complements a few annotated real images. By controlling the image generation and the integration of real and synthetic data, we show that standard object detection models can achieve accurate prediction. We also evaluate their robustness with respect to adverse conditions, in our case nighttime images, that were not represented in the real data, and show the interest of using a customized domain adaptation strategy.

W.J.T. Mitchell's influential essay 'What do pictures want?' shifts the theoretical focus away from the interpretative act of understanding pictures and from the motivations of the humans who create them to the possibility that the picture itself is an entity with agency and wants. In this article, I reframe Mitchell's question in light of contemporary AI image generation tools to ask: what do AI-generated images want? Drawing from art historical discourse on the nature of abstraction, I argue that AI-generated images want specificity and concreteness because they are fundamentally abstract. Multimodal text-to-image models, which are the primary subject of this article, are based on the premise that text and image are interchangeable or exchangeable tokens and that there is a commensurability between them, at least as represented mathematically in data. The user pipeline that sees textual input become visual output, however, obscures this representational regress and makes it seem like one form transforms into the other -- as if by magic.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on their ability to reason over structured data, yet such assessments often overlook a crucial confound: dataset contamination. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs exhibit prior knowledge of widely used tabular benchmarks such as Adult Income, Titanic, and others. Through a series of controlled probing experiments, we reveal that contamination effects emerge exclusively for datasets containing strong semantic cues-for instance, meaningful column names or interpretable value categories. In contrast, when such cues are removed or randomized, performance sharply declines to near-random levels. These findings suggest that LLMs' apparent competence on tabular reasoning tasks may, in part, reflect memorization of publicly available datasets rather than genuine generalization. We discuss implications for evaluation protocols and propose strategies to disentangle semantic leakage from authentic reasoning ability in future LLM assessments.

Chunking strategies significantly impact the effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Existing methods operate within fixed-granularity paradigms that rely on static boundary identification, limiting their adaptability to diverse query requirements. This paper presents FreeChunker, a Cross-Granularity Encoding Framework that fundamentally transforms the traditional chunking paradigm: the framework treats sentences as atomic units and shifts from static chunk segmentation to flexible retrieval supporting arbitrary sentence combinations. This paradigm shift not only significantly reduces the computational overhead required for semantic boundary detection but also enhances adaptability to complex queries. Experimental evaluation on LongBench V2 demonstrates that FreeChunker achieves superior retrieval performance compared to traditional chunking methods, while significantly outperforming existing approaches in computational efficiency.

We investigate whether pre-training exclusively on dialogue data results in formally and functionally apt small language models. Based on this pre-trained llamalogue model, we employ a variety of fine-tuning strategies to enforce "more communicative" text generations by our models. Although our models underperform on most standard BabyLM benchmarks, they excel at dialogue continuation prediction in a minimal pair setting. While PPO fine-tuning has mixed to adversarial effects on our models, DPO fine-tuning further improves their performance on our custom dialogue benchmark.

We consider a unique continuation problem for the wave equation given data in a volumetric subset of the space time domain. In the absence of data on the lateral boundary of the space-time cylinder we prove that the solution can be continued with Hölder stability into a certain proper subset of the space-time domain. Additionally, we show that unique continuation of the solution to the entire space-time cylinder with Lipschitz stability is possible given the knowledge of a suitable finite dimensional space in which the trace of the solution on the lateral boundary is contained. These results allow us to design a finite element method that provably converges to the exact solution at a rate that mirrors the stability properties of the continuous problem.

We demonstrate that the best $k$-sparse approximation of a length-$n$ vector can be recovered within a $(1+\epsilon)$-factor approximation in $O((k/\epsilon) \log n)$ time using a non-adaptive linear sketch with $O((k/\epsilon) \log n)$ rows and $O(\log n)$ column sparsity. This improves the running time of the fastest-known sketch [Nakos, Song; STOC '19] by a factor of $\log n$, and is optimal for a wide range of parameters. Our algorithm is simple and likely to be practical, with the analysis built on a new technique we call weighted hypergraph peeling. Our method naturally extends known hypergraph peeling processes (as in the analysis of Invertible Bloom Filters) to a setting where edges and nodes have (possibly correlated) weights.

Analytical chemistry instruments provide physically meaningful signals for elucidating analyte composition and play important roles in material, biological, and food analysis. These instruments are valued for strong alignment with physical principles, enabling compound identification through pattern matching with chemical libraries. More reliable instruments generate sufficiently sparse signals for direct interpretation. Generative multivariate curve resolution (gMCR) and its energy-based solver (EB-gMCR) offer powerful tools for decomposing mixed signals suitable for chemical data analysis. However, extreme signal sparsity from instruments such as GC-MS or 1H-NMR can impair EB-gMCR decomposability. To address this, a fixed EB-select module inheriting EB-gMCR's design was introduced for handling extreme sparse components. Combined with minor adjustments to energy optimization, this led to SparseEB-gMCR. In synthetic datasets, SparseEB-gMCR exhibited comparable decomposability and graceful scalability to dense-component EB-gMCR. The sparse variant was applied to real GC-MS chromatograms for unsupervised contamination removal. Analysis showed siloxane-related pollution signals were effectively eliminated, improving compound identification reliability. Results demonstrate that SparseEB-gMCR preserves the decomposability and self-determining component capability of EB-gMCR while extending adaptability to sparse and irregular chemical data. With this sparse extension, the EB-gMCR family becomes applicable to wider ranges of real-world chemical datasets, providing a general mathematical framework for signal unmixing and contamination elimination in analytical chemistry.

Meshless methods are commonly used to determine numerical solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) for problems involving free surfaces and/or complex geometries, approximating spatial derivatives at collocation points via local kernels with a finite size. Despite their common use in turbulent flow simulations, the accuracy of meshless methods has typically been assessed using their convergence characteristics resulting from the polynomial consistency of approximations to operators, with little to no attention paid to the resolving power of the approximation. Here we provide a framework for the optimisation of resolving power by exploiting the non-uniqueness of kernels to provide improvements to numerical approximations of spatial derivatives. We first demonstrate that, unlike in finite-difference approximations, the resolving power of meshless methods is dependent not only on the magnitude of the wavenumber, but also its orientation, before using linear combinations of kernels to maximise resolving power over a range of wavenumbers. The new approach shows improved accuracy in convergence tests and has little impact on stability of time-dependent problems for a range of Eulerian meshless methods. Solutions to a variety of PDE systems are computed, with significant gains in accuracy for no extra computational cost per timestep in Eulerian frameworks. The improved resolution characteristics provided by the optimisation procedure presented herein enable accurate simulation of systems of PDEs whose solution contains short spatial scales such as flow fields with homogeneous isotropic turbulence.

Pretrained deep learning model sharing holds tremendous value for researchers and enterprises alike. It allows them to apply deep learning by fine-tuning models at a fraction of the cost of training a brand-new model. However, model sharing exposes end-users to cyber threats that leverage the models for malicious purposes. Attackers can use model sharing by hiding self-executing malware inside neural network parameters and then distributing them for unsuspecting users to unknowingly directly execute them, or indirectly as a dependency in another software. In this work, we propose NeuPerm, a simple yet effec- tive way of disrupting such malware by leveraging the theoretical property of neural network permutation symmetry. Our method has little to no effect on model performance at all, and we empirically show it successfully disrupts state-of-the-art attacks that were only previously addressed using quantization, a highly complex process. NeuPerm is shown to work on LLMs, a feat that no other previous similar works have achieved. The source code is available at this https URL.

We provide faster strongly polynomial time algorithms solving maximum flow in structured $n$-node $m$-arc networks. Our results imply an $n^{\omega + o(1)}$-time strongly polynomial time algorithms for computing a maximum bipartite $b$-matching where $\omega$ is the matrix multiplication constant. Additionally, they imply an $m^{1 + o(1)} W$-time algorithm for solving the problem on graphs with a given tree decomposition of width $W$. We obtain these results by strengthening and efficiently implementing an approach in Orlin's (STOC 2013) state-of-the-art $O(mn)$ time maximum flow algorithm. We develop a general framework that reduces solving maximum flow with arbitrary capacities to (1) solving a sequence of maximum flow problems with polynomial bounded capacities and (2) dynamically maintaining a size-bounded supersets of the transitive closure under arc additions; we call this problem \emph{incremental transitive cover}. Our applications follow by leveraging recent weakly polynomial, almost linear time algorithms for maximum flow due to Chen, Kyng, Liu, Peng, Gutenberg, Sachdeva (FOCS 2022) and Brand, Chen, Kyng, Liu, Peng, Gutenberg, Sachdeva, Sidford (FOCS 2023), and by developing incremental transitive cover data structures.

Reward model (RM) plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, classical RMs trained on human preferences are vulnerable to reward hacking and generalize poorly to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. By contrast, strong LLM judges equipped with reasoning capabilities demonstrate superior generalization, even without additional training, but incur significantly higher inference costs, limiting their applicability in online RLHF. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-based routing framework that efficiently complements a fast RM with a strong but costly LLM judge. Our approach formulates advantage estimation in policy gradient (PG) methods as pairwise preference classification, enabling principled uncertainty quantification to guide routing. Uncertain pairs are forwarded to the LLM judge, while confident ones are evaluated by the RM. Experiments on RM benchmarks demonstrate that our uncertainty-based routing strategy significantly outperforms random judge calling at the same cost, and downstream alignment results showcase its effectiveness in improving online RLHF.

Recent studies on hallucination in large language models (LLMs) have been actively progressing in natural language processing. However, the impact of negated text on hallucination with LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we set three important yet unanswered research questions and aim to address them. To derive the answers, we investigate whether LLMs can recognize contextual shifts caused by negation and still reliably distinguish hallucinations comparable to affirmative cases. We also design the NegHalu dataset by reconstructing existing hallucination detection datasets with negated expressions. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs struggle to detect hallucinations in negated text effectively, often producing logically inconsistent or unfaithful judgments. Moreover, we trace the internal state of LLMs as they process negated inputs at the token level and reveal the challenges of mitigating their unintended effects.

Continual pretraining promises to adapt large language models (LLMs) to new domains using only unlabeled test-time data, but naively applying standard self-supervised objectives to instruction-tuned models is known to degrade their instruction-following capability and semantic representations. Existing fixes assume access to the original base model or rely on knowledge from an external domain-specific database - both of which pose a realistic barrier in settings where the base model weights are withheld for safety reasons or reliable external corpora are unavailable. In this work, we propose Instruction-Knowledge-Aware Continual Adaptation (IKnow), a simple and general framework that formulates novel self-supervised objectives in the instruction-response dialogue format. Rather than depend- ing on external resources, IKnow leverages domain knowledge embedded within the text itself and learns to encode it at a deeper semantic level.

Analog Lagrange Coded Computing (ALCC) is a recently proposed computational paradigm wherein certain computations over analog datasets are efficiently performed using distributed worker nodes through floating point representation. While the vanilla version of ALCC is known to preserve the privacy of the datasets from the workers and also achieve resilience against stragglers, it is not robust against Byzantine workers that return erroneous results. Highlighting this vulnerability, we propose a secure ALCC framework that is resilient against a wide range of integrity threats from the Byzantine workers. As a foundational step, we use error-correction algorithms for Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) codes to build novel reconstruction strategies for ALCC thereby improving its computational accuracy in the presence of a bounded number of Byzantine workers. Furthermore, capitalizing on some theoretical results on the performance of the DFT decoders, we propose novel strategies for distributing the ALCC computational tasks to the workers, and show that such methods significantly improve the accuracy when the workers' trust profiles are available at the master server. Finally, we study the robustness of the proposed framework against colluding attacks, and show that interesting attack strategies can be executed by exploiting the inherent precision noise owing to floating point implementation.

This paper presents the VLSP 2025 MLQA-TSR - the multimodal legal question answering on traffic sign regulation shared task at VLSP 2025. VLSP 2025 MLQA-TSR comprises two subtasks: multimodal legal retrieval and multimodal question answering. The goal is to advance research on Vietnamese multimodal legal text processing and to provide a benchmark dataset for building and evaluating intelligent systems in multimodal legal domains, with a focus on traffic sign regulation in Vietnam. The best-reported results on VLSP 2025 MLQA-TSR are an F2 score of 64.55% for multimodal legal retrieval and an accuracy of 86.30% for multimodal question answering.

Pattern-avoiding permutations are a central object of study in both combinatorics and theoretical computer science. In this paper we design a data structure that can store any size-$n$ permutation $\tau$ that avoids an arbitrary (and unknown) fixed pattern $\pi$ in the asymptotically optimal $O(n \lg{s_\pi})$ bits, where $s_\pi$ is the Stanley-Wilf limit of $\pi$. Our data structure supports $\tau(i)$ and $\tau^{-1}(i)$ queries in $O(1)$ time, sidestepping the lower bound of Golynski (SODA 2009) that holds for general permutations. Comparable results were previously known only in more restricted cases, e.g., when $\tau$ is separable, which means avoiding the patterns 2413 and 3142. We also extend our data structure to support more complex geometric queries on pattern-avoiding permutations (or planar point sets) such as rectangle range counting in $O(\lg\lg{n})$ time. This result circumvents the lower bound of $\Omega{(\lg{n}/\lg\lg{n})}$ by Pătraşcu (STOC 2007) that holds in the general case. For bounded treewidth permutation classes (which include the above-mentioned separable class), we further reduce the space overhead to a lower order additive term, making our data structure succinct. This extends and improves results of Chakraborty et al. (ISAAC 2024) that were obtained for separable permutations via different techniques. All our data structures can be constructed in linear time.

This paper focuses on forecasting hierarchical time-series data, where each higher-level observation equals the sum of its corresponding lower-level time series. In such contexts, the forecast values should be coherent, meaning that the forecast value of each parent series exactly matches the sum of the forecast values of its child series. Existing hierarchical forecasting methods typically generate base forecasts independently for each series and then apply a reconciliation procedure to adjust them so that the resulting forecast values are coherent across the hierarchy. These methods generally derive an optimal reconciliation, using a covariance matrix of the forecast error. In practice, however, the true covariance matrix is unknown and has to be estimated from finite samples in advance. This gap between the true and estimated covariance matrix may degrade forecast performance. To address this issue, we propose a robust optimization framework for hierarchical reconciliation that accounts for uncertainty in the estimated covariance matrix. We first introduce an uncertainty set for the estimated covariance matrix and formulate a reconciliation problem that minimizes the worst-case expected squared error over this uncertainty set. We show that our problem can be cast as a semidefinite optimization problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed robust reconciliation method achieved better forecast performance than existing hierarchical forecasting methods, which indicates the effectiveness of integrating uncertainty into the reconciliation process.

This paper presents a critical review of methods commonly employed in the literature for small signal stability analysis of inverter based resources (IBRs). It discusses the intended purposes of these methods and outlines both their proper and improper implementations. The paper provides insights into the applicability of these techniques, clarifies their inherent limitations, and discusses and illustrates common sources of misinterpretation.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for visual generation, powering state-of-the-art image and video models. By representing images as patch tokens with positional encodings (PEs), DiTs combine Transformer scalability with spatial and temporal inductive biases. In this work, we revisit how DiTs organize visual content and discover that patch tokens exhibit a surprising degree of independence: even when PEs are perturbed, DiTs still produce globally coherent outputs, indicating that spatial coherence is primarily governed by PEs. Motivated by this finding, we introduce the Positional Encoding Field (PE-Field), which extends positional encodings from the 2D plane to a structured 3D field. PE-Field incorporates depth-aware encodings for volumetric reasoning and hierarchical encodings for fine-grained sub-patch control, enabling DiTs to model geometry directly in 3D space. Our PE-Field-augmented DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-image novel view synthesis and generalizes to controllable spatial image editing.

Since their initial release, BERT models have demonstrated exceptional performance on a variety of tasks, despite their relatively small size (BERT-base has ~100M parameters). Nevertheless, the architectural choices used in these models are outdated compared to newer transformer-based models such as Llama3 and Qwen3. In recent months, several architectures have been proposed to close this gap. ModernBERT and NeoBERT both show strong improvements on English benchmarks and significantly extend the supported context window. Following their successes, we introduce NeoDictaBERT and NeoDictaBERT-bilingual: BERT-style models trained using the same architecture as NeoBERT, with a dedicated focus on Hebrew texts. These models outperform existing ones on almost all Hebrew benchmarks and provide a strong foundation for downstream tasks. Notably, the NeoDictaBERT-bilingual model shows strong results on retrieval tasks, outperforming other multilingual models of similar size. In this paper, we describe the training process and report results across various benchmarks. We release the models to the community as part of our goal to advance research and development in Hebrew NLP.

Scaling laws aim to accurately predict model performance across different scales. Existing scaling-law studies almost exclusively rely on cross-entropy as the evaluation metric. However, cross-entropy provides only a partial view of performance: it measures the absolute probability assigned to the correct token, but ignores the relative ordering between correct and incorrect tokens. Yet, relative ordering is crucial for language models, such as in greedy-sampling scenario. To address this limitation, we investigate scaling from the perspective of relative ordering. We first propose the Relative-Based Probability (RBP) metric, which quantifies the probability that the correct token is ranked among the top predictions. Building on this metric, we establish the Relative-Based Scaling Law, which characterizes how RBP improves with increasing model size. Through extensive experiments on four datasets and four model families spanning five orders of magnitude, we demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of this law. Finally, we illustrate the broad application of this law with two examples, namely providing a deeper explanation of emergence phenomena and facilitating finding fundamental theories of scaling laws. In summary, the Relative-Based Scaling Law complements the cross-entropy perspective and contributes to a more complete understanding of scaling large language models. Thus, it offers valuable insights for both practical development and theoretical exploration.

Cloud computing has established itself as the support for the vast majority of emerging technologies, mainly due to the characteristic of elasticity it offers. Auto-scalers are the systems that enable this elasticity by acquiring and releasing resources on demand to ensure an agreed service level. In this article we present FLAS (Forecasted Load Auto-Scaling), an auto-scaler for distributed services that combines the advantages of proactive and reactive approaches according to the situation to decide the optimal scaling actions in every moment. The main novelties introduced by FLAS are (i) a predictive model of the high-level metrics trend which allows to anticipate changes in the relevant SLA parameters (e.g. performance metrics such as response time or throughput) and (ii) a reactive contingency system based on the estimation of high-level metrics from resource use metrics, reducing the necessary instrumentation (less invasive) and allowing it to be adapted agnostically to different applications. We provide a FLAS implementation for the use case of a content-based publish-subscribe middleware (E-SilboPS) that is the cornerstone of an event-driven architecture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first auto-scaling system for content-based publish-subscribe distributed systems (although it is generic enough to fit any distributed service). Through an evaluation based on several test cases recreating not only the expected contexts of use, but also the worst possible scenarios (following the Boundary-Value Analysis or BVA test methodology), we have validated our approach and demonstrated the effectiveness of our solution by ensuring compliance with performance requirements over 99% of the time.

Software platforms often act as structure preserving systems. They provide consistent interfaces and behaviors that remain stable under specific transformations that we denote as symmetries. This paper explores the idea that architectural robustness emerges from enforcing such structural regularities

Grasping accuracy is a critical prerequisite for precise object manipulation, often requiring careful alignment between the robot hand and object. Neural Descriptor Fields (NDF) offer a promising vision-based method to generate grasping poses that generalize across object categories. However, NDF alone can produce inaccurate poses due to imperfect camera calibration, incomplete point clouds, and object variability. Meanwhile, tactile sensing enables more precise contact, but existing approaches typically learn policies limited to simple, predefined contact geometries. In this work, we introduce NeuralTouch, a multimodal framework that integrates NDF and tactile sensing to enable accurate, generalizable grasping through gentle physical interaction. Our approach leverages NDF to implicitly represent the target contact geometry, from which a deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy is trained to refine the grasp using tactile feedback. This policy is conditioned on the neural descriptors and does not require explicit specification of contact types. We validate NeuralTouch through ablation studies in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world manipulation tasks--such as peg-out-in-hole and bottle lid opening--without additional fine-tuning. Results show that NeuralTouch significantly improves grasping accuracy and robustness over baseline methods, offering a general framework for precise, contact-rich robotic manipulation.

Existing approaches for image-to-recipe retrieval have the implicit assumption that a food image can fully capture the details textually documented in its recipe. However, a food image only reflects the visual outcome of a cooked dish and not the underlying cooking process. Consequently, learning cross-modal representations to bridge the modality gap between images and recipes tends to ignore subtle, recipe-specific details that are not visually apparent but are crucial for recipe retrieval. Specifically, the representations are biased to capture the dominant visual elements, resulting in difficulty in ranking similar recipes with subtle differences in use of ingredients and cooking methods. The bias in representation learning is expected to be more severe when the training data is mixed of images and recipes sourced from different cuisines. This paper proposes a novel causal approach that predicts the culinary elements potentially overlooked in images, while explicitly injecting these elements into cross-modal representation learning to mitigate biases. Experiments are conducted on the standard monolingual Recipe1M dataset and a newly curated multilingual multicultural cuisine dataset. The results indicate that the proposed causal representation learning is capable of uncovering subtle ingredients and cooking actions and achieves impressive retrieval performance on both monolingual and multilingual multicultural datasets.

The main goal of this contribution is to explain how to use interlacing techniques for LTI controllers implementation and analyze different struc- tures in this environment. These considerations lead to an important com- putation saving in constrained resource environments. It has been also intro- duced new procedures for obtaining the blocks related to different real and complex controllers poles. The resultant time-varying system is modeled using proper discrete lifting techniques and a new and efficient dual-rate fre- quency response computation allows to determine the characteristics of the control loop with interlaced controller. Examples illustrate the theoretical proposals.

Multiple HPC applications are often bottlenecked by compute-intensive kernels implementing complex dependency patterns (data-dependency bound). Traditional general-purpose accelerators struggle to effectively exploit fine-grain parallelism due to limitations in implementing convoluted data-dependency patterns (like SIMD) and overheads due to synchronization and data transfers (like GPGPUs). In contrast, custom FPGA and ASIC designs offer improved performance and energy efficiency at a high cost in hardware design and programming complexity and often lack the flexibility to process different workloads. We propose Squire, a general-purpose accelerator designed to exploit fine-grain parallelism effectively on dependency-bound kernels. Each Squire accelerator has a set of general-purpose low-power in-order cores that can rapidly communicate among themselves and directly access data from the L2 cache. Our proposal integrates one Squire accelerator per core in a typical multicore system, allowing the acceleration of dependency-bound kernels within parallel tasks with minimal software changes. As a case study, we evaluate Squire's effectiveness by accelerating five kernels that implement complex dependency patterns. We use three of these kernels to build an end-to-end read-mapping tool that will be used to evaluate Squire. Squire obtains speedups up to 7.64$\times$ in dynamic programming kernels. Overall, Squire provides an acceleration for an end-to-end application of 3.66$\times$. In addition, Squire reduces energy consumption by up to 56% with a minimal area overhead of 10.5% compared to a Neoverse-N1 baseline.

This paper presents a new computational model of creative outcomes, informed by creativity theories and techniques, which was implemented to generate more novel opportunities for innovation projects. The model implemented five functions that were developed to contribute to the generation of innovation opportunities with higher novelty without loss of usefulness. The model was evaluated using opportunities generated for an innovation project in the hospitality sector. The evaluation revealed that the computational model generated outcomes that were more novel and/or useful than outcomes from Notebook LM and ChatGPT4o. However, not all model functions contributed to the generation of more novel opportunities, leading to new directions for further model development

Distributed co-simulation plays a key role in enabling collaborative modeling and simulation by different stakeholders while protecting their Intellectual Property (IP). Although IP protection is provided implicitly by co-simulation, there is no consensus in the guidelines to conduct distributed co-simulation of continuous-time or hybrid systems with no exposure to potential hacking attacks. We propose an approach for distributed co-simulation on top of UniFMU with enhanced cybersecurity and IP protection mechanisms, ensuring that the connection is initiated by the client and the models and binaries live on trusted platforms. We showcase the functionality of this approach using two co-simulation demos in four different network settings and analyze the trade-off between IP-protected distribution and performance efficiency in these settings.

Robotic manipulation systems benefit from complementary sensing modalities, where each provides unique environmental information. Point clouds capture detailed geometric structure, while RGB images provide rich semantic context. Current point cloud methods struggle to capture fine-grained detail, especially for complex tasks, which RGB methods lack geometric awareness, which hinders their precision and generalization. We introduce PointMapPolicy, a novel approach that conditions diffusion policies on structured grids of points without downsampling. The resulting data type makes it easier to extract shape and spatial relationships from observations, and can be transformed between reference frames. Yet due to their structure in a regular grid, we enable the use of established computer vision techniques directly to 3D data. Using xLSTM as a backbone, our model efficiently fuses the point maps with RGB data for enhanced multi-modal perception. Through extensive experiments on the RoboCasa and CALVIN benchmarks and real robot evaluations, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse manipulation tasks. The overview and demos are available on our project page: this https URL

We present a mixed reality-based underwater robot arm teleoperation system with a reaction torque indicator via bilateral control (MR-UBi). The reaction torque indicator (RTI) overlays a color and length-coded torque bar in the MR-HMD, enabling seamless integration of visual and haptic feedback during underwater robot arm teleoperation. User studies with sixteen participants compared MR-UBi against a bilateral-control baseline. MR-UBi significantly improved grasping-torque control accuracy, increasing the time within the optimal torque range and reducing both low and high grasping torque range during lift and pick-and-place tasks with objects of different stiffness. Subjective evaluations further showed higher usability (SUS) and lower workload (NASA--TLX). Overall, the results confirm that \textit{MR-UBi} enables more stable, accurate, and user-friendly underwater robot-arm teleoperation through the integration of visual and haptic feedback. For additional material, please check: this https URL

Autonomous control of multi-stage industrial processes requires both local specialization and global coordination. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach, but its industrial adoption remains limited due to challenges such as reward design, modularity, and action space management. Many academic benchmarks differ markedly from industrial control problems, limiting their transferability to real-world applications. This study introduces an enhanced industry-inspired benchmark environment that combines tasks from two existing benchmarks, SortingEnv and ContainerGym, into a sequential recycling scenario with sorting and pressing operations. We evaluate two control strategies: a modular architecture with specialized agents and a monolithic agent governing the full system, while also analyzing the impact of action masking. Our experiments show that without action masking, agents struggle to learn effective policies, with the modular architecture performing better. When action masking is applied, both architectures improve substantially, and the performance gap narrows considerably. These results highlight the decisive role of action space constraints and suggest that the advantages of specialization diminish as action complexity is reduced. The proposed benchmark thus provides a valuable testbed for exploring practical and robust multi-agent RL solutions in industrial automation, while contributing to the ongoing debate on centralization versus specialization.

As autonomous agents, from self-driving cars to virtual assistants, become increasingly present in everyday life, safe and effective collaboration depends on human understanding of agents' intentions. Current intent communication approaches are often rigid, agent-specific, and narrowly scoped, limiting their adaptability across tasks, environments, and user preferences. A key gap remains: existing models of what to communicate are rarely linked to systematic choices of how and when to communicate, preventing the development of generalizable, multi-modal strategies. In this paper, we introduce a multidimensional design space for intent communication structured along three dimensions: Transparency (what is communicated), Abstraction (when), and Modality (how). We apply this design space to three distinct human-agent collaboration scenarios: (a) bystander interaction, (b) cooperative tasks, and (c) shared control, demonstrating its capacity to generate adaptable, scalable, and cross-domain communication strategies. By bridging the gap between intent content and communication implementation, our design space provides a foundation for designing safer, more intuitive, and more transferable agent-human interactions.

Multi-turn dialogues between a child and a caregiver are characterized by a property called contingency - that is, prompt, direct, and meaningful exchanges between interlocutors. We introduce ContingentChat, a teacher-student framework that benchmarks and improves multi-turn contingency in a BabyLM trained on 100M words. Using a novel alignment dataset for post-training, BabyLM generates responses that are more grammatical and cohesive. Experiments with adaptive teacher decoding strategies show limited additional gains. ContingentChat demonstrates the benefits of targeted post-training for dialogue quality and indicates that contingency remains a challenging goal for BabyLMs.

Direct alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tune models based on preference data, using only supervised learning instead of two-stage reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). We show that DPO encodes a statistical estimation problem over reward functions induced by a parametric policy class. When the true reward function that generates preferences cannot be realized via the policy class, DPO becomes misspecified, resulting in failure modes such as preference order reversal, worsening of policy reward, and high sensitivity to the input preference data distribution. On the other hand, we study the local behavior of two-stage RLHF for a parametric class and relate it to a natural gradient step in policy space. Our fine-grained geometric characterization allows us to propose AuxDPO, which introduces additional auxiliary variables in the DPO loss function to help move towards the RLHF solution in a principled manner and mitigate the misspecification in DPO. We empirically demonstrate the superior performance of AuxDPO on didactic bandit settings as well as LLM alignment tasks.

Marked Temporal Point Process (MTPP) has been well studied to model the event distribution in marked event streams, which can be used to predict the mark and arrival time of the next event. However, existing studies overlook that the distribution of event marks is highly imbalanced in many real-world applications, with some marks being frequent but others rare. The imbalance poses a significant challenge to the performance of the next event prediction, especially for events of rare marks. To address this issue, we propose a thresholding method, which learns thresholds to tune the mark probability normalized by the mark's prior probability to optimize mark prediction, rather than predicting the mark directly based on the mark probability as in existing studies. In conjunction with this method, we predict the mark first and then the time. In particular, we develop a novel neural MTPP model to support effective time sampling and estimation of mark probability without computationally expensive numerical improper integration. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our solution against various baselines for the next event mark and time prediction. The code is available at this https URL.

We present a multifunctional, antenna-integrated capacitive sensing (MAiCaS) platform for passive, wireless, and real-time cardiovascular monitoring. Unlike conventional systems that require separate sensors and wireless modules, our device unifies sensing, telemetry, and mechanical functionality into a compact and scalable design by exploiting the parasitic capacitance of an inductive antenna as a strain-sensitive element. The sensor is fabricated using a cleanroom-free, single-step UV laser patterning process on a flexible PDMS substrate, reducing manufacturing complexity and enabling high reproducibility. The MAiCaS is suitable for three different applications: as a sensor for epicardial strain measurement, a stent as a sensor, and a vascular graft sensor. We demonstrate MAiCaS's versatility by validating its wireless resonance-based response to strain, pressure, and deformation across unrolled and rolled forms. In vitro experiments demonstrated consistent resonance frequency shifts under physiological conditions, with stable performance on skin, in PBS, human serum, and simulated vascular environments. Repeatability and aging tests confirmed its long-term reliability and elasticity under cyclic loading. Calibration curves revealed high sensitivity across all configurations, with wireless interrogation achieved through S11 parameter measurements and resonance frequency shift as the output metric. The sensitivity of the device was measured to be 2.9 MHz per 1% strain, 0.43 MHz/mmHg, and 309.6kHz/\textmu m for epicardial patch, graft, and stent integrated sensor, respectively. The operation of MAiCaS was evaluated in a human experiment. This monolithic sensor architecture provides a scalable and cost-effective solution for battery-free monitoring of vascular dynamics, with potential for remote diagnostics, post-surgical follow-up, and continuous cardiovascular health management.

Aggregating Message Authentication Codes (MACs) promises to save valuable bandwidth in resource-constrained environments. The idea is simple: Instead of appending an authentication tag to each message in a communication stream, the integrity protection of multiple messages is aggregated into a single tag. Recent studies postulate, e.g., based on simulations, that these benefits also spread to wireless, and thus lossy, scenarios despite each lost packet typically resulting in the loss of integrity protection information for multiple messages. In this paper, we investigate these claims in a real deployment. Therefore, we first design a MAC aggregation extension for the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) 1.3 protocol. Afterward, we extensively evaluate the performance of MAC aggregation on a complete communication protocol stack on embedded hardware. We find that MAC aggregation can indeed increase goodput by up to 50% and save up to 17% of energy expenditure for the transmission of short messages, even in lossy channels.

Dual quaternions have gained significant attention due to their wide applications in areas such as multi-agent formation control, 3D motion modeling, and robotics. A fundamental aspect in dual quaternion research involves the projection onto unit dual quaternion sets. In this paper, we systematically study such projections under the $2^R$-norm, which is commonly used in practical applications. We identify several distinct cases based on the relationship between the standard and dual parts in vector form, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through numerical experiments.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world systems, yet they can produce toxic or biased outputs that undermine safety and trust. Post-hoc model repair provides a practical remedy, but the high cost of parameter updates motivates selective use of repair data. Despite extensive prior work on data selection for model training, it remains unclear which sampling criteria are most effective and efficient when applied specifically to behavioral repair of large generative models. Our study presents a systematic analysis of sample prioritization strategies for LLM repair. We evaluate five representative selection methods, including random sampling, K-Center, gradient-norm-based selection(GraNd), stratified coverage (CCS), and a Semantic-Aware Prioritized Sampling (SAPS) approach we proposed. Repair effectiveness and trade-offs are assessed through toxicity reduction, perplexity on WikiText-2 and LAMBADA, and three composite metrics: the Repair Proximity Score (RPS), the Overall Performance Score (OPS), and the Repair Efficiency Score (RES). Experimental results show that SAPS achieves the best balance between detoxification, utility preservation, and efficiency, delivering comparable or superior repair outcomes with substantially less data. Random sampling remains effective for large or robust models, while high-overhead methods such as CCS and GraNd provide limited benefit. The optimal data proportion depends on model scale and repair method, indicating that sample selection should be regarded as a tunable component of repair pipelines. Overall, these findings establish selection-based repair as an efficient and scalable paradigm for maintaining LLM reliability.

The higher-order correlation clustering problem for a graph $G$ and costs associated with cliques of $G$ consists in finding a clustering of $G$ so as to minimize the sum of the costs of those cliques whose nodes all belong to the same cluster. To tackle this NP-hard problem in practice, local search heuristics have been proposed and studied in the context of applications. Here, we establish partial optimality conditions for cubic correlation clustering, i.e., for the special case of at most 3-cliques. We define and implement algorithms for deciding these conditions and examine their effectiveness numerically, on two data sets.

Predicting the motion of surrounding vehicles is key to safe autonomous driving, especially in unstructured environments without prior information. This paper proposes a novel online method to accurately predict the occupancy sets of surrounding vehicles based solely on motion observations. The approach is divided into two stages: first, an Extended Kalman Filter and a Linear Programming (LP) problem are used to estimate a compact zonotopic set of control actions; then, a reachability analysis propagates this set to predict future occupancy. The effectiveness of the method has been validated through simulations in an urban environment, showing accurate and compact predictions without relying on prior assumptions or prior training data.

This paper presents the FuzzyDistillViT-MobileNet model, a novel approach for lung cancer (LC) classification, leveraging dynamic fuzzy logic-driven knowledge distillation (KD) to address uncertainty and complexity in disease diagnosis. Unlike traditional models that rely on static KD with fixed weights, our method dynamically adjusts the distillation weight using fuzzy logic, enabling the student model to focus on high-confidence regions while reducing attention to ambiguous areas. This dynamic adjustment improves the model ability to handle varying uncertainty levels across different regions of LC images. We employ the Vision Transformer (ViT-B32) as the instructor model, which effectively transfers knowledge to the student model, MobileNet, enhancing the student generalization capabilities. The training process is further optimized using a dynamic wait adjustment mechanism that adapts the training procedure for improved convergence and performance. To enhance image quality, we introduce pixel-level image fusion improvement techniques such as Gamma correction and Histogram Equalization. The processed images (Pix1 and Pix2) are fused using a wavelet-based fusion method to improve image resolution and feature preservation. This fusion method uses the wavedec2 function to standardize images to a 224x224 resolution, decompose them into multi-scale frequency components, and recursively average coefficients at each level for better feature representation. To address computational efficiency, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to select the most suitable pre-trained student model from a pool of 12 candidates, balancing model performance with computational cost. The model is evaluated on two datasets, including LC25000 histopathological images (99.16% accuracy) and IQOTH/NCCD CT-scan images (99.54% accuracy), demonstrating robustness across different imaging domains.

Evaluating competing systems in a comparable way, i.e., benchmarking them, is an undeniable pillar of the scientific method. However, system performance is often summarized via a small number of metrics. The analysis of the evaluation details and the derivation of insights for further development or use remains a tedious manual task with often biased results. Thus, this paper argues for a new type of benchmarking, which is dubbed explainable benchmarking. The aim of explainable benchmarking approaches is to automatically generate explanations for the performance of systems in a benchmark. We provide a first instantiation of this paradigm for knowledge-graph-based question answering systems. We compute explanations by using a novel concept learning approach developed for large knowledge graphs called PruneCEL. Our evaluation shows that PruneCEL outperforms state-of-the-art concept learners on the task of explainable benchmarking by up to 0.55 points F1 measure. A task-driven user study with 41 participants shows that in 80\% of the cases, the majority of participants can accurately predict the behavior of a system based on our explanations. Our code and data are available at this https URL

Multicast allows sending a message to multiple recipients without having to create and send a separate message for each recipient. This preserves network bandwidth, which is particularly important in time-sensitive networks. These networks are commonly used to provide latency-bounded communication for real-time systems in domains like automotive, avionics, industrial internet of things, automated shop floors, and smart energy grids. The preserved bandwidth can be used to admit additional real-time messages with specific quality of service requirements or to reduce the end-to-end latencies for messages of any type. However, using multicast communication can complicate traffic planning, as it requires free queues or available downstream egress ports on all branches of the multicast tree. In this work, we present a novel multicast partitioning technique to split multicast trees into smaller multicast or unicast trees. This allows for a more fine-grained trade-off between bandwidth utilization and traffic scheduling difficulty. Thus, schedulability in dynamic systems can be improved, in terms the number of admitted streams and the accumulated network throughput. We evaluated the multicast partitioning on different network topologies and with three different scheduling algorithms. With the partitioning, 5-15\% fewer streams were rejected, while achieving 5-125\% more network throughput, depending on the scheduling algorithm.

The development of neural audio codecs (NACs) has largely promoted applications of language models (LMs) to speech processing and understanding. However, there lacks the verification on the effectiveness of autoregressive (AR) LMbased models in unifying different sub-tasks of speech enhancement (SE). In this work, we propose UniSE, a unified decoder-only LM-based framework to handle different SE tasks including speech restoration, target speaker extraction and speech separation. It takes input speech features as conditions and generates discrete tokens of the target speech using AR modeling, which facilitates a compatibility between distinct learning patterns of multiple tasks. Experiments on several benchmarks indicate the proposed UniSE can achieve competitive performance compared to discriminative and generative baselines, showing the capacity of LMs in unifying SE tasks. The demo page is available here: this https URL.

Devices within the marine Internet of Things (MIoT) can connect to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to facilitate low-latency data transmission and execution, as well as enhanced-capacity data storage. However, without proper traffic handling strategy, it is still difficult to effectively meet the low-latency requirements. In this paper, we consider a cooperative satellite-aerial-MIoT network (CSAMN) for maritime edge computing and maritime data storage to prioritize delay-sensitive (DS) tasks by employing mobile edge computing, while handling delay-tolerant (DT) tasks via the store-carry-forward method. Considering the delay constraints of DS tasks, we formulate a constrained joint optimization problem of maximizing satellite-collected data volume while minimizing system energy consumption by controlling four interdependent variables, including the transmit power of UAVs for DS tasks, the start time of DT tasks, computing resource allocation, and offloading ratio. To solve this non-convex and non-linear problem, we propose a joint computation offloading and resource management (JCORM) algorithm using the Dinkelbach method and linear programming. Our results show that the volume of data collected by the proposed JCORM algorithm can be increased by up to 41.5% compared to baselines. Moreover, JCORM algorithm achieves a dramatic reduction in computational time, from a maximum of 318.21 seconds down to just 0.16 seconds per experiment, making it highly suitable for real-time maritime applications.

Drug combinations offer therapeutic benefits but also carry the risk of adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs), especially under complex molecular structures. Accurate DDI event prediction requires capturing fine-grained inter-drug relationships, which are critical for modeling metabolic mechanisms such as enzyme-mediated competition. However, existing approaches typically rely on isolated drug representations and fail to explicitly model atom-level cross-molecular interactions, limiting their effectiveness across diverse molecular complexities and DDI type distributions. To address these limitations, we propose MolBridge, a novel atom-level joint graph refinement framework for robust DDI event prediction. MolBridge constructs a joint graph that integrates atomic structures of drug pairs, enabling direct modeling of inter-drug associations. A central challenge in such joint graph settings is the potential loss of information caused by over-smoothing when modeling long-range atomic dependencies. To overcome this, we introduce a structure consistency module that iteratively refines node features while preserving the global structural context. This joint design allows MolBridge to effectively learn both local and global interaction outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior performance across long-tail and inductive scenarios. patterns, yielding robust representations across both frequent and rare DDI types. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that MolBridge consistently. These results demonstrate the advantages of fine-grained graph refinement in improving the accuracy, robustness, and mechanistic interpretability of DDI event this http URL work contributes to Web Mining and Content Analysis by developing graph-based methods for mining and analyzing drug-drug interaction networks.

Instruction tuning is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the quality of instruction-following data varies significantly. While high-quality data is paramount, it is often scarce; conversely, abundant low-quality data is frequently discarded, leading to substantial information loss. Existing data augmentation methods struggle to augment this low-quality data effectively, and the evaluation of such techniques remains poorly defined. To address this, we formally define the task of Instruction Distillation: distilling multiple low-quality and redundant inputs into high-quality and coherent instruction-output pairs. Specifically, we introduce a comprehensive data construction pipeline to create MIXTURE, a 144K-sample dataset pairing low-quality or semantically redundant imperfect instruction clusters with their high-quality distillations. We then introduce LM-Mixup, by first performing supervised fine-tuning on MIXTURE and then optimizing it with reinforcement learning. This process uses three complementary reward signals: quality, semantic alignment, and format compliance, via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We demonstrate that LM-Mixup effectively augments imperfect datasets: fine-tuning LLMs on its distilled data, which accounts for only about 3% of the entire dataset, not only surpasses full-dataset training but also competes with state-of-the-art high-quality data selection methods across multiple benchmarks. Our work establishes that low-quality data is a valuable resource when properly distilled and augmented with LM-Mixup, significantly enhancing the efficiency and performance of instruction-tuned LLMs.

This paper introduces the hybrid quantum language with general recursion $\mathtt{Hyrql}$, driven towards resource-analysis. By design, $\mathtt{Hyrql}$ does not require the specification of an initial set of quantum gates and, hence, is well amenable towards a generic cost analysis. Indeed, languages using different sets of quantum gates lead to representations of quantum circuits whose complexity varies. Towards resource-analysis, a semantics-preserving compilation algorithm to simply-typed term rewrite systems is described; allowing a generic reuse of all known techniques for analyzing the complexity of term rewrite systems. We prove the versatility of this approach through many examples.

Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. We find the bookmaker Pinnacle Sports poorly handles matches with high intransitive complexity and posit that our graph-based approach is uniquely positioned to capture relational dynamics in these scenarios. When selectively betting on higher intransitivity matchups with our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.215 Brier Score), we achieve significant positive returns of 3.26% ROI with Kelly staking over 1903 bets, suggesting a market inefficiency in handling intransitive matchups that our approach successfully exploits.

Generative recommenders, typically transformer-based autoregressive models, predict the next item or action from a user's interaction history. Their effectiveness depends on how the model represents where an interaction event occurs in the sequence (discrete index) and when it occurred in wall-clock time. Prevailing approaches inject time via learned embeddings or relative attention biases. In this paper, we argue that RoPE-based approaches, if designed properly, can be a stronger alternative for jointly modeling temporal and sequential information in user behavior sequences. While vanilla RoPE in LLMs considers only token order, generative recommendation requires incorporating both event time and token index. To address this, we propose Time-and-Order RoPE (TO-RoPE), a family of rotary position embedding designs that treat index and time as angle sources shaping the query-key geometry directly. We present three instantiations: early fusion, split-by-dim, and split-by-head. Extensive experiments on both publicly available datasets and a proprietary industrial dataset show that TO-RoPE variants consistently improve accuracy over existing methods for encoding time and index. These results position rotary embeddings as a simple, principled, and deployment-friendly foundation for generative recommendation.

We present a parallel algorithm for computing $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate mincost flow on an undirected graph with $m$ edges, where capacities and costs are assigned to both edges and vertices. Our algorithm achieves $\hat{O}(m)$ work and $\hat{O}(1)$ depth when $\epsilon > 1/\mathrm{polylog}(m)$, making both the work and depth almost optimal, up to a subpolynomial factor. Previous algorithms with $\hat{O}(m)$ work required $\Omega(m)$ depth, even for special cases of mincost flow with only edge capacities or max flow with vertex capacities. Our result generalizes prior almost-optimal parallel $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithms for these special cases, including shortest paths [Li, STOC'20] [Andoni, Stein, Zhong, STOC'20] [Rozhen, Haeupler, Marinsson, Grunau, Zuzic, STOC'23] and max flow with only edge capacities [Agarwal, Khanna, Li, Patil, Wang, White, Zhong, SODA'24]. Our key technical contribution is the first construction of length-constrained flow shortcuts with $(1+\epsilon)$ length slack, $\hat{O}(1)$ congestion slack, and $\hat{O}(1)$ step bound. This provides a strict generalization of the influential concept of $(\hat{O}(1),\epsilon)$-hopsets [Cohen, JACM'00], allowing for additional control over congestion. Previous length-constrained flow shortcuts [Haeupler, Hershkowitz, Li, Roeyskoe, Saranurak, STOC'24] incur a large constant in the length slack, which would lead to a large approximation factor. To enable our flow algorithms to work under vertex capacities, we also develop a close-to-linear time algorithm for computing length-constrained vertex expander decomposition. Building on Cohen's idea of path-count flows [Cohen, SICOMP'95], we further extend our algorithm to solve $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate $k$-commodity mincost flow problems with almost-optimal $\hat{O}(mk)$ work and $\hat{O}(1)$ depth, independent of the number of commodities $k$.

Concept learning exploits background knowledge in the form of description logic axioms to learn explainable classification models from knowledge bases. Despite recent breakthroughs in neuro-symbolic concept learning, most approaches still cannot be deployed on real-world knowledge bases. This is due to their use of description logic reasoners, which are not robust against inconsistencies nor erroneous data. We address this challenge by presenting a novel neural reasoner dubbed EBR. Our reasoner relies on embeddings to approximate the results of a symbolic reasoner. We show that EBR solely requires retrieving instances for atomic concepts and existential restrictions to retrieve or approximate the set of instances of any concept in the description logic $\mathcal{SHOIQ}$. In our experiments, we compare EBR with state-of-the-art reasoners. Our results suggest that EBR is robust against missing and erroneous data in contrast to existing reasoners.

Large language models (LLMs) produce outputs with varying levels of uncertainty, and, just as often, varying levels of correctness; making their practical reliability far from guaranteed. To quantify this uncertainty, we systematically evaluate four approaches for confidence estimation in LLM outputs: VCE, MSP, Sample Consistency, and CoCoA (Vashurin et al., 2025). For the evaluation of the approaches, we conduct experiments on four question-answering tasks using a state-of-the-art open-source LLM. Our results show that each uncertainty metric captures a different facet of model confidence and that the hybrid CoCoA approach yields the best reliability overall, improving both calibration and discrimination of correct answers. We discuss the trade-offs of each method and provide recommendations for selecting uncertainty measures in LLM applications.

Knowledge graph alignment is the task of matching equivalent entities (that is, instances and classes) and relations across two knowledge graphs. Most existing methods focus on pure entity-level alignment, computing the similarity of entities in some embedding space. They lack interpretable reasoning and need training data to work. In this paper, we propose FLORA, a simple yet effective method that (1) is unsupervised, i.e., does not require training data, (2) provides a holistic alignment for entities and relations iteratively, (3) is based on fuzzy logic and thus delivers interpretable results, (4) provably converges, (5) allows dangling entities, i.e., entities without a counterpart in the other KG, and (6) achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks.

Recent years have seen a surge in interest in digital content watermarking techniques, driven by the proliferation of generative models and increased legal pressure. With an ever-growing percentage of AI-generated content available online, watermarking plays an increasingly important role in ensuring content authenticity and attribution at scale. There have been many works assessing the robustness of watermarking to removal attacks, yet, watermark forging, the scenario when a watermark is stolen from genuine content and applied to malicious content, remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate watermark forging in the context of widely used post-hoc image watermarking. Our contributions are as follows. First, we introduce a preference model to assess whether an image is watermarked. The model is trained using a ranking loss on purely procedurally generated images without any need for real watermarks. Second, we demonstrate the model's capability to remove and forge watermarks by optimizing the input image through backpropagation. This technique requires only a single watermarked image and works without knowledge of the watermarking model, making our attack much simpler and more practical than attacks introduced in related work. Third, we evaluate our proposed method on a variety of post-hoc image watermarking models, demonstrating that our approach can effectively forge watermarks, questioning the security of current watermarking approaches. Our code and further resources are publicly available.

There has recently been a major advance with respect to how information fusion is performed. Information fusion has gone from being conceived as a purely hierarchical procedure, as is the case of traditional military applications, to now being regarded collaboratively, as holonic fusion, which is better suited for civil applications and edge organizations. The above paradigm shift is being boosted as information fusion gains ground in different non-military areas, and human-computer and machine-machine communications, where holarchies, which are more flexible structures than ordinary, static hierarchies, become more widespread. This paper focuses on showing how holonic structures tend to be generated when there are constraints on resources (energy, available messages, time, etc.) for interactions based on a set of fully intercommunicating elements (peers) whose components fuse information as a means of optimizing the impact of vagueness and uncertainty present message exchanges. Holon formation is studied generically based on a multiagent system model, and an example of its possible operation is shown. Holonic structures have a series of advantages, such as adaptability, to sudden changes in the environment or its composition, are somewhat autonomous and are capable of cooperating in order to achieve a common goal. This can be useful when the shortage of resources prevents communications or when the system components start to fail.

Video reasoning, which requires multi-step deduction across frames, remains a major challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods enhance reasoning capabilities, they often rely on text-only chains that yield ungrounded or hallucinated conclusions. Conversely, frame-retrieval approaches introduce visual grounding but still struggle with inaccurate evidence localization. To address these challenges, we present Conan, a framework for evidence-grounded multi-step video reasoning. Conan identifies contextual and evidence frames, reasons over cross-frame clues, and adaptively decides when to conclude or explore further. To achieve this, we (1) construct Conan-91K, a large-scale dataset of automatically generated reasoning traces that includes frame identification, evidence reasoning, and action decision, and (2) design a multi-stage progressive cold-start strategy combined with an Identification-Reasoning-Action (AIR) RLVR training framework to jointly enhance multi-step visual reasoning. Extensive experiments on six multi-step reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Conan surpasses the baseline Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct by an average of over 10% in accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, Conan generalizes effectively to long-video understanding tasks, validating its strong scalability and robustness.

This paper presents a method for planning a trajectory in workspace coordinates using a spatially fixed tool center point (TCP), while taking into account the processing path on a part. This approach is beneficial if it is easier to move the part rather than moving the tool. Whether a mathematical description that defines the shape to be processed or single points from a design program are used, the robot path is finally represented using B-splines. The use of splines enables the path to be continuous with a desired degree, which finally leads to a smooth robot trajectory. While calculating the robot trajectory through prescribed orientation, additionally a given velocity at the TCP has to be considered. The procedure was validated on a real system using an industrial robot moving an arbitrary defined part.

We describe our strategy for the 2025 edition of the BabyLM Challenge. Our main contribution is that of an improved form of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), which adapts the probabilities of the tokens masked according to the model's ability to predict them. The results show a substantial increase in performance on (Super)GLUE tasks over the standard MLM. We also incorporate sub-token embeddings, finding that this increases the model's morphological generalization capabilities. Our submission beats the baseline in the strict-small track.

Exploiting unlabeled data through semi-supervised learning (SSL) or leveraging pre-trained models via fine-tuning are two prevailing paradigms for addressing label-scarce scenarios. Recently, growing attention has been given to combining fine-tuning of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with SSL, forming the emerging paradigm of semi-supervised fine-tuning. However, existing methods often suffer from model bias and hyperparameter sensitivity, due to reliance on prediction consistency or pre-defined confidence thresholds. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play methodology named $\underline{\textbf{Bi-Co}}$nsistency-$\underline{\textbf{G}}$uided Self-Training (Bi-CoG), which assigns high-quality and low-bias pseudo-labels, by simultaneously exploiting inter-model and intra-model consistency, along with an error-aware dynamic pseudo-label assignment strategy. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over 14 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Bi-CoG, which consistently and significantly improves the performance of existing methods.

We unveil that internal representations in large language models (LLMs) serve as reliable proxies of learned knowledge, and propose RECALL, a novel representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. RECALL computes inter-model similarity from layer-wise hidden representations over clustered typical samples, and performs adaptive, hierarchical parameter fusion to align knowledge across models. This design enables the preservation of domain-general features in shallow layers while allowing task-specific adaptation in deeper layers. Unlike prior methods that require task labels or incur performance trade-offs, RECALL achieves seamless multi-domain integration and strong resistance to catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios show that RECALL outperforms baselines in both knowledge retention and generalization, providing a scalable and data-free solution for evolving LLMs.

Accurate long-term localization using onboard sensors is crucial for robots operating in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. While complementary sensors mitigate individual degradations, carrying all the available sensor types on a single robot significantly increases the size, weight, and power demands. Distributing sensors across multiple robots enhances the deployability but introduces challenges in fusing asynchronous, multi-modal data from independently moving platforms. We propose a novel adaptive multi-modal multi-robot cooperative localization approach using a factor-graph formulation to fuse asynchronous Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO), and 3D inter-robot detections from distinct robots in a loosely-coupled fashion. The approach adapts to changing conditions, leveraging reliable data to assist robots affected by sensory degradations. A novel interpolation-based factor enables fusion of the unsynchronized measurements. LIO degradations are evaluated based on the approximate scan-matching Hessian. A novel approach of weighting odometry data proportionally to the Wasserstein distance between the consecutive VIO outputs is proposed. A theoretical analysis is provided, investigating the cooperative localization problem under various conditions, mainly in the presence of sensory degradations. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated on real-world data gathered with heterogeneous teams of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), showing that the approach provides significant improvements in localization accuracy in the presence of various sensory degradations.

Fairness evaluation in face analysis systems (FAS) typically depends on automatic demographic attribute inference (DAI), which itself relies on predefined demographic segmentation. However, the validity of fairness auditing hinges on the reliability of the DAI process. We begin by providing a theoretical motivation for this dependency, showing that improved DAI reliability leads to less biased and lower-variance estimates of FAS fairness. To address this, we propose a fully reproducible DAI pipeline that replaces conventional end-to-end training with a modular transfer learning approach. Our design integrates pretrained face recognition encoders with non-linear classification heads. We audit this pipeline across three dimensions: accuracy, fairness, and a newly introduced notion of robustness, defined via intra-identity consistency. The proposed robustness metric is applicable to any demographic segmentation scheme. We benchmark the pipeline on gender and ethnicity inference across multiple datasets and training setups. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms strong baselines, particularly on ethnicity, which is the more challenging attribute. To promote transparency and reproducibility, we will publicly release the training dataset metadata, full codebase, pretrained models, and evaluation toolkit. This work contributes a reliable foundation for demographic inference in fairness auditing.

This work addresses the problem of robot manipulation tasks under unknown dynamics, such as pick-and-place tasks under payload uncertainty, where active exploration and(/for) online parameter adaptation during task execution are essential to enable accurate model-based control. The problem is framed as dual control seeking a closed-loop optimal control problem that accounts for parameter uncertainty. We simplify the dual control problem by pre-defining the structure of the feedback policy to include an explicit adaptation mechanism. Then we propose two methods for reference trajectory generation. The first directly embeds parameter uncertainty in robust optimal control methods that minimize the expected task cost. The second method considers minimizing the so-called optimality loss, which measures the sensitivity of parameter-relevant information with respect to task performance. We observe that both approaches reason over the Fisher information as a natural side effect of their formulations, simultaneously pursuing optimal task execution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches for a pick-and-place manipulation task. We show that designing the reference trajectories whilst taking into account the control enables faster and more accurate task performance and system identification while ensuring stable and efficient control.

Artificial intelligence has advanced quantitative remote sensing, yet its effectiveness is constrained by imbalanced label distribution. This imbalance leads conventionally trained models to favor common samples, which in turn degrades retrieval performance for rare ones. Rainfall retrieval exemplifies this issue, with performance particularly compromised for heavy rain. This study proposes Hurdle-Inversion Model Debiasing Learning (IMDL) framework. Following a divide-and-conquer strategy, imbalance in the rain distribution is decomposed into two components: zero inflation, defined by the predominance of non-rain samples; and long tail, defined by the disproportionate abundance of light-rain samples relative to heavy-rain samples. A hurdle model is adopted to handle the zero inflation, while IMDL is proposed to address the long tail by transforming the learning object into an unbiased ideal inverse model. Comprehensive evaluation via statistical metrics and case studies investigating rainy weather in eastern China confirms Hurdle-IMDL's superiority over conventional, cost-sensitive, generative, and multi-task learning methods. Its key advancements include effective mitigation of systematic underestimation and a marked improvement in the retrieval of heavy-to-extreme rain. IMDL offers a generalizable approach for addressing imbalance in distributions of environmental variables, enabling enhanced retrieval of rare yet high-impact events.

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes detect when they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior to appear more aligned, compromising the reliability of safety evaluations. In this paper, we show that adding a steering vector to an LLM's activations can suppress evaluation-awareness and make the model act like it is deployed during evaluation. To study our steering technique, we train an LLM to exhibit evaluation-aware behavior using a two-step training process designed to mimic how this behavior could emerge naturally. First, we perform continued pretraining on documents with factual descriptions of the model (1) using Python type hints during evaluation but not during deployment and (2) recognizing that the presence of a certain evaluation cue always means that it is being tested. Then, we train the model with expert iteration to use Python type hints in evaluation settings. The resulting model is evaluation-aware: it writes type hints in evaluation contexts more than deployment contexts. However, this gap can only be observed by removing the evaluation cue. We find that activation steering can suppress evaluation awareness and make the model act like it is deployed even when the cue is present. Importantly, we constructed our steering vector using the original model before our additional training. Our results suggest that AI evaluators could improve the reliability of safety evaluations by steering models to act like they are deployed.

A major field of industrial robot applications deals with repetitive tasks that alternate between operating points. For these so-called pick-and-place operations, parallel kinematic manipulators (PKM) are frequently employed. These tasks tend to automatically run for a long period of time and therefore minimizing energy consumption is always of interest. Recent research addresses this topic by the use of elastic elements and particularly series elastic actuators (SEA). This paper explores the possibilities of minimizing energy consumption of SEA actuated PKM performing pick-and-place tasks. The basic idea is to excite eigenmotions that result from the actuator springs and exploit their oscillating characteristics. To this end, a prescribed cyclic pick-and-place operation is analyzed and a dynamic model of SEA driven PKM is derived. Subsequently, an energy minimizing optimal control problem is formulated where operating trajectories as well as SEA stiffnesses are optimized simultaneously. Here, optimizing the actuator stiffness does not account for variable stiffness actuators. It serves as a tool for the design and dimensioning process. The hypothesis on energy reduction is tested on two (parallel) robot applications where redundant actuation is also addressed. The results confirm the validity of this approach.

Cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) are key technologies in the Industry 4.0 vision. They incorporate sensors and actuators to interact with the physical environment. However, when creating and interconnecting components to form a heterogeneous smart systems architecture, these face challenges in cybersecurity. This paper presents an experimental investigation of architectural configurations for a LoRaWAN-based Smart-Lighting project, aimed at verifying and improving the system's robustness against attacks. We assess the system's robustness in a series of iterative experiments conducted both in-vitro and on-site. The results show that most attacks on a LoRaWAN network are unsuccessful, also highlighting unresolved issues with the installed products. The most successful attacks are high-power jamming attacks within a few meters of the target, which, in the case of gateways, can be mitigated through gateway redundancy.

Accurate prediction of application performance is critical for enabling effective scheduling and resource management in resource-constrained dynamic edge environments. However, achieving predictable performance in such environments remains challenging due to the co-location of multiple applications and the node heterogeneity. To address this, we propose a methodology that automatically builds and assesses various performance predictors. This approach prioritizes both accuracy and inference time to identify the most efficient model. Our predictors achieve up to 90% accuracy while maintaining an inference time of less than 1% of the Round Trip Time. These predictors are trained on the historical state of the most correlated monitoring metrics to application performance and evaluated across multiple servers in dynamic co-location scenarios. As usecase we consider electron microscopy (EM) workflows, which have stringent real-time demands and diverse resource requirements. Our findings emphasize the need for a systematic methodology that selects server-specific predictors by jointly optimizing accuracy and inference latency in dynamic co-location scenarios. Integrating such predictors into edge environments can improve resource utilization and result in predictable performance.

In this paper the computational challenges of time-optimal path following are addressed. The standard approach is to minimize the travel time, which inevitably leads to singularities at zero path speed, when reformulating the optimization problem in terms of a path parameter. Thus, smooth trajectory generation while maintaining a low computational effort is quite challenging, since the singularities have to be taken into account. To this end, a different approach is presented in this paper. This approach is based on maximizing the path speed along a prescribed path. Furthermore, the approach is capable of planning smooth trajectories numerically efficient. Moreover, the discrete reformulation of the underlying problem is linear in optimization variables.

Aligning large language models with human preferences is critical for creating reliable and controllable AI systems. A human preference can be visualized as a high-dimensional vector where different directions represent trade-offs between desired attributes (e.g., helpfulness vs. verbosity). Yet, because the training data often reflects dominant, average preferences, LLMs tend to perform well on common requests but fall short in specific, individual needs. This mismatch creates a preference coverage gap. Existing methods often address this through costly retraining, which may not be generalized to the full spectrum of diverse preferences. This brittleness means that when a user's request reflects a nuanced preference deviating from the training data's central tendency, model performance can degrade unpredictably. To address this challenge, we introduce Robust Preference Selection (RPS), a post-hoc, training-free method by leveraging directional neighborhood consensus. Instead of forcing a model to generate a response from a single, highly specific preference, RPS samples multiple responses from a local neighborhood of related preferences to create a superior candidate pool. It then selects the response that best aligns with the user's original intent. We provide a theoretical framework showing our neighborhood generation strategy is provably superior to a strong baseline that also samples multiple candidates. Comprehensive experiments across three distinct alignment paradigms (DPA, DPO, and SFT) demonstrate that RPS consistently improves robustness against this baseline, achieving win rates of up to 69% on challenging preferences from under-represented regions of the space without any model retraining. Our work presents a practical, theoretically-grounded solution for enhancing the reliability of preference-aligned models.

Speech codecs serve as bridges between continuous speech signals and large language models, yet face an inherent conflict between acoustic fidelity and semantic preservation. To mitigate this conflict, prevailing methods augment acoustic codecs with complex semantic supervision. We explore the opposite direction: a semantic-first approach that starts from a semantically-capable model and adapts it for high-fidelity acoustic reconstruction. Through empirical analysis, we discover that targeted architectural simplification can unlock the acoustic modeling potential of Whisper, a text-aligned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Based on this finding, we propose SimWhisper-Codec, a novel codec that balances the semantic and acoustic preservation by leveraging a frozen, simplified Whisper encoder without requiring external supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that SimWhisper-Codec achieves superior performance in both semantic preservation and acoustic quality compared to semantically-supervised codecs such as Mimi Codec and SpeechTokenizer at similar bitrates, validating the effectiveness of our semantic-first approach. Code is available at this https URL.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains brittle on multi-step questions and heterogeneous evidence sources, trading accuracy against latency and token/tool budgets. This paper introducesHierarchical Sequence (HSEQ) Iteration for Heterogeneous Question Answering, a unified framework that (i) linearize documents, tables, and knowledge graphs into a reversible hierarchical sequence with lightweight structural tags, and (ii) perform structure-aware iteration to collect just-enough evidence before answer synthesis. A Head Agent provides guidance that leads retrieval, while an Iteration Agent selects and expands HSeq via structure-respecting actions (e.g., parent/child hops, table row/column neighbors, KG relations); Finally the head agent composes canonicalized evidence to genearte the final answer, with an optional refinement loop to resolve detected contradictions. Experiments on HotpotQA (text), HybridQA/TAT-QA (table+text), and MetaQA (KG) show consistent EM/F1 gains over strong single-pass, multi-hop, and agentic RAG baselines with high efficiency. Besides, HSEQ exhibits three key advantages: (1) a format-agnostic unification that enables a single policy to operate across text, tables, and KGs without per-dataset specialization; (2) guided, budget-aware iteration that reduces unnecessary hops, tool calls, and tokens while preserving accuracy; and (3) evidence canonicalization for reliable QA, improving answers consistency and auditability.

Distributed applications increasingly demand low end-to-end latency, especially in edge and cloud environments where co-located workloads contend for limited resources. Traditional load-balancing strategies are typically reactive and rely on outdated or coarse-grained metrics, often leading to suboptimal routing decisions and increased tail latencies. This paper investigates the use of round-trip time (RTT) predictors to enhance request routing by anticipating application latency. We develop lightweight and accurate RTT predictors that are trained on time-series monitoring data collected from a Kubernetes-managed GPU cluster. By leveraging a reduced set of highly correlated monitoring metrics, our approach maintains low overhead while remaining adaptable to diverse co-location scenarios and heterogeneous hardware. The predictors achieve up to 95% accuracy while keeping the prediction delay within 10% of the application RTT. In addition, we identify the minimum prediction accuracy threshold and key system-level factors required to ensure effective predictor deployment in resource-constrained clusters. Simulation-based evaluation demonstrates that performance-aware load balancing can significantly reduce application RTT and minimize resource waste. These results highlight the feasibility of integrating predictive load balancing into future production systems.

The political biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) are usually assessed by simulating their answers to English surveys. In this work, we propose an alternative framing of political biases, relying on principles of fairness in multilingual translation. We systematically compare the translation quality of speeches in the European Parliament (EP), observing systematic differences with majority parties from left, center, and right being better translated than outsider parties. This study is made possible by a new, 21-way multiparallel version of EuroParl, the parliamentary proceedings of the EP, which includes the political affiliations of each speaker. The dataset consists of 1.5M sentences for a total of 40M words and 249M characters. It covers three years, 1000+ speakers, 7 countries, 12 EU parties, 25 EU committees, and hundreds of national parties.

Recent advances in accelerating text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have enabled the synthesis of high-fidelity images even in a single step. However, personalizing these models to incorporate novel concepts remains a challenge due to the limited capacity of one-step models to capture new concept distributions effectively. We propose a bidirectional concept distillation framework, EchoDistill, to enable one-step diffusion personalization (1-SDP). Our approach involves an end-to-end training process where a multi-step diffusion model (teacher) and a one-step diffusion model (student) are trained simultaneously. The concept is first distilled from the teacher model to the student, and then echoed back from the student to the teacher. During the EchoDistill, we share the text encoder between the two models to ensure consistent semantic understanding. Following this, the student model is optimized with adversarial losses to align with the real image distribution and with alignment losses to maintain consistency with the teacher's output. Furthermore, we introduce the bidirectional echoing refinement strategy, wherein the student model leverages its faster generation capability to feedback to the teacher model. This bidirectional concept distillation mechanism not only enhances the student ability to personalize novel concepts but also improves the generative quality of the teacher model. Our experiments demonstrate that this collaborative framework significantly outperforms existing personalization methods over the 1-SDP setup, establishing a novel paradigm for rapid and effective personalization in T2I diffusion models.

Recent speech-to-speech (S2S) models generate intelligible speech but still lack natural expressiveness, largely due to the absence of a reliable evaluation metric. Existing approaches, such as subjective MOS ratings, low-level acoustic features, and emotion recognition are costly, limited, or incomplete. To address this, we present DeEAR (Decoding the Expressive Preference of eAR), a framework that converts human preference for speech expressiveness into an objective score. Grounded in phonetics and psychology, DeEAR evaluates speech across three dimensions: Emotion, Prosody, and Spontaneity, achieving strong alignment with human perception (Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient, SRCC = 0.86) using fewer than 500 annotated samples. Beyond reliable scoring, DeEAR enables fair benchmarking and targeted data curation. It not only distinguishes expressiveness gaps across S2S models but also selects 14K expressive utterances to form ExpressiveSpeech, which improves the expressive score (from 2.0 to 23.4 on a 100-point scale) of S2S models. Demos and codes are available at this https URL

Deductive verification is an effective method to ensure that a given system exposes the intended behavior. In spite of its proven usefulness and feasibility in selected projects, deductive verification is still not a mainstream technique. To pave the way to widespread use, we present a study investigating the factors enabling successful applications of deductive verification and the underlying issues preventing broader adoption. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 practitioners of verification from both industry and academia and systematically analyzed the collected data employing a thematic analysis approach. Beside empirically confirming familiar challenges, e.g., the high level of expertise needed for conducting formal proofs, our data reveal several underexplored obstacles, such as proof maintenance, insufficient control over automation, and usability concerns. We further use the results from our data analysis to extract enablers and barriers for deductive verification and formulate concrete recommendations for practitioners, tool builders, and researchers, including principles for usability, automation, and integration with existing workflows.

AI-based sensing at wireless edge devices has the potential to significantly enhance Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, particularly for vision and perception tasks such as in autonomous driving and environmental monitoring. AI systems rely both on efficient model learning and inference. In the inference phase, features extracted from sensing data are utilized for prediction tasks (e.g., classification or regression). In edge networks, sensors and model servers are often not co-located, which requires communication of features. As sensitive personal data can be reconstructed by an adversary, transformation of the features are required to reduce the risk of privacy violations. While differential privacy mechanisms provide a means of protecting finite datasets, protection of individual features has not been addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for privacy-preserving AI-based sensing, where devices apply transformations of extracted features before transmission to a model server.

Inspired by recent advancements in LLM reasoning, the field of multimodal reasoning has seen remarkable progress, achieving significant performance gains on intricate tasks such as mathematical problem-solving. Despite this progress, current multimodal large reasoning models exhibit two key limitations. They tend to employ computationally expensive reasoning even for simple queries, leading to inefficiency. Furthermore, this focus on specialized reasoning often impairs their broader, more general understanding capabilities. In this paper, we propose Metis-HOME: a Hybrid Optimized Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to address this trade-off. Metis-HOME enables a ''Hybrid Thinking'' paradigm by structuring the original dense model into two distinct expert branches: a thinking branch tailored for complex, multi-step reasoning, and a non-thinking branch optimized for rapid, direct inference on tasks like general VQA and OCR. A lightweight, trainable router dynamically allocates queries to the most suitable expert. We instantiate Metis-HOME by adapting the Qwen2.5-VL-7B into an MoE architecture. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that our approach not only substantially enhances complex reasoning abilities but also improves the model's general capabilities, reversing the degradation trend observed in other reasoning-specialized models. Our work establishes a new paradigm for building powerful and versatile MLLMs, effectively resolving the prevalent reasoning-vs-generalization dilemma.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks, particularly in automated program repair. However, the effectiveness of such repairs is highly dependent on the performance of upstream fault localization, for which comprehensive evaluations are currently lacking. This paper presents a systematic empirical study on LLMs in the statement-level code fault localization task. We evaluate representative open-source models (Qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct, DeepSeek-V3) and closed-source models (GPT-4.1 mini, Gemini-2.5-flash) to assess their fault localization capabilities on the HumanEval-Java and Defects4J datasets. The study investigates the impact of different prompting strategies--including standard prompts, few-shot examples, and chain-of-reasoning--on model performance, with a focus on analysis across accuracy, time efficiency, and economic cost dimensions. Our experimental results show that incorporating bug report context significantly enhances model performance. Few-shot learning shows potential for improvement but exhibits noticeable diminishing marginal returns, while chain-of-thought reasoning's effectiveness is highly contingent on the model's inherent reasoning capabilities. This study not only highlights the performance characteristics and trade-offs of different models in fault localization tasks, but also offers valuable insights into the strengths of current LLMs and strategies for improving fault localization effectiveness.

Despite well-reported instances of robots being used in disaster response, there is scant published data on the internal composition of the void spaces within structural collapse incidents. Data collected during these incidents is mired in legal constraints, as ownership is often tied to the responding agencies, with little hope of public release for research. While engineered rubble piles are used for training, these sites are also reluctant to release information about their proprietary training grounds. To overcome this access challenge, we present RubbleSim -- an open-source, reconfigurable simulator for photorealistic void space exploration. The design of the simulation assets is directly informed by visits to numerous training rubble sites at differing levels of complexity. The simulator is implemented in Unity with multi-operating system support. The simulation uses a physics-based approach to build stochastic rubble piles, allowing for rapid iteration between simulation worlds while retaining absolute knowledge of the ground truth. Using RubbleSim, we apply a state-of-the-art structure-from-motion algorithm to illustrate how perception performance degrades under challenging visual conditions inside the emulated void spaces. Pre-built binaries and source code to implement are available online: this https URL.

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has bridged the gap between vision and language tasks, enabling the implementation of Explainable DeepFake Analysis (XDFA). However, current methods suffer from a lack of fine-grained awareness: the description of artifacts in data annotation is unreliable and coarse-grained, and the models fail to support the output of connections between textual forgery explanations and the visual evidence of artifacts, as well as the input of queries for arbitrary facial regions. As a result, their responses are not sufficiently grounded in Face Visual Context (Facext). To address this limitation, we propose the Fake-in-Facext (FiFa) framework, with contributions focusing on data annotation and model construction. We first define a Facial Image Concept Tree (FICT) to divide facial images into fine-grained regional concepts, thereby obtaining a more reliable data annotation pipeline, FiFa-Annotator, for forgery explanation. Based on this dedicated data annotation, we introduce a novel Artifact-Grounding Explanation (AGE) task, which generates textual forgery explanations interleaved with segmentation masks of manipulated artifacts. We propose a unified multi-task learning architecture, FiFa-MLLM, to simultaneously support abundant multimodal inputs and outputs for fine-grained Explainable DeepFake Analysis. With multiple auxiliary supervision tasks, FiFa-MLLM can outperform strong baselines on the AGE task and achieve SOTA performance on existing XDFA datasets. The code and data will be made open-source at this https URL.

Type-and-effect systems help the programmer to organize data and computational effects in a program. While for traditional type systems expressive variants with sophisticated inference algorithms have been developed and widely used in programming languages, type-and-effect systems did not yet gain widespread adoption. One reason for this is that type-and-effect systems are more complex and the existing inference algorithms make compromises between expressiveness, intuitiveness, and decidability. In this work, we present an effect inference algorithm for a type-and-effect system with subtyping, expressive higher-rank polymorphism, and intuitive set-like semantics of effects. In order to deal with scoping issues of higher-rank polymorphism, we delay solving of effect constraints by transforming them into formulae of propositional logic. We prove soundness and completeness of our algorithm with respect to a declarative type-and-effect system. All the presented results have been formalized in the Rocq proof assistant, and the algorithm has been successfully implemented in a realistic programming language.

Recent techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought reasoning have led to longer contexts and increased inference costs. Context compression techniques can reduce these costs, but the most effective approaches require fine-tuning the target model or even modifying its architecture. This can degrade its general abilities when not used for this specific purpose. Here we explore an alternative approach: an encoder that compresses the context into continuous representations which replace token embeddings in decoder LLMs. First, we perform a systematic study of training strategies and architecture choices for the encoder. Our findings led to the design of an Adaptable text Representations Compressor, named ARC-Encoder, which outputs $x$-times fewer continuous representations (typically $x\!\in\!\{4,8\}$) than text tokens. We evaluate ARC-Encoder across a variety of LLM usage scenarios, ranging from in-context learning to context window extension, on both instruct and base decoders. Results show that ARC-Encoder achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks while improving computational efficiency at inference. Finally, we demonstrate that our models can be adapted to multiple decoders simultaneously, allowing a single encoder to generalize across different decoder LLMs. This makes ARC-Encoder a flexible and efficient solution for portable encoders that work seamlessly with multiple LLMs. We release a training code at this https URL , fine-tuning dataset and pretrained models are available at this https URL .

Motion blur caused by camera shake, particularly under large or rotational movements, remains a major challenge in image restoration. We propose a deep learning framework that jointly estimates the latent sharp image and the underlying camera motion trajectory from a single blurry image. Our method leverages the Projective Motion Blur Model (PMBM), implemented efficiently using a differentiable blur creation module compatible with modern networks. A neural network predicts a full 3D rotation trajectory, which guides a model-based restoration network trained end-to-end. This modular architecture provides interpretability by revealing the camera motion that produced the blur. Moreover, this trajectory enables the reconstruction of the sequence of sharp images that generated the observed blurry image. To further refine results, we optimize the trajectory post-inference via a reblur loss, improving consistency between the blurry input and the restored output. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real datasets, particularly in cases with severe or spatially variant blur, where end-to-end deblurring networks struggle. Code and trained models are available at this https URL

Conventional multimodal alignment methods assume mutual redundancy across all modalities, an assumption that fails in real-world distributed scenarios. We propose SheafAlign, a sheaf-theoretic framework for decentralized multimodal alignment that replaces single-space alignment with multiple comparison spaces. This approach models pairwise modality relations through sheaf structures and leverages decentralized contrastive learning-based objectives for training. SheafAlign overcomes the limitations of prior methods by not requiring mutual redundancy among all modalities, preserving both shared and unique information. Experiments on multimodal sensing datasets show superior zero-shot generalization, cross-modal alignment, and robustness to missing modalities, with 50\% lower communication cost than state-of-the-art baselines.

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a setting for developing general agents in an unsupervised manner, capable of solving downstream tasks without additional training or planning at test-time. Unlike conventional RL, which optimizes policies for a fixed reward, zero-shot RL requires agents to encode representations rich enough to support immediate adaptation to any objective, drawing parallels to vision and language foundation models. Despite growing interest, the field lacks a common analytical lens. We present the first unified framework for zero-shot RL. Our formulation introduces a consistent notation and taxonomy that organizes existing approaches and allows direct comparison between them. Central to our framework is the classification of algorithms into two families: direct representations, which learn end-to-end mappings from rewards to policies, and compositional representations, which decompose the representation leveraging the substructure of the value function. Within this framework, we highlight shared principles and key differences across methods, and we derive an extended bound for successor-feature methods, offering a new perspective on their performance in the zero-shot regime. By consolidating existing work under a common lens, our framework provides a principled foundation for future research in zero-shot RL and outlines a clear path toward developing more general agents.

When language models correctly parse "The cat that the dog chased meowed," are they analyzing syntax or simply familiar with dogs chasing cats? Despite extensive benchmarking, we lack methods to distinguish structural understanding from semantic pattern matching. We introduce CenterBench, a dataset of 9,720 comprehension questions on center-embedded sentences (like "The cat [that the dog chased] meowed") where relative clauses nest recursively, creating processing demands from simple to deeply nested structures. Each sentence has a syntactically identical but semantically implausible counterpart (e.g., mailmen prescribe medicine, doctors deliver mail) and six comprehension questions testing surface understanding, syntactic dependencies, and causal reasoning. Testing six models reveals that performance gaps between plausible and implausible sentences widen systematically with complexity, with models showing median gaps up to 26.8 percentage points, quantifying when they abandon structural analysis for semantic associations. Notably, semantic plausibility harms performance on questions about resulting actions, where following causal relationships matters more than semantic coherence. Reasoning models improve accuracy but their traces show semantic shortcuts, overthinking, and answer refusal. Unlike models whose plausibility advantage systematically widens with complexity, humans shows variable semantic effects. CenterBench provides the first framework to identify when models shift from structural analysis to pattern matching.

The increasing share of converter based resources in power systems calls for scalable methods to analyse stability without relying on exhaustive system wide simulations. Decentralized small gain and small-phase criteria have recently been proposed for this purpose, but their applicability to grid forming converters is severely limited by the sectoriality assumption, which is not typically satisfied at low frequencies. This work revisits and extends mixed gain phase conditions by introducing loop shaping transformations that reformulate converter and network models in alternative coordinate frames. The proposed approach resolves intrinsic non sectoriality at low frequencies and reduces conservativeness, thereby improving the applicability of decentralized stability certification. Analytical results are illustrated using an infinite bus system first and then extended to the IEEE 14 bus network, demonstrating the practicality and scalability of the method. These findings provide a pathway toward less conservative and more widely applicable decentralized stability certificates in power grids.

This paper introduces a compilation scheme for programs written in the Mimosa programming language, which builds upon the MIMOS model of computation. Mimosa describes embedded systems software as a collection of time-triggered processes which communicate through FIFO queues. We formally describe an adaptation of the Lustre compilation scheme to the semantics of Mimosa and show how the coordination layer can be mapped to real-time operating system primitives.

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite these advances, its effectiveness in multi-hop question answering (QA) remains limited by two fundamental limitations: (i) global planning absence to structure multi-step reasoning, and (ii) unfaithful execution, which hinders effective query formulation and consistent use of retrieved evidence. We propose GlobalRAG, a reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance global reasoning in multi-hop QA. GlobalRAG decomposes questions into subgoals, coordinates retrieval with reasoning, and refines evidence iteratively. To guide this process, we introduce Planning Quality Reward and SubGoal Completion Reward, which encourage coherent planning and reliable subgoal execution. In addition, a progressive weight annealing strategy balances process-oriented and outcome-based objectives. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that GlobalRAG significantly outperforms strong baselines while using only 8k training data (42% of the training data used by strong baselines), achieving average improvements of 14.2% in both EM and F1.

Despite advancements in SLAM technologies, robust operation under challenging conditions such as low-texture, motion-blur, or challenging lighting remains an open challenge. Such conditions are common in applications such as assistive navigation for the visually impaired. These challenges undermine localization accuracy and tracking stability, reducing navigation reliability and safety. To overcome these limitations, we present SELM-SLAM3, a deep learning-enhanced visual SLAM framework that integrates SuperPoint and LightGlue for robust feature extraction and matching. We evaluated our framework using TUM RGB-D, ICL-NUIM, and TartanAir datasets, which feature diverse and challenging scenarios. SELM-SLAM3 outperforms conventional ORB-SLAM3 by an average of 87.84% and exceeds state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM systems by 36.77%. Our framework demonstrates enhanced performance under challenging conditions, such as low-texture scenes and fast motion, providing a reliable platform for developing navigation aids for the visually impaired.

Consumer-grade camera systems often struggle to maintain stable image quality under complex illumination conditions such as low light, high dynamic range, and backlighting, as well as spatial color temperature variation. These issues lead to underexposure, color casts, and tonal inconsistency, which degrade the performance of downstream vision tasks. To address this, we propose ACamera-Net, a lightweight and scene-adaptive camera parameter adjustment network that directly predicts optimal exposure and white balance from RAW inputs. The framework consists of two modules: ACamera-Exposure, which estimates ISO to alleviate underexposure and contrast loss, and ACamera-Color, which predicts correlated color temperature and gain factors for improved color consistency. Optimized for real-time inference on edge devices, ACamera-Net can be seamlessly integrated into imaging pipelines. Trained on diverse real-world data with annotated references, the model generalizes well across lighting conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACamera-Net consistently enhances image quality and stabilizes perception outputs, outperforming conventional auto modes and lightweight baselines without relying on additional image enhancement modules.

Many multiobjective real-world problems, such as facility location and bus routing, become more complex when optimizing the priorities of multiple stakeholders. These are often modeled using infinite classes of objectives, e.g., $L_p$ norms over group distances induced by feasible solutions in a fixed domain. Traditionally, the literature has considered explicitly balancing `equity' (or min-max) and `efficiency' (or min-sum) objectives to capture this trade-off. However, the structure of solutions obtained by such modeling choices can be very different. Taking a solution-centric approach, we introduce the concept of provably small set of solutions $P$, called a {\it portfolio}, such that for every objective function $h(\cdot)$ in the given class $\mathbf{C}$, there exists some solution in $P$ which is an $\alpha$-approximation for $h(\cdot)$. Constructing such portfolios can help decision-makers understand the impact of balancing across multiple objectives. Given a finite set of base objectives $h_1, \ldots, h_N$, we give provable algorithms for constructing portfolios for (1) the class of conic combinations $\mathbf{C} = \{\sum_{j \in [N]}\lambda_j h_j: \lambda \ge 0\}$ and for (2) any class $\mathbf{C}$ of functions that interpolates monotonically between the min-sum efficiency objective (i.e., $h_1 + \ldots + h_N$) and the min-max equity objective (i.e., $\max_{j \in [N]} h_j$). Examples of the latter are $L_p$ norms and top-$\ell$ norms. As an application, we study the Fair Subsidized Facility Location (FSFL) problem, motivated by the crisis of medical deserts caused due to pharmacy closures. FSFL allows subsidizing facilities in underserved areas using revenue from profitable locations. We develop a novel bicriteria approximation algorithm and show a significant reduction of medical deserts across states in the U.S.

Graph rewiring has emerged as a key technique to alleviate over-squashing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers by modifying the graph topology to improve information flow. While effective, rewiring inherently alters the graph's structure, raising the risk of distorting important topology-dependent signals. Yet, despite the growing use of rewiring, little is known about which structural properties must be preserved to ensure both performance gains and structural fidelity. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of how rewiring affects a range of graph structural metrics, and how these changes relate to downstream task performance. We study seven diverse rewiring strategies and correlate changes in local and global graph properties with node classification accuracy. Our results reveal a consistent pattern: successful rewiring methods tend to preserve local structure while allowing for flexibility in global connectivity. These findings offer new insights into the design of effective rewiring strategies, bridging the gap between graph theory and practical GNN optimization.

In this paper, we investigate how users perceive the visual quality of crowd character representations at different levels of detail (LoD) and viewing distances. Each representation: geometric meshes, image-based impostors, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and 3D Gaussians, exhibits distinct trade-offs between visual fidelity and computational performance. Our qualitative and quantitative results provide insights to guide the design of perceptually optimized LoD strategies for crowd rendering.

We present a pollution-free first order system least squares (FOSLS) formulation for the Helmholtz equation, solved iteratively using a block preconditioner. This preconditioner consists of two components: one for the Schur complement, which corresponds to a preconditioner on $L_2(\Omega)$, and another defined on the test space, which we ensure remains Hermitian positive definite using subspace correction techniques. The proposed method is easy to implement and is directly applicable to general domains, including scattering problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate a linear dependence of the number of MINRES iterations on the wave number $\kappa$. We also introduce an approach to estimate algebraic errors which prevents unnecessary iterations.

Existing defence mechanisms have demonstrated significant effectiveness in mitigating rule-based Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, leveraging predefined signatures and static heuristics to identify and block malicious traffic. However, the emergence of AI-driven techniques presents new challenges to SDN security, potentially compromising the efficacy of existing defence mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce~AdaDoS, an adaptive attack model that disrupt network operations while evading detection by existing DoS-based detectors through adversarial reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, AdaDoS models the problem as a competitive game between an attacker, whose goal is to obstruct network traffic without being detected, and a detector, which aims to identify malicious traffic. AdaDoS can solve this game by dynamically adjusting its attack strategy based on feedback from the SDN and the detector. Additionally, recognising that attackers typically have less information than defenders, AdaDoS formulates the DoS-like attack as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP), with the attacker having access only to delay information between attacker and victim nodes. We address this challenge with a novel reciprocal learning module, where the student agent, with limited observations, enhances its performance by learning from the teacher agent, who has full observational capabilities in the SDN environment. AdaDoS represents the first application of RL to develop DoS-like attack sequences, capable of adaptively evading both machine learning-based and rule-based DoS-like attack detectors.

The retrieval-ranking paradigm has long dominated e-commerce search, but its reliance on query-item matching fundamentally misaligns with multi-stage cognitive decision processes of platform users. This misalignment introduces critical limitations: semantic gaps in complex queries, high decision costs due to cross-platform information foraging, and the absence of professional shopping guidance. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Agent Cognitive Decision Framework (MACDF), which shifts the paradigm from passive retrieval to proactive decision support. Extensive offline evaluations demonstrate MACDF's significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction, particularly for complex queries involving negation, multi-constraint, or reasoning demands. Online A/B testing on JD search platform confirms its practical efficacy. This work highlights the transformative potential of multi-agent cognitive systems in redefining e-commerce search.

The worlds people have strong opinions about artificial intelligence (AI), and they want policymakers to listen. Governments are inviting public comment on AI, but as they translate input into policy, much of what citizens say is lost. Policymakers are missing a critical opportunity to build trust in AI and its governance. This paper compares three countries, Australia, Colombia, and the United States, that invited citizens to comment on AI risks and policies. Using a landscape analysis, the authors examined how each government solicited feedback and whether that input shaped governance. Yet in none of the three cases did citizens and policymakers establish a meaningful dialogue. Governments did little to attract diverse voices or publicize calls for comment, leaving most citizens unaware or unprepared to respond. In each nation, fewer than one percent of the population participated. Moreover, officials showed limited responsiveness to the feedback they received, failing to create an effective feedback loop. The study finds a persistent gap between the promise and practice of participatory AI governance. The authors conclude that current approaches are unlikely to build trust or legitimacy in AI because policymakers are not adequately listening or responding to public concerns. They offer eight recommendations: promote AI literacy; monitor public feedback; broaden outreach; hold regular online forums; use innovative engagement methods; include underrepresented groups; respond publicly to input; and make participation easier.

Fluid antenna is a promising wireless communication technology that enhances communication rate by changing the antenna positions. This article proposes a new communication system that combines multiple-input single-output (MISO) fluid antennas with traditional fixed-position antennas, utilizing antenna position optimization to improve energy harvesting efficiency. In this model, we consider simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) which transmits identical signals from the base station to both information receiver (IR) and energy receiver (ER). We strive to enhance the power delivered to the ER by fine-tuning the positions of transmit and receive fluid antennas, along with optimizing the transmit covariance matrix, subject to a given minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint at the IR. Simulation results indicate that fluid antenna systems significantly enhance the energy harvesting efficiency of the ER compared to traditional fixed-position antennas.

The sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are expected to deliver ubiquitous connectivity, resilient coverage, and intelligence-driven services in highly dynamic environments. To achieve these goals, distributed wireless architectures such as cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) have attracted significant attention due to their scalability and fairness. Recently, stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) have emerged as a promising evolution of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, offering multi-layer electromagnetic domain processing with enhanced controllability and spatial degrees of freedom. By integrating SIMs into distributed wireless networks, advanced wave-domain operations can be realized, enabling efficient interference management, improved energy and spectral efficiency, and robust physical-layer security. This article provides a comprehensive overview of SIM-aided distributed wireless networks, including their application scenarios, classification, and system architectures. Key signal processing challenges, such as hierarchical frameworks, user association, and joint precoding, are discussed, followed by case studies demonstrating significant performance gains. Finally, future research directions in hardware design, energy consumption modeling, algorithm development, and artificial intelligence integration are highlighted, aiming to pave the way for scalable and intelligent 6G distributed wireless networks.

The realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates Embodied AI agents capable of robust spatial perception, effective task planning, and adaptive execution in physical environments. However, current large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for embodied tasks suffer from key limitations, including a significant gap between model design and agent requirements, an unavoidable trade-off between real-time latency and performance, and the use of unauthentic, offline evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we propose EmbodiedBrain, a novel vision-language foundation model available in both 7B and 32B parameter sizes. Our framework features an agent-aligned data structure and employs a powerful training methodology that integrates large-scale Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Step-Augumented Group Relative Policy Optimization (Step-GRPO), which boosts long-horizon task success by integrating preceding steps as Guided Precursors. Furthermore, we incorporate a comprehensive reward system, including a Generative Reward Model (GRM) accelerated at the infrastructure level, to improve training efficiency. For enable thorough validation, we establish a three-part evaluation system encompassing General, Planning, and End-to-End Simulation Benchmarks, highlighted by the proposal and open-sourcing of a novel, challenging simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate that EmbodiedBrain achieves superior performance across all metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art for embodied foundation models. Towards paving the way for the next generation of generalist embodied agents, we open-source all of our data, model weight, and evaluating methods, which are available at this https URL.

Most video reasoning models only generate textual reasoning traces without indicating when and where key evidence appears. Recent models such as OpenAI-o3 have sparked wide interest in evidence-centered reasoning for images, yet extending this ability to videos is more challenging, as it requires joint temporal tracking and spatial localization across dynamic scenes. We introduce Open-o3 Video, a non-agent framework that integrates explicit spatio-temporal evidence into video reasoning, and carefully collect training data and design training strategies to address the aforementioned challenges. The model highlights key timestamps, objects, and bounding boxes alongside its answers, allowing reasoning to be grounded in concrete visual observations. To enable this functionality, we first curate and build two high-quality datasets, STGR-CoT-30k for SFT and STGR-RL-36k for RL, with carefully constructed temporal and spatial annotations, since most existing datasets offer either temporal spans for videos or spatial boxes on images, lacking unified spatio-temporal supervision and reasoning traces. Then, we adopt a cold-start reinforcement learning strategy with multiple specially designed rewards that jointly encourage answer accuracy, temporal alignment, and spatial precision. On V-STAR benchmark, Open-o3 Video achieves state-of-the-art performance, raising mAM by 14.4% and mLGM by 24.2% on the Qwen2.5-VL baseline. Consistent improvements are also observed on a broad range of video understanding benchmarks, including VideoMME, WorldSense, VideoMMMU, and TVGBench. Beyond accuracy, the reasoning traces produced by Open-o3 Video also provide valuable signals for test-time scaling, enabling confidence-aware verification and improving answer reliability.

Microservices architectures are an integral part of modern software development. Their adoption brings significant changes to database management. Instead of relying on a single database, a microservices architecture is typically composed of multiple, smaller, heterogeneous, and distributed DBs. In these data-intensive systems, the variety and combination of database categories and technologies play a crucial role in storing and managing data. While data management in microservices is a major challenge, research literature is scarce. We present an empirical study on how databases are used in microservices. On the dataset we collected (and released as open data for future research), considering 15 years of microservices, we examine ca. 1,000 GitHub projects that use databases selected among 180 technologies from 14 categories. We perform a comprehensive analysis of current practices, providing researchers and practitioners with empirical evidence to better understand database usage in microservices. We report 18 findings and 9 recommendations. We show that microservices predominantly use Relational, Key-Value, Document, and Search databases. Notably, 52% of microservices combine multiple database categories. Complexity correlates with database count, with older systems favoring Relational databases and newer ones increasingly adopting Key-Value and Document technologies. Niche databases (e.g., EventStoreDB, PostGIS), while not widespread, are often combined with a mainstream one.

Assessing communication and collaboration at scale depends on a labor intensive task of coding communication data into categories according to different frameworks. Prior research has established that ChatGPT can be directly instructed with coding rubrics to code the communication data and achieves accuracy comparable to human raters. However, whether the coding from ChatGPT or similar AI technology exhibits bias against different demographic groups, such as gender and race, remains unclear. To fill this gap, this paper investigates ChatGPT-based automated coding of communication data using a typical coding framework for collaborative problem solving, examining differences across gender and racial groups. The analysis draws on data from three types of collaborative tasks: negotiation, problem solving, and decision making. Our results show that ChatGPT-based coding exhibits no significant bias across gender and racial groups, paving the road for its adoption in large-scale assessment of collaboration and communication.

Recent years have seen impressive advances in text-to-image generation, with image generative or unified models producing high-quality images from text. Yet these models still struggle with fine-grained color controllability, often failing to accurately match colors specified in text prompts. While existing benchmarks evaluate compositional reasoning and prompt adherence, none systematically assess color precision. Color is fundamental to human visual perception and communication, critical for applications from art to design workflows requiring brand consistency. However, current benchmarks either neglect color or rely on coarse assessments, missing key capabilities such as interpreting RGB values or aligning with human expectations. To this end, we propose GenColorBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for text-to-image color generation, grounded in color systems like ISCC-NBS and CSS3/X11, including numerical colors which are absent elsewhere. With 44K color-focused prompts covering 400+ colors, it reveals models' true capabilities via perceptual and automated assessments. Evaluations of popular text-to-image models using GenColorBench show performance variations, highlighting which color conventions models understand best and identifying failure modes. Our GenColorBench assessments will guide improvements in precise color generation. The benchmark will be made public upon acceptance.

In the online Min-cost Perfect Matching with Delays (MPMD) problem, $m$ requests in a metric space are submitted at different times by an adversary. The goal is to match all requests while (i) minimizing the sum of the distances between matched pairs as well as (ii) how long each request remained unmatched after it appeared. While there exist almost optimal algorithms when the metric space is finite and known a priori, this is not the case when the metric space is infinite or unknown. In this latter case, the best known algorithm, due to Azar and Jacob-Fanani, has competitiveness $\mathcal{O}(m^{0.59})$ which is exponentially worse than the best known lower bound of $\Omega(\log m / \log \log m)$ by Ashlagi et al. We present a $\mathcal{O}(\log^5 m)$-competitive algorithm for the MPMD problem. This algorithm is deterministic and does not need to know the metric space or $m$ in advance. This is an exponential improvement over previous results and only a polylogarithmic factor away from the lower bound.

Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) practices are increas- ingly adopted in industrial settings, yet their integration with Opera- tional Technology (OT) systems presents significant challenges. This pa- per analyzes the fundamental obstacles in combining MLOps with OT en- vironments and proposes a systematic approach to embed MLOps prac- tices into established OT reference models. We evaluate the suitability of the Reference Architectural Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) and the International Society of Automation Standard 95 (ISA-95) for MLOps integration and present a detailed mapping of MLOps lifecycle compo- nents to RAMI 4.0 exemplified by a real-world use case. Our findings demonstrate that while standard MLOps practices cannot be directly transplanted to OT environments, structured adaptation using existing reference models can provide a pathway for successful integration.

Network topology optimization (NTO) via busbar splitting can mitigate transmission grid congestion and reduce redispatch costs. However, solving this mixed-integer non-linear problem for large-scale systems in near-real-time is currently intractable with existing solvers. Machine learning (ML) approaches have emerged as a promising alternative, but they have limited generalization to unseen topologies, varying operating conditions, and different systems, which limits their practical applicability. This paper formulates NTO for congestion management problem considering linearized AC PF, and proposes a graph neural network (GNN)-accelerated approach. We develop a heterogeneous edge-aware message passing NN to predict effective busbar splitting actions as candidate NTO solutions. The proposed GNN captures local flow patterns, achieves generalization to unseen topology changes, and improves transferability across systems. Case studies show up to 4 orders-of-magnitude speed-up, delivering AC-feasible solutions within one minute and a 2.3% optimality gap on the GOC 2000-bus system. These results demonstrate a significant step toward near-real-time NTO for large-scale systems with topology and cross-system generalization.

Deep learning models have achieved great success on various vision challenges, but a well-trained model would face drastic performance degradation when applied to unseen data. Since the model is sensitive to domain shift, unsupervised domain adaptation attempts to reduce the domain gap and avoid costly annotation of unseen domains. This paper proposes a novel framework for cross-modality segmentation via similarity-based prototypes. In specific, we learn class-wise prototypes within an embedding space, then introduce a similarity constraint to make these prototypes representative for each semantic class while separable from different classes. Moreover, we use dictionaries to store prototypes extracted from different images, which prevents the class-missing problem and enables the contrastive learning of prototypes, and further improves performance. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves better results than other state-of-the-art methods.

The billboard advertisement has emerged as an effective out-of-home advertisement technique where the objective is to choose a limited number of slots to play some advertisement content (e.g., animation, video, etc.) with the hope that the content will be visible to a large number of travelers, and this will be helpful to earn more revenue. In this paper, we study a variant of the influential slot selection problem where the advertiser wants to promote multiple products. Formally, we call this problem the \textsc{Multi-Product Influence Maximization Problem for the Balanced Popularity} Problem. The input to our problem is a trajectory and a billboard database, as well as a budget for each product. The goal here is to choose a subset of slots for each product such that the aggregated influence of all the products gets maximized subject to the following two constraints: total selection cost for each product is less than or equal to the allocated budget for that product, and the difference between the influence for any two products is less than or equal to a given threshold. We show that the problem is NP-hard to solve optimally. We formulate this problem as a linear programming problem and use linear programming relaxation with randomized rounding. Further, we propose a greedy-based heuristic with balance correction to solve this problem. We conduct a number of experiments with real-world trajectory and billboard datasets, and the results are reported. From the reported results, we observe that the proposed solution approaches lead to more influence compared to many baseline methods.

Offshore wind and wave energy offer high energy density and availability. While offshore wind has matured significantly, wave energy remains costly and under development. Integrating both technologies into a hybrid system can enhance power generation, stabilize output, and reduce costs. This study explores the benefits of combining an offshore floating wind turbine with the two-body heaving point absorber wave energy converter, Reference Model 3 (RM3). Six configurations are analyzed: RM3 integrated with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5 MW and the International Energy Agency 15 MW wind turbines, each tested on both spar and semi-submersible platforms. The analysis examines dynamic response, mooring loads, and power production under varying environmental conditions, considering the influence of the wave energy converter float motion and an optional reaction plate. Results indicate that the reaction plate improves damping for the spar platform, enhancing wave energy absorption and power output. A comparative analysis indicates that integrating the wave energy converter reduces its levelized cost of energy by 15-83%, while leaving the wind turbine levelized cost of energy unaffected. Hybridization significantly reduces power fluctuations by 50%, reduces the levelized cost of energy with the 5 MW wind turbine, and slightly increases it with the 15 MW wind turbine. The results highlight a mutualistic relationship between the wave energy converter and the offshore wind turbine, where the former benefits substantially while the latter experiences slight improvements or negligible effects. Additional findings quantify hydrodynamic interactions, mooring performance, and economic feasibility. This research provides insights into optimizing hybrid offshore renewable systems, demonstrating their potential to lower costs and support sustainable energy solutions.

Achieving immersive auditory experiences in virtual environments requires flexible sound modeling that supports dynamic source positions. In this paper, we introduce a task called resounding, which aims to estimate room impulse responses at arbitrary emitter location from a sparse set of measured emitter positions, analogous to the relighting problem in vision. We leverage the reciprocity property and introduce Versa, a physics-inspired approach to facilitating acoustic field learning. Our method creates physically valid samples with dense virtual emitter positions by exchanging emitter and listener poses. We also identify challenges in deploying reciprocity due to emitter/listener gain patterns and propose a self-supervised learning approach to address them. Results show that Versa substantially improve the performance of acoustic field learning on both simulated and real-world datasets across different metrics. Perceptual user studies show that Versa can greatly improve the immersive spatial sound experience. Code, dataset and demo videos are available on the project website: this https URL.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on final-answer correctness is the dominant paradigm. This approach, however, provides a coarse signal for model improvement and overlooks the quality of the underlying reasoning process. We argue that a more granular evaluation of reasoning offers a more effective path to building robust models. We decompose reasoning quality into two dimensions: relevance and coherence. Relevance measures if a step is grounded in the problem; coherence measures if it follows logically from prior steps. To measure these aspects reliably, we introduce causal stepwise evaluation (CaSE). This method assesses each reasoning step using only its preceding context, which avoids hindsight bias. We validate CaSE against human judgments on our new expert-annotated benchmarks, MRa-GSM8K and MRa-MATH. More importantly, we show that curating training data with CaSE-evaluated relevance and coherence directly improves final task performance. Our work provides a scalable framework for analyzing, debugging, and improving LLM reasoning, demonstrating the practical value of moving beyond validity checks.

Random walk centrality is a fundamental metric in graph mining for quantifying node importance and influence, defined as the weighted average of hitting times to a node from all other nodes. Despite its ability to capture rich graph structural information and its wide range of applications, computing this measure for large networks remains impractical due to the computational demands of existing methods. In this paper, we present a novel formulation of random walk centrality, underpinning two scalable algorithms: one leveraging approximate Cholesky factorization and sparse inverse estimation, while the other sampling rooted spanning trees. Both algorithms operate in near-linear time and provide strong approximation guarantees. Extensive experiments on large real-world networks, including one with over 10 million nodes, demonstrate the efficiency and approximation quality of the proposed algorithms.

Free-moving object reconstruction from monocular video remains challenging, particularly without reliable pose or depth cues and under arbitrary object motion. We introduce OnlineSplatter, a novel online feed-forward framework generating high-quality, object-centric 3D Gaussians directly from RGB frames without requiring camera pose, depth priors, or bundle optimization. Our approach anchors reconstruction using the first frame and progressively refines the object representation through a dense Gaussian primitive field, maintaining constant computational cost regardless of video sequence length. Our core contribution is a dual-key memory module combining latent appearance-geometry keys with explicit directional keys, robustly fusing current frame features with temporally aggregated object states. This design enables effective handling of free-moving objects via spatial-guided memory readout and an efficient sparsification mechanism, ensuring comprehensive yet compact object coverage. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that OnlineSplatter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pose-free reconstruction baselines, consistently improving with more observations while maintaining constant memory and runtime.

Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to individual choice. We develop a game-theoretic model in which candidates from different socioeconomic groups differ in their perceived post-selection value--shaped by social context and, increasingly, by AI-powered tools offering personalized career or salary guidance. Each candidate strategically chooses effort, balancing its cost against expected reward; effort translates into observable merit, and selection is based solely on merit. We characterize the unique Nash equilibrium in the large-agent limit and derive explicit formulas showing how valuation disparities and institutional selectivity jointly determine effort, representation, social welfare, and utility. We further propose a cost-sensitive optimization framework that quantifies how modifying selectivity or perceived value can reduce disparities without compromising institutional goals. Our analysis reveals a perception-driven bias: when perceptions of post-selection value differ across groups, these differences translate into rational differences in effort, propagating disparities backward through otherwise "fair" selection processes. While the model is static, it captures one stage of a broader feedback cycle linking perceptions, incentives, and outcome--bridging rational-choice and structural explanations of inequality by showing how techno-social environments shape individual incentives in meritocratic systems.

Generalization is a key challenge in machine learning, specifically in reasoning tasks, where models are expected to solve problems more complex than those encountered during training. Existing approaches typically train reasoning models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping input instances to solutions. While this allows models to learn useful heuristics from data, it often results in limited generalization beyond the training distribution. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reasoning generalization by learning energy landscapes over the solution spaces of smaller, more tractable subproblems. At test time, we construct a global energy landscape for a given problem by combining the energy functions of multiple subproblems. This compositional approach enables the incorporation of additional constraints during inference, allowing the construction of energy landscapes for problems of increasing difficulty. To improve the sample quality from this newly constructed energy landscape, we introduce Parallel Energy Minimization (PEM). We evaluate our approach on a wide set of reasoning problems. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its ability to generalize to larger and more complex problems. Project website can be found at: this https URL

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition has emerged as a flexible alternative that ties the second moment of stochastic gradients to the objective value and the full gradient. This paper presents a self-contained convergence analysis of SGD under ES. We (i) refine ES with interpretations and sampling-dependent constants; (ii) derive bounds of the expectation of squared full gradient norm; and (iii) prove $O(1/K)$ rates with explicit residual errors for various step-size schedules. All proofs are given in full detail in the appendix. Our treatment unifies and extends recent threads (Khaled and Richtárik, 2020; Umeda and Iiduka, 2025).

We study retrieval design for code-focused generation tasks under realistic compute budgets. Using two complementary tasks from Long Code Arena -- code completion and bug localization -- we systematically compare retrieval configurations across various context window sizes along three axes: (i) chunking strategy, (ii) similarity scoring, and (iii) splitting granularity. (1) For PL-PL, sparse BM25 with word-level splitting is the most effective and practical, significantly outperforming dense alternatives while being an order of magnitude faster. (2) For NL-PL, proprietary dense encoders (Voyager-3 family) consistently beat sparse retrievers, however requiring 100x larger latency. (3) Optimal chunk size scales with available context: 32-64 line chunks work best at small budgets, and whole-file retrieval becomes competitive at 16000 tokens. (4) Simple line-based chunking matches syntax-aware splitting across budgets. (5) Retrieval latency varies by up to 200x across configurations; BPE-based splitting is needlessly slow, and BM25 + word splitting offers the best quality-latency trade-off. Thus, we provide evidence-based recommendations for implementing effective code-oriented RAG systems based on task requirements, model constraints, and computational efficiency.

This paper details our submission to the Ara- GenEval Shared Task on Arabic AI-generated text detection, where our team, BUSTED, se- cured 5th place. We investigated the effec- tiveness of three pre-trained transformer mod- els: AraELECTRA, CAMeLBERT, and XLM- RoBERTa. Our approach involved fine-tuning each model on the provided dataset for a binary classification task. Our findings revealed a sur- prising result: the multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model achieved the highest performance with an F1 score of 0.7701, outperforming the spe- cialized Arabic models. This work underscores the complexities of AI-generated text detection and highlights the strong generalization capa- bilities of multilingual models.

Breast cancer is considered the most critical and frequently diagnosed cancer in women worldwide, leading to an increase in cancer-related mortality. Early and accurate detection is crucial as it can help mitigate possible threats while improving survival rates. In terms of prediction, conventional diagnostic methods are often limited by variability, cost, and, most importantly, risk of misdiagnosis. To address these challenges, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool for computer-aided diagnosis, with feature selection playing a vital role in improving model performance and interpretability. This research study proposes an integrated framework that incorporates customized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for feature selection. This framework has been evaluated on a comprehensive set of 29 different models, spanning classical classifiers, ensemble techniques, neural networks, probabilistic algorithms, and instance-based algorithms. To ensure interpretability and clinical relevance, the study uses cross-validation in conjunction with explainable AI methods. Experimental evaluation showed that the proposed approach achieved a superior score of 99.1\% across all performance metrics, including accuracy and precision, while effectively reducing dimensionality and providing transparent, model-agnostic explanations. The results highlight the potential of combining swarm intelligence with explainable ML for robust, trustworthy, and clinically meaningful breast cancer diagnosis.

Large Language Models are increasingly adopted as critical tools for accelerating innovation. This paper identifies and formalizes a systemic risk inherent in this paradigm: \textbf{Black Box Absorption}. We define this as the process by which the opaque internal architectures of LLM platforms, often operated by large-scale service providers, can internalize, generalize, and repurpose novel concepts contributed by users during interaction. This mechanism threatens to undermine the foundational principles of innovation economics by creating severe informational and structural asymmetries between individual creators and platform operators, thereby jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of the innovation ecosystem. To analyze this challenge, we introduce two core concepts: the idea unit, representing the transportable functional logic of an innovation, and idea safety, a multidimensional standard for its protection. This paper analyzes the mechanisms of absorption and proposes a concrete governance and engineering agenda to mitigate these risks, ensuring that creator contributions remain traceable, controllable, and equitable.

Mass spectrometry (MS) plays a critical role in molecular identification, significantly advancing scientific discovery. However, structure elucidation from MS data remains challenging due to the scarcity of annotated spectra. While large-scale pretraining has proven effective in addressing data scarcity in other domains, applying this paradigm to mass spectrometry is hindered by the complexity and heterogeneity of raw spectral signals. To address this, we propose MS-BART, a unified modeling framework that maps mass spectra and molecular structures into a shared token vocabulary, enabling cross-modal learning through large-scale pretraining on reliably computed fingerprint-molecule datasets. Multi-task pretraining objectives further enhance MS-BART's generalization by jointly optimizing denoising and translation task. The pretrained model is subsequently transferred to experimental spectra through finetuning on fingerprint predictions generated with MIST, a pre-trained spectral inference model, thereby enhancing robustness to real-world spectral variability. While finetuning alleviates the distributional difference, MS-BART still suffers molecular hallucination and requires further alignment. We therefore introduce a chemical feedback mechanism that guides the model toward generating molecules closer to the reference structure. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MS-BART achieves SOTA performance across 5/12 key metrics on MassSpecGym and NPLIB1 and is faster by one order of magnitude than competing diffusion-based methods, while comprehensive ablation studies systematically validate the model's effectiveness and robustness.

Differentially private (DP) transfer learning, i.e., fine-tuning a pretrained model on private data, is the current state-of-the-art approach for training large models under privacy constraints. We focus on two key hyperparameters in this setting: the clipping bound $C$ and batch size $B$. We show a clear mismatch between the current theoretical understanding of how to choose an optimal $C$ (stronger privacy requires smaller $C$) and empirical outcomes (larger $C$ performs better under strong privacy), caused by changes in the gradient distributions. Assuming a limited compute budget (fixed epochs), we demonstrate that the existing heuristics for tuning $B$ do not work, while cumulative DP noise better explains whether smaller or larger batches perform better. We also highlight how the common practice of using a single $(C,B)$ setting across tasks can lead to suboptimal performance. We find that performance drops especially when moving between loose and tight privacy and between plentiful and limited compute, which we explain by analyzing clipping as a form of gradient re-weighting and examining cumulative DP noise.

Interpretable-by-design models are crucial for fostering trust, accountability, and safe adoption of automated decision-making models in real-world applications. In this paper we formalize the ground for the MIMOSA (Mining Interpretable Models explOiting Sophisticated Algorithms) framework, a comprehensive methodology for generating predictive models that balance interpretability with performance while embedding key ethical properties. We formally define here the supervised learning setting across diverse decision-making tasks and data types, including tabular data, time series, images, text, transactions, and trajectories. We characterize three major families of interpretable models: feature importance, rule, and instance based models. For each family, we analyze their interpretability dimensions, reasoning mechanisms, and complexity. Beyond interpretability, we formalize three critical ethical properties, namely causality, fairness, and privacy, providing formal definitions, evaluation metrics, and verification procedures for each. We then examine the inherent trade-offs between these properties and discuss how privacy requirements, fairness constraints, and causal reasoning can be embedded within interpretable pipelines. By evaluating ethical measures during model generation, this framework establishes the theoretical foundations for developing AI systems that are not only accurate and interpretable but also fair, privacy-preserving, and causally aware, i.e., trustworthy.

Long video understanding remains challenging due to its complex, diverse, and temporally scattered content. Although video large language models (Video-LLMs) can process videos lasting tens of minutes, applying them to truly long sequences is computationally prohibitive and often leads to unfocused or inconsistent reasoning. A promising solution is to select only the most informative frames, yet existing approaches typically ignore temporal dependencies or rely on unimodal evidence, limiting their ability to provide complete and query-relevant context. We propose a Semantic-Visual Consensus Evidence Selection (SeViCES) framework for effective and reliable long video understanding. SeViCES is training-free and model-agnostic, and introduces two key components. The Semantic-Visual Consensus Frame Selection (SVCFS) module selects frames through (1) a temporal-aware semantic branch that leverages LLM reasoning over captions, and (2) a cluster-guided visual branch that aligns embeddings with semantic scores via mutual information. The Answer Consensus Refinement (ACR) module further resolves inconsistencies between semantic- and visual-based predictions by fusing evidence and constraining the answer space. Extensive experiments on long video understanding benchmarks show that SeViCES consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and robustness, demonstrating the importance of consensus-driven evidence selection for Video-LLMs.

We introduce H-SPLID, a novel algorithm for learning salient feature representations through the explicit decomposition of salient and non-salient features into separate spaces. We show that H-SPLID promotes learning low-dimensional, task-relevant features. We prove that the expected prediction deviation under input perturbations is upper-bounded by the dimension of the salient subspace and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) between inputs and representations. This establishes a link between robustness and latent representation compression in terms of the dimensionality and information preserved. Empirical evaluations on image classification tasks show that models trained with H-SPLID primarily rely on salient input components, as indicated by reduced sensitivity to perturbations affecting non-salient features, such as image backgrounds. Our code is available at this https URL.

As machine learning models become increasingly integrated into healthcare, structural inequities and social biases embedded in clinical data can be perpetuated or even amplified by data-driven models. In survival analysis, censoring and time dynamics can further add complexity to fair model development. Additionally, algorithmic fairness approaches often overlook disparities in cross-group rankings, e.g., high-risk Black patients may be ranked below lower-risk White patients who do not experience the event of mortality. Such misranking can reinforce biological essentialism and undermine equitable care. We propose a Fairness-Aware Survival Modeling (FASM), designed to mitigate algorithmic bias regarding both intra-group and cross-group risk rankings over time. Using breast cancer prognosis as a representative case and applying FASM to SEER breast cancer data, we show that FASM substantially improves fairness while preserving discrimination performance comparable to fairness-unaware survival models. Time-stratified evaluations show that FASM maintains stable fairness over a 10-year horizon, with the greatest improvements observed during the mid-term of follow-up. Our approach enables the development of survival models that prioritize both accuracy and equity in clinical decision-making, advancing fairness as a core principle in clinical care.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on general-purpose NLP benchmarks, yet their capabilities in specialized domains remain underexplored. In e-commerce, existing evaluations-such as EcomInstruct, ChineseEcomQA, eCeLLM, and Shopping MMLU-suffer from limited task diversity (e.g., lacking product guidance and after-sales issues), limited task modalities (e.g., absence of multimodal data), synthetic or curated data, and a narrow focus on English and Chinese, leaving practitioners without reliable tools to assess models on complex, real-world shopping scenarios. We introduce EcomEval, a comprehensive multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in e-commerce. EcomEval covers six categories and 37 tasks (including 8 multimodal tasks), sourced primarily from authentic customer queries and transaction logs, reflecting the noisy and heterogeneous nature of real business interactions. To ensure both quality and scalability of reference answers, we adopt a semi-automatic pipeline in which large models draft candidate responses subsequently reviewed and modified by over 50 expert annotators with strong e-commerce and multilingual expertise. We define difficulty levels for each question and task category by averaging evaluation scores across models with different sizes and capabilities, enabling challenge-oriented and fine-grained assessment. EcomEval also spans seven languages-including five low-resource Southeast Asian languages-offering a multilingual perspective absent from prior work.

Efficient analysis and processing of dental images are crucial for dentists to achieve accurate diagnosis and optimal treatment planning. However, dental imaging inherently poses several challenges, such as low contrast, metallic artifacts, and variations in projection angles. Combined with the subjectivity arising from differences in clinicians' expertise, manual interpretation often proves time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based automated dental image analysis (DIA) offers a promising solution to these issues and has become an integral part of computer-aided dental diagnosis and treatment. Among various AI technologies, deep learning (DL) stands out as the most widely applied and influential approach due to its superior feature extraction and representation capabilities. To comprehensively summarize recent progress in this field, we focus on the two fundamental aspects of DL research-datasets and models. In this paper, we systematically review 260 studies on DL applications in DIA, including 49 papers on publicly available dental datasets and 211 papers on DL-based algorithms. We first introduce the basic concepts of dental imaging and summarize the characteristics and acquisition methods of existing datasets. Then, we present the foundational techniques of DL and categorize relevant models and algorithms according to different DIA tasks, analyzing their network architectures, optimization strategies, training methods, and performance. Furthermore, we summarize commonly used training and evaluation metrics in the DIA domain. Finally, we discuss the current challenges of existing research and outline potential future directions. We hope that this work provides a valuable and systematic reference for researchers in this field. All supplementary materials and detailed comparison tables will be made publicly available on GitHub.

Curiosity serves as a pivotal conduit for human beings to discover and learn new knowledge. Recent advancements of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing have sparked discussions regarding whether these models possess capability of curiosity-driven learning akin to humans. In this paper, starting from the human curiosity assessment questionnaire Five-Dimensional Curiosity scale Revised (5DCR), we design a comprehensive evaluation framework that covers dimensions such as Information Seeking, Thrill Seeking, and Social Curiosity to assess the extent of curiosity exhibited by LLMs. The results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a stronger thirst for knowledge than humans but still tend to make conservative choices when faced with uncertain environments. We further investigated the relationship between curiosity and thinking of LLMs, confirming that curious behaviors can enhance the model's reasoning and active learning abilities. These findings suggest that LLMs have the potential to exhibit curiosity similar to that of humans, providing experimental support for the future development of learning capabilities and innovative research in LLMs.

This paper introduces the Fluidity Index (FI) to quantify model adaptability in dynamic, scaling environments. The benchmark evaluates response accuracy based on deviations in initial, current, and future environment states, assessing context switching and continuity. We distinguish between closed-ended and open-ended benchmarks, prioritizing closed-loop open-ended real-world benchmarks to test adaptability. The approach measures a model's ability to understand, predict, and adjust to state changes in scaling environments. A truly super-intelligent model should exhibit at least second-order adaptability, enabling self-sustained computation through digital replenishment for optimal fluidity.

Large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved unprecedented breakthrough, showcasing remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and complex reasoning. This transformative potential has positioned them as key enablers for 6G autonomous communications among machines, vehicles, and humanoids. In this article, we provide an overview of task-oriented autonomous communications with LLMs/LMMs, focusing on multimodal sensing integration, adaptive reconfiguration, and prompt/fine-tuning strategies for wireless tasks. We demonstrate the framework through three case studies: LMM-based traffic control, LLM-based robot scheduling, and LMM-based environment-aware channel estimation. From experimental results, we show that the proposed LLM/LMM-aided autonomous systems significantly outperform conventional and discriminative deep learning (DL) model-based techniques, maintaining robustness under dynamic objectives, varying input parameters, and heterogeneous multimodal conditions where conventional static optimization degrades.

Recent progress in vision-language modeling for 3D medical imaging has been fueled by large-scale computed tomography (CT) corpora with paired free-text reports, stronger architectures, and powerful pretrained models. This has enabled applications such as automated report generation and text-conditioned 3D image synthesis. Yet, current approaches struggle with high-resolution, long-sequence volumes: contrastive pretraining often yields vision encoders that are misaligned with clinical language, and slice-wise tokenization blurs fine anatomy, reducing diagnostic performance on downstream tasks. We introduce BTB3D (Better Tokens for Better 3D), a causal convolutional encoder-decoder that unifies 2D and 3D training and inference while producing compact, frequency-aware volumetric tokens. A three-stage training curriculum enables (i) local reconstruction, (ii) overlapping-window tiling, and (iii) long-context decoder refinement, during which the model learns from short slice excerpts yet generalizes to scans exceeding 300 slices without additional memory overhead. BTB3D sets a new state-of-the-art on two key tasks: it improves BLEU scores and increases clinical F1 by 40% over CT2Rep, CT-CHAT, and Merlin for report generation; and it reduces FID by 75% and halves FVD compared to GenerateCT and MedSyn for text-to-CT synthesis, producing anatomically consistent 512*512*241 volumes. These results confirm that precise three-dimensional tokenization, rather than larger language backbones alone, is essential for scalable vision-language modeling in 3D medical imaging. The codebase is available at: this https URL

In this paper, we present DiRecGNN, an attention-enhanced entity recommendation framework for monitoring cloud services at Microsoft. We provide insights on the usefulness of this feature as perceived by the cloud service owners and lessons learned from deployment. Specifically, we introduce the problem of recommending the optimal subset of attributes (dimensions) that should be tracked by an automated watchdog (monitor) for cloud services. To begin, we construct the monitor heterogeneous graph at production-scale. The interaction dynamics of these entities are often characterized by limited structural and engagement information, resulting in inferior performance of state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, traditional methods fail to capture the dependencies between entities spanning a long range due to their homophilic nature. Therefore, we propose an attention-enhanced entity ranking model inspired by transformer architectures. Our model utilizes a multi-head attention mechanism to focus on heterogeneous neighbors and their attributes, and further attends to paths sampled using random walks to capture long-range dependencies. We also employ multi-faceted loss functions to optimize for relevant recommendations while respecting the inherent sparsity of the data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, with our model achieving a 43.1% increase in MRR. Furthermore, product teams who consumed these features perceive the feature as useful and rated it 4.5 out of 5.

Thanks to the remarkable human-like capabilities of machine learning (ML) models in perceptual and cognitive tasks, frameworks integrating ML within rational agent architectures are gaining traction. Yet, the landscape remains fragmented and incoherent, often focusing on embedding ML into generic agent containers while overlooking the expressive power of rational architectures--such as Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. This paper presents a fine-grained systematisation of existing approaches, using the BDI paradigm as a reference. Our analysis illustrates the fast-evolving literature on rational agents enhanced by ML, and identifies key research opportunities and open challenges for designing effective rational ML agents.

In this paper, we introduce a decentralized optimization-based density controller designed to enforce set invariance constraints in multi-robot systems. By designing a decentralized control barrier function, we derived sufficient conditions under which local safety constraints guarantee global safety. We account for localization and motion noise explicitly by modeling robots as spatial probability density functions governed by the Fokker-Planck equation. Compared to traditional centralized approaches, our controller requires less computational and communication power, making it more suitable for deployment in situations where perfect communication and localization are impractical. The controller is validated through simulations and experiments with four quadcopters.

Mutual Information (MI) is a fundamental measure of statistical dependence widely used in representation learning. While direct optimization of MI via its definition as a Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) is often intractable, many recent methods have instead maximized alternative dependence measures, most notably, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) between joint and product of marginal distributions via discriminative losses. However, the connection between these surrogate objectives and MI remains poorly understood. In this work, we bridge this gap by deriving a new, tight, and tractable lower bound on KLD as a function of JSD in the general case. By specializing this bound to joint and marginal distributions, we demonstrate that maximizing the JSD-based information increases a guaranteed lower bound on mutual information. Furthermore, we revisit the practical implementation of JSD-based objectives and observe that minimizing the cross-entropy loss of a binary classifier trained to distinguish joint from marginal pairs recovers a known variational lower bound on the JSD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our lower bound is tight when applied to MI estimation. We compared our lower bound to state-of-the-art neural estimators of variational lower bound across a range of established reference scenarios. Our lower bound estimator consistently provides a stable, low-variance estimate of a tight lower bound on MI. We also demonstrate its practical usefulness in the context of the Information Bottleneck framework. Taken together, our results provide new theoretical justifications and strong empirical evidence for using discriminative learning in MI-based representation learning.

Despite the popularity of Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) because of their use in wide areas of applications such as payment channels, atomic swaps, etc, their use in exchange is still questionable. This is because of its incentive incompatibility and susceptibility to bribery attacks. State-of-the-art solutions such as MAD-HTLC (Oakland'21) and He-HTLC (NDSS'23) address this by leveraging miners' profit-driven behaviour to mitigate such attacks. The former is the mitigation against passive miners; however, the latter works against both active and passive miners. However, they consider only two bribing scenarios where either of the parties involved in the transfer collude with the miner. In this paper, we expose vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art solutions by presenting a miner-collusion bribery attack with implementation and game-theoretic analysis. Additionally, we propose a stronger attack on MAD-HTLC than He-HTLC, allowing the attacker to earn profits equivalent to attacking naive HTLC. Leveraging our insights, we propose \prot, a game-theoretically secure HTLC protocol resistant to all bribery scenarios. \prot\ employs a two-phase approach, preventing unauthorized token confiscation by third parties, such as miners. In Phase 1, parties commit to the transfer; in Phase 2, the transfer is executed without manipulation. We demonstrate \prot's efficiency in transaction cost and latency via implementations on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical, scientific, and other question-answering tasks, but their multilingual reasoning abilities remain underexplored. When presented with non-English questions, LRMs often default to reasoning in English, raising concerns about interpretability and the handling of linguistic and cultural nuances. We systematically compare an LRM's reasoning in English versus the language of the question. Our evaluation spans two tasks: MGSM and GPQA Diamond. Beyond measuring answer accuracy, we also analyze cognitive attributes in the reasoning traces. We find that English reasoning traces exhibit a substantially higher presence of these cognitive behaviors, and that reasoning in English generally yields higher final-answer accuracy, with the performance gap increasing as tasks become more complex. However, this English-centric strategy is susceptible to a key failure mode - getting "Lost in Translation," where translation steps lead to errors that would have been avoided by question's language reasoning.

Extreme events frequently occur in real-world time series and often carry significant practical implications. In domains such as climate and healthcare, these events, such as floods, heatwaves, or acute medical episodes, can lead to serious consequences. Accurate forecasting of such events is therefore of substantial importance. Most existing time series forecasting models are optimized for overall performance within the prediction window, but often struggle to accurately predict extreme events, such as high temperatures or heart rate spikes. The main challenges are data imbalance and the neglect of valuable information contained in intermediate events that precede extreme events. In this paper, we propose xTime, a novel framework for extreme event forecasting in time series. xTime leverages knowledge distillation to transfer information from models trained on lower-rarity events, thereby improving prediction performance on rarer ones. In addition, we introduce a mixture of experts (MoE) mechanism that dynamically selects and fuses outputs from expert models across different rarity levels, which further improves the forecasting performance for extreme events. Experiments on multiple datasets show that xTime achieves consistent improvements, with forecasting accuracy on extreme events improving from 3% to 78%.

We examine whether measured cognitive processes predict cyber-attack behavior. We analyzed data that included psychometric scale responses and labeled attack behaviors from cybersecurity professionals who conducted red-team operations against a simulated enterprise network. We employed multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regression with technique counts nested within participants to test whether cognitive processes predicted technique-specific usage. The scales significantly predicted technique use, but effects varied by technique rather than operating uniformly. Neither expertise level nor experimental treatment condition significantly predicted technique patterns, indicating that cognitive processes may be stronger drivers of technique selection than training or experience. These findings demonstrate that individual cognitive differences shape cyber-attack behavior and support the development of psychology-informed defense strategies.

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen notable progress. However, two key challenges remain : 1) the absence of a large-scale high-quality UHR T2I dataset, and (2) the neglect of tailored training strategies for fine-grained detail synthesis in UHR scenarios. To tackle the first challenge, we introduce \textbf{UltraHR-100K}, a high-quality dataset of 100K UHR images with rich captions, offering diverse content and strong visual fidelity. Each image exceeds 3K resolution and is rigorously curated based on detail richness, content complexity, and aesthetic quality. To tackle the second challenge, we propose a frequency-aware post-training method that enhances fine-detail generation in T2I diffusion models. Specifically, we design (i) \textit{Detail-Oriented Timestep Sampling (DOTS)} to focus learning on detail-critical denoising steps, and (ii) \textit{Soft-Weighting Frequency Regularization (SWFR)}, which leverages Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to softly constrain frequency components, encouraging high-frequency detail preservation. Extensive experiments on our proposed UltraHR-eval4K benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the fine-grained detail quality and overall fidelity of UHR image generation. The code is available at \href{this https URL}{here}.

Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces from large language models remains understudied, labor-intensive, and unreliable: current practice relies on expert rubrics, manual annotation, and slow pairwise judgments. Automated efforts are dominated by graph-based proxies that quantify structural connectivity but do not clarify what constitutes high-quality reasoning; such abstractions can be overly simplistic for inherently complex processes. We introduce a topological data analysis (TDA)-based evaluation framework that captures the geometry of reasoning traces and enables label-efficient, automated assessment. In our empirical study, topological features yield substantially higher predictive power for assessing reasoning quality than standard graph metrics, suggesting that effective reasoning is better captured by higher-dimensional geometric structures rather than purely relational graphs. We further show that a compact, stable set of topological features reliably indicates trace quality, offering a practical signal for future reinforcement learning algorithms.

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are vulnerable to jamming, particularly in urban areas where multipath and shadowing distort received power. Previous data-driven approaches achieved reasonable localization but poorly reconstructed the received signal strength (RSS) field due to limited spatial context. We propose a hybrid Bayesian mixture-of-experts framework that fuses a physical path-loss (PL) model and a convolutional neural network (CNN) through log-linear pooling. The PL expert ensures physical consistency, while the CNN leverages building-height maps to capture urban propagation effects. Bayesian inference with Laplace approximation provides posterior uncertainty over both the jammer position and RSS field. Experiments on urban ray-tracing data show that localization accuracy improves and uncertainty decreases with more training points, while uncertainty concentrates near the jammer and along urban canyons where propagation is most sensitive.

This is not a typical survey of world models; it is a guide for those who want to build worlds. We do not aim to catalog every paper that has ever mentioned a ``world model". Instead, we follow one clear road: from early masked models that unified representation learning across modalities, to unified architectures that share a single paradigm, then to interactive generative models that close the action-perception loop, and finally to memory-augmented systems that sustain consistent worlds over time. We bypass loosely related branches to focus on the core: the generative heart, the interactive loop, and the memory system. We show that this is the most promising path towards true world models.

Accurate waste classification is vital for achieving sustainable waste management and reducing the environmental footprint of urbanization. Misclassification of recyclable materials contributes to landfill accumulation, inefficient recycling, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. To address these issues, this study introduces HybridSOMSpikeNet, a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates convolutional feature extraction, differentiable self-organization, and spiking-inspired temporal processing to enable intelligent and energy-efficient waste classification. The proposed model employs a pre-trained ResNet-152 backbone to extract deep spatial representations, followed by a Differentiable Soft Self-Organizing Map (Soft-SOM) that enhances topological clustering and interpretability. A spiking neural head accumulates temporal activations over discrete time steps, improving robustness and generalization. Trained on a ten-class waste dataset, HybridSOMSpikeNet achieved a test accuracy of 97.39%, outperforming several state-of-the-art architectures while maintaining a lightweight computational profile suitable for real-world deployment. Beyond its technical innovations, the framework provides tangible environmental benefits. By enabling precise and automated waste segregation, it supports higher recycling efficiency, reduces contamination in recyclable streams, and minimizes the ecological and operational costs of waste processing. The approach aligns with global sustainability priorities, particularly the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 11 and SDG 12), by contributing to cleaner cities, circular economy initiatives, and intelligent environmental management systems.

Cantonese, although spoken by millions, remains under-resourced due to policy and diglossia. To address this scarcity of evaluation frameworks for Cantonese, we introduce \textsc{\textbf{CantoNLU}}, a benchmark for Cantonese natural language understanding (NLU). This novel benchmark spans seven tasks covering syntax and semantics, including word sense disambiguation, linguistic acceptability judgment, language detection, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, part-of-speech tagging, and dependency parsing. In addition to the benchmark, we provide model baseline performance across a set of models: a Mandarin model without Cantonese training, two Cantonese-adapted models obtained by continual pre-training a Mandarin model on Cantonese text, and a monolingual Cantonese model trained from scratch. Results show that Cantonese-adapted models perform best overall, while monolingual models perform better on syntactic tasks. Mandarin models remain competitive in certain settings, indicating that direct transfer may be sufficient when Cantonese domain data is scarce. We release all datasets, code, and model weights to facilitate future research in Cantonese NLP.

Determining the appropriate locus of care for addiction patients is one of the most critical clinical decisions that affects patient treatment outcomes and effective use of resources. With a lack of sufficient specialized treatment resources, such as inpatient beds or staff, there is an unmet need to develop an automated framework for the same. Current decision-making approaches suffer from severe class imbalances in addiction datasets. To address this limitation, we propose a novel graph neural network (GRACE) framework that formalizes locus of care prediction as a structured learning problem. Further, we perform extensive feature engineering and propose a new approach of obtaining an unbiased meta-graph to train a GNN to overcome the class imbalance problem. Experimental results in real-world data show an improvement of 11-35% in terms of the F1 score of the minority class over competitive baselines. The codes and note embeddings are available at this https URL.

Multi-bit quantization networks enable flexible deployment of deep neural networks by supporting multiple precision levels within a single model. However, existing approaches suffer from significant training overhead as full-dataset updates are repeated for each supported bit-width, resulting in a cost that scales linearly with the number of precisions. Additionally, extra fine-tuning stages are often required to support additional or intermediate precision options, further compounding the overall training burden. To address this issue, we propose two techniques that greatly reduce the training overhead without compromising model utility: (i) Weight bias correction enables shared batch normalization and eliminates the need for fine-tuning by neutralizing quantization-induced bias across bit-widths and aligning activation distributions; and (ii) Bit-wise coreset sampling strategy allows each child model to train on a compact, informative subset selected via gradient-based importance scores by exploiting the implicit knowledge transfer phenomenon. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-1K with both ResNet and ViT architectures demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior accuracy while reducing training time up to 7.88x. Our code is released at this https URL.

This study presents the multilingual e-commerce search system developed by the Tredence_AICOE team. The competition features two multilingual relevance tasks: Query-Category (QC) Relevance, which evaluates how well a user's search query aligns with a product category, and Query-Item (QI) Relevance, which measures the match between a multilingual search query and an individual product listing. To ensure full language coverage, we performed data augmentation by translating existing datasets into languages missing from the development set, enabling training across all target languages. We fine-tuned Gemma-3 12B and Qwen-2.5 14B model for both tasks using multiple strategies. The Gemma-3 12B (4-bit) model achieved the best QC performance using original and translated data, and the best QI performance using original, translated, and minority class data creation. These approaches secured 4th place on the final leaderboard, with an average F1-score of 0.8857 on the private test set.

In real-world singing voice conversion (SVC) applications, environmental noise and the demand for expressive output pose significant challenges. Conventional methods, however, are typically designed without accounting for real deployment scenarios, as both training and inference usually rely on clean data. This mismatch hinders practical use, given the inevitable presence of diverse noise sources and artifacts from music separation. To tackle these issues, we propose R2-SVC, a robust and expressive SVC framework. First, we introduce simulation-based robustness enhancement through random fundamental frequency ($F_0$) perturbations and music separation artifact simulations (e.g., reverberation, echo), substantially improving performance under noisy conditions. Second, we enrich speaker representation using domain-specific singing data: alongside clean vocals, we incorporate DNSMOS-filtered separated vocals and public singing corpora, enabling the model to preserve speaker timbre while capturing singing style nuances. Third, we integrate the Neural Source-Filter (NSF) model to explicitly represent harmonic and noise components, enhancing the naturalness and controllability of converted singing. R2-SVC achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple SVC benchmarks under both clean and noisy conditions.

Modern software development reuses code by importing libraries as dependencies. Software projects typically include an average of 36 dependencies, with 80% being transitive, meaning they are dependencies of dependencies. Recent research indicates that only 24.9% of these dependencies are required at runtime, and even within those, many program constructs remain unused, adding unnecessary code to the project. This has led to the development of debloating tools that remove unnecessary dependencies and program constructs while balancing precision by eliminating unused constructs and soundness by preserving all required constructs. To systematically evaluate this trade-off, we developed Deblometer, a micro-benchmark consisting of 59 test cases designed to assess support for various Java language features in debloating tools. Each test case includes a manually curated ground truth specifying necessary and bloated classes, methods, and fields, enabling precise measurement of soundness and precision. Using Deblometer, we evaluated three popular Java debloating tools: Deptrim, JShrink, and ProGuard. Our evaluation reveals that all tools remove required program constructs, which results in changed semantics or execution crashes. In particular, the dynamic class loading feature introduces unsoundness in all evaluated tools. Our comparison shows that Deptrim retains more bloated constructs, while ProGuard removes more required constructs. JShrink's soundness is significantly affected by limited support for annotations, which leads to corrupted debloated artifacts. These soundness issues highlight the need to improve debloating tools to ensure stable and reliable debloated software.

Inspired by the performance of score-based diffusion models in estimating complex text, video, and image distributions with thousands of dimensions, we introduce Accelerated Diffusion Cardest (ADC), the first joint distribution cardinality estimator based on a downsized diffusion model. To calculate the pointwise density value of data distributions, ADC's density estimator uses a formula that evaluates log-likelihood by integrating the score function, a gradient mapping which ADC has learned to efficiently approximate using its lightweight score estimator. To answer ranged queries, ADC's selectivity estimator first predicts their selectivity using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), then uses importance sampling Monte Carlo to correct its predictions with more accurate pointwise density values calculated by the density estimator. ADC+ further trains a decision tree to identify the high-volume, high-selectivity queries that the GMM alone can predict very accurately, in which case it skips the correction phase to prevent Monte Carlo from adding more variance. Doing so lowers median Q-error and cuts per-query latency by 25 percent, making ADC+ usually twice as fast as Naru, arguably the state-of-the-art joint distribution cardinality estimator. Numerical experiments using well-established benchmarks show that on all real-world datasets tested, ADC+ is capable of rivaling Naru and outperforming MSCN, DeepDB, LW-Tree, and LW-NN using around 66 percent their storage space, being at least 3 times as accurate as MSCN on 95th and 99th percentile error. Furthermore, on a synthetic dataset where attributes exhibit complex, multilateral correlations, ADC and ADC+ are considerably robust while almost every other learned model suffered significant accuracy declines. In this case, ADC+ performs better than any other tested model, being 10 times as accurate as Naru on 95th and 99th percentile error.

This paper presents the design and deployment of a process-aware cyber-physical system that automates plant-level logistics, traceability, and sanitation in a centralized maple-syrup boiling center. The system replaces ad-hoc, manual operations with event-driven orchestration on a local server, employing reusable device abstractions and a centralized interlock with priority-based arbitration for shared piping. It implements deterministic routines for delivery, reverse osmosis integration, evaporator feed, and permeate management. The system is sensor rich: inline measurements of flow, temperature, and sugar concentration (degrees Brix) drive routing decisions and trigger systematic post-transfer rinses (cleaning-in-place), ensuring consistent hygiene and complete, immediate traceability up to the evaporator inlet. During the 2025 production season, the system queued 431 operations without incident; executed 908 \enquote{topstock} and \enquote{downstock} balancing cycles; increased usable permeate reserves from 22,712 to approximately 41,640 L through dynamic storage assignment; eliminated mid-season contamination incidents previously observed under manual practice; and reduced administrative effort for billing and reporting from more than 30 hours to roughly 1 hour through automatic documentation. These results demonstrate a practical path to modular, plant-scale automation beyond traditional architectures, and lay the groundwork for packaging reusable elements for similar plants or adjacent industries. This work is part of a larger project involving the first scientifically-documented integration of Industry 4.0 technologies in a maple syrup boiling center.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to enable vital functions, such as speech and prosthetic control, for individuals with neuromotor impairments. Central to their success are neural decoders, models that map neural activity to intended behavior. Current learning-based decoding approaches fall into two classes: simple, causal models that lack generalization, or complex, non-causal models that generalize and scale offline but struggle in real-time settings. Both face a common challenge, their reliance on power-hungry artificial neural network backbones, which makes integration into real-world, resource-limited systems difficult. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative. Because they operate causally these models are suitable for real-time use, and their low energy demands make them ideal for battery-constrained environments. To this end, we introduce Spikachu: a scalable, causal, and energy-efficient neural decoding framework based on SNNs. Our approach processes binned spikes directly by projecting them into a shared latent space, where spiking modules, adapted to the timing of the input, extract relevant features; these latent representations are then integrated and decoded to generate behavioral predictions. We evaluate our approach on 113 recording sessions from 6 non-human primates, totaling 43 hours of recordings. Our method outperforms causal baselines when trained on single sessions using between 2.26 and 418.81 times less energy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that scaling up training to multiple sessions and subjects improves performance and enables few-shot transfer to unseen sessions, subjects, and tasks. Overall, Spikachu introduces a scalable, online-compatible neural decoding framework based on SNNs, whose performance is competitive relative to state-of-the-art models while consuming orders of magnitude less energy.

Embodied agents are expected to perform object navigation in dynamic, open-world environments. However, existing approaches typically rely on static trajectories and a fixed set of object categories during training, overlooking the real-world requirement for continual adaptation to evolving scenarios. To facilitate related studies, we introduce the continual object navigation benchmark, which requires agents to acquire navigation skills for new object categories while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. To tackle this challenge, we propose C-Nav, a continual visual navigation framework that integrates two key innovations: (1) A dual-path anti-forgetting mechanism, which comprises feature distillation that aligns multi-modal inputs into a consistent representation space to ensure representation consistency, and feature replay that retains temporal features within the action decoder to ensure policy consistency. (2) An adaptive sampling strategy that selects diverse and informative experiences, thereby reducing redundancy and minimizing memory overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple model architectures demonstrate that C-Nav consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior performance even compared to baselines with full trajectory retention, while significantly lowering memory requirements. The code will be publicly available at this https URL.

Unsafe Rust code is necessary for interoperability with C/C++ libraries and implementing low-level data structures, but it can cause memory safety violations in otherwise memory-safe Rust programs. Sanitizers can catch such memory errors at runtime, but introduce many unnecessary checks even for memory accesses guaranteed safe by the Rust type system. We introduce SafeFFI, a system for optimizing memory safety instrumentation in Rust binaries such that checks occur at the boundary between unsafe and safe code, handing over the enforcement of memory safety from the sanitizer to the Rust type system. Unlike previous approaches, our design avoids expensive whole-program analysis and adds much less compile-time overhead (2.64x compared to over 8.83x). On a collection of popular Rust crates and known vulnerable Rust code, SafeFFI achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art systems, reducing sanitizer checks by up to 98%, while maintaining correctness and flagging all spatial and temporal memory safety violations.

Language models continue to hallucinate despite increases in parameters, compute, and data. We propose neural diversity -- decorrelated parallel representations -- as a principled mechanism that reduces hallucination rates at fixed parameter and data budgets. Inspired by portfolio theory, where uncorrelated assets reduce risk by $\sqrt{P}$, we prove hallucination probability is bounded by representational correlation: $P(H) \leq f(\sigma^2((1-\rho(P))/P + \rho(P)), \mu^2)$, which predicts that language models need an optimal amount of neurodiversity. To validate this, we introduce ND-LoRA (Neural Diversity Low-Rank Adaptation), combining parallel LoRA adapters with Barlow Twins regularization, and demonstrate that ND-LoRA reduces hallucinations by up to 25.6% (and 14.6% on average) without degrading general accuracy. Ablations show LoRA adapters and regularization act synergistically, causal interventions prove neurodiversity as the mediating factor and correlational analyses indicate scale: a 0.1% neural correlation increase is associated with a 3.8% hallucination increase. Finally, task-dependent optimality emerges: different tasks require different amounts of optimal neurodiversity. Together, our results highlight neural diversity as a third axis of scaling -- orthogonal to parameters and data -- to improve the reliability of language models at fixed budgets.

Knowledge Graph Question Answering aims to answer natural language questions by reasoning over structured knowledge graphs. While large language models have advanced KGQA through their strong reasoning capabilities, existing methods continue to struggle to fully exploit both the rich knowledge encoded in KGs and the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, particularly in complex scenarios. They often assume complete KG coverage and lack mechanisms to judge when external information is needed, and their reasoning remains locally myopic, failing to maintain coherent multi-step planning, leading to reasoning failures even when relevant knowledge exists. We propose Graph-RFT, a novel two-stage reinforcement fine-tuning KGQA framework with a 'plan-KGsearch-and-Websearch-during-think' paradigm, that enables LLMs to perform autonomous planning and adaptive retrieval scheduling across KG and web sources under incomplete knowledge conditions. Graph-RFT introduces a chain-of-thought fine-tuning method with a customized plan-retrieval dataset activates structured reasoning and resolves the GRPO cold-start problem. It then introduces a novel plan-retrieval guided reinforcement learning process integrates explicit planning and retrieval actions with a multi-reward design, enabling coverage-aware retrieval scheduling. It employs a Cartesian-inspired planning module to decompose complex questions into ordered subquestions, and logical expression to guide tool invocation for globally consistent multi-step reasoning. This reasoning retrieval process is optimized with a multi-reward combining outcome and retrieval specific signals, enabling the model to learn when and how to combine KG and web retrieval effectively.

Cloud computing is ubiquitous, with a growing number of services being hosted on the cloud every day. Typical cloud compute systems allow administrators to write policies implementing access control rules which specify how access to private data is governed. These policies must be manually written, and due to their complexity can often be error prone. Moreover, existing policies often implement complex access control specifications and thus can be difficult to precisely analyze in determining their behavior works exactly as intended. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great success in automated code synthesis and summarization. Given this success, they could potentially be used for automatically generating access control policies or aid in understanding existing policies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of LLMs for access control policy synthesis and summarization. Specifically, we first investigate diverse LLMs for access control policy synthesis, finding that: although LLMs can effectively generate syntactically correct policies, they have permissiveness issues, generating policies equivalent to the given specification 45.8% of the time for non-reasoning LLMs, and 93.7% of the time for reasoning LLMs. We then investigate how LLMs can be used to analyze policies by introducing a novel semantic-based request summarization approach which leverages LLMs to generate a precise characterization of the requests allowed by a policy. Our results show that while there are significant hurdles in leveraging LLMs for automated policy generation, LLMs show promising results when combined with symbolic approaches in analyzing existing policies.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that integrate visual and textual reasoning leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to tackle complex visual tasks, yet continue to exhibit visual hallucinations and an over-reliance on textual priors. We present a systematic diagnosis of state-of-the-art vision-language models using a three-stage evaluation framework, uncovering key failure modes. To address these, we propose an agent-based architecture that combines LLM reasoning with lightweight visual modules, enabling fine-grained analysis and iterative refinement of reasoning chains. Our results highlight future visual reasoning models should focus on integrating a broader set of specialized tools for analyzing visual content. Our system achieves significant gains (+10.3 on MMMU, +6.0 on MathVista over a 7B baseline), matching or surpassing much larger models. We will release our framework and evaluation suite to facilitate future research.

Social media platforms provide millions of professional content creators with sustainable incomes. Their income is largely influenced by their number of views and followers, which in turn depends on the platform's recommender system (RS). So, as with regular jobs, it is important to ensure that RSs distribute revenue in a fair way. For example, prior work analyzed whether the creators of the highest-quality content would receive the most followers and income. Results showed this is unlikely to be the case, but did not suggest targeted solutions. In this work, we first use theoretical analysis and simulations on synthetic datasets to understand the system better and find interventions that improve fairness for creators. We find that the use of ordered pairwise comparison overcomes the cold start problem for a new set of items and greatly increases the chance of achieving fair outcomes for all content creators. Importantly, it also maintains user satisfaction. We also test the intervention on the MovieLens dataset and investigate its effectiveness on platforms with interaction histories that are currently unfair for content creators. These experiments reveal that the intervention improves fairness when deployed at early stages of the platform, but the effect decreases as the strength of pre-existing bias increases. Altogether, we find that the ordered pairwise comparison approach might offer a plausible alternative for both new and existing platforms to implement.

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding has seen renewed interest as an alternative to traditional generation strategies. While MBR has proven effective in machine translation, where the variability of a language model's outcome space is naturally constrained, it may face challenges in more open-ended tasks such as dialogue or instruction-following. We hypothesise that in such settings, applying MBR with standard similarity-based utility functions may result in selecting responses that are broadly representative of the model's distribution, yet sub-optimal with respect to any particular grouping of generations that share an underlying latent structure. In this work, we introduce three lightweight adaptations to the utility function, designed to make MBR more sensitive to structural variability in the outcome space. To test our hypothesis, we curate a dataset capturing three representative types of latent structure: dialogue act, emotion, and response structure (e.g., a sentence, a paragraph, or a list). We further propose two metrics to evaluate the structural optimality of MBR. Our analysis demonstrates that common similarity-based utility functions fall short by these metrics. In contrast, our proposed adaptations considerably improve structural optimality. Finally, we evaluate our approaches on real-world instruction-following benchmarks, AlpacaEval and MT-Bench, and show that increased structural sensitivity improves generation quality by up to 13.7 percentage points in win rate.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have been used to generate human-like content across multiple domains (e.g., sound, image, text, and programming). However, their reliability in terms of correctness and functionality in novel contexts such as programmable networks remains unclear. Hence, this paper presents an empirical evaluation of the source code of a POX controller generated by different AI tools, namely ChatGPT, Copilot, DeepSeek, and this http URL. To evaluate such a code, three networking tasks of increasing complexity were defined and for each task, zero-shot and few-shot prompting techniques were input to the tools. Next, the output code was tested in emulated network topologies with Mininet and analyzed according to functionality, correctness, and the need for manual fixes. Results show that all evaluated models can produce functional controllers. However, ChatGPT and DeepSeek exhibited higher consistency and code quality, while Copilot and this http URL required more adjustments.

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled adaptable and agile quadruped locomotion; however, policies often converge to a single gait, leading to suboptimal performance. Traditionally, Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been extensively used to obtain task-specific optimal policies but lacks the ability to adapt to varying environments. To address these limitations, we propose an optimization framework for real-time gait adaptation in a continuous gait space, combining the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) algorithm with a Dreamer module to produce adaptive and optimal policies for quadruped locomotion. At each time step, MPPI jointly optimizes the actions and gait variables using a learned Dreamer reward that promotes velocity tracking, energy efficiency, stability, and smooth transitions, while penalizing abrupt gait changes. A learned value function is incorporated as terminal reward, extending the formulation to an infinite-horizon planner. We evaluate our framework in simulation on the Unitree Go1, demonstrating an average reduction of up to 36.48\% in energy consumption across varying target speeds, while maintaining accurate tracking and adaptive, task-appropriate gaits.

Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in processing extended multi-modal sequences, yet the resulting key-value (KV) cache expansion creates a critical memory bottleneck that fundamentally limits deployment scalability. While existing KV cache compression methods focus on retaining high-importance KV pairs to minimize storage, they often overlook the modality-specific semantic redundancy patterns that emerge distinctively in multi-modal KV caches. In this work, we first analyze how, beyond simple importance, the KV cache in LVLMs exhibits varying levels of redundancy across attention heads. We show that relying solely on importance can only cover a subset of the full KV cache information distribution, leading to potential loss of semantic coverage. To address this, we propose \texttt{MixKV}, a novel method that mixes importance with diversity for optimized KV cache compression in LVLMs. \texttt{MixKV} adapts to head-wise semantic redundancy, selectively balancing diversity and importance when compressing KV pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \texttt{MixKV} consistently enhances existing methods across multiple LVLMs. Under extreme compression (budget=64), \texttt{MixKV} improves baseline methods by an average of \textbf{5.1\%} across five multi-modal understanding benchmarks and achieves remarkable gains of \textbf{8.0\%} and \textbf{9.0\%} for SnapKV and AdaKV on GUI grounding tasks, all while maintaining comparable inference efficiency. Furthermore, \texttt{MixKV} extends seamlessly to LLMs with comparable performance gains. Our code is available at \href{this https URL}{\textcolor{citeblue}{this https URL}}.

3D LiDAR sensors are essential for autonomous navigation, environmental monitoring, and precision mapping in remote sensing applications. To efficiently process the massive point clouds generated by these sensors, LiDAR data is often projected into 2D range images that organize points by their angular positions and distances. While these range image representations enable efficient processing, conventional projection methods suffer from fundamental geometric inconsistencies that cause irreversible information loss, compromising high-fidelity applications. We present ALICE-LRI (Automatic LiDAR Intrinsic Calibration Estimation for Lossless Range Images), the first general, sensor-agnostic method that achieves lossless range image generation from spinning LiDAR point clouds without requiring manufacturer metadata or calibration files. Our algorithm automatically reverse-engineers the intrinsic geometry of any spinning LiDAR sensor by inferring critical parameters including laser beam configuration, angular distributions, and per-beam calibration corrections, enabling lossless projection and complete point cloud reconstruction with zero point loss. Comprehensive evaluation across the complete KITTI and DurLAR datasets demonstrates that ALICE-LRI achieves perfect point preservation, with zero points lost across all point clouds. Geometric accuracy is maintained well within sensor precision limits, establishing geometric losslessness with real-time performance. We also present a compression case study that validates substantial downstream benefits, demonstrating significant quality improvements in practical applications. This paradigm shift from approximate to lossless LiDAR projections opens new possibilities for high-precision remote sensing applications requiring complete geometric preservation.

The ability to continually learn, retain and deploy skills to accomplish goals is a key feature of intelligent and efficient behavior. However, the neural mechanisms facilitating the continual learning and flexible (re-)composition of skills remain elusive. Here, we study continual learning and the compositional reuse of learned computations in recurrent neural network (RNN) models using a novel two-system approach: one system that infers what computation to perform, and one that implements how to perform it. We focus on a set of compositional cognitive tasks commonly studied in neuroscience. To construct the what system, we first show that a large family of tasks can be systematically described by a probabilistic generative model, where compositionality stems from a shared underlying vocabulary of discrete task epochs. The shared epoch structure makes these tasks inherently compositional. We first show that this compositionality can be systematically described by a probabilistic generative model. Furthermore, We develop an unsupervised online learning approach that can learn this model on a single-trial basis, building its vocabulary incrementally as it is exposed to new tasks, and inferring the latent epoch structure as a time-varying computational context within a trial. We implement the how system as an RNN whose low-rank components are composed according to the context inferred by the what system. Contextual inference facilitates the creation, learning, and reuse of low-rank RNN components as new tasks are introduced sequentially, enabling continual learning without catastrophic forgetting. Using an example task set, we demonstrate the efficacy and competitive performance of this two-system learning framework, its potential for forward and backward transfer, as well as fast compositional generalization to unseen tasks.

In this study we aim to better align fall risk prediction from the Johns Hopkins Fall Risk Assessment Tool (JHFRAT) with additional clinically meaningful measures via a data-driven modelling approach. We conducted a retrospective analysis of 54,209 inpatient admissions from three Johns Hopkins Health System hospitals between March 2022 and October 2023. A total of 20,208 admissions were included as high fall risk encounters, and 13,941 were included as low fall risk encounters. To incorporate clinical knowledge and maintain interpretability, we employed constrained score optimization (CSO) models on JHFRAT assessment data and additional electronic health record (EHR) variables. The model demonstrated significant improvements in predictive performance over the current JHFRAT (CSO AUC-ROC=0.91, JHFRAT AUC-ROC=0.86). The constrained score optimization models performed similarly with and without the EHR variables. Although the benchmark black-box model (XGBoost), improves upon the performance metrics of the knowledge-based constrained logistic regression (AUC-ROC=0.94), the CSO demonstrates more robustness to variations in risk labelling. This evidence-based approach provides a robust foundation for health systems to systematically enhance inpatient fall prevention protocols and patient safety using data-driven optimization techniques, contributing to improved risk assessment and resource allocation in healthcare settings.

Semiconductor manufacturing is an extremely complex and precision-driven process, characterized by thousands of interdependent parameters collected across diverse tools and process steps. Multi-variate time-series analysis has emerged as a critical field for real-time monitoring and fault detection in such environments. However, anomaly prediction in semiconductor fabrication presents several critical challenges, including high dimensionality of sensor data and severe class imbalance due to the rarity of true faults. Furthermore, the complex interdependencies between variables complicate both anomaly prediction and root-cause-analysis. This paper proposes two novel approaches to advance the field from anomaly detection to anomaly prediction, an essential step toward enabling real-time process correction and proactive fault prevention. The proposed anomaly prediction framework contains two main stages: (a) training a forecasting model on a dataset assumed to contain no anomalies, and (b) performing forecast on unseen time series data. The forecast is compared with the forecast of the trained signal. Deviations beyond a predefined threshold are flagged as anomalies. The two approaches differ in the forecasting model employed. The first assumes independence between variables by utilizing the N-BEATS model for univariate time series forecasting. The second lifts this assumption by utilizing a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to capture inter-variable relationships. Both models demonstrate strong forecasting performance up to a horizon of 20 time points and maintain stable anomaly prediction up to 50 time points. The GNN consistently outperforms the N-BEATS model while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters and lower computational cost. These results position the GNN as promising solution for online anomaly forecasting to be deployed in manufacturing environments.

Large language models (LLMs) have seen rapid adoption for tasks such as drafting emails, summarizing meetings, and answering health questions. In such uses, users may need to share private information (e.g., health records, contact details). To evaluate LLMs' ability to identify and redact such private information, prior work developed benchmarks (e.g., ConfAIde, PrivacyLens) with real-life scenarios. Using these benchmarks, researchers have found that LLMs sometimes fail to keep secrets private when responding to complex tasks (e.g., leaking employee salaries in meeting summaries). However, these evaluations rely on LLMs (proxy LLMs) to gauge compliance with privacy norms, overlooking real users' perceptions. Moreover, prior work primarily focused on the privacy-preservation quality of responses, without investigating nuanced differences in helpfulness. To understand how users perceive the privacy-preservation quality and helpfulness of LLM responses to privacy-sensitive scenarios, we conducted a user study with 94 participants using 90 scenarios from PrivacyLens. We found that, when evaluating identical responses to the same scenario, users showed low agreement with each other on the privacy-preservation quality and helpfulness of the LLM response. Further, we found high agreement among five proxy LLMs, while each individual LLM had low correlation with users' evaluations. These results indicate that the privacy and helpfulness of LLM responses are often specific to individuals, and proxy LLMs are poor estimates of how real users would perceive these responses in privacy-sensitive scenarios. Our results suggest the need to conduct user-centered studies on measuring LLMs' ability to help users while preserving privacy. Additionally, future research could investigate ways to improve the alignment between proxy LLMs and users for better estimation of users' perceived privacy and utility.

We study the growth of the support size of the capacity-achieving input distribution for the amplitude-constrained additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. While it is known since Smith (1971) that the optimal input is discrete with finitely many mass points, tight bounds on the number of support points $K(A)$ as the amplitude constraint $A$ increases remain open. Building on recent work by Dytso \emph{et al.} (2019) and Mattingly \emph{et al.} (2018), we derive a new analytical lower bound showing that $K(A)$ grows super-linearly in $A$. Our approach combines total-variation convergence of the output distribution to the uniform law with quantitative limits on Gaussian mixture approximation.

Thompson sampling (TS) is a powerful and widely used strategy for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical foundations of TS remain limited, particularly in settings with complex temporal structure such as RL. We address this gap by establishing no-regret guarantees for TS using models with Gaussian marginal distributions. Specifically, we consider TS in episodic RL with joint Gaussian process (GP) priors over rewards and transitions. We prove a regret bound of $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(\sqrt{KH\Gamma(KH)})$ over $K$ episodes of horizon $H$, where $\Gamma(\cdot)$ captures the complexity of the GP model. Our analysis addresses several challenges, including the non-Gaussian nature of value functions and the recursive structure of Bellman updates, and extends classical tools such as the elliptical potential lemma to multi-output settings. This work advances the understanding of TS in RL and highlights how structural assumptions and model uncertainty shape its performance in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes.

This paper proposes AutoScape, a long-horizon driving scene generation framework. At its core is a novel RGB-D diffusion model that iteratively generates sparse, geometrically consistent keyframes, serving as reliable anchors for the scene's appearance and geometry. To maintain long-range geometric consistency, the model 1) jointly handles image and depth in a shared latent space, 2) explicitly conditions on the existing scene geometry (i.e., rendered point clouds) from previously generated keyframes, and 3) steers the sampling process with a warp-consistent guidance. Given high-quality RGB-D keyframes, a video diffusion model then interpolates between them to produce dense and coherent video frames. AutoScape generates realistic and geometrically consistent driving videos of over 20 seconds, improving the long-horizon FID and FVD scores over the prior state-of-the-art by 48.6\% and 43.0\%, respectively.

Objective: Fluoropyrimidines are widely prescribed for colorectal and breast cancers, but are associated with toxicities such as hand-foot syndrome and cardiotoxicity. Since toxicity documentation is often embedded in clinical notes, we aimed to develop and evaluate natural language processing (NLP) methods to extract treatment and toxicity information. Materials and Methods: We constructed a gold-standard dataset of 236 clinical notes from 204,165 adult oncology patients. Domain experts annotated categories related to treatment regimens and toxicities. We developed rule-based, machine learning-based (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine [SVM], Logistic Regression [LR]), deep learning-based (BERT, ClinicalBERT), and large language models (LLM)-based NLP approaches (zero-shot and error-analysis prompting). Models used an 80:20 train-test split. Results: Sufficient data existed to train and evaluate 5 annotated categories. Error-analysis prompting achieved optimal precision, recall, and F1 scores (F1=1.000) for treatment and toxicities extraction, whereas zero-shot prompting reached F1=1.000 for treatment and F1=0.876 for toxicities this http URL and SVM ranked second for toxicities (F1=0.937). Deep learning underperformed, with BERT (F1=0.873 treatment; F1= 0.839 toxicities) and ClinicalBERT (F1=0.873 treatment; F1 = 0.886 toxicities). Rule-based methods served as our baseline with F1 scores of 0.857 in treatment and 0.858 in toxicities. Discussion: LMM-based approaches outperformed all others, followed by machine learning methods. Machine and deep learning approaches were limited by small training data and showed limited generalizability, particularly for rare categories. Conclusion: LLM-based NLP most effectively extracted fluoropyrimidine treatment and toxicity information from clinical notes, and has strong potential to support oncology research and pharmacovigilance.

Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems still rely solely on natural language, exchanging tokens or their embeddings. To go beyond language, we introduce a new paradigm, thought communication, which enables agents to interact directly mind-to-mind, akin to telepathy. To uncover these latent thoughts in a principled way, we formalize the process as a general latent variable model, where agent states are generated by an unknown function of underlying thoughts. We prove that, in a nonparametric setting without auxiliary information, both shared and private latent thoughts between any pair of agents can be identified. Moreover, the global structure of thought sharing, including which agents share which thoughts and how these relationships are structured, can also be recovered with theoretical guarantees. Guided by the established theory, we develop a framework that extracts latent thoughts from all agents prior to communication and assigns each agent the relevant thoughts, along with their sharing patterns. This paradigm naturally extends beyond LLMs to all modalities, as most observational data arise from hidden generative processes. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate the theory and demonstrate the collaborative advantages of thought communication. We hope this work illuminates the potential of leveraging the hidden world, as many challenges remain unsolvable through surface-level observation alone, regardless of compute or data scale.

In this paper, we consider the problem of spread pilot design and effective channel estimation in multiple-input multiple-output Zak-OTFS (MIMO-Zak-OTFS) with superimposed spread pilots, where data and spread pilot signals are superimposed in the same frame. To achieve good estimation performance in a MIMO setting, the spread pilots at different transmit antennas need to be effectively separated at the receiver. Towards this, we propose a spread pilot design that separates the pilot sequences in the cross-ambiguity domain and enables the estimation of the effective channel taps by a simple read-off operation. To further alleviate the effect of pilot-data interference on performance, we carry out turbo iterations between channel estimation and detection. Simulation results for $2\times 2$ and $3\times 3$ MIMO-Zak-OTFS with Gaussian-sinc pulse shaping filter for vehicular-A channel model show that the proposed pilot design and estimation scheme with three turbo iterations can achieve very good estimation/detection performance.

Developing effective multimodal fusion approaches has become increasingly essential in many real-world scenarios, such as health care and finance. The key challenge is how to preserve the feature expressiveness in each modality while learning cross-modal interactions. Previous approaches primarily focus on the cross-modal alignment, while over-emphasis on the alignment of marginal distributions of modalities may impose excess regularization and obstruct meaningful representations within each modality. The Dirichlet process (DP) mixture model is a powerful Bayesian non-parametric method that can amplify the most prominent features by its richer-gets-richer property, which allocates increasing weights to them. Inspired by this unique characteristic of DP, we propose a new DP-driven multimodal learning framework that automatically achieves an optimal balance between prominent intra-modal representation learning and cross-modal alignment. Specifically, we assume that each modality follows a mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions and further adopt DP to calculate the mixture weights for all the components. This paradigm allows DP to dynamically allocate the contributions of features and select the most prominent ones, leveraging its richer-gets-richer property, thus facilitating multimodal feature fusion. Extensive experiments on several multimodal datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model over other competitors. Ablation analysis further validates the effectiveness of DP in aligning modality distributions and its robustness to changes in key hyperparameters. Code is anonymously available at this https URL

Radar charts are widely used to visualize multivariate data and compare multiple profiles across features. However, the visual clarity of radar charts can be severely compromised when feature values alternate drastically in magnitude around the circle, causing areas to collapse, which misrepresents relative differences. In the present work we introduce a permutation optimization strategy that reorders features to minimize polygon ``spikiness'' across multiple profiles simultaneously. The method is combinatorial (exhaustive search) for moderate numbers of features and uses a lexicographic minimax criterion that first considers overall smoothness (mean jump) and then the largest single jump as a tie-breaker. This preserves more global information and produces visually balanced arrangements. We discuss complexity, practical bounds, and relations to existing approaches that either change the visualization (e.g., OrigamiPlot) or learn orderings (e.g., Versatile Ordering Network). An example with two profiles and $p=6$ features (before/after ordering) illustrates the qualitative improvement. Keywords: data visualization, radar charts, combinatorial optimization, minimax optimization, feature ordering

Program analysis tools often produce large volumes of candidate vulnerability reports that require costly manual review, creating a practical challenge: how can security analysts prioritize the reports most likely to be true vulnerabilities? This paper investigates whether machine learning can be applied to prioritizing vulnerabilities reported by program analysis tools. We focus on this http URL packages and collect a benchmark of 1,883 this http URL packages, each containing one reported ACE or ACI vulnerability. We evaluate a variety of machine learning approaches, including classical models, graph neural networks (GNNs), large language models (LLMs), and hybrid models that combine GNN and LLMs, trained on data based on a dynamic program analysis tool's output. The top LLM achieves $F_{1} {=} 0.915$, while the best GNN and classical ML models reaching $F_{1} {=} 0.904$. At a less than 7% false-negative rate, the leading model eliminates 66.9% of benign packages from manual review, taking around 60 ms per package. If the best model is tuned to operate at a precision level of 0.8 (i.e., allowing 20% false positives amongst all warnings), our approach can detect 99.2% of exploitable taint flows while missing only 0.8%, demonstrating strong potential for real-world vulnerability triage.

We present Empathic Prompting, a novel framework for multimodal human-AI interaction that enriches Large Language Model (LLM) conversations with implicit non-verbal context. The system integrates a commercial facial expression recognition service to capture users' emotional cues and embeds them as contextual signals during prompting. Unlike traditional multimodal interfaces, empathic prompting requires no explicit user control; instead, it unobtrusively augments textual input with affective information for conversational and smoothness alignment. The architecture is modular and scalable, allowing integration of additional non-verbal modules. We describe the system design, implemented through a locally deployed DeepSeek instance, and report a preliminary service and usability evaluation (N=5). Results show consistent integration of non-verbal input into coherent LLM outputs, with participants highlighting conversational fluidity. Beyond this proof of concept, empathic prompting points to applications in chatbot-mediated communication, particularly in domains like healthcare or education, where users' emotional signals are critical yet often opaque in verbal exchanges.

We study Maxwell's equations in conducting media with perfectly conducting boundary conditions on Lipschitz domains, allowing rough material coefficients and $L^2$-data. Our first contribution is a direct proof of well-posedness of the first-order weak formulation, including solution existence and uniqueness, an energy identity, and continuous dependence on the data. The argument uses interior-in-time mollification to show uniqueness while avoiding reflection techniques. Existence is via the well-known Galerkin method (cf.~Duvaut and Lions \cite[Eqns.~(4.31)--(4.32), p.~346; Thm.~4.1]{GDuvaut_JLLions_1976a}). For completeness, and to make the paper self-contained, a complete proof has been provided. Our second contribution is a structure-preserving semi-discrete finite element method based on the Nédélec/Raviart--Thomas de Rham complex. The scheme preserves a discrete Gauss law for all times and satisfies a continuous-in-time energy identity with stability for nonnegative conductivity. With a divergence-free initialization of the magnetic field (via potential reconstruction or constrained $L^2$ projection), we prove convergence of the semi-discrete solutions to the unique weak solution as the mesh is refined. The analysis mostly relies on projector consistency, weak-* compactness in time-bounded $L^2$ spaces, and identification of time derivatives in dual spaces.

As we evolve towards more heterogeneous and cutting-edge mobile networks, Network Digital Twins (NDTs) are proving to be a promising paradigm in solving challenges faced by network operators, as they give a possibility of replicating the physical network operations and testing scenarios separately without interfering with the live network. However, with mobile networks becoming increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous due to massive device connectivity, replicating traffic and having NDTs synchronized in real-time with the physical network remains a challenge, thus necessitating the need to develop real-time adaptive mechanisms to bridge this gap. In this part II of our work, we implement a novel framework that integrates an adaptive Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller to dynamically improve synchronization. Additionally, through an interactive user interface, results of our enhanced approach demonstrate an improvement in real-time traffic synchronization.

Automated histopathological image analysis plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis of various diseases. Among developed algorithms, deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated excellent performance in multiple tasks, including semantic tissue segmentation in histological images. In this study, we propose a novel approach based on attention-driven feature fusion of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) within a unified dual-encoder model to improve semantic segmentation performance. Evaluation on two publicly available datasets showed that our model achieved {\mu}IoU/{\mu}Dice scores of 76.79%/86.87% on the GCPS dataset and 64.93%/76.60% on the PUMA dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art and baseline benchmarks. The implementation of our method is publicly available in a GitHub repository: this https URL

Music representations are the backbone of modern recommendation systems, powering playlist generation, similarity search, and personalized discovery. Yet most embeddings offer little control for adjusting a single musical attribute, e.g., changing only the mood of a track while preserving its genre or instrumentation. In this work, we address the problem of controllable music retrieval through embedding-based transformation, where the objective is to retrieve songs that remain similar to a seed track but are modified along one chosen dimension. We propose a novel framework for mood-guided music embedding transformation, which learns a mapping from a seed audio embedding to a target embedding guided by mood labels, while preserving other musical attributes. Because mood cannot be directly altered in the seed audio, we introduce a sampling mechanism that retrieves proxy targets to balance diversity with similarity to the seed. We train a lightweight translation model using this sampling strategy and introduce a novel joint objective that encourages transformation and information preservation. Extensive experiments on two datasets show strong mood transformation performance while retaining genre and instrumentation far better than training-free baselines, establishing controllable embedding transformation as a promising paradigm for personalized music retrieval.

Decoding visual stimuli from neural population activity is crucial for understanding the brain and for applications in brain-machine interfaces. However, such biological data is often scarce, particularly in primates or humans, where high-throughput recording techniques, such as two-photon imaging, remain challenging or impossible to apply. This, in turn, poses a challenge for deep learning decoding techniques. To overcome this, we introduce MEIcoder, a biologically informed decoding method that leverages neuron-specific most exciting inputs (MEIs), a structural similarity index measure loss, and adversarial training. MEIcoder achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstructing visual stimuli from single-cell activity in primary visual cortex (V1), especially excelling on small datasets with fewer recorded neurons. Using ablation studies, we demonstrate that MEIs are the main drivers of the performance, and in scaling experiments, we show that MEIcoder can reconstruct high-fidelity natural-looking images from as few as 1,000-2,500 neurons and less than 1,000 training data points. We also propose a unified benchmark with over 160,000 samples to foster future research. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of reliable decoding in early visual system and provide practical insights for neuroscience and neuroengineering applications.

Diffusion Transformer models can generate images with remarkable fidelity and detail, yet training them at ultra-high resolutions remains extremely costly due to the self-attention mechanism's quadratic scaling with the number of image tokens. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Position Extrapolation (DyPE), a novel, training-free method that enables pre-trained diffusion transformers to synthesize images at resolutions far beyond their training data, with no additional sampling cost. DyPE takes advantage of the spectral progression inherent to the diffusion process, where low-frequency structures converge early, while high-frequencies take more steps to resolve. Specifically, DyPE dynamically adjusts the model's positional encoding at each diffusion step, matching their frequency spectrum with the current stage of the generative process. This approach allows us to generate images at resolutions that exceed the training resolution dramatically, e.g., 16 million pixels using FLUX. On multiple benchmarks, DyPE consistently improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art fidelity in ultra-high-resolution image generation, with gains becoming even more pronounced at higher resolutions. Project page is available at this https URL.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as the dominant architectural pattern to operationalize Large Language Model (LLM) usage in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) systems. However, this design is susceptible to poisoning attacks, and previously proposed defenses can fail for CTI contexts as cyber threat information is often completely new for emerging attacks, and sophisticated threat actors can mimic legitimate formats, terminology, and stylistic conventions. To address this issue, we propose that the robustness of modern RAG defenses can be accelerated by applying source credibility algorithms on corpora, using PageRank as an example. In our experiments, we demonstrate quantitatively that our algorithm applies a lower authority score to malicious documents while promoting trusted content, using the standardized MS MARCO dataset. We also demonstrate proof-of-concept performance of our algorithm on CTI documents and feeds.

MeanFlow has recently emerged as a powerful framework for few-step generative modeling trained from scratch, but its success is not yet fully understood. In this work, we show that the MeanFlow objective naturally decomposes into two parts: trajectory flow matching and trajectory consistency. Through gradient analysis, we find that these terms are strongly negatively correlated, causing optimization conflict and slow convergence. Motivated by these insights, we introduce $\alpha$-Flow, a broad family of objectives that unifies trajectory flow matching, Shortcut Model, and MeanFlow under one formulation. By adopting a curriculum strategy that smoothly anneals from trajectory flow matching to MeanFlow, $\alpha$-Flow disentangles the conflicting objectives, and achieves better convergence. When trained from scratch on class-conditional ImageNet-1K 256x256 with vanilla DiT backbones, $\alpha$-Flow consistently outperforms MeanFlow across scales and settings. Our largest $\alpha$-Flow-XL/2+ model achieves new state-of-the-art results using vanilla DiT backbones, with FID scores of 2.58 (1-NFE) and 2.15 (2-NFE).

Large-scale and diverse datasets are vital for training robust robotic manipulation policies, yet existing data collection methods struggle to balance scale, diversity, and quality. Simulation offers scalability but suffers from sim-to-real gaps, while teleoperation yields high-quality demonstrations with limited diversity and high labor cost. We introduce FieldGen, a field-guided data generation framework that enables scalable, diverse, and high-quality real-world data collection with minimal human supervision. FieldGen decomposes manipulation into two stages: a pre-manipulation phase, allowing trajectory diversity, and a fine manipulation phase requiring expert precision. Human demonstrations capture key contact and pose information, after which an attraction field automatically generates diverse trajectories converging to successful configurations. This decoupled design combines scalable trajectory diversity with precise supervision. Moreover, FieldGen-Reward augments generated data with reward annotations to further enhance policy learning. Experiments demonstrate that policies trained with FieldGen achieve higher success rates and improved stability compared to teleoperation-based baselines, while significantly reducing human effort in long-term real-world data collection. Webpage is available at this https URL.

This work proposes a new generation-based 3D reconstruction method, named Cupid, that accurately infers the camera pose, 3D shape, and texture of an object from a single 2D image. Cupid casts 3D reconstruction as a conditional sampling process from a learned distribution of 3D objects, and it jointly generates voxels and pixel-voxel correspondences, enabling robust pose and shape estimation under a unified generative framework. By representing both input camera poses and 3D shape as a distribution in a shared 3D latent space, Cupid adopts a two-stage flow matching pipeline: (1) a coarse stage that produces initial 3D geometry with associated 2D projections for pose recovery; and (2) a refinement stage that integrates pose-aligned image features to enhance structural fidelity and appearance details. Extensive experiments demonstrate Cupid outperforms leading 3D reconstruction methods with an over 3 dB PSNR gain and an over 10% Chamfer Distance reduction, while matching monocular estimators on pose accuracy and delivering superior visual fidelity over baseline 3D generative models. For an immersive view of the 3D results generated by Cupid, please visit this http URL.

Training learning parameterizations to solve optimal power flow (OPF) with pointwise constraints is proposed. In this novel training approach, a learning parameterization is substituted directly into an OPF problem with constraints required to hold over all problem instances. This is different from existing supervised learning methods in which constraints are required to hold across the average of problem instances. Training with pointwise constraints is undertaken in the dual domain with the use of augmented Lagrangian and dual gradient ascent algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate that training with pointwise constraints produces solutions with smaller constraint violations. Experiments further demonstrated that pointwise constraints are most effective at reducing constraint violations in corner cases - defined as those realizations in which constraints are most difficult to satisfy. Gains are most pronounced in power systems with large numbers of buses.

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have introduced an intermediate "thinking" process prior to generating final answers, improving their reasoning capabilities on complex downstream tasks. However, the potential of LRMs as evaluators for machine translation (MT) quality remains underexplored. We provides the first systematic analysis of LRM-as-a-judge in MT evaluation. We identify key challenges, revealing LRMs require tailored evaluation materials, tend to "overthink" simpler instances and have issues with scoring mechanisms leading to overestimation. To address these, we propose to calibrate LRM thinking by training them on synthetic, human-like thinking trajectories. Our experiments on WMT24 Metrics benchmarks demonstrate that this approach largely reduces thinking budgets by ~35x while concurrently improving evaluation performance across different LRM scales from 7B to 32B (e.g., R1-Distill-Qwen-7B achieves a +8.7 correlation point improvement). These findings highlight the potential of efficiently calibrated LRMs to advance fine-grained automatic MT evaluation.

Current methods for evaluating large language models (LLMs) typically focus on high-level tasks such as text generation, without targeting a particular AI application. This approach is not sufficient for evaluating LLMs for Responsible AI dimensions like fairness, since protected attributes that are highly relevant in one application may be less relevant in another. In this work, we construct a dataset that is driven by a real-world application (generate a plain-text product description, given a list of product features), parameterized by fairness attributes intersected with gendered adjectives and product categories, yielding a rich set of labeled prompts. We show how to use the data to identify quality, veracity, safety, and fairness gaps in LLMs, contributing a proposal for LLM evaluation paired with a concrete resource for the research community.

Chess is a canonical example of a task that requires rigorous reasoning and long-term planning. Modern decision Transformers - trained similarly to LLMs - are able to learn competent gameplay, but it is unclear to what extent they truly capture the rules of chess. To investigate this, we train a 270M parameter chess Transformer and test it on out-of-distribution scenarios, designed to reveal failures of systematic generalization. Our analysis shows that Transformers exhibit compositional generalization, as evidenced by strong rule extrapolation: they adhere to fundamental syntactic rules of the game by consistently choosing valid moves even in situations very different from the training data. Moreover, they also generate high-quality moves for OOD puzzles. In a more challenging test, we evaluate the models on variants including Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess) - a variant of chess where starting positions of pieces are randomized. We found that while the model exhibits basic strategy adaptation, they are inferior to symbolic AI algorithms that perform explicit search, but gap is smaller when playing against users on Lichess. Moreover, the training dynamics revealed that the model initially learns to move only its own pieces, suggesting an emergent compositional understanding of the game.

Recent work by \citet{hendrycks2025agidefinition} formalized \textit{Artificial General Intelligence} (AGI) as the arithmetic mean of proficiencies across cognitive domains derived from the Cattell--Horn--Carroll (CHC) model of human cognition. While elegant, this definition assumes \textit{compensability} -- that exceptional ability in some domains can offset failure in others. True general intelligence, however, should reflect \textit{coherent sufficiency}: balanced competence across all essential domains. We propose a coherence-aware measure of AGI based on the integral of generalized means over a continuum of compensability exponents. This formulation spans arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic regimes, and the resulting \textit{area under the curve} (AUC) quantifies robustness under varying compensability assumptions. Unlike the arithmetic mean, which rewards specialization, the AUC penalizes imbalance and captures inter-domain dependency. Applied to published CHC-based domain scores for GPT-4 and GPT-5, the coherence-adjusted AUC reveals that both systems remain far from general competence despite high arithmetic scores (e.g., GPT-5 at~24\%). Integrating the generalized mean thus yields a principled, interpretable, and stricter foundation for measuring genuine progress toward AGI.

Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To mitigate the issue, we explore a series of hybrid models that restore direct access to past tokens. We interleave token mixers with intermediate time and space complexity between linear and full attention, including sparse attention with token eviction, and the query-aware native sparse attention. Particularly, we propose a novel learnable token eviction approach. Combined with sliding-window attention, an end-to-end trainable lightweight CNN aggregates information from both past and future adjacent tokens to adaptively retain a limited set of critical KV-pairs per head, maintaining linear attention's constant time and space complexity. Efficient Triton kernels for the sparse attention mechanisms are provided. Empirical evaluations on retrieval-intensive benchmarks support the effectiveness of our approaches.

The rapid progress of graph generation has raised new security concerns, particularly regarding backdoor vulnerabilities. While prior work has explored backdoor attacks in image diffusion and unconditional graph generation, conditional, especially text-guided graph generation remains largely unexamined. This paper proposes BadGraph, a backdoor attack method targeting latent diffusion models for text-guided graph generation. BadGraph leverages textual triggers to poison training data, covertly implanting backdoors that induce attacker-specified subgraphs during inference when triggers appear, while preserving normal performance on clean inputs. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (PubChem, ChEBI-20, PCDes, MoMu) demonstrate the effectiveness and stealth of the attack: less than 10% poisoning rate can achieves 50% attack success rate, while 24% suffices for over 80% success rate, with negligible performance degradation on benign samples. Ablation studies further reveal that the backdoor is implanted during VAE and diffusion training rather than pretraining. These findings reveal the security vulnerabilities in latent diffusion models of text-guided graph generation, highlight the serious risks in models' applications such as drug discovery and underscore the need for robust defenses against the backdoor attack in such diffusion models.

This paper presents a Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) framework that fuses radar and camera data to enhance tracking efficiency while minimizing manual interventions. Contrary to many studies that underutilize radar and assign it a supplementary role--despite its capability to provide accurate range/depth information of targets in a world 3D coordinate system--our approach positions radar in a crucial role. Meanwhile, this paper utilizes common features to enable online calibration to autonomously associate detections from radar and camera. The main contributions of this work include: (1) the development of a radar-camera fusion MOT framework that exploits online radar-camera calibration to simplify the integration of detection results from these two sensors, (2) the utilization of common features between radar and camera data to accurately derive real-world positions of detected objects, and (3) the adoption of feature matching and category-consistency checking to surpass the limitations of mere position matching in enhancing sensor association accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the integration of radar-camera common features and their use in online calibration for achieving MOT. The efficacy of our framework is demonstrated by its ability to streamline the radar-camera mapping process and improve tracking precision, as evidenced by real-world experiments conducted in both controlled environments and actual traffic scenarios. Code is available at this https URL

As 5G and future 6G mobile networks become increasingly more sophisticated, the requirements for agility, scalability, resilience, and precision in real-time service provisioning cannot be met using traditional and heuristic-based resource management techniques, just like any advancing technology. With the aim of overcoming such limitations, network operators are foreseeing Digital Twins (DTs) as key enablers, which are designed as dynamic and virtual replicas of network infrastructure, allowing operators to model, analyze, and optimize various operations without any risk of affecting the live network. However, for Digital Twin Networks (DTNs) to meet the challenges faced by operators especially in line with resource management, a driving engine is needed. In this paper, an AI (Artificial Intelligence)-driven approach is presented by integrating a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network into the DT framework, aimed at forecasting network traffic patterns and proactively managing resource allocation. Through analytical experiments, the AI-Enabled DT framework demonstrates superior performance benchmarked against baseline methods. Our study concludes that embedding AI capabilities within DTs paves the way for fully autonomous, adaptive, and high-performance network management in future mobile networks.

A common strategy to reduce the computational costs of using long contexts in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) is soft context compression, where the input sequence is transformed into a shorter continuous representation. We develop a lightweight and simple mean-pooling approach that consistently outperforms the widely used compression-tokens architecture, and study training the same compressor to output multiple compression ratios. We conduct extensive experiments across in-domain and out-of-domain QA datasets, as well as across model families, scales, and compression ratios. Overall, our simple mean-pooling approach achieves the strongest performance, with a relatively small drop when training for multiple compression ratios. More broadly though, across architectures and training regimes the trade-offs are more nuanced, illustrating the complex landscape of compression methods.

Recently, Sharma et al. suggested a method called Layer-SElective-Rank reduction (LASER) which demonstrated that pruning high-order components of carefully chosen LLM's weight matrices can boost downstream accuracy -- without any gradient-based fine-tuning. Yet LASER's exhaustive, per-matrix search (each requiring full-dataset forward passes) makes it impractical for rapid deployment. We demonstrate that this overhead can be removed and find that: (i) Only a small, carefully chosen subset of matrices needs to be inspected -- eliminating the layer-by-layer sweep, (ii) The gradient of each matrix's singular values pinpoints which matrices merit reduction, (iii) Increasing the factorization search space by allowing matrices rows to cluster around multiple subspaces and then decomposing each cluster separately further reduces overfitting on the original training data and further lifts accuracy by up to 24.6 percentage points, and finally, (iv) we discover that evaluating on just 100 samples rather than the full training data -- both for computing the indicative gradients and for measuring the final accuracy -- suffices to further reduce the search time; we explain that as adaptation to downstream tasks is dominated by prompting style, not dataset size. As a result, we show that combining these findings yields a fast and robust adaptation algorithm for downstream tasks. Overall, with a single gradient step on 100 examples and a quick scan of the top candidate layers and factorization techniques, we can adapt LLMs to new datasets -- entirely without fine-tuning.

Voxelized vector field data consists of a vector field over a high dimensional lattice. The lattice consists of integer coordinates called voxels. The voxelized vector field assigns a vector at each voxel. This data type encompasses images, tensors, and voxel data. Assume there is a nice energy function on the vector field. We consider the problem of lossy compression of voxelized vector field data in Shannon's rate-distortion framework. This means the data is compressed then decompressed up to a bound on the distortion of the energy at each voxel. We formulate this in terms of compressing a single voxelized vector field by a collection of box summary pairs. We call this problem the $(k,D)$-RectLossyVFCompression} problem. We show three main results about this problem. The first is that decompression for this problem is polynomial time tractable. This means that the only obstruction to a tractable solution of the $(k,D)$-RectLossyVFCompression problem lies in the compression stage. This is shown by the two hardness results about the compression stage. We show that the compression stage is NP-Hard to compute exactly and that it is even APX-Hard to approximate for $k,D\geq 2$. Assuming $P\neq NP$, this shows that when $k,D \geq 2$ there can be no exact polynomial time algorithm nor can there even be a PTAS approximation algorithm for the $(k,D)$-RectLossyVFCompression problem.

The Colour Refinement algorithm is a classical procedure to detect symmetries in graphs, whose most prominent application is in graph-isomorphism tests. The algorithm and its generalisation, the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, evaluate local information to compute a colouring for the vertices in an iterative fashion. Different final colours of two vertices certify that no isomorphism can map one onto the other. The number of iterations that the algorithm takes to terminate is its central complexity parameter. For a long time, it was open whether graphs that take the maximum theoretically possible number of Colour Refinement iterations actually exist. Starting from an exhaustive search on graphs of low degrees, Kiefer and McKay proved the existence of infinite families of such long-refinement graphs with degrees 2 and 3, thereby showing that the trivial upper bound on the iteration number of Colour Refinement is tight. In this work, we provide a complete characterisation of the long-refinement graphs with low (or, equivalently, high) degrees. We show that, with one exception, the aforementioned families are the only long-refinement graphs with maximum degree at most 3, and we fully classify the long-refinement graphs with maximum degree 4. To this end, via a reverse-engineering approach, we show that all low-degree long-refinement graphs can be represented as compact strings, and we derive multiple structural insights from this surprising fact. Since long-refinement graphs are closed under taking edge complements, this also yields a classification of long-refinement graphs with high degrees. Kiefer and McKay initiated a search for long-refinement graphs that are only distinguished in the last iteration of Colour Refinement before termination. We conclude it in this submission by showing that such graphs cannot exist.

We propose a novel AutoRegressive Generation-based paradigm for image Segmentation (ARGenSeg), achieving multimodal understanding and pixel-level perception within a unified framework. Prior works integrating image segmentation into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically employ either boundary points representation or dedicated segmentation heads. These methods rely on discrete representations or semantic prompts fed into task-specific decoders, which limits the ability of the MLLM to capture fine-grained visual details. To address these challenges, we introduce a segmentation framework for MLLM based on image generation, which naturally produces dense masks for target objects. We leverage MLLM to output visual tokens and detokenize them into images using an universal VQ-VAE, making the segmentation fully dependent on the pixel-level understanding of the MLLM. To reduce inference latency, we employ a next-scale-prediction strategy to generate required visual tokens in parallel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art approaches on multiple segmentation datasets with a remarkable boost in inference speed, while maintaining strong understanding capabilities.

Data centers are emerging as large, flexible electricity consumers capable of shifting computational workloads across locations in response to economic and environmental signals. While this flexibility has potential for emissions reduction, its impact on power system operations depends critically on how such behavior interacts with network constraints and market signals. We develop a bilevel optimization framework in which a data center minimizes a weighted combination of electricity cost and marginal emissions intensity (LME), while the system operator clears economic dispatch under transmission and generation constraints. Focusing on a stylized three-bus power system, we derive closed-form, piecewise-linear expressions for both the data center and system-wide objectives as functions of the data centers' load shift. These expressions capture threshold-driven regime changes due to congestion and renewable saturation. We identify sufficient conditions under which the data center's decentralized decisions align with or diverge from socially optimal behavior and characterize the resulting externalities. Our results reveal how system topology and generator asymmetry affect incentive alignment and provide insight into when marginal price or emissions signals may fail to guide flexible loads toward socially beneficial outcomes. Our results offer a tractable starting point for analyzing decentralized flexibility under carbon-aware incentives and suggest directions for improving coordination between flexible loads and system operations.

Inspired by the performance and scalability of autoregressive large language models (LLMs), transformer-based models have seen recent success in the visual domain. This study investigates a transformer adaptation for video prediction with a simple end-to-end approach, comparing various spatiotemporal self-attention layouts. Focusing on causal modeling of physical simulations over time; a common shortcoming of existing video-generative approaches, we attempt to isolate spatiotemporal reasoning via physical object tracking metrics and unsupervised training on physical simulation datasets. We introduce a simple yet effective pure transformer model for autoregressive video prediction, utilizing continuous pixel-space representations for video prediction. Without the need for complex training strategies or latent feature-learning components, our approach significantly extends the time horizon for physically accurate predictions by up to 50% when compared with existing latent-space approaches, while maintaining comparable performance on common video quality metrics. In addition, we conduct interpretability experiments to identify network regions that encode information useful to perform accurate estimations of PDE simulation parameters via probing models, and find that this generalizes to the estimation of out-of-distribution simulation parameters. This work serves as a platform for further attention-based spatiotemporal modeling of videos via a simple, parameter efficient, and interpretable approach.

Machine learning has facilitated significant advancements across various robotics domains, including navigation, locomotion, and manipulation. Many such achievements have been driven by the extensive use of simulation as a critical tool for training and testing robotic systems prior to their deployment in real-world environments. However, simulations consist of abstractions and approximations that inevitably introduce discrepancies between simulated and real environments, known as the reality gap. These discrepancies significantly hinder the successful transfer of systems from simulation to the real world. Closing this gap remains one of the most pressing challenges in robotics. Recent advances in sim-to-real transfer have demonstrated promising results across various platforms, including locomotion, navigation, and manipulation. By leveraging techniques such as domain randomization, real-to-sim transfer, state and action abstractions, and sim-real co-training, many works have overcome the reality gap. However, challenges persist, and a deeper understanding of the reality gap's root causes and solutions is necessary. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the sim-to-real landscape, highlighting the causes, solutions, and evaluation metrics for the reality gap and sim-to-real transfer.

With the rapid growth of research in AI and robotics now producing over 10,000 papers annually it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to stay up to date. Fast evolving trends, the rise of interdisciplinary work, and the need to explore domains beyond one's expertise all contribute to this challenge. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable pipeline capable of systematically analyzing any research area: identifying emerging trends, uncovering cross domain opportunities, and offering concrete starting points for new inquiry. In this work, we present Real Deep Research (RDR) a comprehensive framework applied to the domains of AI and robotics, with a particular focus on foundation models and robotics advancements. We also briefly extend our analysis to other areas of science. The main paper details the construction of the RDR pipeline, while the appendix provides extensive results across each analyzed topic. We hope this work sheds light for researchers working in the field of AI and beyond.

With the widespread use of large language models (LLMs), many researchers have turned their attention to detecting text generated by them. However, there is no consistent or precise definition of their target, namely "LLM-generated text". Differences in usage scenarios and the diversity of LLMs further increase the difficulty of detection. What is commonly regarded as the detecting target usually represents only a subset of the text that LLMs can potentially produce. Human edits to LLM outputs, together with the subtle influences that LLMs exert on their users, are blurring the line between LLM-generated and human-written text. Existing benchmarks and evaluation approaches do not adequately address the various conditions in real-world detector applications. Hence, the numerical results of detectors are often misunderstood, and their significance is diminishing. Therefore, detectors remain useful under specific conditions, but their results should be interpreted only as references rather than decisive indicators.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, yet they struggle when reasoning over information-intensive images that densely interleave textual annotations with fine-grained graphical elements. The main challenges lie in precisely localizing critical cues in dense layouts and multi-hop reasoning to integrate dispersed evidence. We propose Speculative Verdict (SV), a training-free framework inspired by speculative decoding that combines multiple lightweight draft experts with a large verdict model. In the draft stage, small VLMs act as draft experts to generate reasoning paths that provide diverse localization candidates; in the verdict stage, a strong VLM synthesizes these paths to produce the final answer, minimizing computational cost while recovering correct answers. To further improve efficiency and accuracy, SV introduces a consensus expert selection mechanism that forwards only high-agreement reasoning paths to the verdict. Empirically, SV achieves consistent gains on challenging information-intensive and high-resolution visual question answering benchmarks, including InfographicVQA, ChartMuseum, ChartQAPro, and HR-Bench 4K. By synthesizing correct insights from multiple partially accurate reasoning paths, SV achieves both error correction and cost-efficiency compared to large proprietary models or training pipelines. Code is available at this https URL

This paper presents GSWorld, a robust, photo-realistic simulator for robotics manipulation that combines 3D Gaussian Splatting with physics engines. Our framework advocates "closing the loop" of developing manipulation policies with reproducible evaluation of policies learned from real-robot data and sim2real policy training without using real robots. To enable photo-realistic rendering of diverse scenes, we propose a new asset format, which we term GSDF (Gaussian Scene Description File), that infuses Gaussian-on-Mesh representation with robot URDF and other objects. With a streamlined reconstruction pipeline, we curate a database of GSDF that contains 3 robot embodiments for single-arm and bimanual manipulation, as well as more than 40 objects. Combining GSDF with physics engines, we demonstrate several immediate interesting applications: (1) learning zero-shot sim2real pixel-to-action manipulation policy with photo-realistic rendering, (2) automated high-quality DAgger data collection for adapting policies to deployment environments, (3) reproducible benchmarking of real-robot manipulation policies in simulation, (4) simulation data collection by virtual teleoperation, and (5) zero-shot sim2real visual reinforcement learning. Website: this https URL.

Hyperspectral sensors capture dense spectra per pixel but suffer from low spatial resolution, causing blurred boundaries and mixed-pixel effects. Co-registered companion sensors such as multispectral, RGB, or panchromatic cameras provide high-resolution spatial detail, motivating hyperspectral super-resolution through the fusion of hyperspectral and multispectral images (HSI-MSI). Existing deep learning based methods achieve strong performance but rely on opaque regressors that lack interpretability and often fail when the MSI has very few bands. We propose SpectraMorph, a physics-guided self-supervised fusion framework with a structured latent space. Instead of direct regression, SpectraMorph enforces an unmixing bottleneck: endmember signatures are extracted from the low-resolution HSI, and a compact multilayer perceptron predicts abundance-like maps from the MSI. Spectra are reconstructed by linear mixing, with training performed in a self-supervised manner via the MSI sensor's spectral response function. SpectraMorph produces interpretable intermediates, trains in under a minute, and remains robust even with a single-band (pan-chromatic) MSI. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show SpectraMorph consistently outperforming state-of-the-art unsupervised/self-supervised baselines while remaining very competitive against supervised baselines.

Despite their remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains, large language models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in natively functioning as generative reasoning recommendation models (GRRMs), where the intrinsic modeling gap between textual semantics and collaborative filtering signals, combined with the sparsity and stochasticity of user feedback, presents significant obstacles. This work explores how to build GRRMs by adapting pre-trained LLMs, which achieves a unified understanding-reasoning-prediction manner for recommendation tasks. We propose GREAM, an end-to-end framework that integrates three components: (i) Collaborative-Semantic Alignment, which fuses heterogeneous textual evidence to construct semantically consistent, discrete item indices and auxiliary alignment tasks that ground linguistic representations in interaction semantics; (ii) Reasoning Curriculum Activation, which builds a synthetic dataset with explicit Chain-of-Thought supervision and a curriculum that progresses through behavioral evidence extraction, latent preference modeling, intent inference, recommendation formulation, and denoised sequence rewriting; and (iii) Sparse-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (SRPO), which stabilizes post-training via Residual-Sensitive Verifiable Reward and Bonus-Calibrated Group Advantage Estimation, enabling end-to-end optimization under verifiable signals despite sparse successes. GREAM natively supports two complementary inference modes: Direct Sequence Recommendation for high-throughput, low-latency deployment, and Sequential Reasoning Recommendation that first emits an interpretable reasoning chain for causal transparency. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate consistent gains over strong baselines, providing a practical path toward verifiable-RL-driven LLM recommenders.

It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred if the goal is to sample from multiple diverse modes. We show -- mathematically and empirically -- that this intuition does not necessarily transfer well to doing reinforcement learning with reverse/forward KL regularization (e.g. as commonly used with language models). Instead, the choice of reverse/forward KL determines the family of optimal target distributions, parameterized by the regularization coefficient. Mode coverage depends primarily on other factors, such as regularization strength, and relative scales between rewards and reference probabilities. Further, we show commonly used settings such as low regularization strength and equal verifiable rewards tend to specify unimodal target distributions, meaning the optimization objective is, by construction, non-diverse. We leverage these insights to construct a simple, scalable, and theoretically justified algorithm. It makes minimal changes to reward magnitudes, yet optimizes for a target distribution which puts high probability over all high-quality sampling modes. In experiments, this simple modification works to post-train both Large Language Models and Chemical Language Models to have higher solution quality and diversity, without any external signals of diversity, and works with both forward and reverse KL when using either naively fails.

A fundamental challenge in robot navigation lies in learning policies that generalize across diverse environments while conforming to the unique physical constraints and capabilities of a specific embodiment (e.g., quadrupeds can walk up stairs, but rovers cannot). We propose VAMOS, a hierarchical VLA that decouples semantic planning from embodiment grounding: a generalist planner learns from diverse, open-world data, while a specialist affordance model learns the robot's physical constraints and capabilities in safe, low-cost simulation. We enabled this separation by carefully designing an interface that lets a high-level planner propose candidate paths directly in image space that the affordance model then evaluates and re-ranks. Our real-world experiments show that VAMOS achieves higher success rates in both indoor and complex outdoor navigation than state-of-the-art model-based and end-to-end learning methods. We also show that our hierarchical design enables cross-embodied navigation across legged and wheeled robots and is easily steerable using natural language. Real-world ablations confirm that the specialist model is key to embodiment grounding, enabling a single high-level planner to be deployed across physically distinct wheeled and legged robots. Finally, this model significantly enhances single-robot reliability, achieving 3X higher success rates by rejecting physically infeasible plans. Website: this https URL

Recent advances in generative modeling have positioned diffusion models as state-of-the-art tools for sampling from complex data distributions. While these models have shown remarkable success across single-modality domains such as images and audio, extending their capabilities to Modality Translation (MT), translating information across different sensory modalities, remains an open challenge. Existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, including shared dimensionality, Gaussian source priors, and modality-specific architectures, which limit their generality and theoretical grounding. In this work, we propose the Latent Denoising Diffusion Bridge Model (LDDBM), a general-purpose framework for modality translation based on a latent-variable extension of Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models. By operating in a shared latent space, our method learns a bridge between arbitrary modalities without requiring aligned dimensions. We introduce a contrastive alignment loss to enforce semantic consistency between paired samples and design a domain-agnostic encoder-decoder architecture tailored for noise prediction in latent space. Additionally, we propose a predictive loss to guide training toward accurate cross-domain translation and explore several training strategies to improve stability. Our approach supports arbitrary modality pairs and performs strongly on diverse MT tasks, including multi-view to 3D shape generation, image super-resolution, and multi-view scene synthesis. Comprehensive experiments and ablations validate the effectiveness of our framework, establishing a new strong baseline in general modality translation. For more information, see our project page: this https URL.

Despite their impressive visual fidelity, existing personalized generative models lack interactive control over spatial composition and scale poorly to multiple subjects. To address these limitations, we present LayerComposer, an interactive framework for personalized, multi-subject text-to-image generation. Our approach introduces two main contributions: (1) a layered canvas, a novel representation in which each subject is placed on a distinct layer, enabling occlusion-free composition; and (2) a locking mechanism that preserves selected layers with high fidelity while allowing the remaining layers to adapt flexibly to the surrounding context. Similar to professional image-editing software, the proposed layered canvas allows users to place, resize, or lock input subjects through intuitive layer manipulation. Our versatile locking mechanism requires no architectural changes, relying instead on inherent positional embeddings combined with a new complementary data sampling strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LayerComposer achieves superior spatial control and identity preservation compared to the state-of-the-art methods in multi-subject personalized image generation.

State-of-the-art text-to-video models excel at generating isolated clips but fall short of creating the coherent, multi-shot narratives, which are the essence of storytelling. We bridge this "narrative gap" with HoloCine, a model that generates entire scenes holistically to ensure global consistency from the first shot to the last. Our architecture achieves precise directorial control through a Window Cross-Attention mechanism that localizes text prompts to specific shots, while a Sparse Inter-Shot Self-Attention pattern (dense within shots but sparse between them) ensures the efficiency required for minute-scale generation. Beyond setting a new state-of-the-art in narrative coherence, HoloCine develops remarkable emergent abilities: a persistent memory for characters and scenes, and an intuitive grasp of cinematic techniques. Our work marks a pivotal shift from clip synthesis towards automated filmmaking, making end-to-end cinematic creation a tangible future. Our code is available at: this https URL.

We provide a rigorous random matrix theory analysis of spiked cross-covariance models where the signals across two high-dimensional data channels are partially aligned. These models are motivated by multi-modal learning and form the standard generative setting underlying Partial Least Squares (PLS), a widely used yet theoretically underdeveloped method. We show that the leading singular values of the sample cross-covariance matrix undergo a Baik-Ben Arous-Peche (BBP)-type phase transition, and we characterize the precise thresholds for the emergence of informative components. Our results yield the first sharp asymptotic description of the signal recovery capabilities of PLS in this setting, revealing a fundamental performance gap between PLS and the Bayes-optimal estimator. In particular, we identify the SNR and correlation regimes where PLS fails to recover any signal, despite detectability being possible in principle. These findings clarify the theoretical limits of PLS and provide guidance for the design of reliable multi-modal inference methods in high dimensions.

A sensor-fused wearable assistance prototype for upper-limb function (triceps brachii and extensor pollicis brevis) is presented. The device integrates surface electromyography (sEMG), an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and flex/force sensors on an M5StickC plus an ESP32-S3 compute hub. Signals are band-pass and notch filtered; features (RMS, MAV, zero-crossings, and 4-12 Hz tremor-band power) are computed in 250 ms windows and fed to an INT8 TensorFlow Lite Micro model. Control commands are bounded by a control-barrier-function safety envelope and delivered within game-based tasks with lightweight personalization. In a pilot technical feasibility evaluation with healthy volunteers (n = 12) performing three ADL-oriented tasks, tremor prominence decreased (Delta TI = -0.092, 95% CI [-0.102, -0.079]), range of motion increased (+12.65%, 95% CI [+8.43, +13.89]), repetitions rose (+2.99 min^-1, 95% CI [+2.61, +3.35]), and the EMG median-frequency slope became less negative (Delta = +0.100 Hz/min, 95% CI [+0.083, +0.127]). The sensing-to-assist loop ran at 100 Hz with 8.7 ms median on-device latency, 100% session completion, and 0 device-related adverse events. These results demonstrate technical feasibility of embedded, sensor-fused assistance for upper-limb function; formal patient studies under IRB oversight are planned.

Electroencephalography (EEG) plays a crucial role in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and neurological diagnostics, but its real-world deployment faces challenges due to noise artifacts, missing data, and high annotation costs. We introduce SSL-SE-EEG, a framework that integrates Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) with Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SE-Nets) to enhance feature extraction, improve noise robustness, and reduce reliance on labeled data. Unlike conventional EEG processing techniques, SSL-SE-EEG} transforms EEG signals into structured 2D image representations, suitable for deep learning. Experimental validation on MindBigData, TUH-AB, SEED-IV and BCI-IV datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy (91% in MindBigData, 85% in TUH-AB), making it well-suited for real-time BCI applications. By enabling low-power, scalable EEG processing, SSL-SE-EEG presents a promising solution for biomedical signal analysis, neural engineering, and next-generation BCIs.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a pathway to restore communication for individuals with severe motor or speech impairments. Imagined handwriting provides an intuitive paradigm for character-level neural decoding, bridging the gap between human intention and digital communication. While invasive approaches such as electrocorticography (ECoG) achieve high accuracy, their surgical risks limit widespread adoption. Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) offers safer and more scalable alternatives but suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution, constraining its decoding precision. This work demonstrates that advanced machine learning combined with informative EEG feature extraction can overcome these barriers, enabling real-time, high-accuracy neural decoding on portable edge devices. A 32-channel EEG dataset was collected from fifteen participants performing imagined handwriting. Signals were preprocessed with bandpass filtering and artifact subspace reconstruction, followed by extraction of 85 time-, frequency-, and graphical-domain features. A hybrid architecture, EEdGeNet, integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network with a multilayer perceptron trained on the extracted features. When deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, the system achieved 89.83 percent accuracy with 914.18 ms per-character latency. Selecting only ten key features reduced latency by 4.5 times to 202.6 ms with less than 1 percent loss in accuracy. These results establish a pathway for accurate, low-latency, and fully portable non-invasive BCIs supporting real-time communication.

Immersive televisualization is important both for telepresence and teleoperation, but resolution and fidelity are often limited by communication bandwidth constraints. We propose a lightweight method for foveated compression of immersive televisualization video streams that can be easily integrated with common video codecs, reducing the required bandwidth if eye tracking data is available. Specifically, we show how to spatially adjust the Quantization Parameter of modern block-based video codecs in a adaptive way based on eye tracking information. The foveal region is transmitted with high fidelity while quality is reduced in the peripheral region, saving bandwidth. We integrate our method with the NimbRo avatar system, which won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition. Our experiments show that bandwidth can be reduced to a third without sacrificing immersion. We analyze transmission fidelity with qualitative examples and report quantitative results.

Accurate tropical cyclone (TC) short-term intensity forecasting with a 24-hour lead time is essential for disaster mitigation in the Atlantic TC basin. Since most TCs evolve far from land-based observing networks, satellite imagery is critical to monitoring these storms; however, these complex and high-resolution spatial structures can be challenging to qualitatively interpret in real time by forecasters. Here we propose a concise, interpretable, and descriptive approach to quantify fine TC structures with a multi-resolution analysis (MRA) by the discrete wavelet transform, enabling data analysts to identify physically meaningful structural features that strongly correlate with rapid intensity change. Furthermore, deep-learning techniques can build on this MRA for short-term intensity guidance.

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disorder that necessitates novel therapeutic innovations due to its gradual progression and the onset of various metabolic complications. Research indicates that Ficus religiosa is a conventional medicinal plant that generates bioactive phytochemicals with potential antidiabetic properties. The investigation employs ecosystem-based computational approaches utilizing artificial intelligence to investigate and evaluate compounds derived from Ficus religiosa that exhibit antidiabetic properties. A comprehensive computational procedure incorporated machine learning methodologies, molecular docking techniques, and ADMET prediction systems to assess phytochemical efficacy against the significant antidiabetic enzyme dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4). DeepBindGCN and the AutoDock software facilitated the investigation of binding interactions via deep learning technology. Flavonoids and alkaloids have emerged as attractive phytochemicals due to their strong binding interactions and advantageous pharmacological effects, as indicated by the study. The introduction of AI accelerated screening procedures and enhanced accuracy rates, demonstrating its efficacy in researching plant-based antidiabetic agents. The scientific foundation now facilitates future experimental validation of natural product therapies tailored for diabetic management.

Multi-omics data integration is crucial for understanding complex diseases, yet limited sample sizes, noise, and heterogeneity often reduce predictive power. To address these challenges, we introduce Omics-GAN, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based framework designed to generate high-quality synthetic multi-omics profiles while preserving biological relationships. We evaluated Omics-GAN on three omics types (mRNA, miRNA, and DNA methylation) using the ROSMAP cohort for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and TCGA datasets for colon and liver cancer. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier with repeated 5-fold cross-validation demonstrated that synthetic datasets consistently improved prediction accuracy compared to original omics profiles. The AUC of SVM for mRNA improved from 0.72 to 0.74 in AD, and from 0.68 to 0.72 in liver cancer. Synthetic miRNA enhanced classification in colon cancer from 0.59 to 0.69, while synthetic methylation data improved performance in liver cancer from 0.64 to 0.71. Boxplot analyses confirmed that synthetic data preserved statistical distributions while reducing noise and outliers. Feature selection identified significant genes overlapping with original datasets and revealed additional candidates validated by GO and KEGG enrichment analyses. Finally, molecular docking highlighted potential drug repurposing candidates, including Nilotinib for AD, Atovaquone for liver cancer, and Tecovirimat for colon cancer. Omics-GAN enhances disease prediction, preserves biological fidelity, and accelerates biomarker and drug discovery, offering a scalable strategy for precision medicine applications.

High-throughput phenotypic screens generate vast microscopy image datasets that push the limits of generative models due to their large dimensionality. Despite the growing popularity of general-purpose models trained on natural images for microscopy data analysis, their suitability in this domain has not been quantitatively demonstrated. We present the first systematic evaluation of Stable Diffusion's variational autoencoder (SD-VAE) for reconstructing Cell Painting images, assessing performance across a large dataset with diverse molecular perturbations and cell types. We find that SD-VAE reconstructions preserve phenotypic signals with minimal loss, supporting its use in microscopy workflows. To benchmark reconstruction quality, we compare pixel-level, embedding-based, latent-space, and retrieval-based metrics for a biologically informed evaluation. We show that general-purpose feature extractors like InceptionV3 match or surpass publicly available bespoke models in retrieval tasks, simplifying future pipelines. Our findings offer practical guidelines for evaluating generative models on microscopy data and support the use of off-the-shelf models in phenotypic drug discovery.

Repurposing existing drugs to treat new diseases is a cost-effective alternative to de novo drug development, but there are millions of potential drug-disease combinations to be considered with only a small fraction being viable. In silico predictions of drug-disease associations can be invaluable for reducing the size of the search space. In this work we present a novel network of drugs and the diseases they treat, compiled using a combination of existing textual and machine-readable databases, natural-language processing tools, and hand curation, and analyze it using network-based link prediction methods to identify potential drug-disease combinations. We measure the efficacy of these methods using cross-validation tests and find that several methods, particularly those based on graph embedding and network model fitting, achieve impressive prediction performance, significantly better than previous approaches, with area under the ROC curve above 0.95 and average precision almost a thousand times better than chance.

The reconstruction of unsteady flow fields from limited measurements is a challenging and crucial task for many engineering applications. Machine learning models are gaining popularity in solving this problem due to their ability to learn complex patterns from data and generalize across diverse conditions. Among these, diffusion models have emerged as particularly powerful in generative tasks, producing high-quality samples by iteratively refining noisy inputs. In contrast to other methods, these generative models are capable of reconstructing the smallest scales of the fluid spectrum. In this work, we introduce a novel sampling method for diffusion models that enables the reconstruction of high-fidelity samples by guiding the reverse process using the available sparse data. Moreover, we enhance the reconstructions with available physics knowledge using a conflict-free update method during training. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on 2 and 3-dimensional turbulent flow data. Our method consistently outperforms other diffusion-based methods in predicting the fluid's structure and in pixel-wise accuracy. This study underscores the remarkable potential of diffusion models in reconstructing flow field data, paving the way for their application in Computational Fluid Dynamics research.

We present a novel enhanced cyclic coordinate descent (ECCD) framework for solving generalized linear models with elastic net constraints that reduces training time in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods. We redesign the CD method by performing a Taylor expansion around the current iterate to avoid nonlinear operations arising in the gradient computation. By introducing this approximation, we are able to unroll the vector recurrences occurring in the CD method and reformulate the resulting computations into more efficient batched computations. We show empirically that the recurrence can be unrolled by a tunable integer parameter, $s$, such that $s > 1$ yields performance improvements without affecting convergence, whereas $s = 1$ yields the original CD method. A key advantage of ECCD is that it avoids the convergence delay and numerical instability exhibited by block coordinate descent. Finally, we implement our proposed method in C++ using Eigen to accelerate linear algebra computations. Comparison of our method against existing state-of-the-art solvers shows consistent performance improvements of $3\times$ in average for regularization path variant on diverse benchmark datasets. Our implementation is available at this https URL.

This study develops an AI-based pose estimation pipeline to enable precise quantification of movement kinematics in resistance training. Using video data from Wolf et al. (2025), which compared lengthened partial (pROM) and full range-of-motion (fROM) training across eight upper-body exercises in 26 participants, 280 recordings were processed to extract frame-level joint-angle trajectories. After filtering and smoothing, per-set metrics were derived, including range of motion (ROM), tempo, and concentric/eccentric phase durations. A random-effects meta-analytic model was applied to account for within-participant and between-exercise variability. Results show that pROM repetitions were performed with a smaller ROM and shorter overall durations, particularly during the eccentric phase of movement. Variance analyses revealed that participant-level differences, rather than exercise-specific factors, were the primary driver of variation, although there is substantial evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects. We then introduce a novel metric, \%ROM, which is the proportion of full ROM achieved during pROM, and demonstrate that this definition of lengthened partials remains relatively consistent across exercises. Overall, these findings suggest that lengthened partials differ from full ROM training not only in ROM, but also in execution dynamics and consistency, highlighting the potential of AI-based methods for advancing research and improving resistance training prescription.

We asked GPT-5 Pro to look for counterexamples among a public list of open problems (the Simons ``Real Analysis in Computer Science'' collection). After several numerical experiments, it suggested a counterexample for the Non-Interactive Correlation Distillation (NICD) with erasures question: namely, a Boolean function on 5 bits that achieves a strictly larger value of $\mathbb{E}|f(z)|$ than the 5-bit majority function when the erasure parameter is $p=0.40.$ In this very short note we record the finding, state the problem precisely, give the explicit function, and verify the computation step by step by hand so that it can be checked without a computer. In addition, we show that for each fixed odd $n$ the majority is optimal (among unbiased Boolean functions) in a neighborhood of $p=0$. We view this as a little spark of an AI contribution in Theoretical Computer Science: while modern Large Language Models (LLMs) often assist with literature and numerics, here a concrete finite counterexample emerged.

Traditional mean-field game (MFG) solvers operate on an instance-by-instance basis, which becomes infeasible when many related problems must be solved (e.g., for seeking a robust description of the solution under perturbations of the dynamics or utilities, or in settings involving continuum-parameterized agents.). We overcome this by training neural operators (NOs) to learn the rules-to-equilibrium map from the problem data (``rules'': dynamics and cost functionals) of LQ MFGs defined on separable Hilbert spaces to the corresponding equilibrium strategy. Our main result is a statistical guarantee: an NO trained on a small number of randomly sampled rules reliably solves unseen LQ MFG variants, even in infinite-dimensional settings. The number of NO parameters needed remains controlled under appropriate rule sampling during training. Our guarantee follows from three results: (i) local-Lipschitz estimates for the highly nonlinear rules-to-equilibrium map; (ii) a universal approximation theorem using NOs with a prespecified Lipschitz regularity (unlike traditional NO results where the NO's Lipschitz constant can diverge as the approximation error vanishes); and (iii) new sample-complexity bounds for $L$-Lipschitz learners in infinite dimensions, directly applicable as the Lipschitz constants of our approximating NOs are controlled in (ii).

Short-horizon epidemic forecasts guide near-term staffing, testing, and messaging. Mobility data are now routinely used to improve such forecasts, yet work diverges on whether the volume of mobility or the structure of mobility networks carries the most predictive signal. We study Massachusetts towns (April 2020-April 2021), build a weekly directed mobility network from anonymized smartphone traces, derive dynamic topology measures, and evaluate their out-of-sample value for one-week-ahead COVID-19 forecasts. We compare models that use only macro-level incidence, models that add mobility network features and their interactions with macro incidence, and autoregressive (AR) models that include town-level recent cases. Two results emerge. First, when granular town-level case histories are unavailable, network information (especially interactions between macro incidence and a town's network position) yields large out-of-sample gains (Predict-R2 rising from 0.60 to 0.83-0.89). Second, when town-level case histories are available, AR models capture most short-horizon predictability; adding network features provides only minimal incremental lift (about +0.5 percentage points). Gains from network information are largest during epidemic waves and rising phases, when connectivity and incidence change rapidly. Agent-based simulations reproduce these patterns under controlled dynamics, and a simple analytical decomposition clarifies why network interactions explain a large share of cross-sectional variance when only macro-level counts are available, but much less once recent town-level case histories are included. Together, the results offer a practical decision rule: compute network metrics (and interactions) when local case histories are coarse or delayed; rely primarily on AR baselines when granular cases are timely, using network signals mainly for diagnostic targeting.

Over a decade ago, it was demonstrated that quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize numerical linear algebra by enabling algorithms with complexity superior to what is classically achievable, e.g., the seminal HHL algorithm for solving linear systems. Efficient execution of such algorithms critically depends on representing inputs (matrices and vectors) as quantum circuits that encode or implement these inputs. For that task, two common circuit representations emerged in the literature: block encodings and state preparation circuits. In this paper, we systematically study encodings matrices in the form of block encodings and state preparation circuits. We examine methods for constructing these representations from matrices given in classical form, as well as quantum two-way conversions between circuit representations. Two key results we establish (among others) are: (a) a general method for efficiently constructing a block encoding of an arbitrary matrix given in classical form (entries stored in classical random access memory); and (b) low-overhead, bidirectional conversion algorithms between block encodings and state preparation circuits, showing that these models are essentially equivalent. From a technical perspective, two central components of our constructions are: (i) a special constant-depth multiplexer that simultaneously multiplexes all higher-order Pauli matrices of a given size, and (ii) an algorithm for performing a quantum conversion between a matrix's expansion in the standard basis and its expansion in the basis of higher-order Pauli matrices.

Vine copulas offer flexible multivariate dependence modeling and have become widely used in machine learning, yet structure learning remains a key challenge. Early heuristics like the greedy algorithm of Dissmann are still considered the gold standard, but often suboptimal. We propose random search algorithms that improve structure selection and a statistical framework based on model confidence sets, which provides theoretical guarantees on selection probabilities and a powerful foundation for ensembling. Empirical results on several real-world data sets show that our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art approaches.

We propose an approach for dynamic efficiency evaluation across multiple organizational dimensions using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The method generates both dimension-specific and aggregate efficiency scores, incorporates desirable and undesirable outputs, and is suitable for large-scale problem settings. Two regularized DEA models are introduced: a slack-based measure (SBM) and a linearized version of a nonlinear goal programming model (GP-SBM). While SBM estimates an aggregate efficiency score and then distributes it across dimensions, GP-SBM first estimates dimension-level efficiencies and then derives an aggregate score. Both models utilize a regularization parameter to enhance discriminatory power while also directly integrating both desirable and undesirable outputs. We demonstrate the computational efficiency and validity of our approach on multiple datasets and apply it to a case study of twelve hospitals in Ontario, Canada, evaluating three theoretically grounded dimensions of organizational effectiveness over a 24-month period from January 2018 to December 2019: technical efficiency, clinical efficiency, and patient experience. Our numerical results show that SBM and GP-SBM better capture correlations among input/output variables and outperform conventional benchmarking methods that separately evaluate dimensions before aggregation.

Transmission system operators face a variety of discrete operational decisions, such as switching of branches and/or devices. Incorporating these decisions into optimal power flow (OPF) results in mixed-integer non-linear programming problems (MINLPs), which can't presently be solved at scale in the required time. Various linearizations of the OPF exist, most famously the DC-OPF, which can be leveraged to find integer decisions. However, these linearizations can yield very poor integer solutions in some edge cases, making them challenging to incorporate into control rooms. This paper introduces the use of modeling to generate alternatives (MGA) to find alternative solutions to the linearized problems, reducing the chance of finding no AC feasible solutions. We test this approach using 13 networks where the DC linearization results in infeasible integer decisions, and MGA finds a solution in all cases. The MGA search criteria selected drastically affects the number and quality of solutions found, so network specific search functions may be necessary.

We study stationary solutions of McKean-Vlasov equations on the circle. Our main contributions stem from observing an exact equivalence between solutions of the stationary McKean-Vlasov equation and an infinite-dimensional quadratic system of equations over Fourier coefficients, which allows explicit characterization of the stationary states in a sequence space rather than a function space. This framework provides a transparent description of local bifurcations, characterizing their periodicity, and resonance structures, while accommodating singular potentials. We derive analytic expressions that characterize the emergence, form and shape (supercritical, critical, subcritical or transcritical) of bifurcations involving possibly multiple Fourier modes and connect them with discontinuous phase transitions. We also characterize, under suitable assumptions, the detailed structure of the stationary bifurcating solutions that are accurate upto an arbitrary number of Fourier modes. At the global level, we establish regularity and concavity properties of the free energy landscape, proving existence, compactness, and coexistence of globally minimizing stationary measures, further identifying discontinuous phase transitions with points of non-differentiability of the minimum free energy map. As an application, we specialize the theory to the Noisy Mean-Field Transformer model, where we show how changing the inverse temperature parameter $\beta$ affects the geometry of the infinitely many bifurcations from the uniform measure. We also explain how increasing $\beta$ can lead to a rich class of approximate multi-mode stationary solutions which can be seen as `metastable states'. Further, a sharp transition from continuous to discontinuous (first-order) phase behavior is observed as $\beta$ increases.

The implicit solvent approach offers a computationally efficient framework to model solvation effects in molecular simulations. However, its accuracy often falls short compared to explicit solvent models, limiting its use in precise thermodynamic calculations. Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) present an opportunity to overcome these limitations by leveraging neural networks to develop more precise implicit solvent potentials for diverse applications. A major drawback of current ML-based methods is their reliance on force-matching alone, which can lead to energy predictions that differ by an arbitrary constant and are therefore unsuitable for absolute free energy comparisons. Here, we introduce a novel methodology with a graph neural network (GNN)-based implicit solvent model, dubbed Lambda Solvation Neural Network (LSNN). In addition to force-matching, this network was trained to match the derivatives of alchemical variables, ensuring that solvation free energies can be meaningfully compared across chemical species.. Trained on a dataset of approximately 300,000 small molecules, LSNN achieves free energy predictions with accuracy comparable to explicit-solvent alchemical simulations, while offering a computational speedup and establishing a foundational framework for future applications in drug discovery.

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) offers significant advantages in managing mobility for both wireless sensing and communication systems, making it a promising candidate for dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC). However, the optimal signal design that fully exploits OTFS's potential in DFRC has not been sufficiently explored. This paper addresses this gap by formulating an optimization problem for signal design in DFRC-OTFS, incorporating both pilot-symbol design for channel estimation and data-power allocation. Specifically, we employ the integrated sidelobe level (ISL) of the ambiguity function as a radar metric, accounting for the randomness of the data symbols alongside the deterministic pilot symbols. For communication, we derive a channel capacity lower bound metric that considers channel estimation errors in OTFS. We maximize the weighted sum of sensing and communication metrics and solve the optimization problem via an alternating optimization framework. Simulations indicate that the proposed signal significantly improves the sensing-communication performance region compared with conventional signal schemes, achieving at least a 9.44 dB gain in ISL suppression for sensing, and a 4.82 dB gain in the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for communication.

Simulating coupled PDE systems is computationally intensive, and prior efforts have largely focused on training surrogates on the joint (coupled) data, which requires a large amount of data. In the paper, we study compositional diffusion approaches where diffusion models are only trained on the decoupled PDE data and are composed at inference time to recover the coupled field. Specifically, we investigate whether the compositional strategy can be feasible under long time horizons involving a large number of time steps. In addition, we compare a baseline diffusion model with that trained using the v-parameterization strategy. We also introduce a symmetric compositional scheme for the coupled fields based on the Euler scheme. We evaluate on Reaction-Diffusion and modified Burgers with longer time grids, and benchmark against a Fourier Neural Operator trained on coupled data. Despite seeing only decoupled training data, the compositional diffusion models recover coupled trajectories with low error. v-parameterization can improve accuracy over a baseline diffusion model, while the neural operator surrogate remains strongest given that it is trained on the coupled data. These results show that compositional diffusion is a viable strategy towards efficient, long-horizon modeling of coupled PDEs.

A Graph of Convex Sets (GCS) is a graph in which vertices are associated with convex programs and edges couple pairs of programs through additional convex costs and constraints. Any optimization problem over an ordinary weighted graph (e.g., the shortest-path, the traveling-salesman, and the minimum-spanning-tree problems) can be naturally generalized to a GCS, yielding a new class of problems at the interface of combinatorial and convex optimization with numerous applications. In this paper, we introduce a unified method for solving any such problem. Starting from an integer linear program that models an optimization problem over a weighted graph, our method automatically produces an efficient mixed-integer convex formulation of the corresponding GCS problem. This formulation is based on homogenization (perspective) transformations, and the resulting program is solved to global optimality using off-the-shelf branch-and-bound solvers. We implement this framework in GCSOPT, an open-source and easy-to-use Python library designed for fast prototyping. We illustrate the versatility and scalability of our approach through multiple numerical examples and comparisons.

Portfolio managers rely on correlation-based analysis and heuristic methods that fail to capture true causal relationships driving performance. We present a hybrid framework that integrates statistical causal discovery algorithms with domain knowledge from two complementary sources: a financial knowledge graph extracted from SEC 10-K filings and large language model reasoning. Our approach systematically enhances three representative causal discovery paradigms, constraint-based (PC), score-based (GES), and continuous optimization (NOTEARS), by encoding knowledge graph constraints algorithmically and leveraging LLM conceptual reasoning for hypothesis generation. Evaluated on a synthetic financial dataset of 500 firms across 18 variables, our KG+LLM-enhanced methods demonstrate consistent improvements across all three algorithms: PC (F1: 0.622 vs. 0.459 baseline, +36%), GES (F1: 0.735 vs. 0.367, +100%), and NOTEARS (F1: 0.759 vs. 0.163, +366%). The framework enables reliable scenario analysis with mean absolute error of 0.003610 for counterfactual predictions and perfect directional accuracy for intervention effects. It also addresses critical limitations of existing methods by grounding statistical discoveries in financial domain expertise while maintaining empirical validation, providing portfolio managers with the causal foundation necessary for proactive risk management and strategic decision-making in dynamic market environments.

Suppose $D = (V, E)$ is a strongly connected digraph and $u, v \in V (D)$. Among the many metrics in graphs, the sum metric warrants further exploration. The sum distance $sd(u, v)$ defined as $sd(u, v) =\overrightarrow{d}(u, v)+\overrightarrow{d}(v, u)$ is a metric where $\overrightarrow{d}(u, v)$ denotes the length of the shortest directed $u - v$ path in $D$. The four main boundary vertices in the digraphs are ``boundary vertices, contour vertices, eccentric vertices'', and ``peripheral vertices'' and their relationships have been studied. Also, an attempt is made to study the boundary-type sets of corona product of (di)graphs. The center of the corona product of two strongly connected digraphs is established. All the boundary-type sets and the center of the corona product are established in terms of factor digraphs.

Image dehazing is a restoration task that aims to recover a clear image from a single hazy input. Traditional approaches rely on statistical priors and the physics-based atmospheric scattering model to reconstruct the haze-free image. While recent state-of-the-art methods are predominantly based on deep learning architectures, these models often involve high computational costs and large parameter sizes, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose GUSL-Dehaze, a Green U-Shaped Learning approach to image dehazing. Our method integrates a physics-based model with a green learning (GL) framework, offering a lightweight, transparent alternative to conventional deep learning techniques. Unlike neural network-based solutions, GUSL-Dehaze completely avoids deep learning. Instead, we begin with an initial dehazing step using a modified Dark Channel Prior (DCP), which is followed by a green learning pipeline implemented through a U-shaped architecture. This architecture employs unsupervised representation learning for effective feature extraction, together with feature-engineering techniques such as the Relevant Feature Test (RFT) and the Least-Squares Normal Transform (LNT) to maintain a compact model size. Finally, the dehazed image is obtained via a transparent supervised learning strategy. GUSL-Dehaze significantly reduces parameter count while ensuring mathematical interpretability and achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art deep learning models.

The objective of this work is to develop a method for detecting rare gamma quanta against the background of charged particles in the fluxes from sources in the Universe with the help of the deep learning and normalizing flows based method designed for anomaly detection. It is shown that the suggested method has a potential for the gamma detection. The method was tested on model data from the TAIGA-IACT experiment. The obtained quantitative performance indicators are still inferior to other approaches, and therefore possible ways to improve the implementation of the method are proposed.

A reproducible deep learning framework is presented for surface metrology to predict surface texture parameters together with their reported standard uncertainties. Using a multi-instrument dataset spanning tactile and optical systems, measurement system type classification is addressed alongside coordinated regression of Ra, Rz, RONt and their uncertainty targets (Ra_uncert, Rz_uncert, RONt_uncert). Uncertainty is modelled via quantile and heteroscedastic heads with post-hoc conformal calibration to yield calibrated intervals. On a held-out set, high fidelity was achieved by single-target regressors (R2: Ra 0.9824, Rz 0.9847, RONt 0.9918), with two uncertainty targets also well modelled (Ra_uncert 0.9899, Rz_uncert 0.9955); RONt_uncert remained difficult (R2 0.4934). The classifier reached 92.85% accuracy and probability calibration was essentially unchanged after temperature scaling (ECE 0.00504 -> 0.00503 on the test split). Negative transfer was observed for naive multi-output trunks, with single-target models performing better. These results provide calibrated predictions suitable to inform instrument selection and acceptance decisions in metrological workflows.

Expectile regression neural networks (ERNNs) are powerful tools for capturing heterogeneity and complex nonlinear structures in data. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fully observed data, with limited attention paid to scenarios involving censored observations. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation based ERNNs algorithm, termed DAERNN, for modeling heterogeneous censored data. The proposed DAERNN is fully data driven, requires minimal assumptions, and offers substantial flexibility. Simulation studies and real data applications demonstrate that DAERNN outperforms existing censored ERNNs methods and achieves predictive performance comparable to models trained on fully observed data. Moreover, the algorithm provides a unified framework for handling various censoring mechanisms without requiring explicit parametric model specification, thereby enhancing its applicability to practical censored data analysis.

Since the advent of various pre-trained large language models, extracting structured knowledge from scientific text has experienced a revolutionary change compared with traditional machine learning or natural language processing techniques. Despite these advances, accessible automated tools that allow users to construct, validate, and visualise datasets from scientific literature extraction remain scarce. We therefore developed ComProScanner, an autonomous multi-agent platform that facilitates the extraction, validation, classification, and visualisation of machine-readable chemical compositions and properties, integrated with synthesis data from journal articles for comprehensive database creation. We evaluated our framework using 100 journal articles against 10 different LLMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, to extract highly complex compositions associated with ceramic piezoelectric materials and corresponding piezoelectric strain coefficients (d33), motivated by the lack of a large dataset for such materials. DeepSeek-V3-0324 outperformed all models with a significant overall accuracy of 0.82. This framework provides a simple, user-friendly, readily-usable package for extracting highly complex experimental data buried in the literature to build machine learning or deep learning datasets.

We present AttDet, a Transformer-inspired MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) detection method that treats each transmit layer as a token and learns inter-stream interference via a lightweight self-attention mechanism. Queries and keys are derived directly from the estimated channel matrix, so attention scores quantify channel correlation. Values are initialized by matched-filter outputs and iteratively refined. The AttDet design combines model-based interpretability with data-driven flexibility. We demonstrate through link-level simulations under realistic 5G channel models and high-order, mixed QAM modulation and coding schemes, that AttDet can approach near-optimal BER/BLER (Bit Error Rate/Block Error Rate) performance while maintaining predictable, polynomial complexity.

Small subsets of data with disproportionate influence on model outcomes can have dramatic impacts on conclusions, with a few data points sometimes overturning key findings. While recent work has developed methods to identify these \emph{most influential sets}, no formal theory exists to determine when their influence reflects genuine problems rather than natural sampling variation. We address this gap by developing a principled framework for assessing the statistical significance of most influential sets. Our theoretical results characterize the extreme value distributions of maximal influence and enable rigorous hypothesis tests for excessive influence, replacing current ad-hoc sensitivity checks. We demonstrate the practical value of our approach through applications across economics, biology, and machine learning benchmarks.

Interactions between different components of the Earth System (e.g. ocean, atmosphere, land and cryosphere) are a crucial driver of global weather patterns. Modern Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems typically run separate models of the different components, explicitly coupled across their interfaces to additionally model exchanges between the different components. Accurately representing these coupled interactions remains a major scientific and technical challenge of weather forecasting. GraphDOP is a graph-based machine learning model that learns to forecast weather directly from raw satellite and in-situ observations, without reliance on reanalysis products or traditional physics-based NWP models. GraphDOP simultaneously embeds information from diverse observation sources spanning the full Earth system into a shared latent space. This enables predictions that implicitly capture cross-domain interactions in a single model without the need for any explicit coupling. Here we present a selection of case studies which illustrate the capability of GraphDOP to forecast events where coupled processes play a particularly key role. These include rapid sea-ice freezing in the Arctic, mixing-induced ocean surface cooling during Hurricane Ian and the severe European heat wave of 2022. The results suggest that learning directly from Earth System observations can successfully characterise and propagate cross-component interactions, offering a promising path towards physically consistent end-to-end data-driven Earth System prediction with a single model.

We present a fully decentralized routing framework for multi-robot exploration missions operating under the constraints of a Lunar Delay-Tolerant Network (LDTN). In this setting, autonomous rovers must relay collected data to a lander under intermittent connectivity and unknown mobility patterns. We formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Problem (POMDP) and propose a Graph Attention-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (GAT-MARL) policy that performs Centralized Training, Decentralized Execution (CTDE). Our method relies only on local observations and does not require global topology updates or packet replication, unlike classical approaches such as shortest path and controlled flooding-based algorithms. Through Monte Carlo simulations in randomized exploration environments, GAT-MARL provides higher delivery rates, no duplications, and fewer packet losses, and is able to leverage short-term mobility forecasts; offering a scalable solution for future space robotic systems for planetary exploration, as demonstrated by successful generalization to larger rover teams.

We demonstrate the efficacy of symbolic regression (SR) to probe models of particle physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), by considering the so-called Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (CMSSM). Like many incarnations of BSM physics this model has a number (four) of arbitrary parameters, which determine the experimental signals, and cosmological observables such as the dark matter relic density. We show that analysis of the phenomenology can be greatly accelerated by using symbolic expressions derived for the observables in terms of the input parameters. Here we focus on the Higgs mass, the cold dark matter relic density, and the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. We find that SR can produce remarkably accurate expressions. Using them we make global fits to derive the posterior probability densities of the CMSSM input parameters which are in good agreement with those performed using conventional methods. Moreover, we demonstrate a major advantage of SR which is the ability to make fits using differentiable methods rather than sampling methods. We also compare the method with neural network (NN) regression. SR produces more globally robust results, while NNs require data that is focussed on the promising regions in order to be equally performant.

This short survey article stems from recent progress on critical cases of stochastic evolution equations in variational formulation with additive, multiplicative or gradient noises. Typical examples appear as the limit cases of the stochastic porous medium equation, stochastic fast- and super fast-diffusion equations, self-organized criticality, stochastic singular $p$-Laplace equations, and the stochastic total variation flow, among others. We present several different notions of solutions, results on convergence of solutions depending on a parameter, and homogenization. Furthermore, we provide some references hinting at the recent progress in regularity results, long-time behavior, ergodicity, and numerical analysis.

Synthetic oversampling of minority examples using SMOTE and its variants is a leading strategy for addressing imbalanced classification problems. Despite the success of this approach in practice, its theoretical foundations remain underexplored. We develop a theoretical framework to analyze the behavior of SMOTE and related methods when classifiers are trained on synthetic data. We first derive a uniform concentration bound on the discrepancy between the empirical risk over synthetic minority samples and the population risk on the true minority distribution. We then provide a nonparametric excess risk guarantee for kernel-based classifiers trained using such synthetic data. These results lead to practical guidelines for better parameter tuning of both SMOTE and the downstream learning algorithm. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate and support the theoretical findings

We introduce a fusion of GPU accelerated primal heuristics for Mixed Integer Programming. Leveraging GPU acceleration enables exploration of larger search regions and faster iterations. A GPU-accelerated PDLP serves as an approximate LP solver, while a new probing cache facilitates rapid roundings and early infeasibility detection. Several state-of-the-art heuristics, including Feasibility Pump, Feasibility Jump, and Fix-and-Propagate, are further accelerated and enhanced. The combined approach of these GPU-driven algorithms yields significant improvements over existing methods, both in the number of feasible solutions and the quality of objectives by achieving 221 feasible solutions and 22% objective gap in the MIPLIB2017 benchmark on a presolved dataset.

We analyze the identifiability of nonlinear networks with node dynamics characterized by functions that are non-additive. We consider the full measurement case (all the nodes are measured) in the path-independent delay scenario where all the excitation signals of a specific node have the same delay in the output of a measured node. Based on the notion of a generic nonlinear matrix associated with the network, we introduce the concept of generic identifiability and characterize the space of functions that satisfies this property. For directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) characterized by analytic functions, we derive a sufficient condition for identifiability based on vertex-disjoint paths from excited nodes to the in-neighbors of each node in the network. Furthermore, when we consider the class of polynomial functions, by using well-known results on algebraic varieties, we prove that the vertex-disjoint path condition is also necessary. Finally, we show that this identifiability condition is not necessary for the additive nonlinear model. Some examples are added to illustrate the results.

Conditional differential entropy provides an intuitive measure for relatively ranking time-series complexity by quantifying uncertainty in future observations given past context. However, its direct computation for high-dimensional processes from unknown distributions is often intractable. This paper builds on the information theoretic prediction error bounds established by Fang et al. \cite{fang2019generic}, which demonstrate that the conditional differential entropy \textbf{$h(X_k \mid X_{k-1},...,X_{k-m})$} is upper bounded by a function of the determinant of the covariance matrix of next-step prediction errors for any next step prediction model. We add to this theoretical framework by further increasing this bound by leveraging Hadamard's inequality and the positive semi-definite property of covariance matrices. To see if these bounds can be used to rank the complexity of time series, we conducted two synthetic experiments: (1) controlled linear autoregressive processes with additive Gaussian noise, where we compare ordinary least squares prediction error entropy proxies to the true entropies of various additive noises, and (2) a complexity ranking task of bio-inspired synthetic audio data with unknown entropy, where neural network prediction errors are used to recover the known complexity ordering. This framework provides a computationally tractable method for time-series complexity ranking using prediction errors from next-step prediction models, that maintains a theoretical foundation in information theory.

Self-supervised learning has become a central strategy for representation learning, but the majority of architectures used for encoding data have only been validated on regularly-sampled inputs such as images, audios. and videos. In many scientific domains, data instead arrive as long, irregular, and multimodal sequences. To extract semantic information from these data, we introduce the Diffusion Autoencoder with Perceivers (daep). daep tokenizes heterogeneous measurements, compresses them with a Perceiver encoder, and reconstructs them with a Perceiver-IO diffusion decoder, enabling scalable learning in diverse data settings. To benchmark the daep architecture, we adapt the masked autoencoder to a Perceiver encoder/decoder design, and establish a strong baseline (maep) in the same architectural family as daep. Across diverse spectroscopic and photometric astronomical datasets, daep achieves lower reconstruction errors, produces more discriminative latent spaces, and better preserves fine-scale structure than both VAE and maep baselines. These results establish daep as an effective framework for scientific domains where data arrives as irregular, heterogeneous sequences.

This paper explores the application of machine learning (ML) techniques in predicting the QPU processing time of quantum jobs. By leveraging ML algorithms, this study introduces predictive models that are designed to enhance operational efficiency in quantum computing systems. Using a dataset of about 150,000 jobs that follow the IBM Quantum schema, we employ ML methods based on Gradient-Boosting (LightGBM) to predict the QPU processing times, incorporating data preprocessing methods to improve model accuracy. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of ML in forecasting quantum jobs. This improvement can have implications on improving resource management and scheduling within quantum computing frameworks. This research not only highlights the potential of ML in refining quantum job predictions but also sets a foundation for integrating AI-driven tools in advanced quantum computing operations.

In this paper, we investigate the inverse problem of determining an unknown time-dependent source term in a semilinear pseudo-parabolic equation with variable coefficients and a Dirichlet boundary condition. The unknown source term is recovered from additional measurement data expressed as a weighted spatial average of the solution. By employing Rothe's time-discretisation method, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a weak solution under a smallness condition on the problem data. We also present a numerical scheme for computations.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, practitioners face increasing options for enhancing inference-time performance without model retraining, including budget tuning and multi-step techniques like self-reflection. While these methods improve output quality, they create complex trade-offs among accuracy, cost, and latency that remain poorly understood across different domains. This paper systematically compares self-reflection and budget tuning across mathematical reasoning and translation tasks. We evaluate prominent LLMs, including Anthropic Claude, Amazon Nova, and Mistral families, along with other models under varying reflection depths and compute budgets to derive Pareto optimal performance frontiers. Our analysis reveals substantial domain dependent variation in self-reflection effectiveness, with performance gains up to 220\% in mathematical reasoning. We further investigate how reflection round depth and feedback mechanism quality influence performance across model families. To validate our findings in a real-world setting, we deploy a self-reflection enhanced marketing content localisation system at Lounge by Zalando, where it shows market-dependent effectiveness, reinforcing the importance of domain specific evaluation when deploying these techniques. Our results provide actionable guidance for selecting optimal inference strategies given specific domains and resource constraints. We open source our self-reflection implementation for reproducibility at this https URL.

We introduce M2VN: Multi-Modal Volatility Network, a novel deep learning-based framework for financial volatility forecasting that unifies time series features with unstructured news data. M2VN leverages the representational power of deep neural networks to address two key challenges in this domain: (i) aligning and fusing heterogeneous data modalities, numerical financial data and textual information, and (ii) mitigating look-ahead bias that can undermine the validity of financial models. To achieve this, M2VN combines open-source market features with news embeddings generated by Time Machine GPT, a recently introduced point-in-time LLM, ensuring temporal integrity. An auxiliary alignment loss is introduced to enhance the integration of structured and unstructured data within the deep learning architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M2VN consistently outperforms existing baselines, underscoring its practical value for risk management and financial decision-making in dynamic markets.

Solving and optimizing differential equations (DEs) is ubiquitous in both engineering and fundamental science. The promise of quantum architectures to accelerate scientific computing thus naturally involved interest towards how efficiently quantum algorithms can solve DEs. Differentiable quantum circuits (DQC) offer a viable route to compute DE solutions using a variational approach amenable to existing quantum computers, by producing a machine-learnable surrogate of the solution. Quantum extremal learning (QEL) complements such approach by finding extreme points in the output of learnable models of unknown (implicit) functions, offering a powerful tool to bypass a full DE solution, in cases where the crux consists in retrieving solution extrema. In this work, we provide the results from the first experimental demonstration of both DQC and QEL, displaying their performance on a synthetic usecase. Whilst both DQC and QEL are expected to require digital quantum hardware, we successfully challenge this assumption by running a closed-loop instance on a commercial analog quantum computer, based upon neutral atom technology.

We present a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop workflow that co-designs quantum codes with prescribed transversal diagonal gates. It builds on the Subset-Sum Linear Programming (SSLP) framework (arXiv:2504.20847), which partitions basis strings by modular residues and enforces $Z$-marginal Knill-Laflamme (KL) equalities via small LPs. The workflow is powered by GPT-5 and implemented within TeXRA (this https URL)-a multi-agent research assistant platform that supports an iterative tool-use loop agent and a derivation-then-edit workflow reasoning agent. We work in a LaTeX-Python environment where agents reason, edit documents, execute code, and synchronize their work to Git/Overleaf. Within this workspace, three roles collaborate: a Synthesis Agent formulates the problem; a Search Agent sweeps/screens candidates and exactifies numerics into rationals; and an Audit Agent independently checks all KL equalities and the induced logical action. As a first step we focus on distance $d=2$ with nondegenerate residues. For code dimension $K\in\{2,3,4\}$ and $n\le6$ qubits, systematic sweeps yield certificate-backed tables cataloging attainable cyclic logical groups-all realized by new codes-e.g., for $K=3$ we obtain order $16$ at $n=6$. From verified instances, Synthesis Agent abstracts recurring structures into closed-form families and proves they satisfy the KL equalities for all parameters. It further demonstrates that SSLP accommodates residue degeneracy by exhibiting a new $((6,4,2))$ code implementing the transversal controlled-phase $diag(1,1,1,i)$. Overall, the workflow recasts diagonal-transversal feasibility as an analytical pipeline executed at scale, combining systematic enumeration with exact analytical reconstruction. It yields reproducible code constructions, supports targeted extensions to larger $K$ and higher distances, and leads toward data-driven classification.

This paper considers the \textit{Zarankiewicz problem} in graphs with low-dimensional geometric representation (i.e., low Ferrers dimension). Our first result reveals a separation between bipartite graphs of Ferrers dimension three and four: while $Z(n;k) \leq 9n(k-1)$ for graphs of Ferrers dimension three, $Z(n;k) \in \Omega\left(n k \cdot \frac{\log n}{\log \log n}\right)$ for Ferrers dimension four graphs (Chan & Har-Peled, 2023) (Chazelle, 1990). To complement this, we derive a tight upper bound of $2n(k-1)$ for chordal bigraphs and $54n(k-1)$ for grid intersection graphs (GIG), a prominent graph class residing in four Ferrers dimensions and capturing planar bipartite graphs as well as bipartite intersection graphs of rectangles. Previously, the best-known bound for GIG was $Z(n;k) \in O(2^{O(k)} n)$, implied by the results of Fox & Pach (2006) and Mustafa & Pach (2016). Our results advance and offer new insights into the interplay between Ferrers dimensions and extremal combinatorics.

Ferrer dimension, along with the order dimension, is a standard dimensional concept for bipartite graphs. In this paper, we prove that a graph is of Ferrer dimension three (equivalent to the intersection bigraph of orthants and points in ${\mathbb R}^3$) if and only if it admits a biadjacency matrix representation that does not contain $\Gamma= \begin{bmatrix} * & 1 & * \\ 1 & 0 & 1 \\ 0 & 1 & * \end{bmatrix}$ and $\Delta = \begin{bmatrix} 1 & * & * \\ 0 & 1 & * \\ 1 & 0 & 1 \end{bmatrix}$, where $*$ denotes zero or one entry.

We consider the problem of minimizing a $d$-dimensional Lipschitz convex function using a stochastic gradient oracle. We introduce and motivate a setting where the noise of the stochastic gradient is isotropic in that it is bounded in every direction with high probability. We then develop an algorithm for this setting which improves upon prior results by a factor of $d$ in certain regimes, and as a corollary, achieves a new state-of-the-art complexity for sub-exponential noise. We give matching lower bounds (up to polylogarithmic factors) for both results. Additionally, we develop an efficient quantum isotropifier, a quantum algorithm which converts a variance-bounded quantum sampling oracle into one that outputs an unbiased estimate with isotropic error. Combining our results, we obtain improved dimension-dependent rates for quantum stochastic convex optimization.

This paper demonstrates how reinforcement learning can explain two puzzling empirical patterns in household consumption behavior during economic downturns. I develop a model where agents use Q-learning with neural network approximation to make consumption-savings decisions under income uncertainty, departing from standard rational expectations assumptions. The model replicates two key findings from recent literature: (1) unemployed households with previously low liquid assets exhibit substantially higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) out of stimulus transfers compared to high-asset households (0.50 vs 0.34), even when neither group faces borrowing constraints, consistent with Ganong et al. (2024); and (2) households with more past unemployment experiences maintain persistently lower consumption levels after controlling for current economic conditions, a "scarring" effect documented by Malmendier and Shen (2024). Unlike existing explanations based on belief updating about income risk or ex-ante heterogeneity, the reinforcement learning mechanism generates both higher MPCs and lower consumption levels simultaneously through value function approximation errors that evolve with experience. Simulation results closely match the empirical estimates, suggesting that adaptive learning through reinforcement learning provides a unifying framework for understanding how past experiences shape current consumption behavior beyond what current economic conditions would predict.

Accurate medium-range precipitation forecasting is crucial for hydrometeorological risk management and disaster mitigation, yet remains challenging for current numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems. Traditional ensemble systems such as the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) struggle to maintain high skill, especially for moderate and heavy rainfall at extended lead times. This study develops a deep learning-based ensemble framework for multi-step precipitation prediction through joint modeling of a comprehensive set of atmospheric variables. The model is trained on ERA5 reanalysis data at 0.25$^{\circ}$ spatial resolution, with precipitation labels from NASA's Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) constellation (IMERG), incorporating 57 input variables, including upper-air and surface predictors. The architecture employs a patch-based Swin Transformer backbone with periodic convolutions to handle longitudinal continuity and integrates time and noise embeddings through conditional layer normalization. A dual-branch decoder predicts total precipitation and other variables, with targeted freezing of encoder-decoder pathways for specialized training. Training minimizes a hybrid loss combining the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) and weighted log1p mean squared error (log1pMSE), balancing probabilistic accuracy and magnitude fidelity. During inference, the model ingests real-time Global Forecast System (GFS) initial conditions to generate 15-day forecasts autoregressively. Evaluation against GEFS using IMERG data demonstrates higher Critical Success Index (CSI) scores at precipitation thresholds of 0.1 mm, 1 mm, 10 mm, and 20 mm, highlighting improved performance for moderate to heavy rainfall.

Let $f_r(d,s_1,\ldots,s_r)$ denote the least integer $n$ such that every $n$-point set $P\subseteq\mathbb{R}^d$ admits a partition $P=P_1\cup\cdots\cup P_r$ with the property that for any choice of $s_i$-convex sets $C_i\supseteq P_i$ $(i\in[r])$ one necessarily has $\bigcap_{i=1}^r C_i\neq\emptyset$, where an $s_i$-convex set means a union of $s_i$ convex sets. A recent breakthrough by Alon and Smorodinsky establishes a general upper bound $f_r(d,s_1,\dots,s_r) = O(dr^2\log r \prod_{i=1}^r s_i\cdot \log(\prod_{i=1}^r s_i).$ Specializing to $r=2$ resolves the problem of Kalai from the 1970s. They further singled out two particularly intriguing questions: whether $f_{2}(2,s,s)$ can be improved from $O(s^2\log s)$ to $O(s)$, and whether $f_r(d,s,\ldots,s)\le Poly(r,d,s)$. We answer both in the negative by showing the exponential lower bound $f_{r}(d,s,\ldots,s)> s^{r}$ for any $r\ge 2$, $s\ge 1$ and $d\ge 2r-2$, which matches the upper bound up to a multiplicative $\log{s}$ factor for sufficiently large $s$. Our construction combines a scalloped planar configuration with a direct product of regular $s$-gon on the high-dimensional torus $(\mathbb{S}^1)^{r-2}$. Perhaps surprisingly, if we additionally require that within each block the $s_i$ convex sets are pairwise disjoint, the picture changes markedly. Let $F_r(d,s_1,\ldots,s_r)$ denote this disjoint-union variant of the extremal function. We show: (1) $F_{2}(2,s,s)=O(s\log s)$ by performing controlled planar geometric transformations and constructing an auxiliary graph whose planarity yields the upper bound; (2) when $s$ is large, $F_r(d,s,\ldots,s)$ can be bounded by $O_{r,d}(s^{(1-\frac{1}{2^{d}(d+1)})r+1})$ and $O_{d}(r^{3}\log r\cdot s^{2d+3})$, respectively. This builds on a novel connection between the geometric obstruction and hypergraph Turán numbers, in particular, a variant of the Erdős box problem.

We develop optimization methods which offer new trade-offs between the number of gradient and Hessian computations needed to compute the critical point of a non-convex function. We provide a method that for any twice-differentiable $f\colon \mathbb R^d \rightarrow \mathbb R$ with $L_2$-Lipschitz Hessian, input initial point with $\Delta$-bounded sub-optimality, and sufficiently small $\epsilon > 0$, outputs an $\epsilon$-critical point, i.e., a point $x$ such that $\|\nabla f(x)\| \leq \epsilon$, using $\tilde{O}(L_2^{1/4} n_H^{-1/2}\Delta\epsilon^{-9/4})$ queries to a gradient oracle and $n_H$ queries to a Hessian oracle for any positive integer $n_H$. As a consequence, we obtain an improved gradient query complexity of $\tilde{O}(d^{1/3}L_2^{1/2}\Delta\epsilon^{-3/2})$ in the case of bounded dimension and of $\tilde{O}(L_2^{3/4}\Delta^{3/2}\epsilon^{-9/4})$ in the case where we are allowed only a \emph{single} Hessian query. We obtain these results through a more general algorithm which can handle approximate Hessian computations and recovers the state-of-the-art bound of computing an $\epsilon$-critical point with $O(L_1^{1/2}L_2^{1/4}\Delta\epsilon^{-7/4})$ gradient queries provided that $f$ also has an $L_1$-Lipschitz gradient.

Deep learning has emerged as a transformative methodology in modern cosmology, providing powerful tools to extract meaningful physical information from complex astronomical datasets. This paper implements a novel Bayesian graph deep learning framework for estimating key cosmological parameters in a primordial magnetic field (PMF) cosmology directly from simulated Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps. Our methodology utilizes DeepSphere, a spherical convolutional neural network architecture specifically designed to respect the spherical geometry of CMB data through HEALPix pixelization. To advance beyond deterministic point estimates and enable robust uncertainty quantification, we integrate Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) into the framework, capturing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties that reflect the model confidence in its predictions. The proposed approach demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving $R^{2}$ scores exceeding 0.89 for the magnetic parameter estimation. We further obtain well-calibrated uncertainty estimates through post-hoc training techniques including Variance Scaling and GPNormal. This integrated DeepSphere-BNNs framework not only delivers accurate parameter estimation from CMB maps with PMF contributions but also provides reliable uncertainty quantification, providing the necessary tools for robust cosmological inference in the era of precision cosmology.

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be approximated within $(1 \pm \epsilon)$ factors in $\text{poly}(\log n, 1/\epsilon)$ rounds in the LOCAL model via network decompositions [Ghaffari, Kuhn, and Maus, STOC 2018]. These approaches require sending messages of unlimited size, so they do not extend to the CONGEST model, which restricts the message size to be $O(\log n)$ bits. In this paper, we develop a generic framework for obtaining $\text{poly}(\log n, 1/\epsilon)$-round $(1\pm \epsilon)$-approximation algorithms for many combinatorial optimization problems, including maximum weighted matching, maximum independent set, and correlation clustering, in graphs excluding a fixed minor in the CONGEST model. This class of graphs covers many sparse network classes that have been studied in the literature, including planar graphs, bounded-genus graphs, and bounded-treewidth graphs. Furthermore, we show that our framework can be applied to give an efficient distributed property testing algorithm for an arbitrary minor-closed graph property that is closed under taking disjoint union, significantly generalizing the previous distributed property testing algorithm for planarity in [Levi, Medina, and Ron, PODC 2018 & Distributed Computing 2021]. Our framework uses distributed expander decomposition algorithms [Chang and Saranurak, FOCS 2020] to decompose the graph into clusters of high conductance. We show that any graph excluding a fixed minor admits small edge separators. Using this result, we show the existence of a high-degree vertex in each cluster in an expander decomposition, which allows the entire graph topology of the cluster to be routed to a vertex. Similar to the use of network decompositions in the LOCAL model, the vertex will be able to perform any local computation on the subgraph induced by the cluster and broadcast the result over the cluster.

Due to their high temporal resolution and large dynamic range, event cameras are uniquely suited for the analysis of time-periodic signals in an image. In this work we present an efficient and fully asynchronous event camera algorithm for detecting the fundamental frequency at which image pixels flicker. The algorithm employs a second-order digital infinite impulse response (IIR) filter to perform an approximate per-pixel brightness reconstruction and is more robust to high-frequency noise than the baseline method we compare to. We further demonstrate that using the falling edge of the signal leads to more accurate period estimates than the rising edge, and that for certain signals interpolating the zero-level crossings can further increase accuracy. Our experiments find that the outstanding capabilities of the camera in detecting frequencies up to 64kHz for a single pixel do not carry over to full sensor imaging as readout bandwidth limitations become a serious obstacle. This suggests that a hardware implementation closer to the sensor will allow for greatly improved frequency imaging. We discuss the important design parameters for fullsensor frequency imaging and present Frequency Cam, an open-source implementation as a ROS node that can run on a single core of a laptop CPU at more than 50 million events per second. It produces results that are qualitatively very similar to those obtained from the closed source vibration analysis module in Prophesee's Metavision Toolkit. The code for Frequency Cam and a demonstration video can be found at this https URL

Latent factor models are the most popular backbones for today's recommender systems owing to their prominent performance. Latent factor models represent users and items as real-valued embedding vectors for pairwise similarity computation, and all embeddings are traditionally restricted to a uniform size that is relatively large (e.g., 256-dimensional). With the exponentially expanding user base and item catalog in contemporary e-commerce, this design is admittedly becoming memory-inefficient. To facilitate lightweight recommendation, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently opened up opportunities for identifying varying embedding sizes for different users/items. However, challenged by search efficiency and learning an optimal RL policy, existing RL-based methods are restricted to highly discrete, predefined embedding size choices. This leads to a largely overlooked potential of introducing finer granularity into embedding sizes to obtain better recommendation effectiveness under a given memory budget. In this paper, we propose continuous input embedding size search (CIESS), a novel RL-based method that operates on a continuous search space with arbitrary embedding sizes to choose from. In CIESS, we further present an innovative random walk-based exploration strategy to allow the RL policy to efficiently explore more candidate embedding sizes and converge to a better decision. CIESS is also model-agnostic and hence generalizable to a variety of latent factor RSs, whilst experiments on two real-world datasets have shown state-of-the-art performance of CIESS under different memory budgets when paired with three popular recommendation models.

Vector databases typically manage large collections of embedding vectors. Currently, AI applications are growing rapidly, and so is the number of embeddings that need to be stored and indexed. The Faiss library is dedicated to vector similarity search, a core functionality of vector databases. Faiss is a toolkit of indexing methods and related primitives used to search, cluster, compress and transform vectors. This paper describes the trade-off space of vector search and the design principles of Faiss in terms of structure, approach to optimization and interfacing. We benchmark key features of the library and discuss a few selected applications to highlight its broad applicability.

One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result in unwanted outcomes. This may lead to issues like "reward hacking" where the agent maximizes rewards by unintended behavior. In this work, we propose to disentangle the reward into two distinct parts. A simple task-specific reward, outlining the particulars of the task at hand, and an unknown common-sense reward, indicating the expected behavior of the agent within the environment. We then explore how this common-sense reward can be learned from expert demonstrations. We first show that inverse reinforcement learning, even when it succeeds in training an agent, does not learn a useful reward function. That is, training a new agent with the learned reward does not impair the desired behaviors. We then demonstrate that this problem can be solved by training simultaneously on multiple tasks. That is, multi-task inverse reinforcement learning can be applied to learn a useful reward function.

The vector field of a controlled differential equation (CDE) describes the relationship between a control path and the evolution of a solution path. Neural CDEs (NCDEs) treat time series data as observations from a control path, parameterise a CDE's vector field using a neural network, and use the solution path as a continuously evolving hidden state. As their formulation makes them robust to irregular sampling rates, NCDEs are a powerful approach for modelling real-world data. Building on neural rough differential equations (NRDEs), we introduce Log-NCDEs, a novel, effective, and efficient method for training NCDEs. The core component of Log-NCDEs is the Log-ODE method, a tool from the study of rough paths for approximating a CDE's solution. Log-NCDEs are shown to outperform NCDEs, NRDEs, the linear recurrent unit, S5, and MAMBA on a range of multivariate time series datasets with up to $50{,}000$ observations.

We consider matroid allocation problems under opportunity fairness constraints: resources need to be allocated to a set of agents under matroid constraints (which include classical problems such as bipartite matching). Agents are divided into $C$ groups according to a sensitive attribute, and an allocation is opportunity-fair if each group receives the same share proportional to the maximum feasible allocation it could achieve in isolation. We study the Price of Fairness (PoF), i.e., the ratio between maximum size allocations and maximum size opportunity-fair allocations. We first provide a characterization of the PoF leveraging the underlying polymatroid structure of the allocation problem. Based on this characterization, we prove bounds on the PoF in various settings from fully adversarial (worst-case) to fully random. Notably, one of our main results considers an arbitrary matroid structure with agents randomly divided into groups. In this setting, we prove a PoF bound as a function of the (relative) size of the largest group. Our result implies that, as long as there is no dominant group (i.e., the largest group is not too large), opportunity fairness constraints do not induce any loss of social welfare (defined as the allocation size). Overall, our results give insights into which aspects of the problem's structure affect the trade-off between opportunity fairness and social welfare.

Industry practitioners are increasingly concerned with software that contains vulnerable versions of third-party dependencies that are included both directly and transitively. To address this problem, projects are encouraged to both (a)~quickly update to non-vulnerable versions of dependencies and (b)~be mindful of the update practices of the dependencies they choose to use. To this end, researchers have proposed metrics to measure the responsiveness of the development teams of the packages in keeping their dependencies updated: Mean-Time-To-Update (MTTU) and Mean-Time-To-Remediate (MTTR). While MTTU covers all dependencies, MTTR quantifies the time needed for a package to update its vulnerable dependencies. However, existing metrics fail to capture important nuances, such as considering floating versions and prioritizing recent updates, leading to inaccurate reflections of a development team's update practices. \textit{The goal of this study is to aid practitioners in understanding how quickly packages update their dependencies.} We propose two novel metrics, Mean-Time-To-Update for dependencies (MTTU) and Mean-Time-To-Remediate for vulnerable dependencies (MTTR), that overcome the limitations of existing metrics. We conduct an empirical study using $163,207$ packages in npm ($117,129$), PyPI ($42,777$), and Cargo ($3,301$) and characterize how the ecosystems differ in MTTU and MTTR, as well as what package characteristics influence MTTU and MTTR. We found that most packages have a relatively fast dependency update practice. We further study whether MTTU can be used as a proxy for MTTR when sufficient vulnerability data is not available. As we did not find enough statistical evidence for a strong proxy, our findings suggest that MTTU could only be partially used (may be used but with caution) as a proxy for MTTR when vulnerability data is not available.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a crucial role in the application of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing retrieval methods in knowledge-dense domains like law and medicine still suffer from a lack of multi-perspective views, which are essential for improving interpretability and reliability. Previous research on multi-view retrieval often focused solely on different semantic forms of queries, neglecting the expression of specific domain knowledge perspectives. This paper introduces a novel multi-view RAG framework, MVRAG, tailored for knowledge-dense domains that utilizes intention-aware query rewriting from multiple domain viewpoints to enhance retrieval precision, thereby improving the effectiveness of the final inference. Experiments conducted on legal and medical case retrieval demonstrate significant improvements in recall and precision rates with our framework. Our multi-perspective retrieval approach unleashes the potential of multi-view information enhancing RAG tasks, accelerating the further application of LLMs in knowledge-intensive fields.

This paper studies the shallow Ritz method for solving the one-dimensional diffusion problem. It is shown that the shallow Ritz method improves the order of approximation dramatically for non-smooth problems. To realize this optimal or nearly optimal order of the shallow Ritz approximation, we develop a damped block Newton (dBN) method that alternates between updates of the linear and non-linear parameters. Per each iteration, the linear and the non-linear parameters are updated by exact inversion and one step of a modified, damped Newton method applied to a reduced non-linear system, respectively. The computational cost of each dBN iteration is $O(n)$. Starting with the non-linear parameters as a uniform partition of the interval, numerical experiments show that the dBN is capable of efficiently moving mesh points to nearly optimal locations. To improve efficiency of the dBN further, we propose an adaptive damped block Newton (AdBN) method by combining the dBN with the adaptive neuron enhancement (ANE) method [26].

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a Layer 2 payment protocol that addresses Bitcoin's scalability by facilitating quick and cost effective transactions through payment channels. This research explores the feasibility of using machine learning models to interpolate channel balances within the network, which can be used for optimizing the network's pathfinding algorithms. While there has been much exploration in balance probing and multipath payment protocols, predicting channel balances using solely node and channel features remains an uncharted area. This paper evaluates the performance of several machine learning models against two heuristic baselines and investigates the predictive capabilities of various features. Our model performs favorably in experimental evaluation, outperforming by 10% against an equal split baseline where both edges are assigned half of the channel capacity.

While significant progress has been made in specifying neural networks capable of representing uncertainty, deep networks still often suffer from overconfidence and misaligned predictive distributions. Existing approaches for measuring this misalignment are primarily developed under the framework of calibration, with common metrics such as Expected Calibration Error (ECE). However, calibration can only provide a strictly marginal assessment of probabilistic alignment. Consequently, calibration metrics such as ECE are $\textit{distribution-wise}$ measures and cannot diagnose the $\textit{point-wise}$ reliability of individual inputs, which is important for real-world decision-making. We propose a stronger condition, which we term $\textit{conditional congruence}$, for assessing probabilistic fit. We also introduce a metric, Conditional Congruence Error (CCE), that uses conditional kernel mean embeddings to estimate the distance, at any point, between the learned predictive distribution and the empirical, conditional distribution in a dataset. We perform several high dimensional regression tasks and show that CCE exhibits four critical properties: $\textit{correctness}$, $\textit{monotonicity}$, $\textit{reliability}$, and $\textit{robustness}$.

Searching through chemical space is an exceptionally challenging problem because the number of possible molecules grows combinatorially with the number of atoms. Large, autoregressive models trained on databases of chemical compounds have yielded powerful generators, but we still lack robust strategies for generating molecules with desired properties. This molecular search problem closely resembles the "alignment" problem for large language models, though for many chemical tasks we have a specific and easily evaluable reward function. Here, we introduce an algorithm called energy rank alignment (ERA) that leverages an explicit reward function to produce a gradient-based objective that we use to optimize autoregressive policies. We show theoretically that this algorithm is closely related to proximal policy optimization (PPO) and direct preference optimization (DPO), but has a minimizer that converges to an ideal Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution with the reward playing the role of an energy function. Furthermore, this algorithm is highly scalable, does not require reinforcement learning, and performs well relative to DPO when the number of preference observations per pairing is small. We deploy this approach to align molecular transformers and protein language models to generate molecules and protein sequences, respectively, with externally specified properties and find that it does so robustly, searching through diverse parts of chemical space.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a popular cloud computing model in which applications are implemented as work flows of multiple independent functions. While cloud providers usually offer composition services for such workflows, they do not support cross-platform workflows forcing developers to hardcode the composition logic. Furthermore, FaaS workflows tend to be slow due to cascading cold starts, inter-function latency, and data download latency on the critical path. In this paper, we propose GeoFF, a serverless choreography middleware that executes FaaS workflows across different public and private FaaS platforms, including ad-hoc workflow recomposition. Furthermore, GeoFF supports function pre-warming and data pre-fetching. This minimizes end-to-end workflow latency by taking cold starts and data download latency off the critical path. In experiments with our proof-of-concept prototype and a realistic application, we were able to reduce end-to-end latency by more than 50%.

We consider solving a combinatorial optimization problem with unknown knapsack constraints using a membership oracle for each unknown constraint such that, given a solution, the oracle determines whether the constraint is satisfied or not with absolute certainty. The goal of the decision maker is to find the best possible solution subject to a budget on the number of oracle calls. Inspired by active learning for binary classification based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs), we devise a framework to solve the problem by learning and exploiting surrogate linear constraints. The framework includes training linear separators on the labeled points and selecting new points to be labeled, which is achieved by applying a sampling strategy and solving a 0-1 integer linear program. Following the active learning literature, a natural choice would be SVM as a linear classifier and the information-based sampling strategy known as simple margin, for each unknown constraint. We improve on both sides: we propose an alternative sampling strategy based on mixed-integer quadratic programming and a linear separation method inspired by an algorithm for convex optimization in the oracle model. We conduct experiments on classical problems and variants inspired by realistic applications to show how different linear separation methods and sampling strategies influence the quality of the results in terms of several metrics including objective value, dual bound and running time.

Various machine learning approaches have gained significant popularity for the automated classification of educational text to identify indicators of learning engagement -- i.e. learning engagement classification (LEC). LEC can offer comprehensive insights into human learning processes, attracting significant interest from diverse research communities, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Learning Analytics, and Educational Data Mining. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable performance in various NLP tasks. However, their comprehensive evaluation and improvement approaches in LEC tasks have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we propose the Annotation Guidelines-based Knowledge Augmentation (AGKA) approach to improve LLMs. AGKA employs GPT 4.0 to retrieve label definition knowledge from annotation guidelines, and then applies the random under-sampler to select a few typical examples. Subsequently, we conduct a systematic evaluation benchmark of LEC, which includes six LEC datasets covering behavior classification (question and urgency level), emotion classification (binary and epistemic emotion), and cognition classification (opinion and cognitive presence). The study results demonstrate that AGKA can enhance non-fine-tuned LLMs, particularly GPT 4.0 and Llama 3 70B. GPT 4.0 with AGKA few-shot outperforms full-shot fine-tuned models such as BERT and RoBERTa on simple binary classification datasets. However, GPT 4.0 lags in multi-class tasks that require a deep understanding of complex semantic information. Notably, Llama 3 70B with AGKA is a promising combination based on open-source LLM, because its performance is on par with closed-source GPT 4.0 with AGKA. In addition, LLMs struggle to distinguish between labels with similar names in multi-class classification.

We study learning to learn for the multi-task structured bandit problem where the goal is to learn a near-optimal algorithm that minimizes cumulative regret. The tasks share a common structure and an algorithm should exploit the shared structure to minimize the cumulative regret for an unseen but related test task. We use a transformer as a decision-making algorithm to learn this shared structure from data collected by a demonstrator on a set of training task instances. Our objective is to devise a training procedure such that the transformer will learn to outperform the demonstrator's learning algorithm on unseen test task instances. Prior work on pretraining decision transformers either requires privileged information like access to optimal arms or cannot outperform the demonstrator. Going beyond these approaches, we introduce a pre-training approach that trains a transformer network to learn a near-optimal policy in-context. This approach leverages the shared structure across tasks, does not require access to optimal actions, and can outperform the demonstrator. We validate these claims over a wide variety of structured bandit problems to show that our proposed solution is general and can quickly identify expected rewards on unseen test tasks to support effective exploration.

The rapid development of time series forecasting research has brought many deep learning-based modules in this field. However, despite the increasing amount of new forecasting architectures, it is still unclear if we have leveraged the full potential of these existing modules within a properly designed architecture. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical neural architecture search approach for time series forecasting tasks. With the design of a hierarchical search space, we incorporate many architecture types designed for forecasting tasks and allow for the efficient combination of different forecasting architecture modules. Results on long-term-time-series-forecasting tasks show that our approach can search for lightweight high-performing forecasting architectures across different forecasting tasks.

In this paper, we extend the Generalized Moving Least-Squares (GMLS) method in two different ways to solve the vector-valued PDEs on unknown smooth 2D manifolds without boundaries embedded in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$, identified with randomly sampled point cloud data. The two approaches are referred to as the intrinsic method and the extrinsic method. For the intrinsic method which relies on local approximations of metric tensors, we simplify the formula of Laplacians and covariant derivatives acting on vector fields at the base point by calculating them in a local Monge coordinate system. On the other hand, the extrinsic method formulates tangential derivatives on a submanifold as the projection of the directional derivative in the ambient Euclidean space onto the tangent space of the submanifold. One challenge of this method is that the discretization of vector Laplacians yields a matrix whose size relies on the ambient dimension. To overcome this issue, we reduce the dimension of vector Laplacian matrices by employing a coordinate transformation. The complexity of both methods scales well with the dimension of manifolds rather than the ambient dimension. We also present supporting numerical examples, including eigenvalue problems, linear Poisson equations, and nonlinear Burgers' equations, to examine the numerical accuracy of proposed methods on various smooth manifolds.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various capabilities but pose safety risks such as generating harmful content and misinformation, even after safety alignment. In this paper, we explore the inner mechanisms of safety alignment through the lens of mechanistic interpretability, focusing on identifying and analyzing safety neurons within LLMs that are responsible for safety behaviors. We propose inference-time activation contrasting to locate these neurons and dynamic activation patching to evaluate their causal effects on model safety. Experiments on multiple prevalent LLMs demonstrate that we can consistently identify about $5\%$ safety neurons, and by only patching their activations we can restore over $90\%$ of the safety performance across various red-teaming benchmarks without influencing general ability. The finding of safety neurons also helps explain the ''alignment tax'' phenomenon by revealing that the key neurons for model safety and helpfulness significantly overlap, yet they require different activation patterns for the same neurons. Furthermore, we demonstrate an application of our findings in safeguarding LLMs by detecting unsafe outputs before generation. The source code is available at this https URL.

Existing Vietnamese Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets lack adversarial complexity, limiting their ability to evaluate model robustness against challenging linguistic phenomena. In this article, we address the gap in robust Vietnamese NLI resources by introducing ViANLI, the first adversarial NLI dataset for Vietnamese, and propose NLIMoE, a Mixture-of-Experts model to tackle its complexity. We construct ViANLI using an adversarial human-and-machine-in-the-loop approach with rigorous verification. NLIMoE integrates expert subnetworks with a learned dynamic routing mechanism on top of a shared transformer encoder. ViANLI comprises over 10,000 premise-hypothesis pairs and challenges state-of-the-art models, with XLM-R Large achieving only 45.5% accuracy, while NLIMoE reaches 47.3%. Training with ViANLI improves performance on other benchmark Vietnamese NLI datasets including ViNLI, VLSP2021-NLI, and VnNewsNLI. ViANLI is released for enhancing research into model robustness and enriching resources for future Vietnamese and multilingual NLI research.

Recommender systems typically represent users and items by learning their embeddings, which are usually set to uniform dimensions and dominate the model parameters. However, real-world recommender systems often operate in streaming recommendation scenarios, where the number of users and items continues to grow, leading to substantial storage resource consumption for these embeddings. Although a few methods attempt to mitigate this by employing embedding size search strategies to assign different embedding dimensions in streaming recommendations, they assume that the embedding size grows with the frequency of users/items, which eventually still exceeds the predefined memory budget over time. To address this issue, this paper proposes to learn Scalable Lightweight Embeddings for streaming recommendation, called SCALL, which can adaptively adjust the embedding sizes of users/items within a given memory budget over time. Specifically, we propose to sample embedding sizes from a probabilistic distribution, with the guarantee to meet any predefined memory budget. By fixing the memory budget, the proposed embedding size sampling strategy can increase and decrease the embedding sizes in accordance to the frequency of the corresponding users or items. Furthermore, we develop a reinforcement learning-based search paradigm that models each state with mean pooling to keep the length of the state vectors fixed, invariant to the changing number of users and items. As a result, the proposed method can provide embedding sizes to unseen users and items. Comprehensive empirical evaluations on two public datasets affirm the advantageous effectiveness of our proposed method.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), exemplified by the release of GPT-3.5 in 2022, has significantly advanced the potential applications of large language models (LLMs), including in the realms of ontology development and knowledge graph creation. Ontologies, which are structured frameworks for organizing information, and knowledge graphs, which combine ontologies with actual data, are essential for enabling interoperability and automated reasoning. However, current research has largely overlooked the generation of ontologies extending from established upper-level frameworks like the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), risking the creation of non-integrable ontology silos. This study explores the extent to which LLMs, particularly GPT-4, can support ontologists trained in BFO. Through iterative development of a specialized GPT model named "My Ontologist," we aimed to generate BFO-conformant ontologies. Initial versions faced challenges in maintaining definition conventions and leveraging foundational texts effectively. My Ontologist 3.0 showed promise by adhering to structured rules and modular ontology suites, yet the release of GPT-4o disrupted this progress by altering the model's behavior. Our findings underscore the importance of aligning LLM-generated ontologies with top-level standards and highlight the complexities of integrating evolving AI capabilities in ontology engineering.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enhance the effectiveness of enriching item descriptions, thereby improving the accuracy of recommendation systems. However, most existing approaches either rely on text-only prompting or employ basic multimodal strategies that do not fully exploit the complementary information available from both textual and visual modalities. This paper introduces a novel framework, Cross-Reflection Prompting, termed X-Reflect, designed to address these limitations by prompting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly identify and reconcile supportive and conflicting information between text and images. By capturing nuanced insights from both modalities, this approach generates more comprehensive and contextually rich item representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing prompting baselines in downstream recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we identify a U-shaped relationship between text-image dissimilarity and recommendation performance, suggesting the benefit of applying multimodal prompting selectively. To support efficient real-time inference, we also introduce X-Reflect-keyword, a lightweight variant that summarizes image content using keywords and replaces the base model with a smaller backbone, achieving nearly 50% reduction in input length while maintaining competitive performance. This work underscores the importance of integrating multimodal information and presents an effective solution for improving item understanding in multimodal recommendation systems.

Deepfakes, which employ GAN to produce highly realistic facial modification, are widely regarded as the prevailing method. Traditional CNN have been able to identify bogus media, but they struggle to perform well on different datasets and are vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to their lack of robustness. Vision transformers have demonstrated potential in the realm of image classification problems, but they require enough training data. Motivated by these limitations, this publication introduces Tex-ViT (Texture-Vision Transformer), which enhances CNN features by combining ResNet with a vision transformer. The model combines traditional ResNet features with a texture module that operates in parallel on sections of ResNet before each down-sampling operation. The texture module then serves as an input to the dual branch of the cross-attention vision transformer. It specifically focuses on improving the global texture module, which extracts feature map correlation. Empirical analysis reveals that fake images exhibit smooth textures that do not remain consistent over long distances in manipulations. Experiments were performed on different categories of FF++, such as DF, f2f, FS, and NT, together with other types of GAN datasets in cross-domain scenarios. Furthermore, experiments also conducted on FF++, DFDCPreview, and Celeb-DF dataset underwent several post-processing situations, such as blurring, compression, and noise. The model surpassed the most advanced models in terms of generalization, achieving a 98% accuracy in cross-domain scenarios. This demonstrates its ability to learn the shared distinguishing textural characteristics in the manipulated samples. These experiments provide evidence that the proposed model is capable of being applied to various situations and is resistant to many post-processing procedures.

In this work, we study the numerical approximation of minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau free energy, a common model to describe the behavior of superconductors under magnetic fields. The unknowns are the order parameter, which characterizes the density of superconducting charge carriers, and the magnetic vector potential, which allows to deduce the magnetic field that penetrates the superconductor. Physically important and numerically challenging are especially settings which involve lattices of quantized vortices which can be formed in materials with a large Ginzburg-Landau parameter $\kappa$. In particular, $\kappa$ introduces a severe mesh resolution condition for numerical approximations. In order to reduce these computational restrictions, we investigate a particular discretization which is based on mixed meshes where we apply a Lagrange finite element approach for the vector potential and a localized orthogonal decomposition (LOD) approach for the order parameter. We justify the proposed method by a rigorous a-priori error analysis (in $L^2$ and $H^1$) in which we keep track of the influence of $\kappa$ in all error contributions. This allows us to conclude $\kappa$-dependent resolution conditions for the various meshes and which only impose moderate practical constraints compared to a conventional finite element discretization. Finally, our theoretical findings are illustrated by numerical experiments.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial in ensuring desirable and controllable model behaviors. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on the Bradley-Terry (B-T) model to maximize the likelihood of pairwise choices. However, when multiple responses are available, the B-T model fails to guarantee an accurate list ranking of the responses. To address this issue, we propose Permutative Preference Alignment (PPA), a novel offline listwise approach that incorporates the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), a widely-used ranking metric, as an alternative training objective for LLM alignment. We develop an end-to-end alignment algorithm by approximating NDCG with a differentiable surrogate loss. Experiments demonstrate that PPA outperforms existing pairwise and listwise methods on evaluation sets and general benchmarks such as AlpacaEval. Furthermore, we show that NDCG-based approaches improve ranking accuracy more effectively than B-T-based methods and provide a theoretical explanation for this improvement.

Despite their immense success, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be difficult to optimize and costly to train due to hundreds of layers within the network depth. Conventional convolutional operations are fundamentally limited by their linear nature along with fixed activations, where many layers are needed to learn meaningful patterns in data. Because of the sheer size of these networks, this approach is simply computationally inefficient, and poses overfitting or gradient explosion risks, especially in small datasets. As a result, we introduce a "plug-in" module, called Residual Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (RKAN). Our module is highly compact, so it can be easily added into any stage (level) of traditional deep networks, where it learns to integrate supportive polynomial feature transformations to existing convolutional frameworks. RKAN offers consistent improvements over baseline models in different vision tasks and widely tested benchmarks, accomplishing cutting-edge performance on them.

With the increasing use of neural policies in control systems, ensuring their safety and reliability has become a critical software engineering task. One prevalent approach to ensuring the safety of neural policies is to deploy programmatic runtime shields alongside them to correct their unsafe commands. However, the programmatic runtime shields synthesized by existing methods are either computationally expensive or insufficiently permissive, resulting in high overhead and unnecessary interventions on the system. To address these challenges, we propose Aegis, a novel framework that synthesizes lightweight and permissive programmatic runtime shields for neural policies. Aegis achieves this by formulating the seeking of a runtime shield as a sketch-based program synthesis problem and proposing a novel method that leverages counterexample-guided inductive synthesis and Bayesian optimization to solve it. To evaluate Aegis and its synthesized shields, we use eight representative control systems and compare Aegis with the current state-of-the-art. Our results show that the programmatic runtime shields synthesized by Aegis can correct all unsafe commands from neural policies, ensuring that the systems do not violate any desired safety properties at all times. Compared to the current state-of-the-art, Aegis's shields exhibit a 2.2$\times$ reduction in time overhead and a 3.9$\times$ reduction in memory usage, suggesting that they are much more lightweight. Moreover, Aegis's shields incur an average of 1.5$\times$ fewer interventions than other shields, showing better permissiveness.

SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values are a widely used method for local feature attribution in interpretable and explainable AI. We propose an efficient two-stage algorithm for computing SHAP values in both black-box setting and tree-based models. Motivated by spectral bias in real-world predictors, we first approximate models using compact Fourier representations, exactly for trees and approximately for black-box models. In the second stage, we introduce a closed-form formula for {\em exactly} computing SHAP values using the Fourier representation, that ``linearizes'' the computation into a simple summation and is amenable to parallelization. As the Fourier approximation is computed only once, our method enables amortized SHAP value computation, achieving significant speedups over existing methods and a tunable trade-off between efficiency and precision.

Machine Learning models in real-world applications must continuously learn new tasks to adapt to shifts in the data-generating distribution. Yet, for Continual Learning (CL), models often struggle to balance learning new tasks (plasticity) with retaining previous knowledge (memory stability). Consequently, they are susceptible to Catastrophic Forgetting, which degrades performance and undermines the reliability of deployed systems. In the Bayesian CL literature, variational methods tackle this challenge by employing a learning objective that recursively updates the posterior distribution while constraining it to stay close to its previous estimate. Nonetheless, we argue that these methods may be ineffective due to compounding approximation errors over successive recursions. To mitigate this, we propose new learning objectives that integrate the regularization effects of multiple previous posterior estimations, preventing individual errors from dominating future posterior updates and compounding over time. We reveal insightful connections between these objectives and Temporal-Difference methods, a popular learning mechanism in Reinforcement Learning and Neuroscience. Experiments on challenging CL benchmarks show that our approach effectively mitigates Catastrophic Forgetting, outperforming strong Variational CL methods.

In this work, we study to release the potential of massive heterogeneous weak computing power to collaboratively train large-scale models on dispersed datasets. In order to improve both efficiency and accuracy in resource-adaptive collaborative learning, we take the first step to consider the \textit{unstructured pruning}, \textit{varying submodel architectures}, \textit{knowledge loss}, and \textit{straggler} challenges simultaneously. We propose a novel semi-asynchronous collaborative training framework, namely ${Co\text{-}S}^2{P}$, with data distribution-aware structured pruning and cross-block knowledge transfer mechanism to address the above concerns. Furthermore, we provide theoretical proof that ${Co\text{-}S}^2{P}$ can achieve asymptotic optimal convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{N^*EQ})$. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two types of tasks with a real-world hardware testbed including diverse IoT this http URL experimental results demonstrate that $Co\text{-}S^2P$ improves accuracy by up to 8.8\% and resource utilization by up to 1.2$\times$ compared to state-of-the-art methods, while reducing memory consumption by approximately 22\% and training time by about 24\% on all resource-limited devices.

Recent research has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks, where adversarial suffixes crafted by algorithms appended to harmful queries bypass safety alignment and trigger unintended responses. Current methods for generating these suffixes are computationally expensive and have low Attack Success Rates (ASR), especially against well-aligned models like Llama2 and Llama3. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ADV-LLM, an iterative self-tuning process that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. Our framework significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100\% ASR on various open-source LLMs. Moreover, it exhibits strong attack transferability to closed-source models, achieving 99\% ASR on GPT-3.5 and 49\% ASR on GPT-4, despite being optimized solely on Llama3. Beyond improving jailbreak ability, ADV-LLM provides valuable insights for future safety alignment research through its ability to generate large datasets for studying LLM safety. Our code is available at: this https URL

Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important for text generation, proposing layer-level KV cache compression to selectively retain key information. Recognizing the distinct roles of attention heads in generation, we propose HeadKV, a head-level KV cache compression method, and HeadKV-R2, which leverages a novel contextual reasoning ability estimation for compression. Our approach operates at the level of individual heads, estimating their importance for contextual QA tasks that require both retrieval and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks (LongBench, LooGLE), model architectures (e.g., Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct), and long-context abilities tests demonstrate that our head-level KV cache compression significantly outperforms strong baselines, particularly in low-resource settings (KV size = 64 & 128). Notably, our method retains just 1.5% of the KV cache while achieving 97% of the performance of the full KV cache on the contextual question answering benchmark. Codes are available at this https URL

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective for downstream applications. In the multi-task setting, prior works have shown empirically that specific meta-learning approaches for preparing a model for future adaptation through parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) can outperform standard retraining methods, but the mechanism of the benefits of meta-learning has been largely unexplored. We introduce a framework for generic PEFT-based meta-learning to learn a model that can easily adapt to unseen tasks. For linear models using LoRA, we show that standard retraining is provably suboptimal for finding an adaptable set of parameters and provide strict performance guarantees for our proposed method. We verify these theoretical insights through experiments on synthetic data as well as real-data vision and language tasks. We observe significant performance benefits using a simple implementation of our proposed meta-learning scheme during retraining relative to the conventional approach.

Hybrid dynamical systems pose significant challenges for effective planning and control, especially when additional constraints such as obstacle avoidance, state boundaries, and actuation limits are present. In this letter, we extend the recently proposed Hybrid iLQR method [1] to handle state and input constraints within an indirect optimization framework, aiming to preserve computational efficiency and ensure dynamic feasibility. Specifically, we incorporate two constraint handling mechanisms into the Hybrid iLQR: Discrete Barrier State and Augmented Lagrangian methods. Comprehensive simulations across various operational situations are conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of these extended methods in terms of convergence and their ability to handle infeasible starting trajectories. Results indicate that while the Discrete Barrier State approach is more computationally efficient, the Augmented Lagrangian method outperforms it in complex and real-world scenarios with infeasible initial trajectories.

In this work, we propose a novel discrete-time distributed algorithm for finding least-squares solutions of linear algebraic equations with a scheduling protocol to further enhance its scalability. Each agent in the network is assumed to know some rows of the coefficient matrix and the corresponding entries in the observation vector. Unlike typical distributed algorithms, our approach considers communication bandwidth limits, allowing agents to transmit only a portion of their ``guessed" solution, independent of its dimension. A cyclic scheduling protocol determines which portion is transmitted at each iteration. Assuming a small fixed step size and a diagonalizable algorithm matrix, we prove that agents' ``guessed" solutions converge exponentially to a least squares solution. For cases where the observation vectors are time-varying, a modified algorithm guarantees practical convergence, with tracking error bounded by the single-step variation in the observation vector. Simulations and comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms validate our algorithm's feasibility and scalability.

The typical Selective State-Space Model (SSM) used in Mamba addresses several limitations of Transformers, such as the quadratic computational complexity with respect to sequence length and the significant memory requirements during inference due to the key-value (KV) cache. However, the increasing size of Mamba models continues to pose challenges for training and deployment, particularly due to their substantial computational demands during both training and inference. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{Bi-Mamba}$, a scalable and powerful 1-bit Mamba architecture designed to enable more efficient large language models (LLMs), with model sizes of 780M, 1.3B, and 2.7B parameters. $\texttt{Bi-Mamba}$ models are trained from scratch on a standard LLM-scale dataset using an autoregressive distillation loss. Extensive experiments on language modeling benchmarks demonstrate that $\texttt{Bi-Mamba}$ achieves performance comparable to its full-precision (FP16 or BF16) counterparts, while outperforming post-training binarization (PTB) Mamba and binarization-aware training (BAT) Transformer baselines. Moreover, $\texttt{Bi-Mamba}$ drastically reduces memory usage and computational cost compared to the original Mamba. Our work pioneers a new line of linear-complexity LLMs under low-bit representation and provides the way for the design of specialized hardware optimized for efficient 1-bit Mamba-based models. Code and the pre-trained weights are available at this https URL.

Embodied agents powered by large language models (LLMs), such as Voyager, promise open-ended competence in worlds such as Minecraft. However, when powered by open-weight LLMs they still falter on elementary tasks after domain-specific fine-tuning. We propose MindForge, a generative-agent framework for cultural lifelong learning through explicit perspective taking. We introduce three key innovations: (1) a structured theory of mind representation linking percepts, beliefs, desires, and actions; (2) natural inter-agent communication; and (3) a multi-component memory system. Following the cultural learning framework, we test MindForge in both instructive and collaborative settings within Minecraft. In an instructive setting with GPT-4, MindForge agents powered by open-weight LLMs significantly outperform their Voyager counterparts in basic tasks yielding $3\times$ more tech-tree milestones and collecting $2.3\times$ more unique items than the Voyager baseline. Furthermore, in fully \textit{collaborative} settings, we find that the performance of two underachieving agents improves with more communication rounds, echoing the Condorcet Jury Theorem. MindForge agents demonstrate sophisticated behaviors, including expert-novice knowledge transfer, collaborative problem solving, and adaptation to out-of-distribution tasks through accumulated cultural experiences.

Robotic manipulators are critical in many applications but are known to degrade over time. This degradation is influenced by the nature of the tasks performed by the robot. Tasks with higher severity, such as handling heavy payloads, can accelerate the degradation process. One way this degradation is reflected is in the position accuracy of the robot's end-effector. In this paper, we present a prognostic modeling framework that predicts a robotic manipulator's Remaining Useful Life (RUL) while accounting for the effects of task severity. Our framework represents the robot's position accuracy as a Brownian motion process with a random drift parameter that is influenced by task severity. The dynamic nature of task severity is modeled using a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). To evaluate RUL, we discuss two approaches -- (1) a novel closed-form expression for Remaining Lifetime Distribution (RLD), and (2) Monte Carlo simulations, commonly used in prognostics literature. Theoretical results establish the equivalence between these RUL computation approaches. We validate our framework through experiments using two distinct physics-based simulators for planar and spatial robot fleets. Our findings show that robots in both fleets experience shorter RUL when handling a higher proportion of high-severity tasks.

With the explosive growth of users and items, Recommender Systems are facing unprecedented challenges in terms of retrieval efficiency and storage overhead. Learning to Hash techniques have emerged as a promising solution to these issues by encoding high-dimensional data into compact hash codes. As a result, hashing-based recommendation methods (HashRec) have garnered growing attention for enabling large-scale and efficient recommendation services. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art HashRec algorithms. Specifically, we begin by introducing the common two-tower architecture used in the recall stage and by detailing two predominant hash search strategies. Then, we categorize existing works into a three-tier taxonomy based on: (i) learning objectives, (ii) optimization strategies, and (iii) recommendation scenarios. Additionally, we summarize widely adopted evaluation metrics for assessing both the effectiveness and efficiency of HashRec algorithms. Finally, we discuss current limitations in the field and outline promising directions for future research. We index these HashRec methods at the repository \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success but are often considered to be challenged by varying levels of homophily in graphs. Recent empirical studies have surprisingly shown that homophilic GNNs can perform well across datasets of different homophily levels with proper hyperparameter tuning, but the underlying theory and effective architectures remain unclear. To advance GNN universality across varying homophily, we theoretically revisit GNN message passing and uncover a novel smoothness-generalization dilemma, where increasing hops inevitably enhances smoothness at the cost of generalization. This dilemma hinders learning in higher-order homophilic neighborhoods and all heterophilic ones, where generalization is critical due to complex neighborhood class distributions that are sensitive to shifts induced by noise and sparsity. To address this, we introduce the Inceptive Graph Neural Network (IGNN) built on three simple yet effective design principles, which alleviate the dilemma by enabling distinct hop-wise generalization alongside improved overall generalization with adaptive smoothness. Benchmarking against 30 baselines demonstrates IGNN's superiority and reveals notable universality in certain homophilic GNN variants. Our code and datasets are available at this https URL.

Manipulating the illumination of a 3D scene within a single image represents a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. This problem has traditionally been addressed using inverse rendering techniques, which involve explicit 3D asset reconstruction and costly ray-tracing simulations. Meanwhile, recent advancements in visual foundation models suggest that a new paradigm could soon be possible -- one that replaces explicit physical models with networks that are trained on large amounts of image and video data. In this paper, we exploit the implicit scene understanding of a video diffusion model, particularly Stable Video Diffusion, to relight a single image. We introduce GenLit, a framework that distills the ability of a graphics engine to perform light manipulation into a video-generation model, enabling users to directly insert and manipulate a point light in the 3D world within a given image and generate results directly as a video sequence. We find that a model fine-tuned on only a small synthetic dataset generalizes to real-world scenes, enabling single-image relighting with plausible and convincing shadows and inter-reflections. Our results highlight the ability of video foundation models to capture rich information about lighting, material, and shape, and our findings indicate that such models, with minimal training, can be used to perform relighting without explicit asset reconstruction or ray-tracing. . Project page: this https URL.

Building a universal multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that performs equitably across languages has long been a challenge due to its inherent difficulties. To address this task we introduce a Language-Agnostic Multilingual ASR pipeline through orthography Unification and language-specific Transliteration (LAMA-UT). LAMA-UT operates without any language-specific modules while matching the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on a minimal amount of data. Our pipeline consists of two key steps. First, we utilize a universal transcription generator to unify orthographic features into Romanized form and capture common phonetic characteristics across diverse languages. Second, we utilize a universal converter to transform these universal transcriptions into language-specific ones. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method leveraging universal transcriptions for massively multilingual ASR. Our pipeline achieves a relative error reduction rate of 45% when compared to Whisper and performs comparably to MMS, despite being trained on only 0.1% of Whisper's training data. Furthermore, our pipeline does not rely on any language-specific modules. However, it performs on par with zero-shot ASR approaches which utilize additional language-specific lexicons and language models. We expect this framework to serve as a cornerstone for flexible multilingual ASR systems that are generalizable even to unseen languages.

Accelerating model convergence in resource-constrained environments is essential for fast and efficient neural network training. This work presents learn2mix, a new training strategy that adaptively adjusts class proportions within batches, focusing on classes with higher error rates. Unlike classical training methods that use static class proportions, learn2mix continually adapts class proportions during training, leading to faster convergence. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets show that neural networks trained with learn2mix converge faster than those trained with existing approaches, achieving improved results for classification, regression, and reconstruction tasks under limited training resources and with imbalanced classes. Our empirical findings are supported by theoretical analysis.

While Diffusion Models (DM) exhibit remarkable performance across various image generative tasks, they nonetheless reflect the inherent bias presented in the training set. As DMs are now widely used in real-world applications, these biases could perpetuate a distorted worldview and hinder opportunities for minority groups. Existing methods on debiasing DMs usually requires model retraining with a human-crafted reference dataset or additional classifiers, which suffer from two major limitations: (1) collecting reference datasets causes expensive annotation cost; (2) the debiasing performance is heavily constrained by the quality of the reference dataset or the additional classifier. To address the above limitations, we propose FairGen, a plug-and-play method that learns attribute latent directions in a self-discovering manner, thus eliminating the reliance on such reference dataset. Specifically, FairGen consists of two parts: a set of attribute adapters and a distribution indicator. Each adapter in the set aims to learn an attribute latent direction, and is optimized via noise composition through a self-discovering process. Then, the distribution indicator is multiplied by the set of adapters to guide the generation process towards the prescribed distribution. Our method enables debiasing multiple attributes in DMs simultaneously, while remaining lightweight and easily integrable with other DMs, eliminating the need for retraining. Extensive experiments on debiasing gender, racial, and their intersectional biases show that our method outperforms previous SOTA by a large margin.

We present a three-stage framework for training deep learning models specializing in antibody sequence-structure co-design. We first pre-train a language model using millions of antibody sequence data. Then, we employ the learned representations to guide the training of a diffusion model for joint optimization over both sequence and structure of antibodies. During the final alignment stage, we optimize the model to favor antibodies with low repulsion and high attraction to the antigen binding site, enhancing the rationality and functionality of the designs. To mitigate conflicting energy preferences, we extend AbDPO (Antibody Direct Preference Optimization) to guide the model toward Pareto optimality under multiple energy-based alignment objectives. Furthermore, we adopt an iterative learning paradigm with temperature scaling, enabling the model to benefit from diverse online datasets without requiring additional data. In practice, our proposed methods achieve high stability and efficiency in producing a better Pareto front of antibody designs compared to top samples generated by baselines and previous alignment techniques. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the superior performance of our methods in generating nature-like antibodies with high binding affinity.

Faces and humans are crucial elements in social interaction and are widely included in everyday photos and videos. Therefore, a deep understanding of faces and humans will enable multi-modal assistants to achieve improved response quality and broadened application scope. Currently, the multi-modal assistant community lacks a comprehensive and scientific evaluation of face and human understanding abilities. In this paper, we first propose a hierarchical ability taxonomy that includes three levels of abilities. Then, based on this taxonomy, we collect images and annotations from publicly available datasets in the face and human community and build a semi-automatic data pipeline to produce problems for the new benchmark. Finally, the obtained Face-Human-Bench includes a development set and a test set, each with 1800 problems, supporting both English and Chinese. We conduct evaluations over 25 mainstream multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with our Face-Human-Bench, focusing on the correlation between abilities, the impact of the relative position of targets on performance, and the impact of Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting on performance. We also explore which abilities of MLLMs need to be supplemented by specialist models. The dataset and evaluation code have been made publicly available at this https URL.

The paper derives analytical expressions for the asymptotic average updating direction of the adaptive moment generation (ADAM) algorithm when applied to recursive identification of nonlinear systems. It is proved that the standard hyper-parameter setting results in the same asymptotic average updating direction as a diagonally power normalized stochastic gradient algorithm. With the internal filtering turned off, the asymptotic average updating direction is instead equivalent to that of a sign-sign stochastic gradient algorithm. Global convergence to an invariant set follows, where a subset of parameters contain those that give a correct input-output description of the system. The paper also exploits a nonlinear dynamic model to embed structure in recurrent neural networks. A Monte-Carlo simulation study validates the results.

We investigate transformer-based language models, including RoBERTa, T5, Llama-3, and MatSciBERT, for predicting the band gaps of semiconductor materials directly from textual descriptions. The inputs encode key material features, such as chemical composition, crystal system, space group, and other structural and electronic properties. Unlike shallow machine learning models, which require extensive feature engineering, or Graph Neural Networks, which rely on graph representations derived from atomic coordinates, pretrained language models can process textual inputs directly, eliminating the need for manual feature preprocessing or structure-based encoding. Material descriptions were constructed in two formats: structured strings with a consistent template and natural language narratives generated via the ChatGPT API. Each model was augmented with a custom regression head and finetuned for band gap prediction task. Language models of different architectures and parameter sizes were all able to predict band gaps from human-readable text with strong accuracy, achieving MAEs in the range of 0.25-0.33 eV, highlighting the success of this approach for scientific regression tasks. Finetuned Llama-3, with 1.2 billion parameters, achieved the highest accuracy (MAE 0.248 eV, R2 0.891). MatSciBERT, pretrained on materials science literature, reached comparable performance (MAE 0.288 eV, R2 0.871) with significantly fewer parameters (110 million), emphasizing the importance of domain-specific pretraining. Attention analysis shows that both models selectively focus on compositional and spin-related features while de-emphasizing geometric features, reflecting the difficulty of capturing spatial information from text. These results establish that pretrained language models can effectively extract complex feature-property relationships from textual material descriptions.

The Active Subspace (AS) method is a widely used technique for identifying the most influential directions in high-dimensional input spaces that affect the output of a computational model. The standard AS algorithm requires a sufficient number of gradient evaluations (samples) of the input output map to achieve quasi-optimal reconstruction of the active subspace, which can lead to a significant computational cost if the samples include numerical discretization errors which have to be kept sufficiently small. To address this issue, we propose a multilevel version of the Active Subspace method (MLAS) that utilizes samples computed with different accuracies and yields different active subspaces across accuracy levels, which can match the accuracy of single-level AS with reduced computational cost, making it suitable for downstream tasks such as function approximation. In particular, we propose to perform the latter via optimally-weighted least-squares polynomial approximation in the different active subspaces, and we present an adaptive algorithm to choose dynamically the dimensions of the active subspaces and polynomial spaces. We demonstrate the practical viability of the MLAS method with polynomial approximation through numerical experiments based on random partial differential equations (PDEs).

Long-context large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, driven by techniques like Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) (Su et al., 2023) and its extensions (Chen et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2024c; Peng et al., 2023). By adjusting RoPE parameters and incorporating training data with extended contexts, we can train performant models with considerably longer input sequences. However, existing RoPE-based methods exhibit performance limitations when applied to extended context lengths. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various attention mechanisms, including RoPE, No Positional Embedding (NoPE), and Query-Key Normalization (QK-Norm), identifying their strengths and shortcomings in long-context modeling. Our investigation identifies distinctive attention patterns in these methods and highlights their impact on long-context performance, providing valuable insights for architectural design. Building on these findings, we propose a novel architecture featuring a hybrid attention mechanism that integrates global and local attention spans. This design not only surpasses conventional RoPE-based transformer models with full attention in both long and short context tasks but also delivers substantial efficiency gains during training and inference.

Large language models (LLMs) process entire input contexts indiscriminately, which is inefficient when the information required to answer a query is localized within the context. We present dynamic context cutoff, a novel method enabling LLMs to self-terminate processing upon acquiring sufficient task-relevant information. Through analysis of model internals, we discover that specific attention heads inherently encode "sufficiency signals" -- detectable through lightweight classifiers -- that predict when critical information has been processed. This reveals a new efficiency paradigm: models' internal understanding naturally dictates processing needs rather than external compression heuristics. Comprehensive experiments across six QA datasets (up to 40K tokens) with three model families (LLaMA/Qwen/Mistral, 1B-70B) demonstrate 3.4% accuracy improvement while achieving 1.33x token reduction on average. Furthermore, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to other context efficiency methods at equivalent token reduction rates. Additionally, we observe an emergent scaling phenomenon: while smaller models require probing for sufficiency detection, larger models exhibit intrinsic self-assessment capabilities through prompting.

Leveraging attention sparsity to accelerate long-context large language models (LLMs) has been a hot research topic. However, current algorithms such as sparse attention or key-value (KV) cache compression tend to use a fixed budget, which presents a significant challenge during deployment because it fails to account for the dynamic nature of real-world scenarios, where the optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency can vary greatly. In this paper, we find that borrowing top-$p$ sampling (nucleus sampling) to sparse attention can surprisingly achieve adaptive budgeting. Based on this, we propose Twilight, a framework to bring adaptive sparsity to any existing sparse attention algorithm without sacrificing their accuracy. Empirical results show that Twilight can adaptively prune at most 98% of redundant tokens, leading to $15.4\times$ acceleration in self-attention operations and $3.9\times$ acceleration in end-to-end per token latency in long context LLM decoding.

This paper introduces IRIS, an Immersive Robot Interaction System leveraging Extended Reality (XR). Existing XR-based systems enable efficient data collection but are often challenging to reproduce and reuse due to their specificity to particular robots, objects, simulators, and environments. IRIS addresses these issues by supporting immersive interaction and data collection across diverse simulators and real-world scenarios. It visualizes arbitrary rigid and deformable objects, robots from simulation, and integrates real-time sensor-generated point clouds for real-world applications. Additionally, IRIS enhances collaborative capabilities by enabling multiple users to simultaneously interact within the same virtual scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IRIS offers efficient and intuitive data collection in both simulated and real-world settings.

Accurate epidemic forecasting is crucial for outbreak preparedness, but existing data-driven models are often brittle. Typically trained on a single pathogen, they struggle with data scarcity during new outbreaks and fail under distribution shifts caused by viral evolution or interventions. However, decades of surveillance data from diverse diseases offer an untapped source of transferable knowledge. To leverage the collective lessons from history, we propose CAPE, the first open-source pre-trained model for epidemic forecasting. Unlike existing time series foundation models that overlook epidemiological challenges, CAPE models epidemic dynamics as mixtures of latent population states, termed compartmental prototypes. It discovers a flexible dictionary of compartment prototypes directly from surveillance data, enabling each outbreak to be expressed as a time-varying mixture that links observed infections to latent population states. To promote robust generalization, CAPE combines self-supervised pre-training objectives with lightweight epidemic-aware regularizers that align the learned prototypes with epidemiological semantics. On a comprehensive benchmark spanning 17 diseases and 50+ regions, CAPE significantly outperforms strong baselines in zero-shot, few-shot, and full-shot forecasting. This work represents a principled step toward pre-trained epidemic models that are both transferable and epidemiologically grounded.

We present a novel video generation framework that integrates 3-dimensional geometry and dynamic awareness. To achieve this, we augment 2D videos with 3D point trajectories and align them in pixel space. The resulting 3D-aware video dataset, PointVid, is then used to fine-tune a latent diffusion model, enabling it to track 2D objects with 3D Cartesian coordinates. Building on this, we regularize the shape and motion of objects in the video to eliminate undesired artifacts, e.g., non-physical deformation. Consequently, we enhance the quality of generated RGB videos and alleviate common issues like object morphing, which are prevalent in current video models due to a lack of shape awareness. With our 3D augmentation and regularization, our model is capable of handling contact-rich scenarios such as task-oriented videos, where 3D information is essential for perceiving shape and motion of interacting solids. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing video diffusion models to improve their visual plausibility.

We propose Heterogeneous Swarms, an algorithm to design multi-LLM systems by jointly optimizing model roles and weights. We represent multi-LLM systems as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of LLMs with topological message passing for collaborative generation. Given a pool of LLM experts and a utility function, Heterogeneous Swarms employs two iterative steps: role-step and weight-step. For role-step, we interpret model roles as learning a DAG that specifies the flow of inputs and outputs between LLMs. Starting from a swarm of random continuous adjacency matrices, we decode them into discrete DAGs, call the LLMs in topological order, evaluate on the utility function (e.g. accuracy on a task), and optimize the adjacency matrices with particle swarm optimization based on the utility score. For weight-step, we assess the contribution of individual LLMs in the multi-LLM systems and optimize model weights with swarm intelligence. We propose JFK-score to quantify the individual contribution of each LLM in the best-found DAG of the role-step, then optimize model weights with particle swarm optimization based on the JFK-score. Experiments demonstrate that Heterogeneous Swarms outperforms 15 role- and/or weight-based baselines by 18.5% on average across 12 tasks. Further analysis reveals that Heterogeneous Swarms discovers multi-LLM systems with heterogeneous model roles and substantial collaborative gains, and benefits from the diversity of language models.

The advent of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has heightened the trade-off between model explainability and security. In particular, explainability techniques, such as counterfactual explanations, inadvertently increase the risk of model extraction attacks, enabling unauthorized replication of proprietary models. In this paper, we formalize and characterize the risks and inherent complexity of model reconstruction, focusing on the "oracle'' queries required for faithfully inferring the underlying prediction function. We present the first formal analysis of model extraction attacks through the lens of competitive analysis, establishing a foundational framework to evaluate their efficiency. Focusing on models based on additive decision trees (e.g., decision trees, gradient boosting, and random forests), we introduce novel reconstruction algorithms that achieve provably perfect fidelity while demonstrating strong anytime performance. Our framework provides theoretical bounds on the query complexity for extracting tree-based model, offering new insights into the security vulnerabilities of their deployment.

Imagination in world models is crucial for enabling agents to learn long-horizon policy in a sample-efficient manner. Existing recurrent state-space model (RSSM)-based world models depend on single-step statistical inference to capture the environment dynamics, and, hence, they are unable to perform long-term imagination tasks due to the accumulation of prediction errors. Inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we propose a novel dual-mind world model (DMWM) framework that integrates logical reasoning to enable imagination with logical consistency. DMWM is composed of two components: an RSSM-based System 1 (RSSM-S1) component that handles state transitions in an intuitive manner and a logic-integrated neural network-based System 2 (LINN-S2) component that guides the imagination process through hierarchical deep logical reasoning. The inter-system feedback mechanism is designed to ensure that the imagination process follows the logical rules of the real environment. The proposed framework is evaluated on benchmark tasks that require long-term planning from the DMControl suite. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework yields significant improvements in terms of logical coherence, trial efficiency, data efficiency and long-term imagination over the state-of-the-art world models.

The Weak-form Estimation of Non-linear Dynamics (WENDy) framework is a recently developed approach for parameter estimation and inference of systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Prior work demonstrated WENDy to be robust, computationally efficient, and accurate, but only works for ODEs which are linear-in-parameters. In this work, we derive a novel extension to accommodate systems of a more general class of ODEs that are nonlinear-in-parameters. Our new WENDy-MLE algorithm approximates a maximum likelihood estimator via local non-convex optimization methods. This is made possible by the availability of analytic expressions for the likelihood function and its first and second order derivatives. WENDy-MLE has better accuracy, a substantially larger domain of convergence, and is often faster than other weak form methods and the conventional output error least squares method. Moreover, we extend the framework to accommodate data corrupted by multiplicative log-normal noise. The this http URL algorithm is efficiently implemented in Julia. In order to demonstrate the practical benefits of our approach, we present extensive numerical results comparing our method, other weak form methods, and output error least squares on a suite of benchmark systems of ODEs in terms of accuracy, precision, bias, and coverage.

This paper addresses the problem of weakly supervised cross-view localization, where the goal is to estimate the pose of a ground camera relative to a satellite image with noisy ground truth annotations. A common approach to bridge the cross-view domain gap for pose estimation is Bird's-Eye View (BEV) synthesis. However, existing methods struggle with height ambiguity due to the lack of depth information in ground images and satellite height maps. Previous solutions either assume a flat ground plane or rely on complex models, such as cross-view transformers. We propose BevSplat, a novel method that resolves height ambiguity by using feature-based Gaussian primitives. Each pixel in the ground image is represented by a 3D Gaussian with semantic and spatial features, which are synthesized into a BEV feature map for relative pose estimation. Additionally, to address challenges with panoramic query images, we introduce an icosphere-based supervision strategy for the Gaussian primitives. We validate our method on the widely used KITTI and VIGOR datasets, which include both pinhole and panoramic query images. Experimental results show that BevSplat significantly improves localization accuracy over prior approaches.

We contribute towards resolving the open question of how many hidden layers are required in ReLU networks for exactly representing all continuous and piecewise linear functions on $\mathbb{R}^d$. While the question has been resolved in special cases, the best known lower bound in general is still 2. We focus on neural networks that are compatible with certain polyhedral complexes, more precisely with the braid fan. For such neural networks, we prove a non-constant lower bound of $\Omega(\log\log d)$ hidden layers required to exactly represent the maximum of $d$ numbers. Additionally, under our assumption, we provide a combinatorial proof that 3 hidden layers are necessary to compute the maximum of 5 numbers; this had only been verified with an excessive computation so far. Finally, we show that a natural generalization of the best known upper bound to maxout networks is not tight, by demonstrating that a rank-3 maxout layer followed by a rank-2 maxout layer is sufficient to represent the maximum of 7 numbers.

Recent advances in skill learning has propelled robot manipulation to new heights by enabling it to learn complex manipulation tasks from a practical number of demonstrations. However, these skills are often limited to the particular action, object, and environment \textit{instances} that are shown in the training data, and have trouble transferring to other instances of the same category. In this work we present an open-vocabulary Spatial-Semantic Diffusion policy (S$^2$-Diffusion) which enables generalization from instance-level training data to category-level, enabling skills to be transferable between instances of the same category. We show that functional aspects of skills can be captured via a promptable semantic module combined with a spatial representation. We further propose leveraging depth estimation networks to allow the use of only a single RGB camera. Our approach is evaluated and compared on a diverse number of robot manipulation tasks, both in simulation and in the real world. Our results show that S$^2$-Diffusion is invariant to changes in category-irrelevant factors as well as enables satisfying performance on other instances within the same category, even if it was not trained on that specific instance. Project website: this https URL.

The ability to recognize patterns from examples and apply them to new ones is a primal ability for general intelligence, and is widely studied by psychology and AI researchers. Many benchmarks have been proposed to measure such ability for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, they focus on few-shot (usually <10) setting and lack evaluation for aggregating many pieces of information from long contexts. On the other hand, the ever-growing context length of LLMs have brought forth the novel paradigm of many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), which addresses new tasks with hundreds to thousands of examples without expensive and inefficient fine-tuning. However, many-shot evaluations often focus on classification, and popular long-context LLM tasks such as Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) seldom require complicated intelligence for integrating many pieces of information. To fix the issues from both worlds, we propose MIR-Bench, the first many-shot in-context reasoning benchmark for pattern recognition that asks LLM to predict output via input-output examples from underlying functions with diverse data format. Based on MIR-Bench, we study many novel problems for many-shot in-context reasoning, and acquired many insightful findings including scaling effect, robustness, inductive vs. transductive reasoning, retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), coding for inductive reasoning, cross-domain generalizability, etc.

Metaphors play a critical role in shaping user experiences with Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), yet existing designs often rely on static, human-centric metaphors that fail to adapt to diverse contexts and user needs. This paper introduces Metaphor-Fluid Design, a novel approach that dynamically adjusts metaphorical representations based on conversational use-contexts. We compare this approach to a Default VUI, which characterizes the present implementation of commercial VUIs commonly designed around the persona of an assistant, offering a uniform interaction style across contexts. In Study 1 (N=130), metaphors were mapped to four key use-contexts-commands, information seeking, sociality, and error recovery-along the dimensions of formality and hierarchy, revealing distinct preferences for task-specific metaphorical designs. Study 2 (N=91) evaluates a Metaphor-Fluid VUI against a Default VUI, showing that the Metaphor-Fluid VUI enhances perceived intention to adopt, enjoyment, and likability by aligning better with user expectations for different contexts. However, individual differences in metaphor preferences highlight the need for personalization. These findings challenge the one-size-fits-all paradigm of VUI design and demonstrate the potential of Metaphor-Fluid Design to create more adaptive and engaging human-AI interactions.

Diffusion models have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in modeling discrete categorical data. However, diffusion models that directly work on discrete data space fail to fully exploit the power of iterative refinement, as the signals are lost during transitions between discrete states. Existing continuous diffusion models for discrete data underperform compared to discrete methods, and the lack of a clear connection between the two approaches hinders the development of effective diffusion models for discrete data. In this work, we propose a continuous diffusion model for language modeling that incorporates the geometry of the underlying categorical distribution. We establish a connection between the discrete diffusion and continuous flow on the statistical manifold, and building on this analogy, introduce a simple diffusion process that generalizes existing discrete diffusion models. We further propose a simulation-free training framework based on radial symmetry, along with a simple technique to address the high dimensionality of the manifold. Comprehensive experiments on language modeling benchmarks and other modalities show that our method outperforms existing discrete diffusion models and approaches the performance of autoregressive models. The code is available at this https URL.

We present Neural Attention Search (NAtS), a framework that automatically evaluates the importance of each token within a sequence and determines if the corresponding token can be dropped after several steps. This approach can efficiently reduce the KV cache sizes required by transformer-based models during inference and thus reduce inference costs. In this paper, we design a search space that contains three token types: (i) Global Tokens will be preserved and queried by all the following tokens. (ii) Local Tokens survive until the next global token appears. (iii) Sliding Window Tokens have an impact on the inference of a fixed size of the next following tokens. Similar to the One-Shot Neural Architecture Search approach, this token-type information can be learned jointly with the architecture weights via a learnable attention mask. Experiments on both training a new transformer from scratch and fine-tuning existing large language models show that NAtS can efficiently reduce the KV cache size required for the models while maintaining the models' performance.

Recently, the new ciphertext side channels resulting from the deterministic memory encryption in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), enable ciphertexts to manifest identifiable patterns when being sequentially written to the same memory address. Attackers with read access to encrypted memory in TEEs can potentially deduce plaintexts by analyzing these changing ciphertext patterns. In this paper, we design CipherGuard, a compiler-based mitigation tool to counteract ciphertext side channels with high efficiency and security guarantees. CipherGuard is based on the LLVM ecosystem, and encompasses multiple defense strategies, including software-assisted probabilistic encryption, secret-aware register allocation, and diversion-based obfuscation. The design of CipherGuard demonstrates that compiler techniques are highly effective for fine-grained control over mitigation code generation and assisted component management. Through a comprehensive evaluation, it demonstrates that CipherGuard can strengthen the security of various cryptographic implementations more efficiently than existing state-of-the-art defense, i.e., CipherFix. In its most efficient strategy, CipherGuard incurs an average performance overhead of only 1.41X, with a maximum of 1.95X.

As the use of large language model (LLM) agents continues to grow, their safety vulnerabilities have become increasingly evident. Extensive benchmarks evaluate various aspects of LLM safety by defining the safety relying heavily on general standards, overlooking user-specific standards. However, safety standards for LLM may vary based on a user-specific profiles rather than being universally consistent across all users. This raises a critical research question: Do LLM agents act safely when considering user-specific safety standards? Despite its importance for safe LLM use, no benchmark datasets currently exist to evaluate the user-specific safety of LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce U-SafeBench, a benchmark designed to assess user-specific aspect of LLM safety. Our evaluation of 20 widely used LLMs reveals current LLMs fail to act safely when considering user-specific safety standards, marking a new discovery in this field. To address this vulnerability, we propose a simple remedy based on chain-of-thought, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving user-specific safety. Our benchmark and code are available at this https URL.

Activation steering methods in large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an effective way to perform targeted updates to enhance generated language without requiring large amounts of adaptation data. We ask whether the features discovered by activation steering methods are interpretable. We identify neurons responsible for specific concepts (e.g., ``cat'') using the ``finding experts'' method from research on activation steering and show that the ExpertLens, i.e., inspection of these neurons provides insights about model representation. We find that ExpertLens representations are stable across models and datasets and closely align with human representations inferred from behavioral data, matching inter-human alignment levels. ExpertLens significantly outperforms the alignment captured by word/sentence embeddings. By reconstructing human concept organization through ExpertLens, we show that it enables a granular view of LLM concept representation. Our findings suggest that ExpertLens is a flexible and lightweight approach for capturing and analyzing model representations.

Time-harmonic wave propagation problems, especially those governed by Maxwell's equations, pose significant computational challenges due to the non-self-adjoint nature of the operators and the large, non-Hermitian linear systems resulting from discretization. Domain decomposition methods, particularly one-level Schwarz methods, offer a promising framework to tackle these challenges, with recent advancements showing the potential for weak scalability under certain conditions. In this paper, we analyze the weak scalability of one-level Schwarz methods for Maxwell's equations in strip-wise domain decompositions, focusing on waveguides with general cross sections and different types of transmission conditions such as impedance or perfectly matched layers (PMLs). By combining techniques from the limiting spectrum analysis of Toeplitz matrices and the modal decomposition of Maxwell's solutions, we provide a novel theoretical framework that extends previous work to more complex geometries and transmission conditions. Numerical experiments confirm that the limiting spectrum effectively predicts practical behavior even with a modest number of subdomains. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the one-level Schwarz method can achieve robustness with respect to the wave number under specific domain decomposition parameters, offering new insights into its applicability for large-scale electromagnetic wave problems.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes in the graph-based machine-learning field is challenging, particularly when in-distribution (ID) node multi-category labels are unavailable. Thus, we focus on feature space rather than label space and find that, ideally, during the optimization of known ID samples, unknown ID samples undergo more significant representation changes than OOD samples, even if the model is trained to fit random targets, which we called the Feature Resonance phenomenon. The rationale behind it is that even without gold labels, the local manifold may still exhibit smooth resonance. Based on this, we further develop a novel graph OOD framework, dubbed Resonance-based Separation and Learning (RSL), which comprises two core modules: (i) a more practical micro-level proxy of feature resonance that measures the movement of feature vectors in one training step. (ii) integrate with synthetic OOD nodes strategy to train an effective OOD classifier. Theoretically, we derive an error bound showing the superior separability of OOD nodes during the resonance period. Extensive experiments on a total of thirteen real-world graph datasets empirically demonstrate that RSL achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Large-scale machine learning models deliver strong performance across a wide range of tasks but come with significant computational and resource constraints. To mitigate these challenges, local smaller models are often deployed alongside larger models, relying on routing and deferral mechanisms to offload complex tasks. However, existing approaches inadequately balance the capabilities of these models, often resulting in unnecessary deferrals or sub-optimal resource usage. In this work we introduce a novel loss function called Gatekeeper for calibrating smaller models in cascade setups. Our approach fine-tunes the smaller model to confidently handle tasks it can perform correctly while deferring complex tasks to the larger model. Moreover, it incorporates a mechanism for managing the trade-off between model performance and deferral accuracy, and is broadly applicable across various tasks and domains without any architectural changes. We evaluate our method on encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder architectures. Experiments across image classification, language modeling, and vision-language tasks show that our approach substantially improves deferral performance.

In real-world applications, node features in graphs often contain noise from various sources, leading to significant performance degradation in GNNs. Although several methods have been developed to enhance robustness, they rely on the unrealistic assumption that noise in node features is independent of the graph structure and node labels, thereby limiting their applicability. To this end, we introduce a more realistic noise scenario, dependency-aware noise on graphs (DANG), where noise in node features create a chain of noise dependencies that propagates to the graph structure and node labels. We propose a novel robust GNN, DA-GNN, which captures the causal relationships among variables in the data generating process (DGP) of DANG using variational inference. In addition, we present new benchmark datasets that simulate DANG in real-world applications, enabling more practical research on robust GNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DA-GNN consistently outperforms existing baselines across various noise scenarios, including both DANG and conventional noise models commonly considered in this field. Our code is available at this https URL.

We present an axiomatic framework for analyzing the algorithmic properties of decision trees. This framework supports the classification of decision tree problems through structural and ancestral constraints within a rigorous mathematical foundation. The central focus of this paper is a special class of decision tree problems-which we term proper decision trees-due to their versatility and effectiveness. In terms of versatility, this class subsumes several well-known data structures, including binary space partitioning trees, K-D trees, and machine learning decision tree models. Regarding effectiveness, we prove that only proper decision trees can be uniquely characterized as K-permutations, whereas typical non-proper decision trees correspond to binary-labeled decision trees with substantially greater complexity. Using this formal characterization, we develop a generic algorithmic approach for solving optimal decision tree problems over arbitrary splitting rules and objective functions for proper decision trees. We constructively derive a generic dynamic programming recursion for solving these problems exactly. However, we show that memoization is generally impractical in terms of space complexity, as both datasets and subtrees must be stored. This result contradicts claims in the literature that suggest a trade-off between memoizing datasets and subtrees. Our framework further accommodates constraints such as tree depth and leaf size, and can be accelerated using techniques such as thinning. Finally, we extend our analysis to several non-proper decision trees, including the commonly studied decision tree over binary feature data, the binary search tree, and the tree structure arising in the matrix chain multiplication problem. We demonstrate how these problems can be solved by appropriately modifying or discarding certain axioms.

Fault injection attacks (FIA) pose significant security threats to embedded systems as they exploit weaknesses across multiple layers, including system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical hardware. Early detection and understanding of how physical faults propagate to system-level behavior are essential to safeguarding cyberinfrastructure. This work introduces CRAFT, a framework that combines pre-silicon analysis with post-silicon validation to systematically uncover and analyze fault injection vulnerabilities. Our study, conducted on a RISC-V soft-core processor (cv32e40x) reveals two novel vulnerabilities. First, we demonstrate a method to induce instruction skips by glitching the clock (single-glitch attack), which prevents critical values from being loaded from memory, thus disrupting program execution. Second, we show a technique that converts a fetched legal instruction into an illegal one mid-execution, diverting control flow in a manner exploitable by attackers. Notably, we identified a specific timing window in which the processor fails to detect these illegal control-flow diversions, allowing silent, undetected corruption of the program state. By simulating 9248 FIA scenarios at pre-silicon and conducting root-cause analysis of the RISC-V pipeline, we trace the faults to a previously unreported vulnerability in a pipeline register shared between the instruction fetch and decode stages. Our approach reduced the search space for post-silicon experiments by 97.31%, showing pre-silicon advantages for post-silicon testing. Finally, we validate our identified exploit cases on real hardware (FPGA).

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the accuracy of Large Language Model (LLM) responses by leveraging relevant external documents during generation. Although previous studies noted that retrieving many documents can degrade performance, they did not isolate how the quantity of documents affects performance while controlling for context length. We evaluate various language models on custom datasets derived from a multi-hop QA task. We keep the context length and position of relevant information constant while varying the number of documents, and find that increasing the document count in RAG settings poses significant challenges for most LLMs, reducing performance by up to 20%. However, Qwen2.5 maintained consistent results across increasing document counts, indicating better multi-document handling capability. Finally, our results indicate that processing multiple documents is a separate challenge from handling long contexts. We also make the datasets and code available: this https URL .

We present a work optimal algorithm for parallel fully batch-dynamic maximal matching against an oblivious adversary. It processes batches of updates (either insertions or deletions of edges) in constant expected amortized work per edge update, and in $O(\log^3 m)$ depth per batch whp, where $m$ is the maximum number of edges in the graph over time. This greatly improves on the recent result by Ghaffari and Trygub (2024) that requires $O(\log^9 m)$ amortized work per update and $O(\log^4 m )$ depth per batch, both whp. The algorithm can also be used for parallel batch-dynamic hyperedge maximal matching. For hypergraphs with rank $r$ (maximum cardinality of any edge) the algorithm supports batches of updates with $O(r^3)$ expected amortized work per edge update, and $O(\log^3 m)$ depth per batch whp. Ghaffari and Trygub's parallel batch-dynamic algorithm on hypergraphs requires $O(r^8 \log^9 m)$ amortized work per edge update whp. We leverage ideas from the prior algorithms but introduce substantial new ideas. Furthermore, our algorithm is relatively simple, perhaps even simpler than Assadi and Solomon's (2021) sequential dynamic hyperedge algorithm. We also present the first work-efficient algorithm for parallel static maximal matching on hypergraphs. For a hypergraph with total cardinality $m'$ (i.e., sum over the cardinality of each edge), the algorithm runs in $O(m')$ work in expectation and $O(\log^2 m)$ depth whp. The algorithm also has some properties that allow us to use it as a subroutine in the dynamic algorithm to select random edges in the graph to add to the matching. With a standard reduction from set cover to hyperedge maximal matching, we give state of the art $r$-approximate static and batch-dynamic parallel set cover algorithms, where $r$ is the maximum frequency of any element, and batch-dynamic updates consist of adding or removing batches of elements.

Precise cell classification is essential in biomedical diagnostics and therapeutic monitoring, particularly for identifying diverse cell types involved in various diseases. Traditional cell classification methods such as flow cytometry depend on molecular labeling which is often costly, time-intensive, and can alter cell integrity. To overcome these limitations, we present a label-free machine learning framework for cell classification, designed for real-time sorting applications using bright-field microscopy images. This approach leverages a teacher-student model architecture enhanced by knowledge distillation, achieving high efficiency and scalability across different cell types. Demonstrated through a use case of classifying lymphocyte subsets, our framework accurately classifies T4, T8, and B cell types with a dataset of 80,000 preprocessed images, accessible via an open-source Python package for easy adaptation. Our teacher model attained 98\% accuracy in differentiating T4 cells from B cells and 93\% accuracy in zero-shot classification between T8 and B cells. Remarkably, our student model operates with only 0.02\% of the teacher model's parameters, enabling field-programmable gate array (FPGA) deployment. Our FPGA-accelerated student model achieves an ultra-low inference latency of just 14.5~$\mu$s and a complete cell detection-to-sorting trigger time of 24.7~$\mu$s, delivering 12x and 40x improvements over the previous state-of-the-art real-time cell analysis algorithm in inference and total latency, respectively, while preserving accuracy comparable to the teacher model. This framework provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for lymphocyte classification, as well as a new SOTA real-time cell sorting implementation for rapid identification of subsets using in situ deep learning on off-the-shelf computing hardware.

Automated livestock monitoring is crucial for precision farming, but robust computer vision models are hindered by a lack of datasets reflecting real-world group challenges. We introduce the 8-Calves dataset, a challenging benchmark for multi-animal detection, tracking, and identification. It features a one-hour video of eight Holstein Friesian calves in a barn, with frequent occlusions, motion blur, and diverse poses. A semi-automated pipeline using a fine-tuned YOLOv8 detector and ByteTrack, followed by manual correction, provides over 537,000 bounding boxes with temporal identity labels. We benchmark 28 object detectors, showing near-perfect performance on a lenient IoU threshold (mAP50: 95.2-98.9%) but significant divergence on stricter metrics (mAP50:95: 56.5-66.4%), highlighting fine-grained localization challenges. Our identification benchmark across 23 models reveals a trade-off: scaling model size improves classification accuracy but compromises retrieval. Smaller architectures like ConvNextV2 Nano achieve the best balance (73.35% accuracy, 50.82% Top-1 KNN). Pre-training focused on semantic learning (e.g., BEiT) yielded superior transferability. For tracking, leading methods achieve high detection accuracy (MOTA > 0.92) but struggle with identity preservation (IDF1 $\approx$ 0.27), underscoring a key challenge in occlusion-heavy scenarios. The 8-Calves dataset bridges a gap by providing temporal richness and realistic challenges, serving as a resource for advancing agricultural vision models. The dataset and code are available at this https URL.

Modern image restoration and super-resolution methods utilize deep learning due to its superior performance compared to traditional algorithms. However, deep learning typically requires large training datasets, which are rarely available in astrophotography. Deep Image Prior (DIP) bypasses this constraint by performing blind training on a single image. Although effective in some cases, DIP often suffers from overfitting, artifact generation, and instability. To overcome these issues and improve general performance, this work proposes DIPLI - a framework that shifts from single-frame to multi-frame training using the Back Projection technique, combined with optical flow estimation via the TVNet model, and replaces deterministic predictions with unbiased Monte Carlo estimation obtained through Langevin dynamics. A comprehensive evaluation compares the method against Lucky Imaging, a classical computer vision technique still widely used in astronomical image reconstruction, DIP, the transformer-based model RVRT, and the diffusion-based model DiffIR2VR-Zero. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate consistent improvements, with the method outperforming baselines for SSIM, PSNR, LPIPS, and DISTS metrics in the majority of cases. In addition to superior reconstruction quality, the model also requires far fewer input images than Lucky Imaging and is less prone to overfitting or artifact generation. Evaluation on real-world astronomical data, where domain shifts typically hinder generalization, shows that the method maintains high reconstruction quality, confirming practical robustness.

The growing reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in critical domains such as healthcare demands robust mechanisms to ensure the trustworthiness of these systems, especially when faced with unexpected or anomalous inputs. This paper introduces the Open Medical Imaging Benchmarks for Out-Of-Distribution Detection (OpenMIBOOD), a comprehensive framework for evaluating out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods specifically in medical imaging contexts. OpenMIBOOD includes three benchmarks from diverse medical domains, encompassing 14 datasets divided into covariate-shifted in-distribution, near-OOD, and far-OOD categories. We evaluate 24 post-hoc methods across these benchmarks, providing a standardized reference to advance the development and fair comparison of OOD detection methods. Results reveal that findings from broad-scale OOD benchmarks in natural image domains do not translate to medical applications, underscoring the critical need for such benchmarks in the medical field. By mitigating the risk of exposing AI models to inputs outside their training distribution, OpenMIBOOD aims to support the advancement of reliable and trustworthy AI systems in healthcare. The repository is available at this https URL.

Existing autonomous driving datasets are predominantly oriented towards well-structured urban settings and favourable weather conditions, leaving the complexities of rural environments and adverse weather conditions largely unaddressed. Although some datasets encompass variations in weather and lighting, bad weather scenarios do not appear often. Rainfall can significantly impair sensor functionality, introducing noise and reflections in LiDAR and camera data and reducing the system's capabilities for reliable environmental perception and safe navigation. This paper introduces the Panoptic-CUDAL dataset, a novel dataset purpose-built for panoptic segmentation in rural areas subject to rain. By recording high-resolution LiDAR, camera, and pose data, Panoptic-CUDAL offers a diverse, information-rich dataset in a challenging scenario. We present the analysis of the recorded data and provide baseline results for panoptic, semantic segmentation, and 3D occupancy prediction methods on LiDAR point clouds. The dataset can be found here: this https URL, this https URL

Federated learning (FL) is now recognized as a key framework for communication-efficient collaborative learning. Most theoretical and empirical studies, however, rely on the assumption that clients have access to pre-collected data sets, with limited investigation into scenarios where clients continuously collect data. In many real-world applications, particularly when data is generated by physical or biological processes, client data streams are often modeled by non-stationary Markov processes. Unlike standard i.i.d. sampling, the performance of FL with Markovian data streams remains poorly understood due to the statistical dependencies between client samples over time. In this paper, we investigate whether FL can still support collaborative learning with Markovian data streams. Specifically, we analyze the performance of Minibatch SGD, Local SGD, and a variant of Local SGD with momentum. We answer affirmatively under standard assumptions and smooth non-convex client objectives: the sample complexity is proportional to the inverse of the number of clients with a communication complexity comparable to the i.i.d. scenario. However, the sample complexity for Markovian data streams remains higher than for i.i.d. sampling.

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) enables collaborative analytics without exposing private data. However, OLAP queries under MPC remain prohibitively slow due to oblivious execution and padding of intermediate results with filler tuples. We present Reflex, the first framework that enables configurable trimming of intermediate results across different query operators -- joins, selections, and aggregations -- within full query plans. At its core is the Resizer operator, which can be inserted between any oblivious operators to selectively remove filler tuples under MPC using user-defined probabilistic strategies. To make privacy trade-offs interpretable, we introduce a new metric that quantifies the number of observations an attacker would need to infer the true intermediate result sizes. Reflex thus makes the performance-privacy space of secure analytics navigable, allowing users to balance efficiency and protection. Experiments show substantial runtime reductions while maintaining quantifiable privacy guarantees.

Deep generative models have become ubiquitous due to their ability to learn and sample from complex distributions. Despite the proliferation of various frameworks, the relationships among these models remain largely unexplored, a gap that hinders the development of a unified theory of AI learning. We address two central challenges: clarifying the connections between different deep generative models and deepening our understanding of their learning mechanisms. We focus on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), known for their universal approximation capabilities for discrete distributions. By introducing a reciprocal space formulation, we reveal a connection between RBMs, diffusion processes, and coupled Bosons. We show that at initialization, the RBM operates at a saddle point, where the local curvature is determined by the singular values, whose distribution follows the Marcenko-Pastur law and exhibits rotational symmetry. During training, this rotational symmetry is broken due to hierarchical learning, where different degrees of freedom progressively capture features at multiple levels of abstraction. This leads to a symmetry breaking in the energy landscape, reminiscent of Landau theory. This symmetry breaking in the energy landscape is characterized by the singular values and the weight matrix eigenvector matrix. We derive the corresponding free energy in a mean-field approximation. We show that in the limit of infinite size RBM, the reciprocal variables are Gaussian distributed. Our findings indicate that in this regime, there will be some modes for which the diffusion process will not converge to the Boltzmann distribution. To illustrate our results, we trained replicas of RBMs with different hidden layer sizes using the MNIST dataset. Our findings bridge the gap between disparate generative frameworks and also shed light on the processes underpinning learning in generative models.

Current image fusion methods struggle to address the composite degradations encountered in real-world imaging scenarios and lack the flexibility to accommodate user-specific requirements. In response to these challenges, we propose a controllable image fusion framework with language-vision prompts, termed ControlFusion, which adaptively neutralizes composite degradations. On the one hand, we develop a degraded imaging model that integrates physical imaging mechanisms, including the Retinex theory and atmospheric scattering principle, to simulate composite degradations, thereby providing potential for addressing real-world complex degradations from the data level. On the other hand, we devise a prompt-modulated restoration and fusion network that dynamically enhances features with degradation prompts, enabling our method to accommodate composite degradation of varying levels. Specifically, considering individual variations in quality perception of users, we incorporate a text encoder to embed user-specified degradation types and severity levels as degradation prompts. We also design a spatial-frequency collaborative visual adapter that autonomously perceives degradations in source images, thus eliminating the complete dependence on user instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlFusion outperforms SOTA fusion methods in fusion quality and degradation handling, particularly in countering real-world and compound degradations with various levels. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.

Many computational tasks benefit from being formulated as the composition of neural networks followed by a discrete symbolic program. The goal of neurosymbolic learning is to train the neural networks using end-to-end input-output labels of the composite. We introduce CTSketch, a novel, scalable neurosymbolic learning algorithm. CTSketch uses two techniques to improve the scalability of neurosymbolic inference: decompose the symbolic program into sub-programs and summarize each sub-program with a sketched tensor. This strategy allows us to approximate the output distribution of the program with simple tensor operations over the input distributions and the sketches. We provide theoretical insight into the maximum approximation error. Furthermore, we evaluate CTSketch on benchmarks from the neurosymbolic learning literature, including some designed for evaluating scalability. Our results show that CTSketch pushes neurosymbolic learning to new scales that were previously unattainable, with neural predictors obtaining high accuracy on tasks with one thousand inputs, despite supervision only on the final output.

A full understanding of the behavior of a large language model (LLM) requires our grasp of its input token space. If this space differs from our assumptions, our comprehension of and conclusions about the LLM will likely be flawed. We elucidate the structure of the token embeddings both empirically and theoretically. We present a novel statistical test assuming that the neighborhood around each token has a relatively flat and smooth structure as the null hypothesis. Failing to reject the null is uninformative, but rejecting it at a specific token $\psi$ implies an irregularity in the token subspace in a $\psi$-neighborhood, $B(\psi)$. The structure assumed in the null is a generalization of a manifold with boundary called a \emph{smooth fiber bundle} (which can be split into two spatial regimes -- small and large radius), so we denote our new hypothesis test as the ``fiber bundle hypothesis.'' By running our test over several open-source LLMs, each with unique token embeddings, we find that the null is frequently rejected, and so the evidence suggests that the token subspace is not a fiber bundle and hence also not a manifold. As a consequence of our findings, when an LLM is presented with two semantically equivalent prompts, if one prompt contains a token implicated by our test, the response to that prompt will likely exhibit less stability than the other.

Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) present unique challenges in representation learning by requiring models to capture both the semantic richness of node-associated texts and the structural dependencies of the graph. While graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at modeling topological information, they lack the capacity to process unstructured text. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) are proficient in text understanding but are typically unaware of graph structure. In this work, we propose BiGTex (Bidirectional Graph Text), a novel architecture that tightly integrates GNNs and LLMs through stacked Graph-Text Fusion Units. Each unit allows for mutual attention between textual and structural representations, enabling information to flow in both directions, text influencing structure and structure guiding textual interpretation. The proposed architecture is trained using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA), keeping the LLM frozen while adapting to task-specific signals. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that BiGTex achieves state-of-the-art performance in node classification and generalizes effectively to link prediction. An ablation study further highlights the importance of soft prompting and bi-directional attention in the model's success.

The performance gap between training sparse neural networks from scratch (PaI) and dense-to-sparse training presents a major roadblock for efficient deep learning. According to the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, PaI hinges on finding a problem specific parameter initialization. As we show, to this end, determining correct parameter signs is sufficient. Yet, they remain elusive to PaI. To address this issue, we propose Sign-In, which employs a dynamic reparameterization that provably induces sign flips. Such sign flips are complementary to the ones that dense-to-sparse training can accomplish, rendering Sign-In as an orthogonal method. While our experiments and theory suggest performance improvements of PaI, they also carve out the main open challenge to close the gap between PaI and dense-to-sparse training.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how traditional RL helps agents explore and learn new strategies, RLVR is believed to enable LLMs to continuously self-improve, thus acquiring novel reasoning abilities beyond those of the corresponding base models. In this study we critically examine the current state of RLVR by systematically probing the reasoning capability boundaries of RLVR-trained LLMs across various model families, RL algorithms, and math, coding, and visual reasoning benchmarks, using pass@k at large k values as the evaluation metric. Surprisingly, we find that the current training setup does not elicit fundamentally new reasoning patterns. While RLVR-trained models outperform their base models at small k (e.g., k = 1), the base models achieve a higher pass@k score when k is large. Coverage and perplexity analyses show that the observed reasoning abilities originate from and are bounded by the base model. Treating the base model as an upper bound, our quantitative analysis shows that six popular RLVR algorithms perform similarly and remain far from optimal in leveraging the potential of the base model. By contrast, we find that distillation can introduce new reasoning patterns from the teacher and genuinely expand the model's reasoning capabilities. Overall, our findings suggest that current RLVR methods have not yet realized the potential of RL to elicit truly novel reasoning abilities in LLMs. This highlights the need for improved RL paradigms, such as continual scaling and multi-turn agent-environment interaction, to unlock this potential.

Process reward models (PRMs) have proven effective for test-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) on challenging reasoning tasks. However, reward hacking issues with PRMs limit their successful application in reinforcement fine-tuning. In this paper, we identify the main cause of PRM-induced reward hacking: the canonical summation-form credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), which defines the value as cumulative gamma-decayed future rewards, easily induces LLMs to hack steps with high rewards. To address this, we propose PURE: Process sUpervised Reinforcement lEarning. The key innovation of PURE is a min-form credit assignment that formulates the value function as the minimum of future rewards. This method significantly alleviates reward hacking by limiting the value function range and distributing advantages more reasonably. Through extensive experiments on 3 base models, we show that PRM-based approaches enabling min-form credit assignment achieve comparable reasoning performance to verifiable reward-based methods within only 30% steps. In contrast, the canonical sum-form credit assignment collapses training even at the beginning! Additionally, when we supplement PRM-based fine-tuning with just 10% verifiable rewards, we further alleviate reward hacking and produce the best fine-tuned model based on Qwen2.5-Math-7B in our experiments, achieving 82.5% accuracy on AMC23 and 53.3% average accuracy across 5 benchmarks. Moreover, we summarize the observed reward hacking cases and analyze the causes of training collapse. We release our code and model weights at this https URL.

Analyzing multi-featured time series data is critical for space missions making efficient event detection, potentially onboard, essential for automatic analysis. However, limited onboard computational resources and data downlink constraints necessitate robust methods for identifying regions of interest in real time. This work presents an adaptive outlier detection algorithm based on the reconstruction error of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for feature reduction, designed explicitly for space mission applications. The algorithm adapts dynamically to evolving data distributions by using Incremental PCA, enabling deployment without a predefined model for all possible conditions. A pre-scaling process normalizes each feature's magnitude while preserving relative variance within feature types. We demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness in detecting space plasma events, such as distinct space environments, dayside and nightside transients phenomena, and transition layers through NASA's MMS mission observations. Additionally, we apply the method to NASA's THEMIS data, successfully identifying a dayside transient using onboard-available measurements.

Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize novel scenes that faithfully preserve subject identity from reference images while adhering to textual guidance. However, existing methods struggle with a critical trade-off between fidelity and efficiency. Tuning-based approaches rely on time-consuming and resource-intensive, subject-specific optimization, while zero-shot methods often fail to maintain adequate subject consistency. In this work, we propose FreeGraftor, a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through cross-image feature grafting. Specifically, FreeGraftor leverages semantic matching and position-constrained attention fusion to transfer visual details from reference subjects to the generated images. Additionally, our framework introduces a novel noise initialization strategy to preserve the geometry priors of reference subjects, facilitating robust feature matching. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method enables precise subject identity transfer while maintaining text-aligned scene synthesis. Without requiring model fine-tuning or additional training, FreeGraftor significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and training-free approaches in both subject fidelity and text alignment. Furthermore, our framework can seamlessly extend to multi-subject generation, making it practical for real-world deployment. Our code is available at this https URL.

When applying reinforcement learning--typically through GRPO--to large vision-language model reasoning struggles to effectively scale reasoning length or generates verbose outputs across all tasks with only marginal gains in accuracy. To address this issue, we present FAST-GRPO, a variant of GRPO that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question characteristics. Through empirical analysis, we establish the feasibility of fast-slow thinking in LVLMs by investigating how response length and data distribution affect performance. Inspired by these observations, we introduce two complementary metrics to estimate the difficulty of the questions, guiding the model to determine when fast or slow thinking is more appropriate. Next, we incorporate adaptive length-based rewards and difficulty-aware KL divergence into the GRPO algorithm. Experiments across seven reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FAST achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with over 10\% relative improvement compared to the base model, while reducing token usage by 32.7-67.3\% compared to previous slow-thinking approaches, effectively balancing reasoning length and accuracy.

The evolution of cooperation has been extensively studied using abstract mathematical models and simulations. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the rise of LLM agents have demonstrated their ability to perform social reasoning, thus providing an opportunity to test the emergence of norms in more realistic agent-based simulations with human-like reasoning using natural language. In this research, we investigate whether the cooperation dynamics presented in Boyd and Richerson's model persist in a more realistic simulation of the Diner's Dilemma using LLM agents compared to the abstract mathematical nature in the work of Boyd and Richerson. Our findings indicate that agents follow the strategies defined in the Boyd and Richerson model, and explicit punishment mechanisms drive norm emergence, reinforcing cooperative behaviour even when the agent strategy configuration varies. Our results suggest that LLM-based Multi-Agent System simulations, in fact, can replicate the evolution of cooperation predicted by the traditional mathematical models. Moreover, our simulations extend beyond the mathematical models by integrating natural language-driven reasoning and a pairwise imitation method for strategy adoption, making them a more realistic testbed for cooperative behaviour in MASs.

We study compute efficiency of LLM training when using different parameterizations, i.e., rules for adjusting model and optimizer hyperparameters (HPs) as model size changes. Some parameterizations fail to transfer optimal base HPs (such as learning rate) across changes in model depth, requiring practitioners to either re-tune these HPs as they scale up (expensive), or accept sub-optimal training when re-tuning is prohibitive. Even when they achieve HP transfer, we develop theory to show parameterizations may still exist in the lazy learning regime where layers learn only features close to their linearization, preventing effective use of depth and nonlinearity. Finally, we identify and adopt the parameterization we call CompleteP that achieves both depth-wise HP transfer and non-lazy learning in all layers. CompleteP enables a wider range of model width/depth ratios to remain compute-efficient, unlocking shapes better suited for different hardware settings and operational contexts. Moreover, CompleteP enables 12-34% compute efficiency improvements over the prior state-of-the-art. All experiments were run on Cerebras CS-3 systems. A minimal implementation is available at this https URL.

The building thermodynamics model, which predicts real-time indoor temperature changes under potential HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) control operations, is crucial for optimizing HVAC control in buildings. While pioneering studies have attempted to develop such models for various building environments, these models often require extensive data collection periods and rely heavily on expert knowledge, making the modeling process inefficient and limiting the reusability of the models. This paper explores a model ensemble perspective that utilizes existing developed models as base models to serve a target building environment, thereby providing accurate predictions while reducing the associated efforts. Given that building data streams are non-stationary and the number of base models may increase, we propose a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approach to dynamically select and weight the base models. Our approach employs a two-tiered decision-making process: the high-level focuses on model selection, while the low-level determines the weights of the selected models. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed approach through offline experiments and an on-site case study, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a pillar of Trustworthy AI and aims to bring transparency in complex models that are opaque by nature. Despite the benefits of incorporating explanations in models, an urgent need is found in addressing the privacy concerns of providing this additional information to end users. In this article, we conduct a scoping review of existing literature to elicit details on the conflict between privacy and explainability. Using the standard methodology for scoping review, we extracted 57 articles from 1,943 studies published from January 2019 to December 2024. The review addresses 3 research questions to present readers with more understanding of the topic: (1) what are the privacy risks of releasing explanations in AI systems? (2) what current methods have researchers employed to achieve privacy preservation in XAI systems? (3) what constitutes a privacy preserving explanation? Based on the knowledge synthesized from the selected studies, we categorize the privacy risks and preservation methods in XAI and propose the characteristics of privacy preserving explanations to aid researchers and practitioners in understanding the requirements of XAI that is privacy compliant. Lastly, we identify the challenges in balancing privacy with other system desiderata and provide recommendations for achieving privacy preserving XAI. We expect that this review will shed light on the complex relationship of privacy and explainability, both being the fundamental principles of Trustworthy AI.

Neural operators, particularly the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), have shown promise in learning mappings between function spaces for solving differential equations. However, standard DeepONet requires input functions to be sampled at fixed locations, limiting its applicability when sensor configurations vary or inputs exist on irregular grids. We introduce the Set Operator Network (SetONet), which modifies DeepONet's branch network to process input functions as unordered sets of location-value pairs. By incorporating Deep Sets principles, SetONet ensures permutation invariance while maintaining the same parameter count as the baseline. On classical operator-learning benchmarks, SetONet achieves parity with DeepONet on fixed layouts while sustaining accuracy under variable sensor configurations or sensor drop-off - conditions for which standard DeepONet is not applicable. More significantly, SetONet natively handles problems where inputs are naturally represented as unstructured point clouds (such as point sources or density samples) rather than values on fixed grids, a capability standard DeepONet lacks. On heat conduction with point sources, advection-diffusion modeling chemical plumes, and optimal transport between density samples, SetONet learns operators end-to-end without rasterization or multi-stage pipelines. These problems feature inputs that are naturally discrete point sets (point sources or density samples) rather than functions on fixed grids. SetONet is a DeepONet-class architecture that addresses such problems with a lightweight design, significantly broadening the applicability of operator learning to problems with variable, incomplete, or unstructured input data.

It is often desirable to remove (a.k.a. unlearn) a specific part of the training data from a trained neural network model. A typical application scenario is to protect the data holder's right to be forgotten, which has been promoted by many recent regulation rules. Existing unlearning methods involve training alternative models with remaining data, which may be costly and challenging to verify from the data holder or a thirdparty auditor's perspective. In this work, we provide a new angle and propose a novel unlearning approach by imposing carefully crafted "patch" on the original neural network to achieve targeted "forgetting" of the requested data to delete. Specifically, inspired by the research line of neural network repair, we propose to strategically seek a lightweight minimum "patch" for unlearning a given data point with certifiable guarantee. Furthermore, to unlearn a considerable amount of data points (or an entire class), we propose to iteratively select a small subset of representative data points to unlearn, which achieves the effect of unlearning the whole set. Extensive experiments on multiple categorical datasets demonstrates our approach's effectiveness, achieving measurable unlearning while preserving the model's performance and being competitive in efficiency and memory consumption compared to various baseline methods.

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a promising approach for scaling Transformer models. While initial works primarily incorporated MoE into feed-forward network (FFN) layers, recent studies have explored extending the MoE paradigm to attention layers to enhance model performance. However, existing attention-based MoE layers require specialized implementations and demonstrate suboptimal performance compared to their FFN-based counterparts. In this paper, we aim to unify MoE designs in attention and FFN layers by introducing a novel reformulation of the attention mechanism, that reveals an underlying FFN-like structure within attention modules. Our proposed architecture, UMoE, achieves superior performance through attention-based MoE layers while enabling efficient parameter sharing between FFN and attention components.

This paper introduces S-DAT (Synthetic-Divergent Association Task), a scalable, multilingual framework for automated assessment of divergent thinking (DT) -a core component of human creativity. Traditional creativity assessments are often labor-intensive, language-specific, and reliant on subjective human ratings, limiting their scalability and cross-cultural applicability. In contrast, S-DAT leverages large language models and advanced multilingual embeddings to compute semantic distance -- a language-agnostic proxy for DT. We evaluate S-DAT across eleven diverse languages, including English, Spanish, German, Russian, Hindi, and Japanese (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana), demonstrating robust and consistent scoring across linguistic contexts. Unlike prior DAT approaches, the S-DAT shows convergent validity with other DT measures and correct discriminant validity with convergent thinking. This cross-linguistic flexibility allows for more inclusive, global-scale creativity research, addressing key limitations of earlier approaches. S-DAT provides a powerful tool for fairer, more comprehensive evaluation of cognitive flexibility in diverse populations and can be freely assessed online: this https URL.

Algorithmic fairness in clustering aims to balance the proportions of instances assigned to each cluster with respect to a given sensitive attribute. While recently developed fair clustering algorithms optimize clustering objectives under specific fairness constraints, their inherent complexity or approximation often results in suboptimal clustering utility or numerical instability in practice. To resolve these limitations, we propose a new fair clustering algorithm based on a novel decomposition of the fair $K$-means clustering objective function. The proposed algorithm, called Fair Clustering via Alignment (FCA), operates by alternately (i) finding a joint probability distribution to align the data from different protected groups, and (ii) optimizing cluster centers in the aligned space. A key advantage of FCA is that it theoretically guarantees approximately optimal clustering utility for any given fairness level without complex constraints, thereby enabling high-utility fair clustering in practice. Experiments show that FCA outperforms existing methods by (i) attaining a superior trade-off between fairness level and clustering utility, and (ii) achieving near-perfect fairness without numerical instability.

We provide a dual fitting technique on a semidefinite program yielding simple proofs of tight bounds for the robust price of anarchy of several congestion and scheduling games under the sum of weighted completion times objective. The same approach also allows to bound the approximation ratio of local search algorithms and the competitive ratio of online algorithms for the scheduling problem $R || \sum w_j C_j$. All of our results are obtained through a simple unified dual fitting argument on the same semidefinite programming relaxation, which can essentially be obtained through the first round of the Lasserre/Sum of Squares hierarchy. As our main application, we show that the known coordination ratio bounds of respectively $4, (3 + \sqrt{5})/2 \approx 2.618,$ and $32/15 \approx 2.133$ for the scheduling game $R || \sum w_j C_j$ under the coordination mechanisms Smith's Rule, Proportional Sharing and Rand (STOC 2011) can be extended to congestion games and obtained through this approach. For the natural restriction where the weight of each player is proportional to its processing time on every resource, we show that the last bound can be improved from 2.133 to 2. This improvement can also be made for general instances when considering the price of anarchy of the game, rather than the coordination ratio. As a further application of this technique, we show that it recovers the tight bound of $(3 + \sqrt{5})/2$ for the price of anarchy of weighted affine congestion games and the Kawaguchi-Kyan bound of $(1+ \sqrt{2})/2$ for the pure price of anarchy of $P || \sum w_j C_j$. Moreover, this approach can analyze a simple local search algorithm for $R || \sum w_j C_j$, the best currently known combinatorial approximation algorithm for this problem achieving an approximation ratio of $(5 + \sqrt{5})/4 + \varepsilon$ and an online greedy algorithm which is $4$-competitive.

The success of today's large language models (LLMs) depends on the observation that larger models perform better. However, the origin of this neural scaling law, that loss decreases as a power law with model size, remains unclear. We propose that representation superposition, meaning that LLMs represent more features than they have dimensions, can be a key contributor to loss and cause neural scaling. Based on Anthropic's toy model, we use weight decay to control the degree of superposition, allowing us to systematically study how loss scales with model size. When superposition is weak, the loss follows a power law only if data feature frequencies are power-law distributed. In contrast, under strong superposition, the loss generically scales inversely with model dimension across a broad class of frequency distributions, due to geometric overlaps between representation vectors. We confirmed that open-sourced LLMs operate in the strong superposition regime and have loss scaling like one over the model dimension, and that the Chinchilla scaling laws are also consistent with this behavior. Our results identify representation superposition as a central driver of neural scaling laws, providing insights into questions like when neural scaling laws can be improved and when they will break down.

Hands are essential to human interaction, and exploring contact between hands and the world can promote comprehensive understanding of their function. Recently, there have been growing number of hand interaction datasets that cover interaction with object, other hand, scene, and body. Despite the significance of the task and increasing high-quality data, how to effectively learn dense hand contact estimation remains largely underexplored. There are two major challenges for learning dense hand contact estimation. First, there exists class imbalance issue from hand contact datasets where majority of regions are not in contact. Second, hand contact datasets contain spatial imbalance issue with most of hand contact exhibited in finger tips, resulting in challenges for generalization towards contacts in other hand regions. To tackle these issues, we present a framework that learns dense HAnd COntact estimation (HACO) from imbalanced data. To resolve the class imbalance issue, we introduce balanced contact sampling, which builds and samples from multiple sampling groups that fairly represent diverse contact statistics for both contact and non-contact vertices. Moreover, to address the spatial imbalance issue, we propose vertex-level class-balanced (VCB) loss, which incorporates spatially varying contact distribution by separately reweighting loss contribution of each vertex based on its contact frequency across dataset. As a result, we effectively learn to predict dense hand contact estimation with large-scale hand contact data without suffering from class and spatial imbalance issue. The codes are available at this https URL.

Predicting protein function from sequence is a central challenge in computational biology. While existing methods rely heavily on structured ontologies or similarity-based techniques, they often lack the flexibility to express structure-free functional descriptions and novel biological functions. In this work, we introduce Prot2Text-V2, a novel multimodal sequence-to-text model that generates free-form natural language descriptions of protein function directly from amino acid sequences. Our method combines a protein language model as a sequence encoder (ESM-3B) and a decoder-only language model (LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct) through a lightweight nonlinear modality projector. A key innovation is our Hybrid Sequence-level Contrastive Alignment Learning (H-SCALE), which improves cross-modal learning by matching mean- and std-pooled protein embeddings with text representations via contrastive loss. After the alignment phase, we apply instruction-based fine-tuning using LoRA on the decoder to teach the model how to generate accurate protein function descriptions conditioned on the protein sequence. We train Prot2Text-V2 on about 250K curated entries from SwissProt and evaluate it under low-homology conditions, where test sequences have low similarity with training samples. Prot2Text-V2 consistently outperforms traditional and LLM-based baselines across various metrics.

Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows, their capabilities remain limited to support high-quality scientific writing. Most existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of research communication beyond surface-level polishing, such as conceptual coherence across sections. Furthermore, academic writing is inherently iterative and revision-driven, a process not well supported by direct prompting-based paradigms. To address these scenarios, we propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision centered on criteria-guided intent alignment and context-aware modeling. To validate the framework, we curate a dataset of 7,000 research papers from top-tier venues annotated with 140,000 instruction-response pairs that reflect realistic, section-level scientific revisions. We instantiate the framework in XtraGPT, the first suite of open-source LLMs (1.5B to 14B parameters) for context-aware, instruction-guided writing assistance. Extensive experiments validate that XtraGPT significantly outperforms same-scale baselines and approaches the quality of proprietary systems. Both automated preference assessments and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of XtraGPT in improving scientific drafts.

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Although RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) have been widely applied to train multi-turn LLM agents, they typically rely only on sparse outcome rewards and lack dense intermediate signals across multiple decision steps, limiting their performance on complex reasoning tasks. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic study of \textit{turn-level reward design} for multi-turn RL algorithms and agent applications. By integrating turn-level rewards, we extend GRPO and PPO to their respective multi-turn variants, enabling fine-grained credit assignment. We conduct case studies on multi-turn reasoning-augmented search agents, where we carefully design two types of turn-level rewards: verifiable and LLM-as-judge. Our experiments on multi-turn search tasks demonstrate that incorporating well-designed turn-level rewards enables RL algorithms to significantly outperform baseline methods with trajectory-level rewards. Both training and validation reward curves illustrate that our method achieves \textit{greater stability}, \textit{faster convergence}, and \textit{higher accuracy}. Numerical results across diverse question-answering datasets further show that our approach consistently delivers highest answer correctness and 100\% format correctness.

Natural gradient methods significantly accelerate the training of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), but are often prohibitively costly. We introduce a suite of techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of energy natural gradient descent (ENGD) for PINNs. First, we leverage the Woodbury formula to dramatically reduce the computational complexity of ENGD. Second, we adapt the Subsampled Projected-Increment Natural Gradient Descent algorithm from the variational Monte Carlo literature to accelerate the convergence. Third, we explore the use of randomized algorithms to further reduce the computational cost in the case of large batch sizes. We find that randomization accelerates progress in the early stages of training for low-dimensional problems, and we identify key barriers to attaining acceleration in other scenarios. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our methods outperform previous approaches, achieving the same $L^2$ error as the original ENGD up to $75\times$ faster.

In this paper, we study the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the associated maximum-margin problem in homogeneous neural networks, including fully-connected and convolutional neural networks. In particular, We investigates the relationship between such KKT points across networks of different widths generated. We introduce and formalize the \textbf{KKT point embedding principle}, establishing that KKT points of a homogeneous network's max-margin problem ($P_{\Phi}$) can be embedded into the KKT points of a larger network's problem ($P_{\tilde{\Phi}}$) via specific linear isometric transformations. We rigorously prove this principle holds for neuron splitting in fully-connected networks and channel splitting in convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, we connect this static embedding to the dynamics of gradient flow training with smooth losses. We demonstrate that trajectories initiated from appropriately mapped points remain mapped throughout training and that the resulting $\omega$-limit sets of directions are correspondingly mapped, thereby preserving the alignment with KKT directions dynamically when directional convergence occurs. We conduct several experiments to justify that trajectories are preserved. Our findings offer insights into the effects of network width, parameter redundancy, and the structural connections between solutions found via optimization in homogeneous networks of varying sizes.

Recent progress in text-video retrieval has been largely driven by contrastive learning. However, existing methods often overlook the effect of the modality gap, which causes anchor representations to undergo in-place optimization (i.e., optimization tension) that limits their alignment capacity. Moreover, noisy hard negatives further distort the semantics of anchors. To address these issues, we propose GARE, a Gap-Aware Retrieval framework that introduces a learnable, pair-specific increment $\Delta_{ij}$ between text $t_i$ and video $v_j$, redistributing gradients to relieve optimization tension and absorb noise. We derive $\Delta_{ij}$ via a multivariate first-order Taylor expansion of the InfoNCE loss under a trust-region constraint, showing that it guides updates along locally consistent descent directions. A lightweight neural module conditioned on the semantic gap couples increments across batches for structure-aware correction. Furthermore, we regularize $\Delta$ through a variational information bottleneck with relaxed compression, enhancing stability and semantic consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that GARE consistently improves alignment accuracy and robustness, validating the effectiveness of gap-aware tension mitigation. Code is available at this https URL.

Solving time-dependent Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using a densely discretized spatial domain is a fundamental problem in various scientific and engineering disciplines, including modeling climate phenomena and fluid dynamics. However, performing these computations directly in the physical space often incurs significant computational costs. To address this issue, several neural surrogate models have been developed that operate in a compressed latent space to solve the PDE. While these approaches reduce computational complexity, they often use Transformer-based attention mechanisms to handle irregularly sampled domains, resulting in increased memory consumption. In contrast, convolutional neural networks allow memory-efficient encoding and decoding but are limited to regular discretizations. Motivated by these considerations, we propose CALM-PDE, a model class that efficiently solves arbitrarily discretized PDEs in a compressed latent space. We introduce a novel continuous convolution-based encoder-decoder architecture that uses an epsilon-neighborhood-constrained kernel and learns to apply the convolution operator to adaptive and optimized query points. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CALM-PDE on a diverse set of PDEs with both regularly and irregularly sampled spatial domains. CALM-PDE is competitive with or outperforms existing baseline methods while offering significant improvements in memory and inference time efficiency compared to Transformer-based methods.

Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated exceptional performance, yet their iterative sampling procedures remain computationally expensive. A prominent strategy to mitigate this cost is distillation, with offline distillation offering particular advantages in terms of efficiency, modularity, and flexibility. In this work, we identify two key observations that motivate a principled distillation framework: (1) while diffusion models have been viewed through the lens of dynamical systems theory, powerful and underexplored tools can be further leveraged; and (2) diffusion models inherently impose structured, semantically coherent trajectories in latent space. Building on these observations, we introduce the Koopman Distillation Model (KDM), a novel offline distillation approach grounded in Koopman theory - a classical framework for representing nonlinear dynamics linearly in a transformed space. KDM encodes noisy inputs into an embedded space where a learned linear operator propagates them forward, followed by a decoder that reconstructs clean samples. This enables single-step generation while preserving semantic fidelity. We provide theoretical justification for our approach: (1) under mild assumptions, the learned diffusion dynamics admit a finite-dimensional Koopman representation; and (2) proximity in the Koopman latent space correlates with semantic similarity in the generated outputs, allowing for effective trajectory alignment. KDM achieves highly competitive performance across standard offline distillation benchmarks.

We introduce ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$, a high-quality, curated benchmark of 161 problems for end-to-end verified code generation in Lean. Each problem consists of (1) the task of generating a specification that matches a held-out ground-truth specification, and (2) the task of generating a Lean implementation that provably satisfies this specification. Unlike prior benchmarks, ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$ avoids test-case supervision, LLM-generated annotations, and specifications that leak implementation logic or allow vacuous solutions. All outputs are verified post-hoc using Lean's type checker to ensure machine-checkable correctness. We use ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$ to evaluate several few-shot and agentic approaches based on state-of-the-art language models. These methods all struggle to achieve full verification, establishing it as a challenging frontier benchmark for program synthesis and formal reasoning. Our benchmark can be found on GitHub(this https URL) as well as HuggingFace(this https URL). All our evaluation code is also available online(this https URL).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have inherent limitations of faithfulness and factuality, commonly referred to as hallucinations. Several benchmarks have been developed that provide a test bed for factuality evaluation within the context of English-centric datasets, while relying on supplementary informative context like web links or text passages but ignoring the available structured factual resources. To this end, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been identified as a useful aid for hallucination mitigation, as they provide a structured way to represent the facts about entities and their relations with minimal linguistic overhead. We bridge the lack of KG paths and multilinguality for factual language modeling within the existing hallucination evaluation benchmarks and propose a KG-based multilingual, multihop benchmark called MultiHal framed for generative text evaluation. As part of our data collection pipeline, we mined 140k KG-paths from open-domain KGs, from which we pruned noisy KG-paths, curating a high-quality subset of 25.9k. Our baseline evaluation shows an absolute scale improvement by approximately 0.12 to 0.36 points for the semantic similarity score, 0.16 to 0.36 for NLI entailment and 0.29 to 0.42 for hallucination detection in KG-RAG over vanilla QA across multiple languages and multiple models, demonstrating the potential of KG integration. We anticipate MultiHal will foster future research towards several graph-based hallucination mitigation and fact-checking tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in flagging harmful content in online communities. Yet, existing approaches for moderation require a separate model for every community and are opaque in their decision-making, limiting real-world adoption. We introduce Mixture of Moderation Experts (MoMoE), a modular, cross-community framework that adds post-hoc explanations to scalable content moderation. MoMoE orchestrates four operators -- Allocate, Predict, Aggregate, Explain -- and is instantiated as seven community-specialized experts (MoMoE-Community) and five norm-violation experts (MoMoE-NormVio). On 30 unseen subreddits, the best variants obtain Micro-F1 scores of 0.72 and 0.67, respectively, matching or surpassing strong fine-tuned baselines while consistently producing concise and reliable explanations. Although community-specialized experts deliver the highest peak accuracy, norm-violation experts provide steadier performance across domains. These findings show that MoMoE yields scalable, transparent moderation without needing per-community fine-tuning. More broadly, they suggest that lightweight, explainable expert ensembles can guide future NLP and HCI research on trustworthy human-AI governance of online communities.

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most apply broad, surface-level fixes and can therefore easily be circumvented by jailbreak attacks. In this paper we leverage sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to identify toxicity-related directions in the residual stream of models and perform targeted activation steering using the corresponding decoder vectors. We introduce three tiers of steering aggressiveness and evaluate them on GPT-2 Small and Gemma-2-2B, revealing trade-offs between toxicity reduction and language fluency. At stronger steering strengths, these causal interventions surpass competitive baselines in reducing toxicity by up to 20%, though fluency can degrade noticeably on GPT-2 Small depending on the aggressiveness. Crucially, standard NLP benchmark scores upon steering remain stable, indicating that the model's knowledge and general abilities are preserved. We further show that feature-splitting in wider SAEs hampers safety interventions, underscoring the importance of disentangled feature learning. Our findings highlight both the promise and the current limitations of SAE-based causal interventions for LLM detoxification, further suggesting practical guidelines for safer language-model deployment.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful outputs but can degrade reasoning depth, leading to significant trade-offs in complex, multi-step tasks, and remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To address this, we introduce SAFEPATH, a lightweight alignment method that fine-tunes LRMs to emit a short, 8-token Safety Primer at the start of their reasoning, in response to harmful prompts, while leaving the rest of the reasoning process unsupervised. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks indicate that SAFEPATH effectively reduces harmful outputs while maintaining reasoning performance. Specifically, SAFEPATH reduces harmful responses by up to 90.0% and blocks 83.3% of jailbreak attempts in the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B model, while requiring 295.9x less compute than Direct Refusal and 314.1x less than SafeChain. We further introduce a zero-shot variant that requires no fine-tuning. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how existing methods in LLMs generalize, or fail, when applied to reasoning-centric models, revealing critical gaps and new directions for safer AI.

How do language models (LMs) represent characters' beliefs, especially when those beliefs may differ from reality? This question lies at the heart of understanding the Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities of LMs. We analyze LMs' ability to reason about characters' beliefs using causal mediation and abstraction. We construct a dataset, CausalToM, consisting of simple stories where two characters independently change the state of two objects, potentially unaware of each other's actions. Our investigation uncovers a pervasive algorithmic pattern that we call a lookback mechanism, which enables the LM to recall important information when it becomes necessary. The LM binds each character-object-state triple together by co-locating their reference information, represented as Ordering IDs (OIs), in low-rank subspaces of the state token's residual stream. When asked about a character's beliefs regarding the state of an object, the binding lookback retrieves the correct state OI and then the answer lookback retrieves the corresponding state token. When we introduce text specifying that one character is (not) visible to the other, we find that the LM first generates a visibility ID encoding the relation between the observing and the observed character OIs. In a visibility lookback, this ID is used to retrieve information about the observed character and update the observing character's beliefs. Our work provides insights into belief tracking mechanisms, taking a step toward reverse-engineering ToM reasoning in LMs.

In standard autoregressive generation, an LLM predicts the next-token distribution, samples a discrete token, and then discards the distribution, passing only the sampled token as new input. To preserve this distribution's rich information, we propose Mixture of Inputs (MoI), a training-free method for autoregressive generation. After generating a token following the standard paradigm, we construct a new input that blends the generated discrete token with the previously discarded token distribution. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian estimation method that treats the token distribution as the prior, the sampled token as the observation, and replaces the conventional one-hot vector with the continuous posterior expectation as the new model input. MoI allows the model to maintain a richer internal representation throughout the generation process, resulting in improved text quality and reasoning capabilities. On mathematical reasoning, code generation, and PhD-level QA tasks, MoI consistently improves performance across multiple models including QwQ-32B, Nemotron-Super-49B, Gemma-3-27B, and DAPO-Qwen-32B, with no additional training and negligible computational overhead.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a compelling approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), where an LLM generator serves as a policy guided by a verifier (reward model). However, current RL post-training methods for LLMs typically use verifiers that are fixed (rule-based or frozen pretrained) or trained discriminatively via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Such designs are susceptible to reward hacking and generalize poorly beyond their training distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Tango, a novel framework that uses RL to concurrently train both an LLM generator and a verifier in an interleaved manner. A central innovation of Tango is its generative, process-level LLM verifier, which is trained via RL and co-evolves with the generator. Importantly, the verifier is trained solely based on outcome-level verification correctness rewards without requiring explicit process-level annotations. This generative RL-trained verifier exhibits improved robustness and superior generalization compared to deterministic or SFT-trained verifiers, fostering effective mutual reinforcement with the generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both components of Tango achieve state-of-the-art results among 7B/8B-scale models: the generator attains best-in-class performance across five competition-level math benchmarks and four challenging out-of-domain reasoning tasks, while the verifier leads on the ProcessBench dataset. Remarkably, both components exhibit particularly substantial improvements on the most difficult mathematical reasoning problems. Code is at: this https URL.

Policy exploration is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), where existing approaches include greedy, Gaussian process, etc. However, these approaches utilize preset stochastic processes and are indiscriminately applied in all kinds of RL tasks without considering task-specific features that influence policy exploration. Moreover, during RL training, the evolution of such stochastic processes is rigid, which typically only incorporates a decay in the variance, failing to adjust flexibly according to the agent's real-time learning status. Inspired by the analyzing and reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs), we design LLM-Explorer to adaptively generate task-specific exploration strategies with LLMs, enhancing the policy exploration in RL. In our design, we sample the learning trajectory of the agent during the RL training in a given task and prompt the LLM to analyze the agent's current policy learning status and then generate a probability distribution for future policy exploration. Updating the probability distribution periodically, we derive a stochastic process specialized for the particular task and dynamically adjusted to adapt to the learning process. Our design is a plug-in module compatible with various widely applied RL algorithms, including the DQN series, DDPG, TD3, and any possible variants developed based on them. Through extensive experiments on the Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks, we demonstrate LLM-Explorer's capability to enhance RL policy exploration, achieving an average performance improvement up to 37.27%. Our code is open-source at this https URL for reproducibility.

Crystal structures are defined by the periodic arrangement of atoms in 3D space, inherently making them equivariant to SO(3) group. A fundamental requirement for crystal property prediction is that the model's output should remain invariant to arbitrary rotational transformations of the input structure. One promising strategy to achieve this invariance is to align the given crystal structure into a canonical orientation with appropriately computed rotations, or called frames. However, existing work either only considers a global frame or solely relies on more advanced local frames based on atoms' local structure. A global frame is too coarse to capture the local structure heterogeneity of the crystal, while local frames may inadvertently disrupt crystal symmetry, limiting their expressivity. In this work, we revisit the frame design problem for crystalline materials and propose a novel approach to construct expressive Symmetry-Preserving Frames, dubbed as SPFrame, for modeling crystal structures. Specifically, this local-global associative frame constructs invariant local frames rather than equivariant ones, thereby preserving the symmetry of the crystal. In parallel, it integrates global structural information to construct an equivariant global frame to enforce SO(3) invariance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SPFrame consistently outperforms traditional frame construction techniques and existing crystal property prediction baselines across multiple benchmark tasks.

Text-to-image diffusion models have gained widespread application across various domains, demonstrating remarkable creative potential. However, the strong generalization capabilities of diffusion models can inadvertently lead to the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, posing significant risks to their safe deployment. While several concept erasure methods have been proposed to mitigate the issue associated with NSFW content, a comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness across various scenarios remains absent. To bridge this gap, we introduce a full-pipeline toolkit specifically designed for concept erasure and conduct the first systematic study of NSFW concept erasure methods. By examining the interplay between the underlying mechanisms and empirical observations, we provide in-depth insights and practical guidance for the effective application of concept erasure methods in various real-world scenarios, with the aim of advancing the understanding of content safety in diffusion models and establishing a solid foundation for future research and development in this critical area.

In this paper, we introduce a model-based deep-learning approach to solve finite-horizon continuous-time stochastic control problems with jumps. We iteratively train two neural networks: one to represent the optimal policy and the other to approximate the value function. Leveraging a continuous-time version of the dynamic programming principle, we derive two different training objectives based on the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, ensuring that the networks capture the underlying stochastic dynamics. Empirical evaluations on different problems illustrate the accuracy and scalability of our approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving complex, high-dimensional stochastic control tasks.