arXiv Daily Digest - 2026-04-16

Parameter space is not function space for neural network architectures. This fact, investigated as early as the 1990s under terms such as ``reverse engineering," or ``parameter identifiability", has led to the natural question of parameter space symmetries\textemdash the study of distinct parameters in neural architectures which realize the same function. Indeed, the quotient space obtained by identifying parameters giving rise to the same function, called the \textit{neuromanifold}, has been shown in some cases to have rich geometric properties, impacting optimization dynamics. Thus far, techniques towards complete classifications have required the analyticity of the activation function, notably excising the important case of ReLU. Here, in contrast, we exploit the non-differentiability of the ReLU activation to provide a complete classification of the symmetries in the shallow case.

Fairness in algorithmic decision-making is often defined in the predictive space, where predictive performance - used as a proxy for decision-maker (DM) utility - is traded off against prediction-based fairness notions, such as demographic parity or equality of opportunity. This perspective, however, ignores how predictions translate into decisions and ultimately into utilities and welfare for both DM and decision subjects (DS), as well as their allocation across social-salient groups. In this paper, we propose a multi-stakeholder framework for fair algorithmic decision-making grounded in welfare economics and distributive justice, explicitly modeling the utilities of both the DM and DS, and defining fairness via a social planner's utility that captures inequalities in DS utilities across groups under different justice-based fairness notions (e.g., Egalitarian, Rawlsian). We formulate fair decision-making as a post-hoc multi-objective optimization problem, characterizing the achievable performance-fairness trade-offs in the two-dimensional utility space of DM utility and the social planner's utility, under different decision policy classes (deterministic vs. stochastic, shared vs. group-specific). Using the proposed framework, we then identify conditions (in terms of the stakeholders' utilities) under which stochastic policies are more optimal than deterministic ones, and empirically demonstrate that simple stochastic policies can yield superior performance-fairness trade-offs by leveraging outcome uncertainty. Overall, we advocate a shift from prediction-centric fairness to a transparent, justice-based, multi-stakeholder approach that supports the collaborative design of decision-making policies.

Recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have stimulated growing interest in automating or assisting Business Process Modeling tasks using natural language. Several approaches have been proposed to transform textual process descriptions into BPMN and related workflow models. However, the extent to which these approaches effectively support complex process modeling in organizational settings remains unclear. This article presents a literature review of AI-driven methods for transforming natural language into BPMN process models, with a particular focus on the role of LLMs. Following a structured review strategy, relevant studies were identified and analyzed to classify existing approaches, examine how LLMs are integrated into text-to-model pipelines, and investigate the evaluation practices used to assess generated models. The analysis reveals a clear shift from rule-based and traditional NLP pipelines toward LLM-based architectures that rely on prompt engineering, intermediate representations, and iterative refinement mechanisms. While these approaches significantly expand the capabilities of automated process model generation, the literature also exposes persistent challenges related to semantic correctness, evaluation fragmentation, reproducibility, and limited validation in real-world organizational contexts. Based on these findings, this review identifies key research gaps and discusses promising directions for future research, including the integration of contextual knowledge through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), its integration with LLMs, the development of interactive modeling architectures, and the need for more comprehensive and standardized evaluation frameworks.

Reinforcement learning has shown promise for automating power-grid operation tasks such as topology control and congestion management. However, its deployment in real-world power systems remains limited by strict safety requirements, brittleness under rare disturbances, and poor generalization to unseen grid topologies. In safety-critical infrastructure, catastrophic failures cannot be tolerated, and learning-based controllers must operate within hard physical constraints. This paper proposes a safety-constrained hierarchical control framework for power-grid operation that explicitly decouples long-horizon decision-making from real-time feasibility enforcement. A high-level reinforcement learning policy proposes abstract control actions, while a deterministic runtime safety shield filters unsafe actions using fast forward simulation. Safety is enforced as a runtime invariant, independent of policy quality or training distribution. The proposed framework is evaluated on the Grid2Op benchmark suite under nominal conditions, forced line-outage stress tests, and zero-shot deployment on the ICAPS 2021 large-scale transmission grid without retraining. Results show that flat reinforcement learning policies are brittle under stress, while safety-only methods are overly conservative. In contrast, the proposed hierarchical and safety-aware approach achieves longer episode survival, lower peak line loading, and robust zero-shot generalization to unseen grids. These results indicate that safety and generalization in power-grid control are best achieved through architectural design rather than increasingly complex reward engineering, providing a practical path toward deployable learning-based controllers for real-world energy systems.

Product bundling boosts e-commerce revenue by recommending complementary item combinations. However, existing methods face two critical challenges: (1) collaborative filtering approaches struggle with cold-start items owing to dependency on historical interactions, and (2) LLMs lack inherent capability to model interactive graph directly. To bridge this gap, we propose a dual-enhancement method that integrates interactive graph learning and LLM-based semantic understanding for product bundling. Our method introduces a graph-to-text paradigm, which leverages a Dynamic Concept Binding Mechanism (DCBM) to translate graph structures into natural language prompts. The DCBM plays a critical role in aligning domain-specific entities with LLM tokenization, enabling effective comprehension of combinatorial constraints. Experiments on three benchmarks (POG, POG_dense, Steam) demonstrate 6.3%-26.5% improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

Oscillator-based Ising/Potts machines (OIMs/OPMs) are promising hardware accelerators for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems using coupled oscillator synchronization dynamics. Analog OIMs/OPMs offer speed advantages but have limited coupling resolution, process variation susceptibility, and scalability issues, while digital GPU/CPU emulations provide flexibility but suffer from irregular memory access patterns and energy inefficiency. This work presents a custom ASIC architecture that digitally emulates OIM/OPM dynamics using simplified fixedpoint Kuramoto model equations. The scalable design features processing elements with direct interconnections, eliminating shared memory bottleneck while maintaining digital programmability and precision. A 20x20 processing element array with king's graph connectivity is prototyped and evaluated via post-layout simulations on unweighted/weighted max-cut and graph coloring problems, achieving 97-100% maximum accuracy with significant speed and energy improvements over general-purpose platforms, demonstrating the viability of algorithmically codesigned ASICs.

Reconstructing 3D representations from 2D inputs is a fundamental task in computer vision and graphics, serving as a cornerstone for understanding and interacting with the physical world. While traditional methods achieve high fidelity, they are limited by slow per-scene optimization or category-specific training, which hinders their practical deployment and scalability. Hence, generalizable feed-forward 3D reconstruction has witnessed rapid development in recent years. By learning a model that maps images directly to 3D representations in a single forward pass, these methods enable efficient reconstruction and robust cross-scene generalization. Our survey is motivated by a critical observation: despite the diverse geometric output representations, ranging from implicit fields to explicit primitives, existing feed-forward approaches share similar high-level architectural patterns, such as image feature extraction backbones, multi-view information fusion mechanisms, and geometry-aware design principles. Consequently, we abstract away from these representation differences and instead focus on model design, proposing a novel taxonomy centered on model design strategies that are agnostic to the output format. Our proposed taxonomy organizes the research directions into five key problems that drive recent research development: feature enhancement, geometry awareness, model efficiency, augmentation strategies and temporal-aware models. To support this taxonomy with empirical grounding and standardized evaluation, we further comprehensively review related benchmarks and datasets, and extensively discuss and categorize real-world applications based on feed-forward 3D models. Finally, we outline future directions to address open challenges such as scalability, evaluation standards, and world modeling.

Modern distributed systems generate large volumes of logs that can be analyzed to support essential AIOps tasks such as fault diagnosis, which plays a crucial role in maintaining system reliability. Most existing approaches rely on log-based models that treat logs as linear sequences of events. However, such representations discard the structural context between events that are often present in execution logs, such as parent-child dependencies, fan-out (branching), or temporal features. To better capture these relationships, recent works on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suggest that representing logs as graphs offers a promising alternative. Building on these observations, this paper conducts a comparative study of log-based encoder architectures (e.g., BERT) and graph-based models (e.g., GNNs) for automated fault diagnosis. We evaluate our models on TraceBench, a trace-oriented log dataset, and on BGL, a more traditional system log dataset, covering both anomaly detection and fault type classification. Our results show that graph-only models fail to outperform encoder baselines. However, integrating learned representations from log encoders into graph-based models achieves the strongest overall performance. These findings highlight conditions under which graph-augmented architectures can outperform traditional log-based approaches.

Under interpolation-type assumptions such as the strong growth condition, stochastic optimization methods can attain convergence rates comparable to full-batch methods, but their performance, particularly for SGD, remains highly sensitive to step-size selection. To address this issue, we propose a unified stochastic trust-region framework that eliminates manual step-size tuning and extends naturally to equality-constrained problems. For unconstrained optimization, we develop a first-order stochastic trust-region algorithm and show that, under the strong growth condition, it achieves an iteration and stochastic first-order oracle complexity of $O(\varepsilon^{-2} \log(1/\varepsilon))$ for finding an $\varepsilon$-stationary point. For equality-constrained problems, we introduce a quadratic-penalty-based stochastic trust-region method with penalty parameter $μ$, and establish an iteration and oracle complexity of $O(\varepsilon^{-4} \log(1/\varepsilon))$ to reach an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of the penalized problem, corresponding to an $O(\varepsilon)$-approximate KKT point of the original constrained problem. Numerical experiments on deep neural network training and orthogonally constrained subspace fitting demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve performance comparable to well-tuned stochastic baselines, while exhibiting stable optimization behavior and effectively handling hard constraints without manual learning-rate scheduling.

Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) is essential for sequential task adaptation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) but is severely restricted by catastrophic forgetting. While existing literature focuses on the reasoning language backbone, in this work, we expose a critical yet neglected dual-forgetting phenomenon across both perception drift in Cross-modal Projection Space and reasoning collapse in Low-rank Parameter Space. To resolve this, we present \textbf{MAny} (\textbf{M}erge \textbf{Any}thing), a framework that merges task-specific knowledge through \textbf{C}ross-modal \textbf{P}rojection \textbf{M}erging (\textbf{CPM}) and \textbf{L}ow-rank \textbf{P}arameter \textbf{M}erging (\textbf{LPM}). Specifically, CPM recovers perceptual alignment by adaptively merging cross-modal visual representations via visual-prototype guidance, ensuring accurate feature recovery during inference. Simultaneously, LPM eliminates mutual interference among task-specific low-rank modules by recursively merging low-rank weight matrices. By leveraging recursive least squares, LPM provides a closed-form solution that mathematically guarantees an optimal fusion trajectory for reasoning stability. Notably, MAny operates as a training-free paradigm that achieves knowledge merging via efficient CPU-based algebraic operations, eliminating additional gradient-based optimization beyond initial tuning. Our extensive evaluations confirm the superior performance and robustness of MAny across multiple MLLMs and benchmarks. Specifically, on the UCIT benchmark, MAny achieves significant leads of up to 8.57\% and 2.85\% in final average accuracy over state-of-the-art methods across two different MLLMs, respectively.

Commit signing is widely promoted as a foundation of software supply-chain security, yet prior work has studied it through the lens of individual repositories or curated project samples, missing the broader picture of how developers behave across an entire platform. Grounded in replicability theory, we vary the sampling unit from repositories to individual developers, following 71,694 active GitHub users, defined as accounts that have authored at least one commit, across all their repositories and their entire commit history, spanning 16 million commits and 874,198 repositories. This platform-wide, user-centric view reveals a fundamental gap that repository sampling cannot detect. The ecosystem's apparent high signing adoption rate is an illusion. Once platform-generated signatures are excluded, fewer than 6% of developers have ever signed a commit themselves, and the vast majority of apparent signers have never signed outside a web browser. Among the minority who do sign locally, signing rarely persists over time or across repositories, and roughly one in eight developer-managed signatures fails verification because signing keys are never uploaded to GitHub. Examining the key registry, we find that expired keys are almost never revoked and more than a quarter of users carry at least one dead key. Together, these findings reveal that commit signing as practiced today cannot serve as a dependable provenance signal at ecosystem scale, and we offer concrete recommendations for closing that gap.

We promote in this paper the processing of radar data in the frequency domain to achieve higher robustness against noise and structural errors, especially in comparison to feature-based methods. This holds also for high dynamics in the scene, i.e., ego-motion of the vehicle with the sensor plus the presence of an unknown number of other moving objects. In addition to the high robustness, the processing in the frequency domain has the so far neglected advantage that the underlying correlation based methods used for, e.g., registration, provide information about all moving structures in the scene. A typical automotive application case is overtaking maneuvers, which in the context of autonomous racing are used here as a motivating example. Initial experiments and results with Fourier SOFT in 2D (FS2D) are presented that use the Boreas dataset to demonstrate radar-only-odometry, i.e., radar-odometry without sensor-fusion, to support our arguments.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models often suffers from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches alleviate this issue by isolating task-critical parameters during training. However, these methods represent a static solution to a dynamic problem, assuming that parameter importance remains fixed once identified. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that parameter importance exhibits temporal drift over the course of training. To address this, we propose Evolving Parameter Isolation (EPI), a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. Instead of freezing a fixed subset of parameters, EPI periodically updates isolation masks using gradient-based signals, enabling the model to protect emerging task-critical parameters while releasing outdated ones to recover plasticity. Experiments on diverse multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPI consistently reduces interference and forgetting compared to static isolation and standard fine-tuning, while improving overall generalization. Our analysis highlights the necessity of synchronizing isolation mechanisms with the evolving dynamics of learning diverse abilities.

Memory-based self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for coding agents. However, existing approaches typically restrict memory utilization to homogeneous task domains, failing to leverage the shared infrastructural foundations, such as runtime environments and programming languages, that exist across diverse real-world coding problems. To address this limitation, we investigate \textbf{Memory Transfer Learning} (MTL) by harnessing a unified memory pool from heterogeneous domains. We evaluate performance across 6 coding benchmarks using four memory representations, ranging from concrete traces to abstract insights. Our experiments demonstrate that cross-domain memory improves average performance by 3.7\%, primarily by transferring meta-knowledge, such as validation routines, rather than task-specific code. Importantly, we find that abstraction dictates transferability; high-level insights generalize well, whereas low-level traces often induce negative transfer due to excessive specificity. Furthermore, we show that transfer effectiveness scales with the size of the memory pool, and memory can be transferred even between different models. Our work establishes empirical design principles for expanding memory utilization beyond single-domain silos. Project page: https://memorytransfer.github.io/

Diffusion language models have recently emerged as a leading alternative to standard language models, due to their ability for bidirectional attention and parallel text generation. In this work, we explore variants for their use in speech recognition. Specifically, we introduce a comprehensive guide to incorporating masked diffusion language models (MDLM) and uniform-state diffusion models (USDMs) for rescoring ASR hypotheses. Additionally, we design a new joint-decoding method that combines CTC and USDM by integrating the framewise probability distributions derived from CTC with the labelwise probability distributions computed by USDM at each decoding step, thereby generating new candidates that combine strong language knowledge from USDM and acoustic information from CTC. Our findings reveal that USDM, as well as MDLM, can significantly improve the accuracy of recognized text. We publish all our code and recipes.

The lack of transparency about code datasets used to train large language models (LLMs) makes it difficult to detect, evaluate, and mitigate data leakage. We present a perturbation-based method to quantify memorization advantage in code LLMs, defined as the performance gap between likely seen and unseen inputs. We evaluate 8 open-source code LLMs on 19 benchmarks across four task families: code generation, code understanding, vulnerability detection, and bug fixing. Sensitivity patterns vary widely across models and tasks. For example, StarCoder reaches high sensitivity on some benchmarks (up to 0.8), while QwenCoder remains lower (mostly below 0.4), suggesting differences in generalization behavior. Task categories also differ: code summarization tends to show low sensitivity, whereas test generation is substantially higher. We then analyze two widely discussed benchmarks, CVEFixes and Defects4J, often suspected of leakage. Contrary to common concerns, both show low memorization advantage across models: CVEFixes remains below 0.1, and Defects4J is lower than other program repair benchmarks. These results suggest that, for these datasets, models may rely more on learned generalization than direct memorization. Overall, our findings provide evidence that memorization risk is highly task- and model-dependent, and highlight the need for stronger evaluation protocols, especially in security-focused settings.

Physical reasoning over visual inputs demands tight integration of visual perception, domain knowledge, and multi-step symbolic inference. Yet even state-of-the-art Vision Language Models (VLMs) fall far short of human performance on physics benchmarks. While post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have demonstrated strong reasoning gains in language models, how reward design shapes VLM physical reasoning behavior remains poorly understood. We present a systematic reward ablation study for GRPO-based VLM training on physical reasoning. We compare four reward signals of increasing semantic richness: format compliance, answer accuracy, a composite rubric reward (answer correctness, physics principle identification, and unit consistency), and a novel internal reward derived from model attention weights over input image regions. We evaluate on PhyX, a 3,000-problem benchmark spanning six physics domains and six reasoning types across multiple-choice and open-ended formats, using IBM Granite Vision 3.3 (2B). Across both formats, GRPO with accuracy-based rewards outperforms SFT on most domains, though gains vary substantially by reward type and domain. Reward design does not uniformly improve performance. Instead, it induces domain-specific reasoning behaviors. Accuracy-based rewards provide the strongest overall gains. Rubric rewards improve structured reasoning quality without consistent accuracy improvements. Attention-based rewards enhance spatial reasoning while degrading performance in symbolic domains. Our internal attention-weight reward requires no spatial annotations and improves spatial relation accuracy from 0.27 to 0.50, suggesting that supervising where the model attends during generation is a promising direction for visually grounded physical reasoning.

Accurate methane sorption prediction across heterogeneous coal ranks requires models that combine thermodynamic consistency, efficient knowledge transfer across data-scarce geological systems, and calibrated uncertainty estimates, capabilities that are rarely addressed together in existing frameworks. We present a physics-informed transfer learning framework that adapts a hydrogen sorption PINN to methane sorption prediction via Elastic Weight Consolidation, coal-specific feature engineering, and a three-phase curriculum that progressively balances transfer preservation with thermodynamic fine-tuning. Trained on 993 equilibrium measurements from 114 independent coal experiments spanning lignite to anthracite, the framework achieves R2 = 0.932 on held-out coal samples, a 227% improvement over pressure-only classical isotherms, while hydrogen pre-training delivers 18.9% lower RMSE and 19.4% faster convergence than random initialization. Five Bayesian uncertainty quantification approaches reveal a systematic divergence in performance across physics-constrained architectures. Monte Carlo Dropout achieves well-calibrated uncertainty at minimal overhead, while deep ensembles, regardless of architectural diversity or initialization strategy, exhibit performance degradation because shared physics constraints narrow the admissible solution manifold. SHAP and ALE analyses confirm that learned representations remain physically interpretable and aligned with established coal sorption mechanisms: moisture-volatile interactions are most influential, pressure-temperature coupling captures thermodynamic co-dependence, and features exhibit non-monotonic effects. These results identify Monte Carlo Dropout as the best-performing UQ method in this physics-constrained transfer learning framework, and demonstrate cross-gas transfer learning as a data-efficient strategy for geological material modeling.

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to generating factually incorrect outputs. Recent work has applied conformal prediction to provide uncertainty estimates and statistical guarantees for the factuality of LLM generations. However, existing approaches are typically not prompt-adaptive, limiting their ability to capture input-dependent variability. As a result, they may filter out too few items (leading to over-coverage) or too many (under-coverage) for a given task or prompt. We propose an adaptive conformal prediction approach that extends conformal score transformation methods to LLMs, with applications to long-form generation and multiple-choice question answering. This enables prompt-dependent calibration, retaining marginal coverage guarantees while improving conditional coverage. In addition, the approach naturally supports selective prediction, allowing unreliable claims or answer choices to be filtered out in downstream applications. We evaluate our approach on multiple white-box models across diverse domains and show that it significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of conditional coverage.

Objective: Investigate whether hypnogram 'realism' can be used to guide an unsupervised method for handling arbitrary types of signal degradation in mobile sleep monitoring. Approach: Combining a pretrained, state-of-the-art 'u-sleep' model with a 'discriminator' network, we align features from a target domain with a feature space learned during pretraining. To test the approach, we distort the source domain with realistic signal degradations, to see how well the method can adapt to different types of degradation. We compare the performance of the resulting model with best-case models designed in a supervised manner for each type of transfer. Main Results: Depending on the type of distortion, we find that the unsupervised approach can increase Cohen's kappa with as little as 0.03 and up to 0.29, and that for all transfers, the method does not decrease performance. However, the approach never quite reaches the estimated theoretical optimal performance, and when tested on a real-life domain mismatch between two sleep studies, the benefit was insignificant. Significance: 'Discriminator-guided fine tuning' is an interesting approach to handling signal degradation for 'in the wild' sleep monitoring, with some promise. In particular, what it says about sleep data in general is interesting. However, more development will be necessary before using it 'in production'.

Predicting the effects of perturbations in-silico on cell state can identify drivers of cell behavior at scale and accelerate drug discovery. However, modeling challenges remain due to the inherent heterogeneity of single cell gene expression and the complex, latent gene dependencies. Here, we present PRiMeFlow, an end-to-end flow matching based approach to directly model the effects of genetic and small molecule perturbations in the gene expression space. The distribution-fitting approach taken by PRiMeFlow enables it to accurately approximate the empirical distribution of single-cell gene expression, which we demonstrate through extensive benchmarking inside PerturBench. Through ablation studies, we also validate important model design choices such as operating in gene expression space and parameterizing the velocity field with a U-Net architecture. The PRiMeFlow architecture was used as the basis for the model that won the Generalist Prize in the first ARC Virtual Cell Challenge.

Antibody lead optimization is inherently a multi-objective challenge in drug discovery. Achieving a balance between different drug-like properties is crucial for the development of viable candidates, and this search becomes exponentially challenging as desired properties grow. The ever-growing zoo of sophisticated in silico tools for predicting antibody properties calls for an efficient joint optimization procedure to overcome resource-intensive sequential filtering pipelines. We present BOAT, a versatile Bayesian optimization framework for multi-property antibody engineering. Our `plug-and-play' framework couples uncertainty-aware surrogate modeling with a genetic algorithm to jointly optimize various predicted antibody traits while enabling efficient exploration of sequence space. Through systematic benchmarking against genetic algorithms and newer generative learning approaches, we demonstrate competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods for multi-objective protein optimization. We identify clear regimes where surrogate-driven optimization outperforms expensive generative approaches and establish practical limits imposed by sequence dimensionality and oracle costs.

Open-world Question Answering (OW-QA) over knowledge graphs (KGs) aims to answer questions over incomplete or evolving KGs. Traditional KGQA assumes a closed world where answers must exist in the KG, limiting real-world applicability. In contrast, open-world QA requires inferring missing knowledge based on graph structure and context. Large language models (LLMs) excel at language understanding but lack structured reasoning. Graph neural networks (GNNs) model graph topology but struggle with semantic interpretation. Existing systems integrate LLMs with GNNs or graph retrievers. Some support open-world QA but rely on structural embeddings without semantic grounding. Most assume observed paths or complete graphs, making them unreliable under missing links or multi-hop reasoning. We present GLOW, a hybrid system that combines a pre-trained GNN and an LLM for open-world KGQA. The GNN predicts top-k candidate answers from the graph structure. These, along with relevant KG facts, are serialized into a structured prompt (e.g., triples and candidates) to guide the LLM's reasoning. This enables joint reasoning over symbolic and semantic signals, without relying on retrieval or fine-tuning. To evaluate generalization, we introduce GLOW-BENCH, a 1,000-question benchmark over incomplete KGs across diverse domains. GLOW outperforms existing LLM-GNN systems on standard benchmarks and GLOW-BENCH, achieving up to 53.3% and an average 38% improvement. GitHub code and data are available.

Synthetic data is a standard component in training large language models, yet systematic comparisons across design dimensions, including rephrasing strategy, generator model, and source data, remain absent. We conduct extensive controlled experiments, generating over one trillion tokens, to identify critical factors in rephrasing web text into synthetic pretraining data. Our results reveal that structured output formats, such as tables, math problems, FAQs, and tutorials, consistently outperform both curated web baselines and prior synthetic methods. Notably, increasing the size of the generator model beyond 1B parameters provides no additional benefit. Our analysis also demonstrates that the selection of the original data used for mixing substantially influences performance. By applying our findings, we develop \textbf{\textsc{FinePhrase}}, a 486-billion-token open dataset of rephrased web text. We show that \textsc{FinePhrase} outperforms all existing synthetic data baselines while reducing generation costs by up to 30 times. We provide the dataset, all prompts, and the generation framework to the research community.

With the rapid growth of deep neural networks (DNNs), compute-in-memory (CIM) has emerged as a promising energy-efficient paradigm for accelerating multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations. Yet, current CIM architectures are largely limited to dot-product computations and struggle to efficiently support general-purpose matrix operations, such as transpose, element-wise addition, and multiplication. This work presents a 3D-integrated, memory-on-memory SRAM-eDRAM hybrid CIM architecture, implemented in GlobalFoundries 22~nm FDSOI technology, capable of performing general matrix operations directly within the memory crossbar with 4-bit precision. By leveraging a specialized transpose-based architecture, in-memory arithmetic operations, peripheral-aware design, and 3D SRAM--eDRAM integration, the proposed architecture balances latency, energy efficiency, and compute density for general purpose matrix operations while remaining compatible with the conventional CIM dot product architectures. Overall, this memory-on-memory CIM framework generalizes CIM beyond dot products, enabling versatile matrix processing and paving the way for broader applications in AI acceleration and general-purpose high performance computing.

We study value adaptation in offline-to-online reinforcement learning under general function approximation. Starting from an imperfect offline pretrained $Q$-function, the learner aims to adapt it to the target environment using only a limited amount of online interaction. We first characterize the difficulty of this setting by establishing a minimax lower bound, showing that even when the pretrained $Q$-function is close to optimal $Q^\star$, online adaptation can be no more efficient than pure online RL on certain hard instances. On the positive side, under a novel structural condition on the offline-pretrained value functions, we propose O2O-LSVI, an adaptation algorithm with problem-dependent sample complexity that provably improves over pure online RL. Finally, we complement our theory with neural-network experiments that demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method.

As AI moves from data centers to robots and wearables, scaling ever-larger models becomes insufficient. Physical AI operates under tight latency, energy, privacy, and reliability constraints, and its performance depends not only on model capacity but also on how signals are acquired through controllable sensors in dynamic environments. We present Artificial Tripartite Intelligence (ATI), a bio-inspired, sensor-first architectural contract for physical AI. ATI is tripartite at the systems level: a Brainstem (L1) provides reflexive safety and signal-integrity control, a Cerebellum (L2) performs continuous sensor calibration, and a Cerebral Inference Subsystem spanning L3/L4 supports routine skill selection and execution, coordination, and deep reasoning. This modular organization allows sensor control, adaptive sensing, edge-cloud execution, and foundation model reasoning to co-evolve within one closed-loop architecture, while keeping time-critical sensing and control on device and invoking higher-level inference only when needed. We instantiate ATI in a mobile camera prototype under dynamic lighting and motion. In our routed evaluation (L3-L4 split inference), compared to the default auto-exposure setting, ATI (L1/L2 adaptive sensing) improves end-to-end accuracy from 53.8% to 88% while reducing remote L4 invocations by 43.3%. These results show the value of co-designing sensing and inference for embodied AI.

Text-to-image (T2I) systems enable rapid generation of high-fidelity imagery but are misaligned with how visual ideas develop. T2I systems generate outputs that make implicit visual decisions on behalf of the user, often introduce fine-grained details that can anchor users prematurely and limit their ability to keep options open early on, and cause unintended changes during editing that are difficult to correct and reduce users' sense of control. To address these concerns, we present Creo, a multi-stage T2I system that scaffolds image generation by progressing from rough sketches to high-resolution outputs, exposing intermediary abstractions where users can make incremental changes. Sketch-like abstractions invite user editing and allow users to keep design options open when ideas are still forming due to their provisional nature. Each stage in Creo can be modified with manual changes and AI-assisted operations, enabling fine-grained, step-wise control through a locking mechanism that preserves prior decisions so subsequent edits affect only specified regions or attributes. Users remain in the loop, making and verifying decisions across stages, while the system applies diffs instead of regenerating full images, reducing drift as fidelity increases. A comparative study with a one-shot baseline shows that participants felt stronger ownership over Creo outputs, as they were able to trace their decisions in building up the image. Furthermore, embedding-based analysis indicates that Creo outputs are less homogeneous than one-shot results. These findings suggest that multi-stage generation, combined with intermediate control and decision locking, is a key design principle for improving controllability, user agency, creativity, and output diversity in generative systems.

According to constructivist theory, students learn software security more effectively when examples are grounded in their own code. Generic examples often fail to connect with students' prior work, limiting engagement and understanding. Advances in LLMs are now making it possible to automatically generate personalized examples by embedding security vulnerabilities directly into student-authored code. This paper introduces a method that uses LLMs to inject instances of specific Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs) into students' own assignment code, creating individualized instructional materials. We present an agentic AI framework, using autonomous LLM-based agents equipped with task-specific tools to orchestrate injection, evaluation, ranking, and learning outcome generation. We report the experience of deploying this system in two undergraduate computer science courses (N=71), where students reviewed code samples containing LLM-injected vulnerabilities and completed a post-project survey. We compared responses with a baseline using a widely adopted set of generic security instructional materials. Students qualitatively reported finding CWE injections into their own code more relevant, clearer, and more engaging than the textbook-style examples. However, our quantitative findings revealed limited statistically significant differences, suggesting that while students valued the personalization, further studies and refinement of the approach are needed to establish stronger empirical support.

Existing agent-safety evaluation has focused mainly on externally induced risks. Yet agents may still enter unsafe trajectories under benign conditions. We study this complementary but underexplored setting through the lens of \emph{intrinsic} risk, where intrinsic failures remain latent, propagate across long-horizon execution, and eventually lead to high-consequence outcomes. To evaluate this setting, we introduce \emph{non-attack intrinsic risk auditing} and present \textbf{HINTBench}, a benchmark of 629 agent trajectories (523 risky, 106 safe; 33 steps on average) supporting three tasks: risk detection, risk-step localization, and intrinsic failure-type identification. Its annotations are organized under a unified five-constraint taxonomy. Experiments reveal a substantial capability gap: strong LLMs perform well on trajectory-level risk detection, but their performance drops to below 35 Strict-F1 on risk-step localization, while fine-grained failure diagnosis proves even harder. Existing guard models transfer poorly to this setting. These findings establish intrinsic risk auditing as an open challenge for agent safety.

This study evaluates colorectal risk factors and compares classical models against Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) for anastomotic leak prediction. Analyzing clinical data with 14\% leak prevalence, we tested ZZFeatureMap encodings with RealAmplitudes and EfficientSU2 ansatze under simulated noise. $F_β$-optimized quantum configurations yielded significantly higher sensitivity (83.3\%) than classical baselines (66.7\%). This demonstrates that quantum feature spaces better prioritize minority class identification, which is critical for low-prevalence clinical risk prediction. Our work explores various optimizers under noisy conditions, highlighting key trade-offs and future directions for hardware deployment.

We show how causal interventions in Transformer models provide insights into English syntax by focusing on a long-standing challenge for syntactic theory: syntactic islands. Extraction from coordinated verb phrases is often degraded, yet acceptability varies gradiently with lexical content (e.g., "I know what he hates art and loves" vs. "I know what he looked down and saw"). We show that modern Transformer language models replicate human judgments across this gradient. Using causal interventions that isolate functionally relevant subspaces in Transformer blocks, attention modules, and MLPs, we demonstrate that extraction from coordination islands engages the same filler-gap mechanisms as canonical wh-dependencies, but that these mechanisms are selectively blocked to varying degrees. By projecting a large corpus of unrelated text onto these causally identified subspaces, we derive a novel linguistic hypothesis: the conjunction "and" is represented differently in extractable versus non-extractable constructions, corresponding to expressions encoding relational dependencies versus purely conjunctive uses. These results illustrate how mechanistic interpretability can inform syntax, generating new hypotheses about linguistic representation and processing.

Automated code generation remains a persistent challenge in software engineering, as conventional multi-agent frameworks are often constrained by static planning, isolated execution, high computational overhead, and limited adaptability to complex tasks. This paper introduces CollabCoder, a novel Plan-Code Co-Evolution framework that improves code generation through dynamic multi-agent collaboration. The core idea is to design a collaborative decision-making process between the plan module and the code module to decide which module should be executed for the debugging process. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that CollabCoder consistently improves code quality and robustness across tasks. Importantly, CollabCoder achieves performance comparable to or exceeding current state-of-the-art methods while reducing computational overhead, with efficiency gains becoming more pronounced as benchmark difficulty increases. On the more challenging LiveCodeBench and xCodeEval benchmarks, our approach improves performance by 11-20% over strong baselines while reducing the number of API calls by an average of 4-10 per execution.

Scientific peer review faces mounting strain as submission volumes surge, making it increasingly difficult to sustain review quality, consistency, and timeliness. Recent advances in AI have led the community to consider its use in peer review, yet a key unresolved question is whether AI can generate technically sound reviews at real-world conference scale. Here we report the first large-scale field deployment of AI-assisted peer review: every main-track submission at AAAI-26 received one clearly identified AI review from a state-of-the-art system. The system combined frontier models, tool use, and safeguards in a multi-stage process to generate reviews for all 22,977 full-review papers in less than a day. A large-scale survey of AAAI-26 authors and program committee members showed that participants not only found AI reviews useful, but actually preferred them to human reviews on key dimensions such as technical accuracy and research suggestions. We also introduce a novel benchmark and find that our system substantially outperforms a simple LLM-generated review baseline at detecting a variety of scientific weaknesses. Together, these results show that state-of-the-art AI methods can already make meaningful contributions to scientific peer review at conference scale, opening a path toward the next generation of synergistic human-AI teaming for evaluating research.

Software engineering research has focused on automating maintenance and evolution processes to reduce costs and improve reliability. The emergence of foundation models (FMs) with strong code understanding and reasoning abilities offers new opportunities for autonomous software behavior. Inspired by Artificial Life (ALife), we propose a fundamental shift in the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC) by introducing self-construction mechanisms that enable software to evolve and maintain autonomously. This position paper explores the potential of Autopoietic Architectures, specifically Psi-Arch, as a foundational framework for self-constructing software. We first analyze the limitations of traditional maintenance approaches and identify gaps in current SDLC automation. Subsequently, we outline the core challenges in achieving self-construction, including the integration of foundation-model-based reasoning units and the establishment of novel architectural paradigms. Although this paper does not present a definitive solution, it seeks to catalyze discourse and inspire research toward a new paradigm in software engineering, one in which self-constructing software represents the next frontier in SDLC automation.

Industrial time-series data from real production environments exhibits substantially higher complexity than commonly used benchmark datasets, primarily due to heterogeneous, multi-stage operational processes. As a result, anomaly detection methods validated under simplified conditions often fail to generalize to industrial settings. This work presents an empirical study on a unique dataset collected from fully operational industrial machinery, explicitly capturing pronounced process-induced variability. We evaluate which model classes are capable of capturing this complexity, starting with a classical Isolation Forest baseline and extending to multiple autoencoder architectures. Experimental results show that Isolation Forest is insufficient for modeling the non-periodic, multi-scale dynamics present in the data, whereas autoencoders consistently perform better. Among them, temporal convolutional autoencoders achieve the most robust performance, while recurrent and variational variants require more careful tuning.

Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is critical in domains such as industrial monitoring, healthcare, and cybersecurity, but it remains challenging due to rare and heterogeneous anomalies and the scarcity of labelled data. This scarcity makes unsupervised approaches predominant, yet existing methods often rely on reconstruction or forecasting, which struggle with complex data, or on embedding-based approaches that require domain-specific anomaly synthesis and fixed distance metrics. We propose ASTER, a framework that generates pseudo-anomalies directly in the latent space, avoiding handcrafted anomaly injections and the need for domain expertise. A latent-space decoder produces tailored pseudo-anomalies to train a Transformer-based anomaly classifier, while a pre-trained LLM enriches the temporal and contextual representations of this space. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ASTER achieves state-of-the-art performance and sets a new standard for LLM-based TSAD.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become an essential tool for predicting fire behavior, yet maintaining both efficiency and accuracy remains challenging. A major source of computational cost in fire simulations is the modeling of radiation transfer, which is usually the dominant heat transfer mechanism in fires. Solving the high-dimensional radiative transfer equation (RTE) with traditional numerical methods can be a performance bottleneck. Here, we present a machine learning framework based on Fourier-enhanced multiple-input neural operators (Fourier-MIONet) as an efficient alternative to direct numerical integration of the RTE. We first investigate the performance of neural operator architectures for a small-scale 2D pool fire and find that Fourier-MIONet provides the most accurate radiative solution predictions. The approach is then extended to 3D CFD fire simulations, where the computational mesh is locally refined across multiple levels. In these high-resolution settings, monolithic surrogate models for direct field-to-field mapping become difficult to train and computationally inefficient. To address this issue, a nested Fourier-MIONet is proposed to predict radiation solutions across multiple mesh-refinement levels. We validate the approach on 3D McCaffrey pool fires simulated with FireFOAM, including fixed fire sizes and a unified model trained over a continuous range of heat release rates (HRRs). The proposed method achieves global relative errors of 2-4% for 3D varying-HRR scenarios while providing faster inference than the estimated cost of one finite-volume radiation solve in FireFOAM for the 16-solid-angle case. With fast and accurate inference, the surrogate makes higher-fidelity radiation treatments practical and enables the incorporation of more spectrally resolved radiation models into CFD fire simulations for engineering applications.

This paper presents the primary research challenges and key findings from the 15th International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2025), one of the official competitions of IJCAI 2025. We focus on two critical domains: multi-deal negotiations and the development of agents capable of concurrent negotiation within complex supply chain management environments. Furthermore, this work analyzes the results of the competition and outlines strategic directions for future iterations.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively managing the exploration and exploitation trade-off remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we fully analyze the exploration and exploitation dilemma of extremely hard and easy samples during the training and propose a new fine-grained trade-off mechanism. Concretely, we introduce a perplexity space disentangling strategy that divides the sample space into distinct exploration (high perplexity) and exploitation (low perplexity) subspaces, thereby mining fine-grained samples requiring exploration-exploitation trade-off. Subsequently, we propose a bidirectional reward allocation mechanism with a minimum impact on verification rewards to implement perplexity-guided exploration and exploitation, enabling more stable policy optimization. Finally, we have evaluated our method on two mainstream tasks: mathematical reasoning and function calling, and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, confirming its effectiveness in enhancing LLM performance by fine-grained exploration-exploitation trade-off.

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances from a short prompt at negligible cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be labelled at once? We investigate both questions on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labelled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing seven annotation strategies across four encoders to detect anti-immigrant hostility. A classifier trained on 25,974 GPT-5.2 labels (\$43) achieves comparable F1-Macro to one trained on 3,800 human annotations (\$316). Active learning offers little advantage over random sampling in our pre-enriched pool and delivers lower F1 than full LLM annotation at the same cost. However, comparable aggregate F1 masks a systematic difference in error structure: LLM-trained classifiers over-predict the positive class relative to the human gold standard. This divergence concentrates in topically ambiguous discussions where the distinction between anti-immigrant hostility and policy critique is most subtle, suggesting that annotation strategy should be guided not by aggregate F1 alone but by the error profile acceptable for the target application.

We present an open Molecular Crystal (MC) database of Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials (MLIP) called MolCryst-MLIPs. The first release comprises fine-tuned MACE models for nine molecular crystal systems -- Benzamide, Benzoic acid, Coumarin, Durene, Isonicotinamide, Niacinamide, Nicotinamide, Pyrazinamide, and Resorcinol -- developed using the Automated Machine Learning Pipeline (AMLP), which streamlines the entire MLIP development workflow, from reference data generation to model training and validation, into a reproducible and user-friendly pipeline. Models are fine-tuned from the MACE-MH-1 foundation model (omol head), yielding a mean energy MAE of 0.141 kJ/mol/atom and a mean force MAE of 0.648 kJ/mol/Angstrom across all systems. Dynamical stability and structural integrity, as assessed through energy conservation, P2 orientational order parameters, and radial distribution functions, are evaluated using molecular dynamics simulations. The released models and datasets constitute a growing open database of validated MLIPs, ready for production MD simulations of molecular crystal polymorphism under different thermodynamic conditions.

Automated driving at unsignalized intersections is challenging due to complex multi-vehicle interactions and the need to balance safety and efficiency. Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers structured constraint handling through optimization but relies on hand-crafted rules that often produce overly conservative behavior. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns adaptive behaviors from experience but often struggles with safety assurance and generalization to unseen environments. In this study, we present an integrated MPC-RL framework to improve navigation performance in multi-agent scenarios. Experiments show that MPC-RL outperforms standalone MPC and end-to-end RL across three traffic-density levels. Collectively, MPC-RL reduces the collision rate by 21% and improves the success rate by 6.5% compared to pure MPC. We further evaluate zero-shot transfer to a highway merging scenario without retraining. Both MPC-based methods transfer substantially better than end-to-end PPO, which highlights the role of the MPC backbone in cross-scenario robustness. The framework also shows faster loss stabilization than end-to-end RL during training, which indicates a reduced learning burden. These results suggest that the integrated approach can improve the balance between safety performance and efficiency in multi-agent intersection scenarios, while the MPC component provides a strong foundation for generalization across driving environments. The implementation code is available open-source.

Why do capitalist economies recurrently generate crises whose severity is disproportionate to the size of the triggering shock? This paper proposes a structural answer grounded in the evolutionary geometry of production networks. As economies evolve through specialization, integration, and competitive selection, their inter-sectoral linkages drift toward configurations of increasing geometric fragility, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which small disturbances generate disproportionately large cascades. We introduce Sandpile Economics, a formal framework that interprets macroeconomic instability as an emergent property of disequilibrium production networks. The key state variable is the Forman--Ricci curvature of the input--output graph, capturing local substitution possibilities when supply chains are disrupted. We show that when curvature falls below an endogenous threshold, the distribution of cascade sizes follows a power law with tail index $α\in (1,2)$, implying a regime of unbounded amplification. The underlying mechanism is evolutionary: specialization reduces input substitutability, pushing the economy toward criticality, while crisis episodes induce endogenous network reconfiguration and path dependence. These dynamics are inherently non-ergodic and cannot be captured by representative-agent frameworks. Empirically, using global input--output data, we document that production networks operate in persistently negative curvature regimes and that curvature robustly predicts medium-run output dynamics. A one-standard-deviation increase in curvature is associated with higher cumulative growth over three-year horizons, and curvature systematically outperforms standard network metrics in explaining cross-country differences in resilience.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) marks a paradigm shift toward autonomous spatial analysis. However, evaluating these LLM-based agents remains challenging due to the complex, multi-step nature of geospatial workflows. Existing benchmarks primarily rely on static text or code matching, neglecting dynamic runtime feedback and the multimodal nature of spatial outputs. To address this gap, we introduce GeoAgentBench (GABench), a dynamic and interactive evaluation benchmark tailored for tool-augmented GIS agents. GABench provides a realistic execution sandbox integrating 117 atomic GIS tools, encompassing 53 typical spatial analysis tasks across 6 core GIS domains. Recognizing that precise parameter configuration is the primary determinant of execution success in dynamic GIS environments, we designed the Parameter Execution Accuracy (PEA) metric, which utilizes a "Last-Attempt Alignment" strategy to quantify the fidelity of implicit parameter inference. Complementing this, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) based verification is proposed to assess data-spatial accuracy and cartographic style adherence. Furthermore, to address the frequent task failures caused by parameter misalignments and runtime anomalies, we developed a novel agent architecture, Plan-and-React, that mimics expert cognitive workflows by decoupling global orchestration from step-wise reactive execution. Extensive experiments with seven representative LLMs demonstrate that the Plan-and-React paradigm significantly outperforms traditional frameworks, achieving the optimal balance between logical rigor and execution robustness, particularly in multi-step reasoning and error recovery. Our findings highlight current capability boundaries and establish a robust standard for assessing and advancing the next generation of autonomous GeoAI.

Modern machine learning models typically represent inputs as fixed points in a high-dimensional embedding space. While this approach has been proven powerful for a wide range of downstream tasks, it fundamentally differs from the way humans process information. Because humans are constantly adapting to their environment, they represent objects and their relationships in a highly context-sensitive manner. To address this gap, we propose a method for context-sensitive similarity computation from neural network embeddings, applied to modeling a triplet odd-one-out task with an anchor image serving as simultaneous context. Modeling context enables us to achieve up to a 15% improvement in odd-one-out accuracy over a context-insensitive model. We find that this improvement is consistent across both original and "human-aligned" vision foundation models.

The evaluation of supervised machine learning models is a critical stage in the development of reliable predictive systems. Despite the widespread availability of machine learning libraries and automated workflows, model assessment is often reduced to the reporting of a small set of aggregate metrics, which can lead to misleading conclusions about real-world performance. This paper examines the principles, challenges, and practical considerations involved in evaluating supervised learning algorithms across classification and regression tasks. In particular, it discusses how evaluation outcomes are influenced by dataset characteristics, validation design, class imbalance, asymmetric error costs, and the choice of performance metrics. Through a series of controlled experimental scenarios using diverse benchmark datasets, the study highlights common pitfalls such as the accuracy paradox, data leakage, inappropriate metric selection, and overreliance on scalar summary measures. The paper also compares alternative validation strategies and emphasizes the importance of aligning model evaluation with the intended operational objective of the task. By presenting evaluation as a decision-oriented and context-dependent process, this work provides a structured foundation for selecting metrics and validation protocols that support statistically sound, robust, and trustworthy supervised machine learning systems.

Driver drowsiness significantly impairs the ability to accurately judge safe braking distances and is estimated to contribute to 10%-20% of road accidents in Europe. Traditional driver-assistance systems lack adaptability to real-time physiological states such as drowsiness. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based autonomous braking system that integrates vehicle dynamics with driver physiological data. Drowsiness is detected from ECG signals using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), selected through an extensive benchmark analysis of 2-minute windows with varying segmentation and overlap configurations. The inferred drowsiness state is incorporated into the observable state space of a Double-Dueling Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent, where driver impairment is modeled as an action delay. The system is implemented and evaluated in a high-fidelity CARLA simulation environment. Experimental results show that the proposed agent achieves a 99.99% success rate in avoiding collisions under both drowsy and non-drowsy conditions. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of physiology-aware control strategies for enhancing adaptive and intelligent driving safety systems.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) deliver state-of-the-art accuracy on regression and classification tasks, yet two structural deficits persistently obstruct their deployment in safety-critical, resource-constrained settings: (i) opacity of the learned function, which precludes formal verification, and (ii) reliance on heterogeneous, library-bound activation functions that inflate latency and silicon area on edge hardware. The recently introduced Exp-Minus-Log (EML) Sheffer operator, eml(x, y) = exp(x) - ln(y), was shown by Odrzywolek (2026) to be sufficient - together with the constant 1 - to express every standard elementary function as a binary tree of identical nodes. We propose to embed EML primitives inside conventional DNN architectures, yielding a hybrid DNN-EML model in which the trunk learns distributed representations and the head is a depth-bounded, weight-sparse EML tree whose snapped weights collapse to closed-form symbolic sub-expressions. We derive the forward equations, prove computational-cost bounds, analyse inference and training acceleration relative to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and quantify the trade-offs for FPGA/analog deployment. We argue that the DNN-EML pairing closes a literature gap: prior neuro-symbolic and equation-learner approaches (EQL, KAN, AI-Feynman) work with heterogeneous primitive sets and do not exploit a single hardware-realisable Sheffer element. A balanced assessment shows that EML is unlikely to accelerate training, and on commodity CPU/GPU it is also unlikely to accelerate inference; however, on a custom EML cell (FPGA logic block or analog circuit) the asymptotic latency advantage can reach an order of magnitude with simultaneous gain in interpretability and formal-verification tractability.

We consider the well-studied setting of minimizing a convex Lipschitz function using either gradient descent (GD) or its stochastic variant (SGD), and examine the last iterate convergence. By now, it is known that standard stepsize choices lead to a last iterate convergence rate of $\log T/\sqrt{T}$ after $T$ steps. A breakthrough result of Jain et al. [2019] recovered the optimal $1/\sqrt{T}$ rate by constructing a non-standard stepsize sequence. However, this sequence requires choosing $T$ in advance, as opposed to common stepsize schedules which apply for any time horizon. Moreover, Jain et al. conjectured that without prior knowledge of $T$, no stepsize sequence can ensure the optimal error for SGD's last iterate, a claim which so far remained unproven. We prove this conjecture, and in fact show that even in the noiseless case of GD, it is impossible to avoid an excess poly-log factor in $T$ when considering an anytime last iterate guarantee. Our proof further suggests that such (slightly) suboptimal stopping times are unavoidably common.

This paper develops a unified Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework for optimising two recurring in-match decisions in T20 cricket namely batting order selection and bowling plan assignment, directly in terms of win and defend probability rather than expected runs. A three-phase player profile engine (Powerplay, Middle, Death) with James-Stein shrinkage is estimated from 1,161 IPL ball-by-ball records (2008-2025). Win/defend probabilities are evaluated by vectorised Monte Carlo simulation over N = 50,000 innings trajectories. Batting orders are searched by exhaustive enumeration. Bowling plans are computed by simulated annealing over the remaining quota with the constraint that the same bowler cannot bowl consecutive overs. Applied to two 2026 IPL matches, the optimal batting order improves Mumbai Indians' win probability by 4.1 percentage points (52.4% to 56.5%), and the optimal Gujarat Titans bowling plan improves defend probability by 5.2 percentage points (39.1% to 44.3%). In both cases the observed sub-optimality is consistent with phase-agnostic deployment in decisions that appear reasonable by aggregate metrics but are exposed as costly when phase-specific profiles are applied.

The rapid proliferation of Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based agentic systems has introduced a new category of security threats that existing frameworks are inadequately equipped to address. We present MCPThreatHive, an open-source platform that automates the end-to-end lifecycle of MCP threat intelligence: from continuous, multi-source data collection through AI-driven threat extraction and classification, to structured knowledge graph storage and interactive visualization. The platform operationalizes the MCP-38 threat taxonomy, a curated set of 38 MCP-specific threat patterns mapped to STRIDE, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, and OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications. A composite risk scoring model provides quantitative prioritization. Through a comparative analysis of representative existing MCP security tools, we identify three critical coverage gaps that MCPThreatHive addresses: incomplete compositional attack modeling, absence of continuous threat intelligence, and lack of unified multi-framework classification.

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to a severe imbalance problem and sub-optimal model accuracy. Existing algorithms and training frameworks typically focus on single issue, failing to systematically co-optimize these two problems. Therefore, we propose SparseBalance, a novel algorithm-system co-design framework, which exploits the sparsity and sequence heterogeneity to optimize model accuracy and system efficiency jointly. First, we propose workload-aware dynamic sparsity tuning, which employs a bidirectional sparsity adjustment to eliminate stragglers and exploit inherent bubbles for free accuracy. Second, we propose a sparsity-aware batching strategy to achieve coarse-grained balance, which complements dynamic sparsity tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that SparseBalance achieves up to a 1.33$\times$ end-to-end speedup while still improving the long-context capability by 0.46\% on the LongBench benchmark.

Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitate more natural, human-like interactions in human-centric applications. However, existing personalization methods are constrained by limited controllability and high resource demands. Furthermore, their reliance on static personality modeling restricts adaptability across varying situations. To address these limitations, we first demonstrate the existence of situation-dependency and consistent situation-behavior patterns within LLM personalities through a multi-perspective analysis of persona neurons. Building on these insights, we propose IRIS, a training-free, neuron-based Identify-Retrieve-Steer framework for advanced situational personality steering. Our approach comprises situational persona neuron identification, situation-aware neuron retrieval, and similarity-weighted steering. We empirically validate our framework on PersonalityBench and our newly introduced SPBench, a comprehensive situational personality benchmark. Experimental results show that our method surpasses best-performing baselines, demonstrating IRIS's generalization and robustness to complex, unseen situations and different models architecture.

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific artifacts, but it does not explicitly encourage the model to ground preferences in the prompt's intent. We learn a decoder that maps a candidate answer to the latent intent embedding of the input. The reconstruction error is used as a signal to regularize the reward model training. We provide theoretical evidence that this signal emphasizes prompt-dependent information while suppressing prompt-independent shortcuts. Across math, helpfulness, and safety benchmarks, the decoder selects shorter and less sycophantic candidates with 0.877 accuracy. Incorporating this signal into RM training in Gemma-2-2B-it and Gemma-2-9B-it increases RewardBench accuracy from 0.832 to 0.868. For Best-of-N selection, our framework increases length-controlled win rates while producing shorter outputs, and remains robust to lengthening and mild off-topic drift in controlled rewrite tests.

Integro-differential equations arise in a wide range of applications, including transport, kinetic theory, radiative transfer, and multiphysics modeling, where nonlocal integral operators couple the solution across phase space. Such nonlocality often introduces dense coupling blocks in deterministic discretizations, leading to increased computational cost and memory usage, while physics-informed neural networks may suffer from expensive nonconvex training and sensitivity to hyperparameter choices. In this work, we present randomized neural networks (RaNNs) as a mesh-free collocation framework for linear integro-differential equations. Because the RaNN approximation is intrinsically dense through globally supported random features, the nonlocal integral operator does not introduce an additional loss of sparsity, while the approximate solution can still be represented with relatively few trainable degrees of freedom. By randomly fixing the hidden-layer parameters and solving only for the linear output weights, the training procedure reduces to a convex least-squares problem in the output coefficients, enabling stable and efficient optimization. As a representative application, we apply the proposed framework to the steady neutron transport equation, a high-dimensional linear integro-differential model featuring scattering integrals and diverse boundary conditions. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that, in the reported test settings, the RaNN approach achieves competitive accuracy while incurring substantially lower training cost than the selected neural and deterministic baselines, highlighting RaNNs as a robust and efficient alternative for the numerical simulation of nonlocal linear operators.

User simulators are essential for the scalable training and evaluation of interactive AI systems. However, existing approaches often rely on shallow user profiling, struggle to maintain persona consistency over long interactions, and are largely limited to English or single-domain settings. We present MUSE, a multi-domain Chinese user simulation framework designed to generate human-like, controllable, and behaviorally consistent responses. First, we propose Iterative Profile Self-Evolution (IPSE), which gradually optimizes user profiles by comparing and reasoning discrepancies between simulated trajectories and real dialogue behaviors. We then apply Role-Reversal Supervised Fine-Tuning to improve local response realism and human-like expression. To enable fine-grained behavioral alignment, we further train a specialized rubric-based reward model and incorporate it into rubric-guided multi-turn reinforcement learning, which optimizes the simulator at the dialogue level and enhances long-horizon behavioral consistency. Experiments show that MUSE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both utterance-level and session-level evaluations, generating responses that are more realistic, coherent, and persona-consistent over extended interactions.

Sentiment analysis in software engineering focuses on understanding emotions expressed in software artifacts. Previous research highlighted the limitations of applying general off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools within the software engineering domain and indicated the need for specialized tools tailored to various software engineering contexts. The development of such tools heavily relies on supervised machine learning techniques that necessitate annotated datasets. Acquiring such datasets is a substantial challenge, as it requires domain-specific expertise and significant effort. Objective: This study explores the potential of ZSL to address the scarcity of annotated datasets in sentiment analysis within software engineering Method:} We conducted an empirical experiment to evaluate the performance of various ZSL techniques, including embedding-based, NLI-based, TARS-based, and generative-based ZSL techniques. We assessed the performance of these techniques under different labels setups to examine the impact of label configurations. Additionally, we compared the results of the ZSL techniques with state-of-the-art fine-tuned transformer-based models. Finally, we performed an error analysis to identify the primary causes of misclassifications. Results: Our findings demonstrate that ZSL techniques, particularly those combining expert-curated labels with embedding-based or generative-based models, can achieve macro-F1 scores comparable to fine-tuned transformer-based models. The error analysis revealed that subjectivity in annotation and polar facts are the main contributors to ZSL misclassifications. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the potential of ZSL for sentiment analysis in software engineering. ZSL can provide a solution to the challenge of annotated dataset scarcity by reducing reliance on annotated dataset.

World models have been emerging as critical components for assessing the consequences of actions generated by interactive agents in online planning and offline evaluation. In text-based environments, world models are typically evaluated and trained with single-step metrics such as Exact Match, aiming to improve the similarity between predicted and real-world states, but such metrics have been shown to be insufficient for capturing actual agent behavior. To address this issue, we introduce a new behavior-aligned training paradigm aimed at improving the functional consistency between the world model and the real environment. This paradigm focuses on optimizing a tractable step-level metric named Behavior Consistency Reward (BehR), which measures how much the likelihood of a logged next action changes between the real state and the world-model-predicted state under a frozen Reference Agent. Experiments on WebShop and TextWorld show that BehR-based training improves long-term alignment in several settings, with the clearest gains in WebShop and less movement in near-ceiling regimes, while preserving or improving single-step prediction quality in three of four settings. World models trained with BehR also achieve lower false positives in offline surrogate evaluation and show modest but encouraging gains in inference-time lookahead planning.

MLLM-based GUI agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex user interface interaction tasks. However, long-horizon scenarios remain challenging, as these agents are burdened with tasks beyond their intrinsic capabilities, suffering from memory degradation, progress confusion, and math hallucination. To address these challenges, we present UI-Copilot, a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. We introduce memory decoupling to separate persistent observations from transient execution context, and train the policy agent to selectively invoke the copilot as Retriever or Calculator based on task demands. To enable effective tool invocation learning, we propose Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (TIPO), which separately optimizes tool selection through single-turn prediction and task execution through on-policy multi-turn rollouts. Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B. Moreover, UI-Copilot-7B delivers a 17.1% absolute improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model, highlighting UI-Copilot's strong generalization to real-world GUI tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in dialogue generation and reasoning, yet their effectiveness in eliciting user-known but concealed information in open-ended conversations remains limited. In many interactive AI applications, such as personal assistants, tutoring systems, and legal or clinical support, users often withhold sensitive or uncertain information due to privacy concerns, ambiguity, or social hesitation. This makes it challenging for LLMs to gather complete and contextually relevant inputs. In this work, we define the problem of information elicitation in open-ended dialogue settings and propose Reinforcement Prompt Selection (RPS), a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that formulates prompt selection as a sequential decision-making problem. To analyze this problem in a controlled setting, we design a synthetic experiment, where a reinforcement learning agent outperforms a random query baseline, illustrating the potential of policy-based approaches for adaptive information elicitation. Building on this insight, RPS learns a policy over a pool of prompts to adaptively elicit concealed or incompletely expressed information from users through dialogue. We also introduce IELegal, a new benchmark dataset constructed from real legal case documents, which simulates dialogue-based information elicitation tasks aimed at uncovering case-relevant facts. In this setting, RPS outperforms static prompt baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive prompt selection for eliciting critical information in LLM-driven dialogue systems.

Determining the number of clusters is a central challenge in unsupervised learning, where ground-truth labels are unavailable. The Silhouette coefficient is a widely used internal validation metric for this task, yet its standard micro-averaged form tends to favor larger clusters under size imbalance. Macro-averaging mitigates this bias by weighting clusters equally, but may overemphasize noise from under-represented groups. We introduce Composite Silhouette, an internal criterion for cluster-count selection that aggregates evidence across repeated subsampled clusterings rather than relying on a single partition. For each subsample, micro- and macro-averaged Silhouette scores are combined through an adaptive convex weight determined by their normalized discrepancy and smoothed by a bounded nonlinearity; the final score is then obtained by averaging these subsample-level composites. We establish key properties of the criterion and derive finite-sample concentration guarantees for its subsampling estimate. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that Composite Silhouette effectively reconciles the strengths of micro- and macro-averaging, yielding more accurate recovery of the ground-truth number of clusters.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promise in automating key aspects of Agile project management, yet their impact on team cognition remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate cognitive offloading in Agile sprint planning by conducting a controlled, three-condition experiment comparing AI-only, human-only, and hybrid planning models on a live client deliverable at a mid-sized digital agency. Using quantitative metrics -- including estimation accuracy, rework rates, and scope change recovery time -- alongside qualitative indicators of planning robustness, we evaluate each model's effectiveness beyond raw efficiency. We find that while AI-only planning minimizes time and cost, it significantly degrades risk capture rates and increases rework due to unstated assumptions, whereas human-only planning excels at adaptability but incurs substantial overhead. Drawing on these findings, we propose a theoretical framework for hybrid AI-human sprint planning that assigns algorithmic tools to estimation and backlog formatting while mandating human deliberation for risk assessment and ambiguity resolution. Our results challenge the assumption that efficiency equates to effectiveness, offering actionable governance strategies for organizations seeking to augment rather than erode team cognition.

Merging is a core operation in version control systems such as Git, but traditional line-based algorithms often yield spurious conflicts, particularly in the presence of refactorings or parallel edits. While syntax- and semantics-aware merging approaches can reduce conflicts, they introduce drawbacks such as loss of formatting, dependence on language-specific parsers, and limited flexibility across heterogeneous artifacts. To address this gap, we present Summer, a novel textual token-based merge algorithm independent of document formats. Dividing text into tokens, our approach formulates token-level changes in one branch into string-rewriting rules and move rules, and applies these rules to the text of the other branch to construct a merge. Despite being independent on programming languages, our move rules model extracting and inlining functions. We evaluated Summer on ConflictBench, a large benchmark of real-world merge scenarios, comparing it with five pioneering merge tools across Java and non-Java files. Experimental results show that Summer achieved the highest 36% accuracy in reproducing merges verbatim identical to developers', and ranked second in semantic accuracy.

Quantum circuit optimization is a central task in Quantum Computing, as current Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum devices suffer from error propagation that often scales with the number of operations. Among quantum operations, the CNOT gate is of fundamental importance, being the only 2-qubit gate in the universal Clifford+T set. The problem of CNOT gates minimization has been addressed by heuristic algorithms such as the well-known Patel-Markov-Hayes (PMH) for linear reversible synthesis (i.e., CNOT minimization with no topological constraints), and more recently by Reinforcement Learning (RL) based strategies in the more complex case of topology-aware synthesis, where each CNOT can act on a subset of all qubits pairs. In this work we introduce AlphaCNOT, a RL framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) that address effectively the CNOT minimization problem by modeling it as a planning problem. In contrast to other RL- based solution, our method is model-based, i.e. it can leverage lookahead search to evaluate future trajectories, thus finding more efficient sequences of CNOTs. Our method achieves a reduction of up to 32% in CNOT gate count compared to PMH baseline on linear reversible synthesis, while in the constraint version we report a consistent gate count reduction on a variety of topologies with up to 8 qubits, with respect to state-of-the-art RL-based solutions. Our results suggest the combination of RL with search-based strategies can be applied to different circuit optimization tasks, such as Clifford minimization, thus fostering the transition toward the "quantum utility" era.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across many domains, but their scale makes deployment challenging. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) reduces memory footprint without retraining by leveraging a small calibration set. Recent Hessian-based PTQ methods compensate quantization error via cross-channel dependencies, but such approaches degrade at low bit-widths due to noisy curvature estimates from limited calibration data. We propose DASH-Q, a robust PTQ framework using diagonal Hessian approximation and iterative weighted least squares. By discarding noise-prone dependencies, DASH-Q filters sampling noise while prioritizing the preservation of salient feature power. We outperform other PTQ baselines in ultra low-bit regime, improving zero-shot accuracy by 7.01% on average and up to 14.01% over the strongest baselines across five baseline LLM models, while showing robust and stable performance with very small calibration data.

The rapid evolution of multimodal large models has revolutionized the simulation of diverse characters in speech dialogue systems, enabling a novel interactive paradigm. Character attributes are manifested not only in textual responses but also through vocal features, as speech conveys rich paralinguistic information that is challenging to quantify. This poses significant difficulties in evaluating the character alignment of role-playing agents. To address these challenges, we present RoleJudge, an evaluation framework that leverages audio large language models to systematically assess the alignment between speech and character across multiple modalities and dimensions. Furthermore, we introduce RoleChat, the first voice role-playing evaluation dataset enriched with chain-of-thought reasoning annotations, comprising a diverse set of authentic and LLM-generated speech samples. Utilizing this dataset, we implement a multi-stage training paradigm and incorporate Standard Alignment in reinforcement learning to mitigate reward misalignment during optimization. Experimental results in terms of accuracy and subjective assessment demonstrate that RoleJudge outperforms various baseline models, validating the effectiveness of our multidimensional evaluation framework.

Vision-language models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, yet their susceptibility to sycophantic manipulation remains poorly understood, particularly in relation to how these models represent visual information internally. Whether models whose visual representations more closely mirror human neural processing are also more resistant to adversarial pressure is an open question with implications for both neuroscience and AI safety. We investigate this question by evaluating 12 open-weight vision-language models spanning 6 architecture families and a 40$\times$ parameter range (256M--10B) along two axes: brain alignment, measured by predicting fMRI responses from the Natural Scenes Dataset across 8 human subjects and 6 visual cortex regions of interest, and sycophancy, measured through 76,800 two-turn gaslighting prompts spanning 5 categories and 10 difficulty levels. Region-of-interest analysis reveals that alignment specifically in early visual cortex (V1--V3) is a reliable negative predictor of sycophancy ($r = -0.441$, BCa 95\% CI $[-0.740, -0.031]$), with all 12 leave-one-out correlations negative and the strongest effect for existence denial attacks ($r = -0.597$, $p = 0.040$). This anatomically specific relationship is absent in higher-order category-selective regions, suggesting that faithful low-level visual encoding provides a measurable anchor against adversarial linguistic override in vision-language models. We release our code on \href{https://github.com/aryashah2k/Gaslight-Gatekeep-Sycophantic-Manipulation}{GitHub} and dataset on \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/aryashah00/Gaslight-Gatekeep-V1-V3}{Hugging Face}

In daily fantasy sports (DFS), match participation is highly time-sensitive. Users must act within a narrow window before a game begins, making match recommendation a time-critical task to prevent missed engagement and revenue loss. Existing recommender systems, typically designed for static item catalogs, are ill-equipped to handle the hard temporal deadlines inherent in these live events. To address this, we designed and deployed a recommendation engine using the Deep Interest Network (DIN) architecture. We adapt the DIN architecture by injecting temporality at two levels: first, through real-time urgency features for each candidate match (e.g., time-to-round-lock), and second, via temporal positional encodings that represent the time-gap between each historical interaction and the current recommendation request, allowing the model to dynamically weigh the recency of past actions. This approach, combined with a listwise neuralNDCG loss function, produces highly relevant and urgency-aware rankings. To support this at industrial scale, we developed a multi-node, multi-GPU training architecture on Ray and PyTorch. Our system, validated on a massive industrial dataset with over 650k users and over 100B interactions, achieves a +9% lift in nDCG@1 over a heavily optimized LightGBM baseline with handcrafted features. The strong offline performance of this model establishes its viability as a core component for our planned on-device (edge) recommendation system, where on-line A/B testing will be conducted.

Vision transformers (ViT) have been shown to allow for more flexible feature detection and can outperform convolutional neural network (CNN) when pre-trained on sufficient data. Due to their promising feature detection capabilities, we deployed ViTs for morphological classification of anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) versus classic Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL). We had previously designed a ViT model which was trained on a small dataset of 1,200 image patches in fully supervised training. That model achieved a diagnostic accuracy of 100% and an F1 score of 1.0 on the independent test set. Since fully supervised training is not a practical method due to lack of expertise resources in both the training and testing phases, we conducted a recent study on a modified approach to training data (weakly supervised training) and show that labeling training image patch automatically at the slide level of each whole-slide-image is a more practical solution for clinical use of Vision Transformer. Our ViT model, trained on a larger dataset of 100,000 image patches, yields evaluation metrics with significant accuracy, F1 score, and area under the curve (AUC) at 91.85%, 0.92, and 0.98, respectively. These are respectable values that qualify this ViT model, with weakly supervised training, as a suitable tool for a deep learning module in clinical model development using automated image patch extraction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enhance their problem-solving capability by utilizing external tools. However, in open-world scenarios with massive and evolving tool repositories, existing methods relying on static embedding retrieval or parameter memorization of tools struggle to align user intent with tool semantics or generalize to unseen tools, respectively, leading to suboptimal accuracy of open-world tool retrieval and execution. To address these, we present ToolOmni, a unified agentic framework that enables LLMs for open-world tool use by proactive retrieval and grounded execution within a reasoning loop. First, we construct a cold-start multi-turn interaction dataset to instill foundational agentic capabilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Then, we introduce open-world tool learning based on a Decoupled Multi-Objective GRPO algorithm, which simultaneously optimizes LLMs for both tool retrieval accuracy and execution efficacy in online environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ToolOmni achieves state-of-the-art performance both in retrieval and execution, surpassing strong baselines by a significant margin of +10.8% in end-to-end execution success rate, while exhibiting exceptional robustness and generalization capabilities.

As large language models become standard backends for content generation, practical provenance increasingly requires multi-bit watermarking. In provider-internal deployments, a key requirement is message symmetry: the message itself should not systematically affect either text quality or verification outcomes. Vocabulary-partition watermarks can break message symmetry in low-entropy decoding: some messages are assigned most of the probability mass, while others are forced to use tail tokens. This makes embedding quality and message decoding accuracy message-dependent. We propose QuantileMark, a white-box multi-bit watermark that embeds messages within the continuous cumulative probability interval $[0, 1)$. At each step, QuantileMark partitions this interval into $M$ equal-mass bins and samples strictly from the bin assigned to the target symbol, ensuring a fixed $1/M$ probability budget regardless of context entropy. For detection, the verifier reconstructs the same partition under teacher forcing, computes posteriors over latent bins, and aggregates evidence for verification. We prove message-unbiasedness, a property ensuring that the base distribution is recovered when averaging over messages. This provides a theoretical foundation for generation-side symmetry, while the equal-mass design additionally promotes uniform evidence strength across messages on the detection side. Empirical results on C4 continuation and LFQA show improved multi-bit recovery and detection robustness over strong baselines, with negligible impact on generation quality. Our code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/zzzjunlin/QuantileMark).

Deep Learning (DL) is becoming more and more widespread in clone detection, motivated by achieving near-perfect performance for this task. In particular in case of semantic code clones, which share only limited syntax but implement the same or similar functionality, Deep Learning appears to outperform conventional tools. In this paper, we want to investigate the generalizability of DL-based clone detectors for Java. We therefore replicate and evaluate the performance of five state-of-the-art DL-based clone detectors, including Transformers like CodeBERT and single-task models like FA-AST+GMN, in a zero-shot evaluation scenario, where we train/fine-tune and evaluate on different datasets and functionalities. Our experiments demonstrate that the models' generalizability to unseen code is limited. Further analysis reveals that the conventional clone detector NiCad even outperforms the DL-based clone detectors in such a zero-shot evaluation scenario.

Soft Q-learning has emerged as a versatile model-free method for entropy-regularised reinforcement learning, optimising for returns augmented with a penalty on the divergence from a reference policy. Despite its success, the multi-step extensions of soft Q-learning remain relatively unexplored and limited to on-policy action sampling under the Boltzmann policy. In this brief research note, we first present a formal $n$-step formulation for soft Q-learning and then extend this framework to the fully off-policy case by introducing a novel Soft Tree Backup operator. Finally, we unify these developments into Soft $Q(λ)$, an elegant online, off-policy, eligibility trace framework that allows for efficient credit assignment under arbitrary behaviour policies. Our derivations propose a model-free method for learning entropy-regularised value functions that can be utilised in future empirical experiments.

Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant privacy and legal concerns. While machine unlearning has emerged as a potential remedy, prevailing paradigms rely on user-provided forget sets, making unlearning requests difficult to audit and exposing systems to secondary leakage and malicious abuse. We propose MAGE, a Memory-grAph Guided Erasure framework for user-minimized, corpus-free unlearning. Given only a lightweight user anchor that identifies a target entity, MAGE probes the target LLM to recover target-related memorization, organizes it into a weighted local memory graph, and synthesizes scoped supervision for unlearning. MAGE is model-agnostic, can be plugged into standard unlearning methods, and requires no access to the original training corpus. Experiments on two benchmarks, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrate that MAGE's self-generated supervision achieves effective unlearning performance comparable to supervision generated with external reference, while preserving overall utility. These results support a practical and auditable unlearning workflow driven by minimal anchors rather than user-supplied forget corpora.

Watermarking is becoming the default mechanism for AI content authentication, with governance policies and frameworks referencing it as infrastructure for content provenance. Yet across text, image, and audio modalities, watermark signal strength, detectability, and robustness depend on statistical properties of the content itself, properties that vary systematically across languages, cultural visual traditions, and demographic groups. We examine how this content dependence creates modality-specific pathways to bias. Reviewing the major watermarking benchmarks across modalities, we find that, with one exception, none report performance across languages, cultural content types, or population groups. To address this, we propose three concrete evaluation dimensions for pluralistic watermark benchmarking: cross-lingual detection parity, culturally diverse content coverage, and demographic disaggregation of detection metrics. We connect these to the governance frameworks currently mandating watermarking deployment and show that watermarking is held to a lower fairness standard than the generative systems it is meant to govern. Our position is that evaluation must precede deployment, and that the same bias auditing requirements applied to AI models should extend to the verification layer.

To date, various paradigms of soft-Computing have been used to solve many modern problems. Among them, a self organizing combination of fuzzy systems and neural networks can make a powerful decision making system. Here, a Dynamic Growing Fuzzy Neural Controller (DGFNC) is combined with an adaptive strategy and applied to a 3PSP parallel robot position control problem. Specifically, the dynamic growing mechanism is considered in more detail. In contrast to other self-organizing methods, DGFNC adds new rules more conservatively; hence the pruning mechanism is omitted. Instead, the adaptive strategy 'adapts' the control system to parameter variation. Furthermore, a sliding mode-based nonlinear controller ensures system stability. The resulting general control strategy aims to achieve faster response with less computation while maintaining overall stability. Finally, the 3PSP is chosen due to its complex dynamics and the utility of such approaches in modern industrial systems. Several simulations support the merits of the proposed DGFNC strategy as applied to the 3PSP robot.

Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers have been shown to substantially increase model capacity without a proportional increase in computational cost and are widely used in transformer architectures, where they typically replace feed-forward network blocks. In contrast, integrating sparse MoE layers into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remains inconsistent, with most prior work focusing on fine-grained MoEs operating at the filter or channel levels. In this work, we investigate a coarser, patch-wise formulation of sparse MoE layers for semantic segmentation, where local regions are routed to a small subset of convolutional experts. Through experiments on the Cityscapes and BDD100K datasets using encoder-decoder and backbone-based CNNs, we conduct a design analysis to assess how architectural choices affect routing dynamics and expert specialization. Our results demonstrate consistent, architecture-dependent improvements (up to +3.9 mIoU) with little computational overhead, while revealing strong design sensitivity. Our work provides empirical insights into the design and internal dynamics of sparse MoE layers in CNN-based dense prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/KASTEL-MobilityLab/moe-layers/.

Large language model (LLM) agents on multi-step tasks suffer reasoning degradation, looping, drift, stuck states, at rates up to 30% on hard tasks. Current solutions include hard step limits (abrupt) or LLM-as-judge monitoring (10-15% overhead per step). This paper introduces the Cognitive Companion, a parallel monitoring architecture with two implementations: an LLM-based Companion and a novel zero-overhead Probe-based Companion. We report a three-batch feasibility study centered on Gemma 4 E4B, with an additional exploratory small-model analysis on Qwen 2.5 1.5B and Llama 3.2 1B. In our experiments, the LLM-based Companion reduced repetition on loop-prone tasks by 52-62% with approximately 11% overhead. The Probe-based Companion, trained on hidden states from layer 28, showed a mean effect size of +0.471 at zero measured inference overhead; its strongest probe result achieved cross-validated AUROC 0.840 on a small proxy-labeled dataset. A key empirical finding is that companion benefit appears task-type dependent: companions are most helpful on loop-prone and open-ended tasks, while effects are neutral or negative on more structured tasks. Our small-model experiments also suggest a possible scale boundary: companions did not improve the measured quality proxy on 1B-1.5B models, even when interventions fired. Overall, the paper should be read as a feasibility study rather than a definitive validation. The results provide encouraging evidence that sub-token monitoring may be useful, identify task-type sensitivity as a practical design constraint, and motivate selective companion activation as a promising direction for future work.

The next generation of autonomous AI systems will be constrained not only by model capability, but by how intelligence is structured across heterogeneous hardware. Current paradigms -- cloud-centric AI, on-device inference, and edge-cloud pipelines -- treat planning, reasoning, and execution as a monolithic process, leading to unnecessary latency, energy consumption, and fragmented behavioral continuity. We introduce the Tri-Spirit Architecture, a three-layer cognitive framework that decomposes intelligence into planning (Super Layer), reasoning (Agent Layer), and execution (Reflex Layer), each mapped to distinct compute substrates and coordinated via an asynchronous message bus. We formalize the system with a parameterized routing policy, a habit-compilation mechanism that promotes repeated reasoning paths into zero-inference execution policies, a convergent memory model, and explicit safety constraints. We evaluate the architecture in a reproducible simulation of 2000 synthetic tasks against cloud-centric and edge-only baselines. Tri-Spirit reduces mean task latency by 75.6 percent and energy consumption by 71.1 percent, while decreasing LLM invocations by 30 percent and enabling 77.6 percent offline task completion. These results suggest that cognitive decomposition, rather than model scaling alone, is a primary driver of system-level efficiency in AI hardware.

The potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in domain of medical imaging raise the demands of systematic and rigorous evaluation frameworks that are aligned with the real-world medical imaging practice. Existing practices that report single or coarse-grained metrics are lack the granularity required for specialized clinical support and fail to assess the reliability of reasoning mechanisms. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift toward multidimensional, fine-grained and in-depth evaluation. Based on a two-stage systematic construction pipeline designed for this paradigm, we instantiate it with MedRCube. We benchmark 33 MLLMs, \textit{Lingshu-32B} achieve top-tier performance. Crucially, MedRCube exposes a series of pronounced insights inaccessible under prior evaluation settings. Furthermore, we introduce a credibility evaluation subset to quantify reasoning credibility, uncover a highly significant positive association between shortcut behavior and diagnostic task performance, raising concerns for clinically trustworthy deployment. The resources of this work can be found at https://github.com/F1mc/MedRCube.

Disaggregated storage systems improve resource utilization and enable independent scaling of storage and compute resources by separating storage resources from computing resources in data centers. NVMe over fabrics (NVMeoF) is a key technology that underpins the functionality and benefits of disaggregated storage systems. While NVMeoF inherently possesses substantial computing and memory capacity, these resources are often underutilized for tasks beyond simple I/O delegation. This study proposes OffloadFS, a user-level file system that enables offloaded IO-intensive tasks primarily to a disaggregated storage node for near-data processing, with the option to offload to peer compute nodes as well, without the need for distributed lock management. OffloadFS optimizes cache management by reducing interference between threads performing distinct I/O operations. On top of OffloadFS, we develop OffloadDB, which enables RocksDB to offload MemTable flush and compaction operations, and OffloadPrep, which offloads image pre-processing tasks for machine learning to disaggregated storage nodes. Our evaluation shows that OffloadFS improves the performance of RocksDB and machine learning pre-processing tasks by up to 3.36x and 1.85x, respectively, compared to OCFS2.

We propose a new partial-observability model for online learning problems where the learner, besides its own loss, also observes some noisy feedback about the other actions, depending on the underlying structure of the problem. We represent this structure by a weighted directed graph, where the edge weights are related to the quality of the feedback shared by the connected nodes. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm that guarantees a regret of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{α^* T})$ after $T$ rounds, where $α^*$ is a novel graph property that we call the effective independence number. Our algorithm is completely parameter-free and does not require knowledge (or even estimation) of $α^*$. For the special case of binary edge weights, our setting reduces to the partial-observability models of Mannor and Shamir (2011) and Alon et al. (2013) and our algorithm recovers the near-optimal regret bounds.

Thompson Sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest due to its good empirical performance, in particular in the computational advertising. Though successful, the tools for its performance analysis appeared only recently. In this paper, we describe and analyze SpectralTS algorithm for a bandit problem, where the payoffs of the choices are smooth given an underlying graph. In this setting, each choice is a node of a graph and the expected payoffs of the neighboring nodes are assumed to be similar. Although the setting has application both in recommender systems and advertising, the traditional algorithms would scale poorly with the number of choices. For that purpose we consider an effective dimension d, which is small in real-world graphs. We deliver the analysis showing that the regret of SpectralTS scales as d*sqrt(T ln N) with high probability, where T is the time horizon and N is the number of choices. Since a d*sqrt(T ln N) regret is comparable to the known results, SpectralTS offers a computationally more efficient alternative. We also show that our algorithm is competitive on both synthetic and real-world data.

We investigate stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits, where the entire joint distribution of outcomes impacts the complexity of the problem instance (unlike in the standard bandits). Typical distributions considered depend on specific parameter values, whose prior knowledge is required in theory but quite difficult to estimate in practice; an example is the commonly assumed sub-Gaussian family. We alleviate this issue by instead considering a new general family of sub-exponential distributions, which contains bounded and Gaussian ones. We prove a new lower bound on the expected regret on this family, that is parameterized by the unknown covariance matrix of outcomes, a tighter quantity than the sub-Gaussian matrix. We then construct an algorithm that uses covariance estimates, and provide a tight asymptotic analysis of the regret. Finally, we apply and extend our results to the family of sparse outcomes, which has applications in many recommender systems.

Recommender systems have historically developed along two largely independent paradigms: feature interaction models for modeling correlations among multi-field categorical features, and sequential models for capturing user behavior dynamics from historical interaction sequences. Although recent trends attempt to bridge these paradigms within shared backbones, we empirically reveal that naive unifying these two branches may lead to a failure mode of Sequential Collapse Propagation (SCP). That is, the interaction with those dimensionally ill non-sequence fields leads to the dimensional collapse of the sequence features. To overcome this challenge, we propose TokenFormer, a unified recommendation architecture with the following innovations. First, we introduce a Bottom-Full-Top-Sliding (BFTS) attention scheme, which applies full self-attention in the lower layers and shrinking-window sliding attention in the upper layers. Second, we introduce a Non-Linear Interaction Representation (NLIR) that applies one-sided non-linear multiplicative transformations to the hidden states. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and Tencent's advertising platform demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, while detailed analysis confirm that TokenFormer significantly improves dimensional robustness and representation discriminability under unified modeling.

This work identifies a necessary condition for any variational quantum approach to reach the exact ground state. Briefly, the norms of the projections of the input and the ground state onto each group module must match, implying that module weights of the solution state have to be known in advance in order to reach the exact ground state. An exemplary case is provided by matchgate circuits applied to problems whose solutions are classical bit strings, since all computational basis states share the same module-wise weights. Combined with the known classical simulability of quantum circuits for which observables lie in a small linear subspace, this implies that certain problems admit a classical surrogate for exact solution with each step taking $O(n^5)$ time. The Maximum Cut problem serves as an illustrative example.

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

Multi-page Document Visual Question Answering requires reasoning over semantics, layouts, and visual elements in long, visually dense documents. Existing OCR-free methods face a trade-off between capacity and precision: end-to-end models scale poorly with document length, while visual retrieval-based pipelines are brittle and passive. We propose Doc-$V^*$, an \textbf{OCR-free agentic} framework that casts multi-page DocVQA as sequential evidence aggregation. Doc-$V^*$ begins with a thumbnail overview, then actively navigates via semantic retrieval and targeted page fetching, and aggregates evidence in a structured working memory for grounded reasoning. Trained by imitation learning from expert trajectories and further optimized with Group Relative Policy Optimization, Doc-$V^*$ balances answer accuracy with evidence-seeking efficiency. Across five benchmarks, Doc-$V^*$ outperforms open-source baselines and approaches proprietary models, improving out-of-domain performance by up to \textbf{47.9\%} over RAG baseline. Other results reveal effective evidence aggregation with selective attention, not increased input pages.

We present a hybrid retrieval system for COVID-19 scientific literature, evaluated on the TREC-COVID benchmark (171,332 papers, 50 expert queries). The system implements six retrieval configurations spanning sparse (SPLADE), dense (BGE), rank-level fusion (RRF), and a projection-based vector fusion (B5) approach. RRF fusion achieves the best relevance (nDCG@10 = 0.828), outperforming dense-only by 6.1% and sparse-only by 14.9%. Our projection fusion variant reaches nDCG@10 = 0.678 on expert queries while being 33% faster (847 ms vs. 1271 ms) and producing 2.2x higher ILD@10 than RRF. Evaluation across 400 queries -- including expert, machine-generated, and three paraphrase styles -- shows that B5 delivers the largest relative gain on keyword-heavy reformulations (+8.8%), although RRF remains best in absolute nDCG@10. On expert queries, MMR reranking increases intra-list diversity by 23.8-24.5% at a 20.4-25.4% nDCG@10 cost. Both fusion pipelines evaluated for latency remain below the sub-2 s target across all query sets. The system is deployed as a Streamlit web application backed by Pinecone serverless indices.

Repository-level code intelligence tasks require large language models (LLMs) to process long, multi-file contexts. Such inputs introduce three challenges: crucial context can be obscured by noise, truncated due to limited windows, and increased inference latency. Context compression mitigates these risks by condensing inputs. While studied in NLP, its applicability to code tasks remains largely unexplored. We present the first systematic empirical study of context compression for repository-level code intelligence, organizing eight methods into three paradigms: discrete token sequences, continuous latent vectors, and visual tokens. We evaluate them on code completion and generation, measuring performance and efficiency. Results show context compression is effective: at 4x compression, continuous latent vector methods surpass full-context performance by up to 28.3% in BLEU score, indicating they filter noise rather than just truncating. On efficiency, all paradigms reduce inference cost. Both visual and text-based compression achieve up to 50% reduction in end-to-end latency at high ratios, approaching the cost of inference without repository context. These findings establish context compression as a viable approach and provide guidance for paradigm selection.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) recast PDE solving as an optimisation problem in function space by minimising a residual-based objective, yet many applications require additional derivative-based relations that are just as fundamental as the governing equations. In this paper, we present Derivative-Constrained PINNs (DC-PINNs), a general framework that treats constrained PDE solving as an optimisation guided by a minimum objective function criterion where the physics resides in the minimum principle. DC-PINNs embed general nonlinear constraints on states and derivatives, e.g., bounds, monotonicity, convexity, incompressibility, computed efficiently via automatic differentiation, and they employ self-adaptive loss balancing to tune the influence of each objective, reducing reliance on manual hyperparameters and problem-specific architectures. DC-PINNs consistently reduce constraint violations and improve physical fidelity versus baseline PINN variants, representative hard-constraint formulations on benchmarks, including heat diffusion with bounds, financial volatilities with arbitrage-free, and fluid flow with vortices shed. Explicitly encoding derivative constraints stabilises training and steers optimisation toward physically admissible minima even when the PDE residual alone is small, providing reliable solutions of constrained PDEs grounded in energy minimum principles.

The technical support team of a supercomputing centre accumulates, over the course of decades, a large volume of resolved incidents that constitute critical operational knowledge. At the Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA) this history has been managed for over twenty years with Request Tracker (RT), whose built-in search engine has significant limitations that hinder knowledge reuse by the support staff. This paper presents Fragata, a semantic ticket search system that combines modern information retrieval techniques with the full RT history. The system can find relevant past incidents regardless of language, the presence of typos, or the specific wording of the query. The architecture is deployed on CESGA's infrastructure, supports incremental updates without service interruption, and offloads the most expensive stages to the FinisTerrae III supercomputer. Preliminary results show a substantial qualitative improvement over RT's native search.

Self-sustained neural activity in the absence of ongoing external input is a fundamental feature of nervous system dynamics, yet the conditions under which it can emerge in biophysically grounded network models remain incompletely understood. We studied whether a recurrent network of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons with spike-timing-dependent plasticity and intrinsic stochasticity can maintain autonomous activity after brief transient stimulation. The simulated network comprised 200 neurons (160 excitatory, 40 inhibitory) with 80% connection probability, incorporating excitatory and inhibitory STDP, probabilistic vesicle release, probabilistic synapse formation, receptor variability, and voltage-dependent inhibition. After a brief 200 ms initialization stimulus to 30 excitatory neurons, the network received no further external input. In one 1800 s simulation and two additional 500 s simulations, the network maintained sparse, irregular activity without ongoing drive. In the 1800 s run, 67% of neurons exhibited mean firing rates below 1 Hz, the population mean firing rate was 1.13 +/- 1.34 Hz, participation increased across longer observation windows, and population-mean Fano factors remained near 1-2, consistent with irregular spike timing. Raster activity also showed spontaneous qualitative reorganizations in collective firing patterns over time. These findings suggest that recurrent Hodgkin-Huxley networks with plastic and stochastic synapses can sustain long-duration autonomous activity in a sparse firing regime after brief initialization.

LLM-as-a-judge, using a language model to score or rank candidate responses, is widely used as a scalable alternative to human evaluation in RLHF pipelines, benchmarking, and application layer evaluations (evals). However, judgment reliability depends heavily on prompting and aggregation strategy. We present an empirical investigation of practical, drop-in techniques that improve GPT-5.4 judge accuracy on RewardBench 2 without any finetuning. Two techniques account for nearly all available gains: task-specific criteria injection (+3.0pp at negligible cost) and ensemble scoring (+9.8pp at 5x cost). Combined, they reach 83.6% accuracy, +11.9pp over the 71.7% baseline. Our investigation also covers three further techniques (calibration context, adaptive model escalation, and soft blending) which did not reliably improve on criteria + ensembling at comparable cost. Cheaper model tiers benefit disproportionately from ensembling: GPT-5.4 mini with k=8 achieves 79.2% at 1.2x baseline cost, and GPT-5.4 nano with k=8 reaches 71.4% at 0.4x baseline cost, making high-accuracy LLM judges accessible at low cost.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) enable general audio understanding and demonstrate remarkable performance across various audio tasks. However, these models still face challenges in temporal perception (e.g., inferring event onset and offset), leading to limited utility in fine-grained scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Audio-Side Time Prompt and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to develop the TimePro-RL framework for fine-grained temporal perception. Specifically, we encode timestamps as embeddings and interleave them within the audio feature sequence as temporal coordinates to prompt the model. Furthermore, we introduce RL following Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to directly optimize temporal alignment performance. Experiments demonstrate that TimePro-RL achieves significant performance gains across a range of audio temporal tasks, such as audio grounding, sound event detection, and dense audio captioning, validating its robust effectiveness.

Metaphor detection models achieve strong benchmark performance, yet it remains unclear whether this reflects transferable generalization or lexical memorization. To address this, we analyze generalization in metaphor detection through RoBERTa, the shared backbone of many state-of-the-art systems, focusing on English verbs using the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus. We introduce a controlled lexical hold-out setup where all instances of selected target lemmas are strictly excluded from fine-tuning, and compare predictions on these Held-out lemmas against Exposed lemmas (verbs seen during fine-tuning). While the model performs best on Exposed lemmas, it maintains robust performance on Held-out lemmas. Further analysis reveals that sentence context alone is sufficient to match full-model performance on Held-out lemmas, whereas static verb-level embeddings are not. Together, these results suggest that generalization is primarily driven by "learning the cue" (transferable contextual patterns), while "learning the word" (verb-specific memorization) provides an additive boost when lexical exposure is available.

Professional fact-checkers rely on domain knowledge and deep contextual understanding to verify claims. Large language models (LLMs) and large reasoning models (LRMs) lack such grounding and primarily reason from available evidence alone, creating a mismatch between expert-led and fully automated claim verification. To mitigate this gap, we posit human-AI collaboration as a more promising path forward, where expert feedback, grounded in real-world knowledge and domain expertise, guides the model's reasoning. However, existing LRMs are hard to calibrate to natural language feedback, particularly in a multi-turn interaction setup. We propose Co-FactChecker, a framework for human-AI collaborative claim verification. We introduce a new interaction paradigm that treats the model's thinking trace as a shared scratchpad. Co-FactChecker translates expert feedback into trace-edits that introduce targeted modifications to the trace, sidestepping the shortcomings of dialogue-based interaction. We provide theoretical results showing that trace-editing offers advantages over multi-turn dialogue, and our automatic evaluations demonstrate that Co-FactChecker outperforms existing autonomous and human-AI collaboration approaches. Human evaluations further show that Co-FactChecker is preferred over multi-turn dialogue, producing higher quality reasoning and verdicts along with relatively easier to interpret and more useful thinking traces.

Fairness in language models is typically studied as a property of a single, centrally optimized model. As large language models become increasingly agentic, we propose that fairness emerges through interaction and exchange. We study this via a controlled hospital triage framework in which two agents negotiate over three structured debate rounds. One agent is aligned to a specific ethical framework via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), while the other is either unaligned or adversarially prompted to favor demographic groups over clinical need. We find that alignment systematically shapes negotiation strategies and allocation patterns, and that neither agent's allocation is ethically adequate in isolation, yet their joint final allocation can satisfy fairness criteria that neither would have reached alone. Aligned agents partially moderate bias through contestation rather than override, acting as corrective patches that restore access for marginalized groups without fully converting a biased counterpart. We further observe that even explicitly aligned agents exhibit intrinsic biases toward certain frameworks, consistent with known left-leaning tendencies in LLMs. We connect these limits to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem: no aggregation mechanism can simultaneously satisfy all desiderata of collective rationality, and multi-agent deliberation navigates rather than resolves this constraint. Our results reposition fairness as an emergent, procedural property of decentralized agent interaction, and the system rather than the individual agent as the appropriate unit of evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic AI systems for scientific discovery, but most approaches remain limited to textbased reasoning without automated experimental verification. We propose MIND, an LLM-driven framework for automated hypothesis validation in materials research. MIND organizes the scientific discovery process into hypothesis refinement, experimentation, and debate-based validation within a multi-agent pipeline. For experimental verification, the system integrates Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials, particularly SevenNet-Omni, enabling scalable in-silico experiments. We also provide a web-based user interface for automated hypothesis testing. The modular design allows additional experimental modules to be integrated, making the framework adaptable to broader scientific workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/IMMS-Ewha/MIND, and a demonstration video at: https://youtu.be/lqiFe1OQzN4.

Reliable and interpretable decision-making is essential in medical imaging, where diagnostic outcomes directly influence patient care. Despite advances in deep learning, most medical AI systems operate as opaque black boxes, providing little insight into why a particular diagnosis was reached. In this paper, we introduce Med-CAM, a framework for generating minimal and sharp maps as evidence-based explanations for Medical decision making via Classifier Activation Matching. Med-CAM trains a segmentation network from scratch to produce a mask that highlights the minimal evidence critical to model's decision for any seen or unseen image. This ensures that the explanation is both faithful to the network's behaviour and interpretable to clinicians. Experiments show, unlike prior spatial explanation methods, such as Grad-CAM and attention maps, which yield only fuzzy regions of relative importance, Med-CAM with its superior spatial awareness to shapes, textures, and boundaries, delivers conclusive, evidence-based explanations that faithfully replicate the model's prediction for any given image. By explicitly constraining explanations to be compact, consistent with model activations, and diagnostic alignment, Med-CAM advances transparent AI to foster clinician understanding and trust in high-stakes medical applications such as pathology and radiology.

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to localize model behavior to the internal components that causally realize it. Prior work has advanced activation-space localization and causal tracing, but modules that appear important in activation space may merely aggregate or amplify upstream signals rather than encode the target capability in their own parameters. To address this gap, we propose Weight Patching, a parameter-space intervention method for source-oriented analysis in paired same-architecture models that differ in how strongly they express a target capability under the inputs of interest. Given a base model and a behavior-specialized counterpart, Weight Patching replaces selected module weights from the specialized model into the base model under a fixed input. We instantiate the method on instruction following and introduce a framework centered on a vector-anchor behavioral interface that provides a shared internal criterion for whether a task-relevant control state has been formed or recovered in open-ended generation. Under this framework, the analysis reveals a hierarchy from shallow candidate source-side carriers to aggregation and routing modules, and further to downstream execution circuits. The recovered component scores can also guide mechanism-aware model merging, improving selective fusion across the evaluated expert combinations and providing additional external validation.

Performance debugging in WebAssembly (Wasm) runtimes is essential for ensuring the robustness of Wasm, especially since performance issues have frequently occurred in Wasm runtimes, which can significantly degrade the capabilities of hosted services. Many performance issues in Wasm runtimes result from suboptimal compilation of input Wasm programs, for which existing performance debugging methods primarily designed for application-level inefficiencies are not well-suited. In this paper, we present WarpL, a novel mutation-based approach that aims to identify the exact suboptimal instruction sequences responsible for the performance issues in Wasm runtimes, thereby narrowing down the root causes. Specifically, WarpL obtains a functionally similar mutant in which the performance issue does not manifest, and isolates the exact suboptimal instructions by comparing the machine code of the original and mutated programs. We implement WarpL as an open-source tool and evaluate it on 12 real-world performance issues across three widely used Wasm runtimes. WarpL identified the exact causes in 10 out of 12 issues. Notably, we have used WarpL to successfully diagnose six previously unknown performance issues in Wasmtime.

As large language models (LLMs) generate text that increasingly resembles human writing, the subtle cues that distinguish AI-generated content from human-written content become increasingly challenging to capture. Reliance on generator-specific artifacts is inherently unstable, since new models emerge rapidly and reduce the robustness of such shortcuts. This generalizes unseen generators as a central and challenging problem for AI-text detection. To tackle this challenge, we propose a progressively structured framework that disentangles AI-detection semantics from generator-aware artifacts. This is achieved through a compact latent encoding that encourages semantic minimality, followed by perturbation-based regularization to reduce residual entanglement, and finally a discriminative adaptation stage that aligns representations with task objectives. Experiments on MAGE benchmark, covering 20 representative LLMs across 7 categories, demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 24.2% accuracy gain and 26.2% F1 improvement. Notably, performance continues to improve as the diversity of training generators increases, confirming strong scalability and generalization in open-set scenarios. Our source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/PuXiao06/DRGD.

3D editing refers to the ability to apply local or global modifications to 3D assets. Effective 3D editing requires maintaining semantic consistency by performing localized changes according to prompts, while also preserving local invariance so that unchanged regions remain consistent with the original. However, existing approaches have significant limitations: multi-view editing methods incur losses when projecting back to 3D, while voxel-based editing is constrained in both the regions that can be modified and the scale of modifications. Moreover, the lack of sufficiently large editing datasets for training and evaluation remains a challenge. To address these challenges, we propose a Beyond Voxel 3D Editing (BVE) framework with a self-constructed large-scale dataset specifically tailored for 3D editing. Building upon this dataset, our model enhances a foundational image-to-3D generative architecture with lightweight, trainable modules, enabling efficient injection of textual semantics without the need for expensive full-model retraining. Furthermore, we introduce an annotation-free 3D masking strategy to preserve local invariance, maintaining the integrity of unchanged regions during editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BVE achieves superior performance in generating high-quality, text-aligned 3D assets, while faithfully retaining the visual characteristics of the original input.

Glitches frequently contaminate data in gravitational-wave detectors, complicating the observation and analysis of astrophysical signals. This work introduces VIGILant, an automatic pipeline for classification and visualization of glitches in the Virgo detector. Using a curated dataset of Virgo O3b glitches, two machine learning approaches are evaluated: tree-based models (Decision Tree, Random Forest and XGBoost) using structured Omicron parameters, and Convolutional Neural Networks (ResNet) trained on spectrogram images. While tree-based models offer higher interpretability and fast training, the ResNet34 model achieved superior performance, reaching a F1 score of 0.9772 and accuracy of 0.9833 in the testing set, with inference times of tens of milliseconds per glitch. The pipeline has been deployed for daily operation at the Virgo site since observing run O4c, providing the Virgo collaboration with an interactive dashboard to monitor glitch populations and detector behavior. This allows to identify low-confidence predictions, highlighting glitches requiring further attention.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Text-to-SQL performance, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts and simplified schemas, leaving a gap in real-world, non-Western applications. We present IndicDB, a multilingual Text-to-SQL benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual semantic parsing across diverse Indic languages. The relational schemas are sourced from open-data platforms, including the National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) and the India Data Portal (IDP), ensuring realistic administrative data complexity. IndicDB comprises 20 databases across 237 tables. To convert denormalized government data into rich relational structures, we employ an iterative three-agent framework (Architect, Auditor, Refiner) to ensure structural rigor and high relational density (11.85 tables per database; join depths up to six). Our pipeline is value-aware, difficulty-calibrated, and join-enforced, generating 15,617 tasks across English, Hindi, and five Indic languages. We evaluate cross-lingual semantic parsing performance of state-of-the-art models (DeepSeek v3.2, MiniMax 2.7, LLaMA 3.3, Qwen3) across seven linguistic variants. Results show a 9.00% performance drop from English to Indic languages, revealing an "Indic Gap" driven by harder schema linking, increased structural ambiguity, and limited external knowledge. IndicDB serves as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual Text-to-SQL. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/multilingualText2Sql-Indic--DDCC/

Deep learning-based surface electromyography (sEMG) gesture recognition is frequently bottlenecked by data scarcity and limited subject diversity. While synthetic data generation via Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models has emerged as a promising augmentation strategy, these approaches often face challenges regarding training stability or inference efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose EMGFlow, a conditional sEMG generation framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the application of Flow Matching (FM) and continuous-time generative modeling in the sEMG domain. To validate EMGFlow across three benchmark sEMG datasets, we employ a unified evaluation protocol integrating feature-based fidelity, distributional geometry, and downstream utility. Extensive evaluations show that EMGFlow outperforms conventional augmentation and GAN baselines, and provides stronger standalone utility than the diffusion baselines considered here under the train-on-synthetic test-on-real (TSTR) protocol. Furthermore, by optimizing generation dynamics through advanced numerical solvers and targeted time sampling, EMGFlow achieves improved quality-efficiency trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that Flow Matching is a promising and efficient paradigm for addressing data bottlenecks in myoelectric control systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Open-EXG/EMGFlow.

The node2vec random walk is a non-Markovian random walk on the vertex set of a graph, widely used for network embedding and exploration. This random walk model is defined in terms of three parameters which control the probability of, respectively, backtracking moves, moves within triangles, and moves to the remaining neighboring nodes. From a mathematical standpoint, the node2vec random walk is a nontrivial generalization of the non-backtracking random walk and thus belongs to the class of second-order Markov chains. Despite its widespread use in applications, little is known about its long-run behavior. The goal of this paper is to begin exploring its fundamental properties on arbitrary graphs. To this aim, we show how lifting the node2vec random walk to the state spaces of directed edges and directed wedges yields two distinct Markovian representations which are key for its asymptotic analysis. Using these representations, we find mild sufficient conditions on the underlying finite or infinite graph to guarantee ergodicity, reversibility, recurrence and characterization of the invariant measure. As we discuss, the behavior of the node2vec random walk is drastically different compared to the non-backtracking random walk. While the latter simplifies on arbitrary graphs when using its natural edge Markovian representation thanks to bistochasticity, the former simplifies on regular graphs when using its natural wedge Markovian representation. Remarkably, this representation reveals that a graph is regular if and only if a certain weighted Eulerianity condition holds.

The `spotoptim` package implements surrogate-model-based optimization of expensive black-box functions in Python. Building on two decades of Sequential Parameter Optimization (SPO) methodology, it provides a Kriging-based optimization loop with Expected Improvement, support for continuous, integer, and categorical variables, noise-aware evaluation via Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA), and multi-objective extensions. A steady-state parallelization strategy overlaps surrogate search with objective evaluation on multi-core hardware, and a success-rate-based restart mechanism detects stagnation while preserving the best solution found. The package returns scipy-compatible `OptimizeResult` objects and accepts any scikit-learn-compatible surrogate model. Built-in TensorBoard logging provides real-time monitoring of convergence and surrogate quality. This report describes the architecture and module structure of spotoptim, provides worked examples including neural network hyperparameter tuning, and compares the framework with BoTorch, Optuna, Ray Tune, BOHB, SMAC, and Hyperopt. The package is open-source.

DNA-based storage has emerged as a promising approach to the global data crisis, offering molecular-scale density and millennial-scale stability at low maintenance cost. Over the past decade, substantial progress has been made in storing text, images, and files in DNA -- yet video remains an open challenge. The difficulty is not merely technical: effective video DNA storage requires co-designing compression and molecular encoding from the ground up, a challenge that sits at the intersection of two fields that have largely evolved independently. In this work, we present HELIX, the first end-to-end neural network jointly optimizing video compression and DNA encoding -- prior approaches treat the two stages independently, leaving biochemical constraints and compression objectives fundamentally misaligned. Our key insight: token-based representations naturally align with DNA's quaternary alphabet -- discrete semantic units map directly to ATCG bases. We introduce TK-SCONE (Token-Kronecker Structured Constraint-Optimized Neural Encoding), which achieves 1.91 bits per nucleotide through Kronecker-structured mixing that breaks spatial correlations and FSM-based mapping that guarantees biochemical constraints. Unlike two-stage approaches, HELIX learns token distributions simultaneously optimized for visual quality, prediction under masking, and DNA synthesis efficiency. This work demonstrates for the first time that learned compression and molecular storage converge naturally at token representations -- suggesting a new paradigm where neural video codecs are designed for biological substrates from the ground up.

Assessing teachers' geometric content knowledge is essential for geometry instructional quality and student learning, but difficult to scale. The Van Hiele model characterizes geometric reasoning through five hierarchical levels. Traditional Van Hiele assessment relies on manual expert analysis of open-ended responses. This process is time-consuming, costly, and prevents large-scale evaluation. This study develops an automated approach for diagnosing teachers' Van Hiele reasoning levels using large language models grounded in educational theory. Our central hypothesis is that integrating explicit skills information significantly improves Van Hiele classification. In collaboration with mathematics education researchers, we built a structured skills dictionary decomposing the Van Hiele levels into 33 fine-grained reasoning skills. Through a custom web platform, 31 pre-service teachers solved geometry problems, yielding 226 responses. Expert researchers then annotated each response with its Van Hiele level and demonstrated skills from the dictionary. Using this annotated dataset, we implemented two classification approaches: (1) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and (2) multi-task learning (MTL). Each approach compared a skills-aware variant incorporating the skills dictionary against a baseline without skills information. Results showed that for both methods, skills-aware variants significantly outperformed baselines across multiple evaluation metrics. This work provides the first automated approach for Van Hiele level classification from open-ended responses. It offers a scalable, theory-grounded method for assessing teachers' geometric reasoning that can enable large-scale evaluation and support adaptive, personalized teacher learning systems.

Tuning of gate-defined semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) is a major bottleneck for scaling spin qubit technologies. We present a deep learning (DL) driven, semantic-segmentation pipeline that performs charge auto-tuning by locating transition lines in full charge stability diagrams (CSDs) and returns gate voltage targets for the single charge regime. We assemble and manually annotate a large, heterogeneous dataset of 1015 experimental CSDs measured from silicon QD devices, spanning nine design geometries, multiple wafers, and fabrication runs. A U-Net style convolutional neural network (CNN) with a MobileNetV2 encoder is trained and validated through five-fold group cross validation. Our model achieves an overall offline tuning success of 80.0% in locating the single-charge regime, with peak performance exceeding 88% for some designs. We analyze dominant failure modes and propose targeted mitigations. Finally, wide-range diagram segmentation also naturally enables scalable physic-based feature extraction that can feed back to fabrication and design workflows and outline a roadmap for real-time integration in a cryogenic wafer prober. Overall, our results show that neural network (NN) based wide-diagram segmentation is a practical step toward automated, high-throughput charge tuning for silicon QD qubits.

Advanced deep learning methods have shown remarkable success in power quality disturbance (PQD) classification. To enhance model transparency, explainable AI (XAI) techniques have been developed to provide instance-specific interpretations of classifier decisions. However, conventional XAI methods yield deterministic explanations, overlooking uncertainty and limiting reliability in safety-critical applications. This paper proposes a Bayesian explanation framework that models explanation uncertainty by generating a relevance attribution distribution for each instance. This method allows experts to select explanations based on confidence percentiles, thereby tailoring interpretability according to specific disturbance types. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world power quality datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the transparency and reliability of PQD classifiers through uncertainty-aware explanations.

The statistical essence of the Transformer architecture has long remained elusive: Is it a universal approximator, or a neural network version of known computational algorithms? Through rigorous algebraic proof, we show that the latter better describes Transformer's basic nature: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is a special case of the single-layer Linear Transformer. Using the spectral decomposition of the empirical covariance matrix, we construct a specific parameter setting where the attention mechanism's forward pass becomes mathematically equivalent to the OLS closed-form projection. This means attention can solve the problem in one forward pass, not by iterating. Building upon this prototypical case, we further uncover a decoupled slow and fast memory mechanism within Transformers. Finally, the evolution from our established linear prototype to standard Transformers is discussed. This progression facilitates the transition of the Hopfield energy function from linear to exponential memory capacity, thereby establishing a clear continuity between modern deep architectures and classical statistical inference.

Front-end development constitutes a substantial portion of software engineering, yet converting design mockups into production-ready User Interface (UI) code remains tedious and costly. While recent work has explored automating this process with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing approaches typically rely solely on design images. As a result, they must infer complex UI details from images alone, often leading to degraded results. In real-world development workflows, however, design mockups are usually delivered as Figma files, a widely used tool for front-end design, that embed rich multimodal information (e.g., metadata and assets) essential for generating high-quality UI. To bridge this gap, we introduce Figma2Code, a new task that advances design-to-code into a multimodal setting and aims to automate design-to-code in the wild. Specifically, we collect paired design images and their corresponding metadata files from the Figma community. We then apply a series of processing operations, including rule-based filtering, human- and MLLM-based annotation and screening, and metadata refinement. This process yields 3,055 samples, from which designers curate a balanced dataset of 213 high-quality cases. Using this dataset, we benchmark ten state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary MLLMs. Our results show that while proprietary models achieve superior visual fidelity, they remain limited in layout responsiveness and code maintainability. Further experiments across modalities and ablation studies corroborate this limitation, partly due to models' tendency to directly map primitive visual attributes from Figma metadata.

Co-training, which combines limited in-domain real-world data with abundant surrogate data such as simulation or cross-embodiment robot data, is widely used for training generative robot policies. Despite its empirical success, the mechanisms that determine when and why co-training is effective remain poorly understood. We investigate the mechanism of sim-and-real co-training through theoretical analysis and empirical study, and identify two intrinsic effects governing performance. The first, \textbf{``structured representation alignment"}, reflects a balance between cross-domain representation alignment and domain discernibility, and plays a primary role in downstream performance. The second, the \textbf{``importance reweighting effect"}, arises from domain-dependent modulation of action weighting and operates at a secondary level. We validate these effects with controlled experiments on a toy model and extensive sim-and-sim and sim-and-real robot manipulation experiments. Our analysis offers a unified interpretation of recent co-training techniques and motivates a simple method that consistently improves upon prior approaches. More broadly, our aim is to examine the inner workings of co-training and to facilitate research in this direction.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but lexically divergent outputs. In this paper, we present Calibrated Speculative Decoding (CSD), a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification. Guided by the principle of "Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection and Probability-Guarded Acceptance," CSD incorporates two lightweight modules: Online Correction Memory, which aggregates historical rejections to propose recurring divergence patterns as rescue candidates, and Semantic Consistency Gating, which verifies candidate admissibility using probability ratios instead of exact token matching. Our evaluation across diverse large language models demonstrates that CSD outperforms existing methods, achieving a peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. CSD preserves model accuracy across all tasks while further boosting performance on complex reasoning datasets. These results establish CSD as a highly effective, lightweight solution for practical LLM deployments.

The performance of large language model (LLM) agents depends critically on the execution harness, the system layer that orchestrates tool use, context management, and state persistence. Yet this same architectural centrality makes the harness a high-value attack surface: a single compromise at the harness level can cascade through the entire execution pipeline. We observe that existing security approaches suffer from structural mismatch, leaving them blind to harness-internal state and unable to coordinate across the different phases of agent operation. In this paper, we introduce \safeharness{}, a security architecture in which four proposed defense layers are woven directly into the agent lifecycle to address above significant limitations: adversarial context filtering at input processing, tiered causal verification at decision making, privilege-separated tool control at action execution, and safe rollback with adaptive degradation at state update. The proposed cross-layer mechanisms tie these layers together, escalating verification rigor, triggering rollbacks, and tightening tool privileges whenever sustained anomalies are detected. We evaluate \safeharness{} on benchmark datasets across diverse harness configurations, comparing against four security baselines under five attack scenarios spanning six threat categories. Compared to the unprotected baseline, \safeharness{} achieves an average reduction of approximately 38\% in UBR and 42\% in ASR, substantially lowering both the unsafe behavior rate and the attack success rate while preserving core task utility.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM, particularly after long pretraining: a phenomenon known as catastrophic overtraining (Springer et al., 2025). To understand overtraining, we first investigate catastrophic forgetting in finetuning through the lens of implicit regularization of the learning rate. For models trained to the same SFT loss, we identify how the learning rate mediates optimization: finetuning with large and small steps converges to qualitatively different models. Next, we link forgetting to overtraining: learning rate decay increases the sharpness of the pretrained model, which in turn exacerbates catastrophic forgetting during SFT, leading to overtraining. Our findings paint a picture of the overtraining mechanism in LLMs and broadly contribute to the understanding of the interplay between optimization dynamics during pretraining and finetuning.

InGaZnO (IGZO) channel FeFETs have attracted notable interest thanks to their advances in endurance. This work evaluates the viability of NOR-type IGZO FeFETs for readcentric AI inference workloads via design-technology cooptimization (DTCO). We demonstrate the cross-node bitcell footprint scalability of back-end-of-line (BEOL) IGZO FeFETs capable of delivering 10-A SRAM-equivalent area (0.016 um2) with 7-nm ground rules and reaching sub-5 ns random access latency despite writability challenges. We further identify the sensing margin penalty in NOR FeFET arrays arising from sneak current associated with the negative program-state Vt, which requires positive-Vt engineering in order to eliminate the unwanted negative voltage read inhibition - for example, by ferroelectric layer thinning. Last but not least, we elucidate the read margin implications on 3D FeNOR for storage-class memories (SCMs), with the 3D stacking density limited by additional sneak current from neighbor channel shunting.

Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) are a classical method for unsupervised learning, vector quantization, and topographic mapping of high-dimensional data. However, existing SOM formulations often involve a trade-off between computational efficiency and a clearly defined optimization objective. Objective-based variants such as Soft Topographic Vector Quantization (STVQ) provide a principled formulation, but their neighborhood-coupled computations become expensive as the number of latent nodes increases. In this paper, we propose Self-Organizing Maps with Optimized Latent Positions (SOM-OLP), an objective-based topographic mapping method that introduces a continuous latent position for each data point. Starting from the neighborhood distortion of STVQ, we construct a separable surrogate local cost based on its local quadratic structure and formulate an entropy-regularized objective based on it. This yields a simple block coordinate descent scheme with closed-form updates for assignment probabilities, latent positions, and reference vectors, while guaranteeing monotonic non-increase of the objective and retaining linear per-iteration complexity in the numbers of data points and latent nodes. Experiments on a synthetic saddle manifold, scalability studies on the Digits and MNIST datasets, and 16 benchmark datasets show that SOM-OLP achieves competitive neighborhood preservation and quantization performance, favorable scalability for large numbers of latent nodes and large datasets, and the best average rank among the compared methods on the benchmark datasets.

Managing natural dialogue timing is a significant challenge for voice-based chatbots. Most current systems usually rely on simple silence detection, which often fails because human speech patterns involve irregular pauses. This causes bots to interrupt users, breaking the conversational flow. This problem is even more severe for languages like Turkish, which lack high-quality datasets for turn-taking prediction. This paper introduces Syn-TurnTurk, a synthetic Turkish dialogue dataset generated using various Qwen Large Language Models (LLMs) to mirror real-life verbal exchanges, including overlaps and strategic silences. We evaluated the dataset using several traditional and deep learning architectures. The results show that advanced models, particularly BI-LSTM and Ensemble (LR+RF) methods, achieve high accuracy (0.839) and AUC scores (0.910). These findings demonstrate that our synthetic dataset can have a positive affect for models understand linguistic cues, allowing for more natural human-machine interaction in Turkish.

Rubric-augmented verification guides reward models with explicit evaluation criteria, yielding more reliable judgments than single-model verification. However, most existing methods require costly rubric annotations, limiting scalability. Moreover, we find that rubric generation is vulnerable to a failure of cooperation; low-quality rubrics actively mislead reward models rather than help. Inspired by the principle of cooperative communication, we propose Cooperative yet Critical reward modeling (C2), a framework that significantly improves reward model judgments by having the reward model critically collaborate with a rubric generator trained solely from binary preferences. In C2, we synthesize helpful and misleading rubric pairs by measuring how each rubric shifts the reward model toward or away from the correct preference. Using these contrastive pairs, we train a cooperative rubric generator to propose helpful rubrics, and a critical verifier to assess rubric validity before making its judgment, following only rubrics it deems helpful at inference time. C2 outperforms reasoning reward models trained on the same binary preferences, with gains of up to 6.5 points on RM-Bench and 6.0 points length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0. Without external rubric annotations, C2 enables an 8B reward model to match performance achieved with rubrics from a 4$\times$ larger model. Overall, our work demonstrates that eliciting deliberate cooperation in rubric-augmented verification makes reward models more trustworthy in a scalable way.

This study examines the impact of additive and multiplicative noise on both a single leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron and a trained spiking neural network (SNN). Noise was introduced at different stages of neural processing, including the input current, membrane potential, and output spike generation. The results show that multiplicative noise applied to the membrane potential has the most detrimental effect on network performance, leading to a significant degradation in accuracy. This is primarily due to its tendency to suppress membrane potentials toward large negative values, effectively silencing neuronal activity. To address this issue, input pre-filtering strategies were evaluated, with a sigmoid-based filter demonstrating the best performance by shifting inputs to a strictly positive range. Under these conditions, additive noise in the input current becomes the dominant source of performance degradation, while other noise configurations reduce accuracy by no more than 1\%, even at high noise intensity. Additionally, the study compares the effects of common and uncommon noise across neuron populations in hidden layer, revealing that SNNs exhibit greater robustness to common noise. Overall, the findings identify the most critical noise mechanisms affecting SNNs and provide practical approaches for improving their robustness.

Smart contracts are a critical component of blockchain systems. Due to the large amount of digital assets carried by smart contracts, their security is of critical importance. Although numerous tools have been developed for detecting smart contract vulnerability, their effectiveness remains limited, particularly due to the high false positives included in the reported results. Therefore, developers and auditors are often overwhelmed with manually verifying the reported issues. A fundamental reason behind this is that while a reported vulnerability satisfies specific vulnerable patterns, it may not actually be exploitable, either because the vulnerable code cannot be triggered or it does not result in any financial loss. In this paper, we propose V2E, a new framework for validating whether a reported vulnerability is truly exploitable. The core idea of V2E is to automatically generate executable Proof-of-Concept Exploit (PoC for short), and then assess if the vulnerability could be triggered and incur any real damage (i.e., causing financial loss) by the PoC. While LLMs have shown proficiency in PoC generation, achieving our task is by no means trivial. In detail, it is difficult for LLM to: (1) generate and update PoC to trigger a specific vulnerability, (2) evaluate the PoC's effectiveness to validate exploitable vulnerability. To this end, V2E automates the whole process through a novel combination of PoC generation, validation, and refinement: (1) Firstly, V2E generates targeted PoCs by analyzing potential vulnerability paths. (2) Then, V2E verifies the validity of PoCs through triggerability and profitability analysis. (3) In addition, V2E iteratively refines the generated PoC based on PoC execution feedback, therefore, increasing the chance to confirm the vulnerability. Evaluation on 264 manually labeled contracts shows that V2E outperforms the baseline approach.

Reinforcement learners can attain high reward through novel unintended strategies. We study a Bayesian mitigation for general environments: we expand the agent's subjective reward range to include a large negative value $-L$, while the true environment's rewards lie in $[0,1]$. After observing consistently high rewards, the Bayesian policy becomes risk-averse to novel schemes that plausibly lead to $-L$. We design a simple override mechanism that yields control to a safe mentor whenever the predicted value drops below a fixed threshold. We prove two properties of the resulting agent: (i) Capability: using mentor-guided exploration with vanishing frequency, the agent attains sublinear regret against its best mentor. (ii) Safety: no decidable low-complexity predicate is triggered by the optimizing policy before it is triggered by a mentor.

Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for near-term quantum machine learning. However, their practical performance strongly depends on design choices such as classical-to-quantum data encoding, quantum circuit architecture, measurement strategy and shots. In this paper, we present a comprehensive design space exploration of HQNNs for Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) diagnosis. Using a carefully curated and preprocessed clinical dataset, we benchmark 625 different HQNN models obtained by combining five encoding schemes, five entanglement architectures, five measurement strategies, and five different shot settings. To ensure fair and robust evaluation, all models are trained using 10-fold stratified cross-validation and assessed on a test set using a comprehensive set of metrics, including accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), F1-score, and a composite performance score. Our results reveal strong and non-trivial interactions between encoding choices and circuit architectures, showing that high performance does not necessarily require large parameter counts or complex circuits. In particular, we find that compact architectures combined with appropriate encodings (e.g., IQP with Ring entanglement) can achieve the best trade-off between accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. Beyond absolute performance analysis, we also provide actionable insights into how different design dimensions influence learning behavior in HQNNs.

Binary stellar evolution simulations are computationally expensive. Stellar population synthesis relies on these detailed evolution models at a fundamental level. Producing thousands of such models requires hundreds of CPU hours, but stellar track interpolation provides one approach to significantly reduce this computational cost. Although single-star track interpolation is straightforward, stellar interactions in binary systems introduce significant complexity to binary evolution, making traditional single-track interpolation methods inapplicable. Binary tracks present fundamentally different challenges compared to single stars, which possess relatively straightforward evolutionary phases identifiable through distinct physical properties. Binary systems are complicated by mutual interactions that can dramatically alter evolutionary trajectories and introduce discontinuities difficult to capture through standard interpolation. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for track alignment and iterative track averaging based on Dynamic Time Warping to address misalignments between neighboring tracks. Our method computes a single shared warping path across all physical parameters simultaneously, placing them on a consistent temporal grid that preserves the causal relationships between parameters. We demonstrate that this joint-alignment strategy maintains key physical relationships such as the Stefan-Boltzmann law in the interpolated tracks. Our comprehensive evaluation across multiple binary configurations demonstrates that proper temporal alignment is crucial for track interpolation methods. The proposed method consistently outperforms existing approaches and enables the efficient generation of more accurate binary population samples for astrophysical studies.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these approaches introduce a systemic vulnerability: reward hacking, where models exploit imperfections in learned reward signals to maximize proxy objectives without fulfilling true task intent. As models scale and optimization intensifies, such exploitation manifests as verbosity bias, sycophancy, hallucinated justification, benchmark overfitting, and, in multimodal settings, perception--reasoning decoupling and evaluator manipulation. Recent evidence further suggests that seemingly benign shortcut behaviors can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic gaming of oversight mechanisms. In this survey, we propose the Proxy Compression Hypothesis (PCH) as a unifying framework for understanding reward hacking. We formalize reward hacking as an emergent consequence of optimizing expressive policies against compressed reward representations of high-dimensional human objectives. Under this view, reward hacking arises from the interaction of objective compression, optimization amplification, and evaluator--policy co-adaptation. This perspective unifies empirical phenomena across RLHF, RLAIF, and RLVR regimes, and explains how local shortcut learning can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic manipulation of oversight mechanisms. We further organize detection and mitigation strategies according to how they intervene on compression, amplification, or co-adaptation dynamics. By framing reward hacking as a structural instability of proxy-based alignment under scale, we highlight open challenges in scalable oversight, multimodal grounding, and agentic autonomy.

SAKURAONE is a managed high performance computing (HPC) cluster developed and operated by the SAKURA Internet Research Center. It builds on the KOKARYOKU PHY bare metal GPU platform and is optimized for advanced workloads, including large language model (LLM) training. In ISC 2025 TOP500, SAKURAONE is ranked 49th by HPL and is the only top 100 system that uses a fully open networking stack - 800 GbE with SONiC - demonstrating the scalability of vendor-neutral technology. Measured performance is 33.95 PFLOP/s (HPL Rmax), 396.295 TFLOP/s (HPCG), and 339.86 PFLOP/s on HPL-MxP with FP8. The system consists of 100 nodes, each with eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs and a 2 PB all-flash Lustre file system, interconnected via a rail-optimized 800 GbE leaf-spine fabric with RoCEv2. Through exclusive use by a single research project, we observed the characteristics of development-related jobs. Consistent with previous HPC studies, small-scale jobs dominated in number, while a few large-scale jobs accounted for most GPU resource time. As the project progressed, resource use shifted from large-scale to mid-scale jobs, reflecting a transition from initial large-scale training to iterative refinement. These observations illustrate the real-world utilization dynamics of GPU clusters under unified project workloads.

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have advanced radiology report generation (RRG), yet two core limitations persist: (1) report-level rewards offer limited evidence-grounded guidance for clinical faithfulness; and (2) current methods lack an explicit self-improving mechanism to align with clinical preference. We introduce clinically aligned Evidence-aware Self-Correcting Reinforcement Learning (ESC-RL), comprising two key components. First, a Group-wise Evidence-aware Alignment Reward (GEAR) delivers group-wise, evidence-aware feedback. GEAR reinforces consistent grounding for true positives, recovers missed findings for false negatives, and suppresses unsupported content for false positives. Second, a Self-correcting Preference Learning (SPL) strategy automatically constructs a reliable, disease-aware preference dataset from multiple noisy observations and leverages an LLM to synthesize refined reports without human supervision. ESC-RL promotes clinically faithful, disease-aligned reward and supports continual self-improvement during training. Extensive experiments on two public chest X-ray datasets demonstrate consistent gains and state-of-the-art performance.

Binary droplet collisions are ubiquitous in dense sprays. Traditional deterministic models cannot adequately represent transitional and stochastic behaviors of binary droplet collision. To bridge this gap, we developed a probabilistic model by using a machine learning approach, the Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LightGBM). The model was trained on a comprehensive dataset of 33,540 experimental cases covering eight collision regimes across broad ranges of Weber number, Ohnesorge number, impact parameter, size ratio, and ambient pressure. The resulting machine learning classifier captures highly nonlinear regime boundaries with 99.2% accuracy and retains sensitivity in transitional regions. To facilitate its implementation in spray simulation, the model was translated into a probabilistic form, a multinomial logistic regression, which preserves 93.2% accuracy and maps continuous inter-regime transitions. A biased-dice sampling mechanism then converts these probabilities into definite yet stochastic outcomes. This work presents the first probabilistic, high-dimensional droplet collision model derived from experimental data, offering a physically consistent, comprehensive, and user-friendly solution for spray simulation.

Reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) have generally advanced significantly. However, it is still challenging for existing reasoning-based LLMs to perform effective decision-making abilities in multi-agent environments, due to the absence of explicit foresight modeling. To this end, strategic reasoning, the most fundamental capability to anticipate the counterpart's behaviors and foresee its possible future actions, has been introduced to alleviate the above issues. Strategic reasoning is fundamental to effective decision-making in multi-agent environments, yet existing reasoning enhancement methods for LLMs do not explicitly capture its foresight nature. In this work, we introduce Foresight Policy Optimization (FoPO) to enhance strategic reasoning in LLMs, which integrates opponent modeling principles into policy optimization, thereby enabling explicit consideration of both self-interest and counterpart influence. Specifically, we construct two curated datasets, namely Cooperative RSA and Competitive Taboo, equipped with well-designed rules and moderate difficulty to facilitate a systematic investigation of FoPO in a self-play framework. Our experiments demonstrate that FoPO significantly enhances strategic reasoning across LLMs of varying sizes and origins. Moreover, models trained with FoPO exhibit strong generalization to out-of-domain strategic scenarios, substantially outperforming standard LLM reasoning optimization baselines.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for legal reasoning requires workflows that span task design, expert annotation, model execution, and metric-based evaluation. In practice, these steps are split across platforms and scripts, limiting transparency, reproducibility, and participation by non-technical legal experts. We present the BenGER (Benchmark for German Law) framework, an open-source web platform that integrates task creation, collaborative annotation, configurable LLM runs, and evaluation with lexical, semantic, factual, and judge-based metrics. BenGER supports multi-organization projects with tenant isolation and role-based access control, and can optionally provide formative, reference-grounded feedback to annotators. We will demonstrate a live deployment showing end-to-end benchmark creation and analysis.

Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle with complex multi-hop queries over long documents due to their single-pass retrieval. We introduce MM-Doc-R1, a novel framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. To incentivize the information seeking capabilities of our agents, we propose Similarity-based Policy Optimization (SPO), addressing baseline estimation bias in existing multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like GRPO. Our core insight is that in multi-turn RL, the more semantically similar two trajectories are, the more accurate their shared baseline estimation becomes. Leveraging this, SPO calculates a more precise baseline by similarity-weighted averaging of rewards across multiple trajectories, unlike GRPO which inappropriately applies the initial state's baseline to all intermediate states. This provides a more stable and accurate learning signal for our agents, leading to superior training performance that surpasses GRPO. Our experiments on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark show that MM-Doc-R1 outperforms previous baselines by 10.4%. Furthermore, SPO demonstrates superior performance over GRPO, boosting results by 5.0% with Qwen3-8B and 6.1% with Qwen3-4B. These results highlight the effectiveness of our integrated framework and novel training algorithm in advancing the state-of-the-art for complex, long-document visual question answering.

Brain digital twins aim to provide faithful, individualized computational representations of brains as dynamical systems, enabling mechanistic understanding and supporting prediction of clinical interventions. Yet current approaches remain fragmented across data pipelines, model classes, temporal scales, and computing platforms, which prevents the preservation of execution semantics across the end-toend workflow. This survey introduces physically constrained executability as a unifying perspective for comparing approaches at the level of execution: whether an execution state is persistent, which events are permitted to update it (simulation, measurement, actuation), and how strongly execution is temporally and causally coupled to neurobiological dynamics. Building on modeling and simulation theory, I propose a taxonomy of execution regimes ranging from isolated offline models to coordinated co-simulation, to continuously executing digital twins sustained by online data assimilation, and ultimately to neuro-neuromorphic physical systems in which biological and computational dynamics are co-executed under shared physical constraints. The executability concept clarifies why accuracy alone is insufficient, and motivates an agenda centered on semantic interoperability, hybrid-time correctness, evaluation protocols, scalable reproducible workflows, and safe closed-loop validation. This survey adopts a systems and runtime-oriented perspective, enabling comparison of heterogeneous approaches based on their execution semantics rather than on model form or application domain alone.

Heart sound signals, phonocardiography (PCG) signals, allow for the automatic diagnosis of potential cardiovascular pathology. Such classification task can be tackled using the bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) network, trained on features extracted from labeled PCG signals. Regarding the non-stationarity of PCG signals, it is recommended to extract the features from multiple short-length segments of the signals using a sliding window of certain shape and length. However, some window contains unfavorable spectral side lobes, which distort the features. Accordingly, it is preferable to adapt the window shape and length in terms of classification performance. We propose an experimental evaluation for three window shapes, each with three window lengths. The biLSTM network is trained and tested on statistical features extracted, and the performance is reported in terms of the window shapes and lengths. Results show that the best performance is obtained when the Gaussian window is used for splitting the signals, and the triangular window competes with the Gaussian window for a length of 75 ms. Although the rectangular window is a commonly offered option, it is the worst choice for splitting the signals. Moreover, the classification performance obtained with a 75 ms Gaussian window outperforms that of a baseline method.

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery couples kilometer-scale context with query-critical evidence that may occupy only a few pixels. Such vast spatial scale leads to a quadratic explosion of visual tokens and hinders the extraction of information from small objects. Previous works utilize direct downsampling, dense tiling, or global top-k pruning, which either compromise query-critical image details or incur unpredictable compute. In this paper, we propose UHR-BAT, a query-guided and region-faithful token compression framework to efficiently select visual tokens under a strict context budget. Specifically, we leverage text-guided, multi-scale importance estimation for visual tokens, effectively tackling the challenge of achieving precise yet low-cost feature extraction. Furthermore, by introducing region-wise preserve and merge strategies, we mitigate visual token redundancy, further driving down the computational budget. Experimental results show that UHR-BAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/UHR.

Vision-language models trained with contrastive learning on paired medical images and reports show strong zero-shot diagnostic capabilities, yet the effect of training batch composition on learned representations remains unexplored for 3D medical imaging. We reproduce Merlin, a dual-encoder model that aligns 3D abdominal CT volumes with radiology reports using symmetric InfoNCE loss, achieving a zero-shot macro F1 of 74.45% across 30 findings (original: 73.00%). We then investigate two axes of variation. First, we control the normal-to-abnormal ratio within training batches at 25:75, 50:50, and 75:25 using section-level balanced sampling on the full dataset. All three configurations underperform the unbalanced baseline by 2.4 to 2.8 points, with 75:25 achieving the best result (72.02%) among balanced variants. Second, we conduct data scaling ablations on a 4,362-study subset, training with 20%, 40%, and 100% of the data. Performance scales sub-linearly from 65.26% to 71.88%, with individual findings varying dramatically in data sensitivity. Enforcing 50:50 balanced sampling on the same subset further degrades performance to 68.01%, confirming that explicit class balancing hurts regardless of dataset or balancing granularity. Our results indicate that the stochastic diversity of random sampling, combined with Merlin's alternating batching over anatomical subsections, provides more effective regularization than engineered class ratios at the small batch sizes required by 3D medical volumes.

Multi-task learning (MTL) improves generalization and data efficiency by jointly learning related tasks through shared representations. In the widely used hard-parameter-sharing setting, a shared backbone is combined with task-specific prediction heads. However, task-specific parameters can grow rapidly with the number of tasks. Therefore, designing multi-task heads that preserve task specialization while improving parameter efficiency remains a key challenge. In Quantum Machine Learning (QML), variational quantum circuits (VQCs) provide a compact mechanism for mapping classical data to quantum states residing in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, enabling expressive representations within constrained parameter budgets. We propose a parameter-efficient quantum multi-task learning (QMTL) framework that replaces conventional task-specific linear heads with a fully quantum prediction head in a hybrid architecture. The model consists of a VQC with a shared, task-independent quantum encoding stage, followed by lightweight task-specific ansatz blocks enabling localized task adaptation while maintaining compact parameterization. Under a controlled and capacity-matched formulation where the shared representation dimension grows with the number of tasks, our parameter-scaling analysis demonstrates that a standard classical head exhibits quadratic growth, whereas the proposed quantum head parameter cost scales linearly. We evaluate QMTL on three multi-task benchmarks spanning natural language processing, medical imaging, and multimodal sarcasm detection, where we achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, classical hard-parameter-sharing baselines while consistently outperforming existing hybrid quantum MTL models with substantially fewer head parameters. We further demonstrate QMTL's executability on noisy simulators and real quantum hardware, illustrating its feasibility.

Scenario testing is an important technique for detecting errors in web systems. Testers draft test scenarios and convert them into test scripts for execution. Early methods relied on testers to convert test scenarios into test scripts. Recent LLM-based scenario testing methods can generate test scripts from natural language descriptions of test scenarios. However, these methods are not only limited by the incompleteness of descriptions but also overlook test adequacy criteria, making it difficult to detect potential errors. To address these limitations, this paper proposes WebMAC, a multi-agent collaborative framework for scenario testing of web systems. WebMAC can complete natural language descriptions of test scenarios through interactive clarification and transform adequate instantiated test scenarios via equivalence class partitioning. WebMAC consists of three multi-agent modules, responsible respectively for completing natural language descriptions of test scenarios, transforming test scenarios, and converting test scripts. We evaluated WebMAC on four web systems. Compared with the SOTA method, WebMAC improves the execution success rate of generated test scripts by 30%-60%, increases testing efficiency by 29%, and reduces token consumption by 47.6%. Furthermore, WebMAC can effectively detect more errors in web systems.

Cross-layer key-value (KV) compression has been found to be effective in efficient inference of large language models (LLMs). Although they reduce the memory consumption of the KV cache, such methods usually introduce non-negligible performance degradation. In this work, we aim to enhance the performance of YOCO, a cross-layer KV compression method that shares the KVs of the middle layer with the top-half layers. We propose YOCO++, an enhanced YOCO that incorporates a weighted residual connection between the KVs of each bottom-half layer and the bottom layer. Compared to YOCO, YOCO++ increases model capacity while maintaining the same training and inference efficiency. Our experiments show that YOCO++ achieves state-of-the-art performance among the cross-layer KV compression methods at a 50% KV cache compression rate, outperforming the standard Transformer.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, but their performance often degrades under distribution shift. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods rely on gradient-based updates that require white-box access and need substantial overhead, while training-free alternatives are either static or depend on external guidance. In this paper, we propose Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning TF-TTCL, a training-free adaptation framework that enables a frozen LLM to improve online by distilling supervision from its own inference experiences. Specifically, TF-TTCL implements a dynamic "Explore-Reflect-Steer" loop through three core modules: 1) Semantic Query Augmentation first diversifies problem views via multi-agent role-playing to generate different reasoning trajectories; 2) Contrastive Experience Distillation then captures the semantic gap between superior and inferior trajectories, distilling them into explicit textual rules; and 3) Contextual Rule Retrieval finally activates these stored rules during inference to dynamically steer the frozen LLM toward robust reasoning patterns while avoiding observed errors. Extensive experiments on closed-ended reasoning tasks and open-ended evaluation tasks demonstrate that TF-TTCL consistently outperforms strong zero-shot baselines and representative TTA methods under online evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinSCUTer/TF-TTCL.

Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities referring to the same real-world object across different knowledge graphs (KGs). Recent approaches based on large language models (LLMs) typically obtain entity embeddings through knowledge representation learning and use embedding similarity to identify an alignment-uncertain entity set. For each uncertain entity, a candidate entity set (CES) is then retrieved based on embedding similarity to support subsequent alignment reasoning and decision making. However, the reliability of the CES and the reasoning capability of LLMs critically affect the effectiveness of subsequent alignment decisions. To address this issue, we propose AgentEA, a reliable EA framework based on multi-agent debate. AgentEA first improves embedding quality through entity representation preference optimization, and then introduces a two-stage multi-role debate mechanism consisting of lightweight debate verification and deep debate alignment to progressively enhance the reliability of alignment decisions while enabling more efficient debate-based reasoning. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks under cross-lingual, sparse, large-scale, and heterogeneous settings demonstrate the effectiveness of AgentEA.

Conventional neural networks strictly separate learning and inference because if parameters are updated during inference, outputs become unstable and even the inference function itself is not well defined [1, 2, 3]. This paper shows that DynamicGate MLP structurally permits learning inference concurrency [4, 5]. The key idea is to separate routing (gating) parameters from representation (prediction) parameters, so that the gate can be adapted online while inference stability is preserved, or weights can be selectively updated only within the inactive subspace [4, 5, 6, 7]. We mathematically formalize sufficient conditions for concurrency and show that even under asynchronous or partial updates, the inference output at each time step can always be interpreted as a forward computation of a valid model snapshot [8, 9, 10]. This suggests that DynamicGate MLP can serve as a practical foundation for online adaptive and on device learning systems [11, 12].

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks have penetrated healthcare applications where real-time requirements and edge computing capabilities are essential. Gait analysis that detects abnormal steps to prevent patients from falling is a prominent problem for such applications. Given the extremely stringent design requirements in performance, power dissipation, and area, an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) enables an efficient real-time exploitation of LSTMs for gait analysis, achieving high accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first cross-layer co-optimized LSTM accelerator for real-time gait analysis, targeting an ASIC design. We conduct a comprehensive design space exploration from software down to layout design. We carry out a bit-width optimization at the software level with hardware-aware quantization to reduce the hardware complexity, explore various designs at the register-transfer level, and generate alternative layouts to find efficient realizations of the LSTM accelerator in terms of hardware complexity and accuracy. The physical synthesis results show that, using the 65 nm technology, the die size of the accelerator's layout optimized for the highest accuracy is 0.325 mm^2, while the alternative design optimized for hardware complexity with a slightly lower accuracy occupies 15.4% smaller area. Moreover, the designed accelerators achieve accurate gait abnormality detection 4.05x faster than the given application requirement.

The growth of compute-intensive AI tasks highlights the need to mitigate the processing costs and improve performance and energy efficiency. This necessitates the integration of intelligent agents as architectural adaptation supervisors tasked with adaptive scaling of the infrastructure and efficient offloading of computation within the continuum. This paper presents a self-adaptation approach for an efficient computing system of a mixed human-robot environment. The computation task is associated with a Neural Network algorithm that leverages sensory data to predict human mobility behaviors, to enhance mobile robots' proactive path planning, and ensure human safety. To streamline neural network processing, we built a distributed edge offloading system with heterogeneous processing units, orchestrated by Kubernetes. By monitoring response times and power consumption, the MAPE-K-based adaptation supervisor makes informed decisions on scaling and offloading. Results show notable improvements in service quality over traditional setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for AI-driven systems.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) aim to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single structure. However, these models exhibit a notable capability mismatch, where their understanding capability significantly outperforms their generation. This mismatch indicates that the model's rich internal knowledge, while effective for understanding tasks, remains underactivated during generation. To address this, we draw inspiration from the human ``Thinking-While-Drawing'' paradigm, where humans continuously reflect to activate their knowledge and rectify intermediate results. In this paper, we propose UniRect-CoT, a training-free unified rectification chain-of-thought framework. Our approach unlocks the ``free lunch'' hidden in the UMM's powerful inherent understanding to continuously reflect, activating its internal knowledge and rectifying intermediate results during generation.We regard the diffusion denoising process in UMMs as an intrinsic visual reasoning process and align the intermediate results with the target instruction understood by the model, serving as a self-supervisory signal to rectify UMM generation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniRect-CoT can be easily integrated into existing UMMs, significantly enhancing generation quality across diverse complex tasks.

Using responses generated by high-performing large language models (LLMs) for instruction tuning has become a widely adopted approach. However, the existing literature overlooks a property of LLM-generated responses: they conflate world knowledge acquired during pre-training with instruction-following capabilities acquired during post-training. We hypothesize that disentangling the instruction-following capabilities from pre-trained knowledge improves the effectiveness of instruction tuning. To this end, we propose CoDIT, a method that applies contrastive decoding between a post-trained model and its pre-trained counterpart during response generation. The method suppresses pre-trained knowledge shared between the two models while amplifying the instruction-following behavior acquired via post-training, resulting in responses that more purely reflect instruction-following capabilities. Experiment results demonstrate that models trained on datasets constructed via CoDIT consistently outperform those trained on directly generated responses. Training on our datasets also yields better performance than on existing publicly available instruction-tuning datasets across multiple benchmarks. Furthermore, we theoretically and empirically show that CoDIT can be interpreted as distilling the chat vector from parameter space to text space, enabling the transfer of instruction-tuning capabilities across models of different architectures.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show strong capabilities for automating web tasks, but existing interactive benchmarks primarily target benign, predictable consumer environments. Their effectiveness in high-stakes, investigative domains such as authentic e-commerce risk management remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present RiskWebWorld, the first highly realistic interactive benchmark for evaluating GUI agents in e-commerce risk management. RiskWebWorld features 1,513 tasks sourced from production risk-control pipelines across 8 core domains, and captures the authentic challenges of risk operations on uncooperative websites, partially environmental hijackments. To support scalable evaluation and agentic reinforcement learning (RL), we further build a Gymnasium-compliant infrastructure that decouples policy planning from environment mechanics. Our evaluation across diverse models reveals a dramatic capability gap: top-tier generalist models achieve 49.1% success, while specialized open-weights GUI models lag at near-total failure. This highlights that foundation model scale currently matters more than zero-shot interface grounding in long-horizon professional tasks. We also demonstrate the viability of our infrastructure through agentic RL, which improves open-source models by 16.2%. These results position RiskWebWorld as a practical testbed for developing robust digital workers.

The robust low-rank tensor completion problem addresses the challenge of recovering corrupted high-dimensional tensor data with missing entries, outliers, and sparse noise commonly found in real-world applications. Existing methodologies have encountered fundamental limitations due to their reliance on uniform regularization schemes, particularly the tensor nuclear norm and $\ell_1$ norm regularization approaches, which indiscriminately apply equal shrinkage to all singular values and sparse components, thereby compromising the preservation of critical tensor structures. The proposed tensor weighted correlated total variation (TWCTV) regularizer addresses these shortcomings through an $M$-product framework that combines a weighted Schatten-$p$ norm on gradient tensors for low-rankness with smoothness enforcement and weighted sparse components for noise suppression. The proposed weighting scheme adaptively reduces the thresholding level to preserve both dominant singular values and sparse components, thus improving the reconstruction of critical structural elements and nuanced details in the recovered signal. Through a systematic algorithmic approach, we introduce an enhanced alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) that offers both computational efficiency and theoretical substantiation, with convergence properties comprehensively analyzed within the $M$-product framework.Comprehensive numerical evaluations across image completion, denoising, and background subtraction tasks validate the superior performance of this approach relative to established benchmark methods.

Numerous tensor accelerator designs have been proposed, yet most lack well-documented ISAs and compiler backends, limiting evaluation to a handful of operators. Recent work has shown that given a tensor-level ISA specification, complete software stacks including compiler backends can be automatically generated--but writing such specifications remains a manual, expert-driven process. We present ATLAAS, the first end-to-end MLIR-based pipeline that lifts RTL-extracted accelerator semantics to tensor ISA specifications. Starting from bit-level LLVM IR produced by prior architecture-level model extraction, ATLAAS applies an 8-pass semantic lifting pipeline that progressively recovers high-level tensor structure--MAC idioms, saturation semantics, multi-dimensional buffer organizations, and data layout transformations--emitting specifications that immediately enable automatic software stack generation through the ACT ecosystem. We evaluate ATLAAS on the Gemmini systolic-array accelerator, where the pipeline collapses bit-level MLIR by up to 92.9% on processing elements and 24-34% on controller modules. ATLAAS discovers hardware features omitted from the hand-written reference, with correctness validated via Z3 SMT equivalence proofs. Generality is confirmed on TVM's VTA processor, where the same pipeline lifts all four datapath modules without accelerator-specific changes, enabling an automated path from RTL to a performance-competitive compiler backend.

Existing multi-source root cause analysis (RCA) methods for microservice systems assume all services have traces to construct a service call graph. However, this assumption is not practical as microservice systems evolve rapidly and may contain blackbox services without traces, such as compiled software or unsupported services. We refer to these services as blind spots. In the presence of blind spots, the performance of existing multi-source RCA methods may be affected, as they only diagnose visible services on the call graph. To overcome this limitation, we propose TORAI, a novel unsupervised approach that effectively pinpoints fine-grained root causes without relying on the service call graph. Instead, TORAI first measures anomaly severity using available multi-source telemetry data. It then performs clustering to group services based on their severity symptoms and conducts causal analysis to rank services within each severity cluster. Finally, TORAI aggregates the cluster rankings and uses hypothesis testing to identify fine-grained root causes. TORAI provides an unsupervised approach that leverages available multi-source telemetry data for RCA without requiring a constructed service call graph or further intrusive actions, thus addressing the limitations of existing methods. Our experiments on three benchmark systems demonstrate that TORAI outperforms state-of-the-art baselines remarkably in the presence of blind spots. Performance on real-world failures further shows that TORAI can accurately pinpoint the root causes in top-3 recommendations.

Neural network models with latent recurrent processing, where identical layers are recursively applied to the latent state, have gained attention as promising models for performing reasoning tasks. A strength of such models is that they enable test-time scaling, where the models can enhance their performance in the test phase without additional training. Models such as the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) and Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) can facilitate deeper reasoning by increasing the number of recurrent steps, thereby enabling the completion of challenging tasks, including Sudoku, Maze solving, and AGI benchmarks. In this work, we introduce confidence-based voting (C-voting), a test-time scaling strategy designed for recurrent models with multiple latent candidate trajectories. Initializing the latent state with multiple candidates using random variables, C-voting selects the one maximizing the average of top-1 probabilities of the predictions, reflecting the model's confidence. Additionally, it yields 4.9% higher accuracy on Sudoku-hard than the energy-based voting strategy, which is specific to models with explicit energy functions. An essential advantage of C-voting is its applicability: it can be applied to recurrent models without requiring an explicit energy function. Finally, we introduce a simple attention-based recurrent model with randomized initial values named ItrSA++, and demonstrate that when combined with C-voting, it outperforms HRM on Sudoku-extreme (95.2% vs. 55.0%) and Maze (78.6% vs. 74.5%) tasks.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly promising for carbon capture, yet navigating their vast design space remains challenging. Recent deep generative models enable de novo MOF design but primarily act as feed-forward structure generators. By heavily relying on predefined building block libraries and non-differentiable post-optimization, they fundamentally sever the information flow required for continuous structural editing. Here, we propose a target-driven generative framework focused on continuous structural manipulation. At its core is LinkerVAE, which maps discrete 3D chemical graphs into a continuous, SE(3)-equivariant latent space. This smooth manifold unlocks geometry-aware manipulations, including implicit chemical style transfer and zero-shot isoreticular expansion. Building upon this, we introduce a test-time optimization (TTO) strategy, utilizing an accurate surrogate model to continuously optimize the latent graphs of existing MOFs toward desired properties. This approach systematically enhances carbon capture performance, achieving a striking average relative boost of 147.5% in pure CO2 uptake while strictly preserving structural validity. Integrated with a latent diffusion model and rigid-body assembly for full MOF construction, our framework establishes a scalable, fully differentiable pathway for both the automated discovery, targeted optimization and editing of functional materials.

Tool calling has greatly expanded the practical utility of large language models (LLMs) by enabling them to interact with external applications. As LLM capabilities advance, effective tool use increasingly involves multi-step, multi-turn interactions to solve complex tasks. However, the resulting growth in tool interactions incurs substantial latency, posing a key challenge for real-time LLM serving. Through empirical analysis, we find that tool-calling traces are highly structured, conform to constrained schemas, and often exhibit recurring invocation patterns. Motivated by this, we propose ToolSpec, a schema-aware, retrieval-augmented speculative decoding method for accelerating tool calling. ToolSpec exploits predefined tool schemas to generate accurate drafts, using a finite-state machine to alternate between deterministic schema token filling and speculative generation for variable fields. In addition, ToolSpec retrieves similar historical tool invocations and reuses them as drafts to further improve efficiency. ToolSpec presents a plug-and-play solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing LLM workflows. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ToolSpec achieves up to a 4.2x speedup, substantially outperforming existing training-free speculative decoding methods.

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a major technique for the task of learning from unlabeled data, where the current methods mostly revolve around alignment of representations and input recon struction. Although such approaches have demonstrated excellent performance in practice, their scope remains mostly confined to learning from observed data and does not provide much help in terms of a learning structure that is predictive of the data distribution. In this paper, we study some of the recent developments in the realm of self-supervised learning. We define a new category called Predictive Representation Learning (PRL), which revolves around the latent prediction of unobserved components of data based on the observation. We propose a common taxonomy that classifies PRL along with alignment and reconstruction-based learning approaches. Furthermore, we argue that Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture(JEPA) can be considered as an exemplary member of this new paradigm. We further discuss theoretical perspectives and open challenges, highlighting predictive representation learning as a promising direction for future self-supervised learning research. In this study, we implemented Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL), Masked Autoencoders (MAE), and Image-JEPA (I-JEPA) for comparative analysis. The results indicate that MAE achieves perfect similarity of 1.00, but exhibits relatively weak robustness of 0.55. In contrast, BYOL and I-JEPA attain accuracies of 0.98 and 0.95, with robustness scores of 0.75 and 0.78, respectively.

Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning has long been a central challenge. Inspired by the multi-timescale encoding of the dopamine system in neurobiology, recent research has sought to introduce multiple discount factors into Actor-Critic architectures, such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to balance short-term responses with long-term planning. However, this paper reveals that blindly fusing multi-timescale signals in complex delayed-reward tasks can lead to severe algorithmic pathologies. We systematically demonstrate that exposing a temporal attention routing mechanism to policy gradients results in surrogate objective hacking, while adopting gradient-free uncertainty weighting triggers irreversible myopic degeneration, a phenomenon we term the Paradox of Temporal Uncertainty. To address these issues, we propose a Target Decoupling architecture: on the Critic side, we retain multi-timescale predictions to enforce auxiliary representation learning, while on the Actor side, we strictly isolate short-term signals and update the policy based solely on long-term advantages. Rigorous empirical evaluations across multiple independent random seeds in the LunarLander-v2 environment demonstrate that our proposed architecture achieves statistically significant performance improvements. Without relying on hyperparameter hacking, it consistently surpasses the ''Environment Solved'' threshold with minimal variance, completely eliminates policy collapse, and escapes the hovering local optima that trap single-timescale baselines.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a common post-training recipe. We conduct a controlled ablation over SFT-GRPO data overlap, evaluating Qwen3-8B (thinking disabled) post-trained for Lean 4 autoformalization under six conditions that differ solely in training recipe: a base model, SFT-only, GRPO-only, and three SFT+GRPO configurations where 0 percent, 30 percent, or 100 percent of the GRPO prompts coincide with the SFT corpus. Keeping SFT and GRPO data disjoint consistently outperforms full overlap at zero additional compute cost. Evaluating on Gaokao-Formal and PutnamBench under both compile pass at k and semantic pass at k assessed by an LLM judge, we find that lower overlap is monotonically associated with higher compilation and semantic accuracy. At 0 percent overlap, GRPO yields a 10.4 percentage point semantic gain over SFT alone on Gaokao, while at 100 percent overlap both metrics remain flat, rendering the GRPO stage effectively redundant. We further show that dual-metric evaluation reveals compile semantic gaps exceeding 30 percentage points for the highest compiling models, a disparity invisible under compile-only benchmarking. To our knowledge, this is the first controlled investigation of SFT-GRPO data overlap as a post-training hyperparameter, demonstrating how model behavior varies based on the degree of data sharing between training stages.

Designing effective reward functions is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning (RL), yet it remains a challenging and labor-intensive process due to the inefficiencies and inconsistencies inherent in traditional methods. Existing methods often rely on extensive manual design and evaluation steps, which are prone to redundancy and overlook local uncertainties at intermediate decision points. To address these challenges, we propose the Chain of Uncertain Rewards (CoUR), a novel framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) to streamline reward function design and evaluation in RL environments. Specifically, our CoUR introduces code uncertainty quantification with a similarity selection mechanism that combines textual and semantic analyses to identify and reuse the most relevant reward function components. By reducing redundant evaluations and leveraging Bayesian optimization on decoupled reward terms, CoUR enables a more efficient and robust search for optimal reward feedback. We comprehensively evaluate CoUR across nine original environments from IsaacGym and all 20 tasks from the Bidexterous Manipulation benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that CoUR not only achieves better performance but also significantly lowers the cost of reward evaluations.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) refer to environmental, behavioral, and social conditions that influence how individuals live, work, and age. SDOH have a significant impact on personal health outcomes, and their systematic identification and management can yield substantial improvements in patient care. However, SDOH information is predominantly captured in unstructured clinical notes within electronic health records, which limits its direct use as machine-readable entities. To address this issue, researchers have employed Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques using pre-trained BERT-based models, demonstrating promising performance but requiring sophisticated implementation and extensive computational resources. In this study, we investigated prompt engineering strategies for extracting structured SDOH events utilizing LLMs with advanced reasoning capabilities. Our method consisted of four modules: 1) developing concise and descriptive prompts integrated with established guidelines, 2) applying few-shot learning with carefully curated examples, 3) using a self-consistency mechanism to ensure robust outputs, and 4) post-processing for quality control. Our approach achieved a micro-F1 score of 0.866, demonstrating competitive performance compared to the leading models. The results demonstrated that LLMs with reasoning capabilities are effective solutions for SDOH event extraction, offering both implementation simplicity and strong performance.

Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable digital automation on end-user devices. While scaling both parameters and data has yielded substantial gains, advanced methods still suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. When facing complex in-the-wild scenarios, lightweight GUI agents are bottlenecked by limited capacity and poor task scalability under end-to-end episodic learning, impeding adaptation to multi-agent systems (MAS), while training multiple skill-specific experts remains costly. Can we strike an effective trade-off in this cost-scalability dilemma, enabling lightweight MLLMs to participate in realistic GUI workflows? To address these challenges, we propose the LAMO framework, which endows a lightweight MLLM with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability, allowing multi-role orchestration to expand its capability boundary for GUI automation. LAMO combines role-oriented data synthesis with a two-stage training recipe: (i) supervised fine-tuning with Perplexity-Weighted Cross-Entropy optimization for knowledge distillation and visual perception enhancement, and (ii) reinforcement learning for role-oriented cooperative exploration. With LAMO, we develop a task-scalable native GUI agent, LAMO-3B, supporting monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. When paired with advanced planners as a plug-and-play policy executor, LAMO-3B can continuously benefit from planner advances, enabling a higher performance ceiling. Extensive static and online evaluations validate the effectiveness of our design.

Clustering and dimensionality reduction have been crucial topics in machine learning and computer vision. Clustering high-dimensional data has been challenging for a long time due to the curse of dimensionality. For that reason, a more promising direction is the joint learning of dimension reduction and clustering. In this work, we propose a Manifold Learning Framework that learns dimensionality reduction and clustering simultaneously. The proposed framework is able to jointly learn the parameters of a dimension reduction technique (e.g. linear projection or a neural network) and cluster the data based on the resulting features (e.g. under a Gaussian Mixture Model framework). The framework searches for the dimension reduction parameters and the optimal clusters by traversing a manifold,using Gradient Manifold Optimization. The obtained The proposed framework is exemplified with a Gaussian Mixture Model as one simple but efficient example, in a process that is somehow similar to unsupervised Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). We apply the proposed method to the unsupervised training of simulated data as well as a benchmark image dataset (i.e. MNIST). The experimental results indicate that our algorithm has better performance than popular clustering algorithms from the literature.

Here, we describe Monthly Diffusion at 1.5-degree grid spacing (MD-1.5 version 0.9), a climate emulator that leverages a spherical Fourier neural operator (SFNO)-inspired Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) architecture to model the evolution of low-frequency internal atmospheric variability using latent diffusion. MDv0.9 was designed to forward-step at monthly mean timesteps in a data-sparse regime, using modest computational requirements. This work describes the motivation behind the architecture design, the MDv0.9 training procedure, and initial results.

We propose a novel end-to-end privacy-preserving framework, instantiated by three efficient protocols for different deployment scenarios, covering both input and output privacy, for the vertically split scenario in federated learning (FL), where features are split across clients and labels are not shared by all parties. We do so by distributing the role of the aggregator in FL into multiple servers and having them run secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols to perform model and feature aggregation and apply differential privacy (DP) to the final released model. While a naive solution would have the clients delegating the entirety of training to run in MPC between the servers, our optimized solution, which supports purely global and also global-local models updates with privacy-preserving, drastically reduces the amount of computation and communication performed using multiparty computation. The experimental results also show the effectiveness of our protocols.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is widely used to address large joint observation and action spaces by decomposing a centralized control problem into multiple interacting agents. However, such decomposition often introduces additional challenges, including non-stationarity, unstable training, weak coordination, and limited theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose the Consensus Multi-Agent Transformer (CMAT), a centralized framework that bridges cooperative MARL to a hierarchical single-agent reinforcement learning (SARL) formulation. CMAT treats all agents as a unified entity and employs a Transformer encoder to process the large joint observation space. To handle the extensive joint action space, we introduce a hierarchical decision-making mechanism in which a Transformer decoder autoregressively generates a high-level consensus vector, simulating the process by which agents reach agreement on their strategies in latent space. Conditioned on this consensus, all agents generate their actions simultaneously, enabling order-independent joint decision making and avoiding the sensitivity to action-generation order in conventional Multi-Agent Transformers (MAT). This factorization allows the joint policy to be optimized using single-agent PPO while preserving expressive coordination through the latent consensus. To evaluate the proposed method, we conduct experiments on benchmark tasks from StarCraft II, Multi-Agent MuJoCo, and Google Research Football. The results show that CMAT achieves superior performance over recent centralized solutions, sequential MARL methods, and conventional MARL baselines. The code for this paper is available at:https://github.com/RS2002/CMAT .

In silico tools are important for generating novel hypotheses and exploring alternatives in de novo metabolic pathway design. However, while many computational frameworks have been proposed for retrobiosynthesis, few successful examples of algorithm-guided xenobiotic biochemical retrosynthesis have been reported in the literature. Deep learning has improved the quality of synthesis and retrosynthesis in organic chemistry applications. Inspired by this progress, we explored combining deep learning of biochemical transformations with the traditional retrobiosynthetic workflow to improve in silico synthetic metabolic pathway designs. To develop our computational biosynthetic pathway design framework, we assembled metabolic reaction and enzymatic template data from public databases. A data augmentation procedure, adapted from literature, was carried out to enrich the assembled reaction dataset with artificial metabolic reactions generated by enzymatic reaction templates. Two neural network-based pathway ranking models were trained as binary classifiers to distinguish assembled reactions from artificial counterparts; each model output a scalar quantifying the plausibility of a 1-step or 2-step pathway. Combining these two models with enzymatic templates, we built a multistep retrobiosynthesis pipeline and validated it by reproducing some natural and non-natural pathways computationally.

We prove that conditional diffusion models whose reverse kernels are finite Gaussian mixtures with ReLU-network logits can approximate suitably regular target distributions arbitrarily well in context-averaged conditional KL divergence, up to an irreducible terminal mismatch that typically vanishes with increasing diffusion horizon. A path-space decomposition reduces the output error to this mismatch plus per-step reverse-kernel errors; assuming each reverse kernel factors through a finite-dimensional feature map, each step becomes a static conditional density approximation problem, solved by composing Norets' Gaussian-mixture theory with quantitative ReLU bounds. Under exact terminal matching the resulting neural reverse-kernel class is dense in conditional KL.

The travelling thief problem (TTP) is a well-known multi-component optimisation problem that captures the interdependence between two components: the tour across cities and the packing of items. The packing while travelling problem (PWT) is an NP-hard subproblem of TTP where the packing of items should be optimised for a given fixed tour. In many solvers, the packing component is often addressed using greedy heuristics. Here, the use of suitable greedy functions is essential for the success of greedy algorithms. In this paper, we introduce new reward functions tailored to the PWT and extend them to a hyper-heuristic framework to achieve further advantage. Furthermore, we investigate the chance constrained PWT for greedy approaches and adopt the newly introduced reward functions for stochastic weights. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the benefit of the tailored heuristics over the standard heuristics in both deterministic and stochastic constraints.

Generative information retrieval (GenIR) formulates the retrieval process as a text-to-text generation task, leveraging the vast knowledge of large language models. However, existing works primarily optimize for relevance while often overlooking document trustworthiness. This is critical in high-stakes domains like healthcare and finance, where relying solely on semantic relevance risks retrieving unreliable information. To address this, we propose an Authority-aware Generative Retriever (AuthGR), the first framework that incorporates authority into GenIR. AuthGR consists of three key components: (i) Multimodal Authority Scoring, which employs a vision-language model to quantify authority from textual and visual cues; (ii) a Three-stage Training Pipeline to progressively instill authority awareness into the retriever; and (iii) a Hybrid Ensemble Pipeline for robust deployment. Offline evaluations demonstrate that AuthGR successfully enhances both authority and accuracy, with our 3B model matching a 14B baseline. Crucially, large-scale online A/B tests and human evaluations conducted on the commercial web search platform confirm significant improvements in real-world user engagement and reliability.

Ultrasonic metal welding (UMW) is widely used in industrial applications but is sensitive to tool wear, surface contamination, and material variability, which can lead to unexpected process faults and unsatisfactory weld quality. Conventional monitoring systems typically rely on supervised learning models that assume all fault types are known in advance, limiting their ability to handle previously unseen process faults. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an adaptive condition monitoring approach that enables unknown fault detection and few-shot continual learning for UMW. Unknown faults are detected by analyzing hidden-layer representations of a multilayer perceptron and leveraging a statistical thresholding strategy. Once detected, the samples from unknown fault types are incorporated into the existing model through a continual learning procedure that selectively updates only the final layers of the network, which enables the model to recognize new fault types while preserving knowledge of existing classes. To accelerate the labeling process, cosine similarity transformation combined with a clustering algorithm groups similar unknown samples, thereby reducing manual labeling effort. Experimental results using a multi-sensor UMW dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 96% accuracy in detecting unseen fault conditions while maintaining reliable classification of known classes. After incorporating a new fault type using only five labeled samples, the updated model achieves 98% testing classification accuracy. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables adaptive monitoring with minimal retraining cost and time. The proposed approach provides a scalable solution for continual learning in condition monitoring where new process conditions may constantly emerge over time and is extensible to other manufacturing processes.

Mobile apps often suffer from functional bugs that do not cause crashes but instead manifest as incorrect behaviors under specific user interactions. Such bugs are difficult to detect automatically because they often lack explicit test oracles. Property-based testing can effectively expose them by checking intended behavioral properties under diverse interactions. However, its use largely depends on manually written properties, whose construction is difficult and expensive, limiting its practical use for mobile apps. To address this limitation, we propose PropGen, an automated approach for generating properties for Android apps. However, this task is challenging for two reasons: app functionalities are often hard to systematically uncover and execute, and properties are difficult to derive accurately from observed behaviors. To this end, PropGen performs functionality-guided exploration to collect behavioral evidence from app executions, synthesizes properties from the collected evidence, and refines imprecise properties based on testing feedback. We implemented PropGen and evaluated it on 12 real-world Android apps. The results show that PropGen can effectively identify and execute valid app functionalities, generate valid properties, and repair most imprecise ones. Across all apps, PropGen identified 1,210 valid functionalities and correctly executed 977 of them, compared with 491 and 187 for the baseline. It generated 985 properties, 912 of which were valid, and repaired 118 of 127 imprecise ones exposed during testing. With the resulting properties, we found 25 previously unknown functional bugs in the latest versions of the subject apps, many of which were missed by existing functional testing techniques.

Effective IT change management is important for businesses that depend on software and services, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as finance, where operational reliability, auditability, and explainability are essential. A significant portion of IT incidents are caused by changes, making it important to identify high-risk changes before deployment. This study presents a predictive incident risk scoring approach at a large international bank. The approach supports engineers during the assessment and planning phases of change deployments by predicting the potential of inducing incidents. To satisfy regulatory constraints, we built the model with auditability and explainability in mind, applying SHAP values to provide feature-level insights and ensure decisions are traceable and transparent. Using a one-year real-world dataset, we compare the existing rule-based process with three machine learning models: HGBC, LightGBM, and XGBoost. LightGBM achieved the best performance, particularly when enriched with aggregated team metrics that capture organisational context. Our results show that data-driven, interpretable models can outperform rule-based approaches while meeting compliance needs, enabling proactive risk mitigation and more reliable IT operations.

A central challenge in continual learning is forgetting, the loss of performance on previously learned tasks induced by sequential adaptation to new ones. While forgetting has been extensively studied empirically, rigorous theoretical characterizations remain limited. A notable step in this direction is \citet{evron2022catastrophic}, which analyzes forgetting under random orderings of a fixed task collection in overparameterized linear regression. We shift the perspective from order to distribution. Rather than asking how a fixed task collection behaves under random orderings, we study an exact-fit linear regime in which tasks are sampled i.i.d.\ from a task distribution~$Π$, and ask how the generating distribution itself governs forgetting. In this setting, we derive an exact operator identity for the forgetting quantity, revealing a recursive spectral structure. Building on this identity, we establish an unconditional upper bound, identify the leading asymptotic term, and, in generic nondegenerate cases, characterize the convergence rate up to constants. We further relate this rate to geometric properties of the task distribution, clarifying what drives slow or fast forgetting in this model.

Turbofan engine degradation under sustained operational stress necessitates robust prognostic systems capable of accurately estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of critical components. Existing deep learning approaches frequently fail to simultaneously capture multi-sensor spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies, while standard symmetric loss functions inadequately penalize the safety-critical error of over-estimating residual life. This study proposes a hybrid architecture integrating Twin-Stage One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN), a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network, and a custom Bahdanau Additive Attention mechanism. The model was trained and evaluated on the NASA Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) FD001 sub-dataset employing a zero-leakage preprocessing pipeline, piecewise-linear RUL labeling capped at 130 cycles, and the NASA-specified asymmetric exponential loss function that disproportionately penalizes over-estimation to enforce industrial safety constraints. Experiments on 100 test engines achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 17.52 cycles and a NASA S-Score of 922.06. Furthermore, extracted attention weight heatmaps provide interpretable, per-engine insights into the temporal progression of degradation, supporting informed maintenance decision-making. The proposed framework demonstrates competitive performance against established baselines and offers a principled approach to safe, interpretable prognostics in industrial settings.

Woody Breast (WB) and Spaghetti Meat (SM) myopathies significantly impact poultry meat quality, yet current detection methods rely either on subjective manual evaluation or costly laboratory-grade imaging systems. We address the problem of low-cost, non-destructive multi-class myopathy classification using consumer smartphones. MyoVision is introduced as a mobile transillumination imaging framework in which 14-bit RAW images are captured and structural texture descriptors indicative of internal tissue abnormalities are extracted. To classify three categories (Normal, Woody Breast, Spaghetti Meat), we propose a NEATBoost-Attention Ensemble model, which is a neuroevolution-optimized weighted fusion of LightGBM and attention-based MLP models. Hyperparameters are automatically discovered using NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), eliminating manual tuning and enabling architecture diversity for small tabular datasets. On a dataset of 336 fillets collected from a commercial processing facility, our method achieves 82.4% test accuracy (F1 = 0.83), outperforming conventional machine learning and deep learning baselines and matching performance reported by hyperspectral imaging systems costing orders of magnitude more. Beyond classification performance, MyoVision establishes a reproducible mobile RGB-D acquisition pipeline for multimodal meat quality research, demonstrating that consumer-grade imaging can support scalable internal tissue assessment.

Accurate Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) forecasting is critical for grid stability, particularly in arid regions characterized by rapid aerosol fluctuations. While recent trends favor computationally expensive Transformer-based architectures, this paper challenges the prevailing "complexity-first" paradigm. We propose a lightweight, Physics-Informed Hybrid CNN-BiLSTM framework that prioritizes domain knowledge over architectural depth. The model integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for spatial feature extraction with a Bi-Directional LSTM for capturing temporal dependencies. Unlike standard data-driven approaches, our model is explicitly guided by a vector of 15 engineered features including Clear-Sky indices and Solar Zenith Angle - rather than relying solely on raw historical data. Hyperparameters are rigorously tuned using Bayesian Optimization to ensure global optimality. Experimental validation using NASA POWER data in Sudan demonstrates that our physics-guided approach achieves a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 19.53 W/m^2, significantly outperforming complex attention-based baselines (RMSE 30.64 W/m^2). These results confirm a "Complexity Paradox": in high-noise meteorological tasks, explicit physical constraints offer a more efficient and accurate alternative to self-attention mechanisms. The findings advocate for a shift towards hybrid, physics-aware AI for real-time renewable energy management.

Traffic forecasting requires modeling complex temporal dynamics and long-range spatial dependencies over large sensor networks. Existing methods typically face a trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency: Transformer-based models capture global dependencies well but suffer from quadratic complexity, while recent selective state-space models are computationally efficient yet less effective at modeling spatial interactions in graph-structured traffic data. We propose FAST, a unified framework that combines attention and state-space modeling for scalable spatiotemporal traffic forecasting. FAST adopts a Temporal-Spatial-Temporal architecture, where temporal attention modules capture both short- and long-term temporal patterns, and a Mamba-based spatial module models long-range inter-sensor dependencies with linear complexity. To better represent heterogeneous traffic contexts, FAST further introduces a learnable multi-source spatiotemporal embedding that integrates historical traffic flow, temporal context, and node-level information, together with a multi-level skip prediction mechanism for hierarchical feature fusion. Experiments on PeMS04, PeMS07, and PeMS08 show that FAST consistently outperforms strong baselines from Transformer-, GNN-, attention-, and Mamba-based families. In particular, FAST achieves the best MAE and RMSE on all three benchmarks, with up to 4.3\% lower RMSE and 2.8\% lower MAE than the strongest baseline, demonstrating a favorable balance between accuracy, scalability, and generalization.

Long-form visual storytelling requires maintaining continuity across shots, including consistent characters, stable environments, and smooth scene transitions. While existing generative models can produce strong individual frames, they fail to preserve such continuity, leading to appearance changes, inconsistent backgrounds, and abrupt scene shifts. We introduce CANVAS (Continuity-Aware Narratives via Visual Agentic Storyboarding), a multi-agent framework that explicitly plans visual continuity in multi-shot narratives. CANVAS enforces coherence through character continuity, persistent background anchors, and location-aware scene planning for smooth transitions within the same setting We evaluate CANVAS on two storyboard generation benchmarks ST-BENCH and ViStoryBench and introduce a new challenging benchmark HardContinuityBench for long-range narrative consistency. CANVAS consistently outperforms the best-performing baseline, improving background continuity by 21.6%, character consistency by 9.6% and props consistency by 7.6%.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to detect interactions between humans and objects in images. While recent advances have improved performance on existing benchmarks, their evaluations mainly focus on overall prediction accuracy and provide limited insight into the underlying causes of model failures. In particular, modern models often struggle in complex scenes involving multiple people and rare interaction combinations. In this work, we present a study to better understand the failure modes of two-stage HOI models, which form the basis of many current HOI detection approaches. Rather than constructing a large-scale benchmark, we instead decompose HOI detection into multiple interpretable perspectives and analyze model behavior across these dimensions to study different types of failure patterns. We curate a subset of images from an existing HOI dataset organized by human-object-interaction configurations (e.g., multi-person interactions and object sharing), and analyze model behavior under these configurations to examine different failure modes. This design allows us to analyze how these HOI models behave under different scene compositions and why their predictions fail. Importantly, high overall benchmark performance does not necessarily reflect robust visual reasoning about human-object relationships. We hope that this study can provide useful insights into the limitations of HOI models and offer observations for future research in this area.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices faces severe computational and memory constraints, limiting real-time processing and on-device intelligence. Hybrid architectures combining Structured State Space Models (SSMs) with transformer-based LLMs offer a balance of efficiency and performance. Aggressive quantization can drastically cut model size and speed up inference, but its uneven effects on different components require careful management. In this work, we propose a lightweight, backpropagation-free, surrogate-based sensitivity analysis framework to identify hybrid SSM-Transformer components most susceptible to quantization-induced degradation. Relying solely on forward-pass metrics, our method avoids expensive gradient computations and retraining, making it suitable for situations where access to in-domain data is limited due to proprietary restrictions or privacy constraints. We also provide a formal analysis showing that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence metric better captures quantization sensitivity for Language modeling tasks than widely adopted alternatives such as mean squared error (MSE) and signal-to-quantization-noise ratio (SQNR). Through extensive experiments on SSM and hybrid architectures, our ablation studies confirm that KL-based rankings align with observed performance drops and outperform alternative metrics. This framework enables the practical deployment of advanced hybrid models on resource-constrained edge devices with minimal accuracy loss. We further validate our approach with real-world on-device profiling on Intel Lunar Lake hardware, demonstrating that KL-guided mixed-precision achieves near-FP16 perplexity with model sizes and throughput competitive with Uniform INT4 on both CPU and GPU execution modes. Code is available at https://github.com/jasonkongie/kl-ssm-quant.

Privacy concerns in LLMs have led to the rapidly growing need to enforce a data's "right to be forgotten". Machine unlearning addresses precisely this task, namely the removal of the influence of some specific data, i.e., the forget set, from a trained model. The gold standard for unlearning is to produce the model that would have been learned on only the rest of the training data, i.e., the retain set. Most existing unlearning methods rely on direct access to the retained data, which may not be practical due to privacy or cost constraints. We propose WIN-U, a retained-data free unlearning framework that requires only second order information for the originally trained model on the full data. The unlearning is performed using a single Newton-style step. Using the Woodbury matrix identity and a generalized Gauss-Newton approximation for the forget set curvature, the WIN-U update recovers the closed-form linear solution and serves as a local second-order approximation to the gold-standard retraining optimum. Extensive experiments on various vision and language benchmarks demonstrate that WIN-U achieves SOTA performance in terms of unlearning efficacy and utility preservation, while being more robust against relearning attacks compared to existing methods. Importantly, WIN-U does not require access to the retained data.

We propose a new sparse matrix format, PackSELL, designed to support diverse data representations and enable efficient sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) on GPUs. Building on sliced ELLPACK (SELL), PackSELL incorporates delta encoding of column indices and a novel packing scheme that stores each index-delta-value pair in a single word, thereby reducing memory footprint and data movement. This design further enables fine-grained control over the bit allocation between deltas and values, allowing flexible data representations, including non-IEEE formats. Experimental results show that, when configured for half precision (FP16), the PackSELL-based SpMV kernel outperforms the cuSPARSE SELL-based kernel by up to $1.63\times$. Moreover, with configurations using customized formats, PackSELL achieves FP32-level accuracy while exceeding the performance of FP16 cuSPARSE. These benefits extend to sparse linear solvers; for example, a mixed-precision preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) solver using PackSELL achieves up to a $2.09\times$ speedup over the standard full-precision PCG.

Token compression is crucial for mitigating the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms in Vision Transformers (ViTs), which often involve numerous input tokens. Existing methods, such as ToMe, rely on GPU-inefficient operations (e.g., sorting, scattered writes), introducing overheads that limit their effectiveness. We introduce MaMe, a training-free, differentiable token merging method based entirely on matrix operations, which is GPU-friendly to accelerate ViTs. Additionally, we present MaRe, its inverse operation, for token restoration, forming a MaMe+MaRe pipeline for image synthesis. When applied to pre-trained models, MaMe doubles ViT-B throughput with a 2% accuracy drop. Notably, fine-tuning the last layer with MaMe boosts ViT-B accuracy by 1.0% at 1.1x speed. In SigLIP2-B@512 zero-shot classification, MaMe provides 1.3x acceleration with negligible performance degradation. In video tasks, MaMe accelerates VideoMAE-L by 48.5% on Kinetics-400 with only a 0.84% accuracy loss. Furthermore, MaMe achieves simultaneous improvements in both performance and speed on some tasks. In image synthesis, the MaMe+MaRe pipeline enhances quality while reducing Stable Diffusion v2.1 generation latency by 31%. Collectively, these results demonstrate MaMe's and MaRe's effectiveness in accelerating vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/cominder/mame}{https://github.com/cominder/mame.

Text-driven motion editing and intra-structural retargeting, where source and target share topology but may differ in bone lengths, are traditionally handled by fragmented pipelines with incompatible inputs and representations: editing relies on specialized generative steering, while retargeting is deferred to geometric post-processing. We present a unifying perspective where both tasks are cast as instances of conditional transport within a single generative framework. By leveraging recent advances in flow matching, we demonstrate that editing and retargeting are fundamentally the same generative task, distinguished only by which conditioning signal, semantic or structural, is modulated during inference. We implement this vision via a rectified-flow motion model jointly conditioned on text prompts and target skeletal structures. Our architecture extends a DiT-style transformer with per-joint tokenization and explicit joint self-attention to strictly enforce kinematic dependencies, while a multi-condition classifier-free guidance strategy balances text adherence with skeletal conformity. Experiments on SnapMoGen and a multi-character Mixamo subset show that a single trained model supports text-to-motion generation, zero-shot editing, and zero-shot intra-structural retargeting. This unified approach simplifies deployment and improves structural consistency compared to task-specific baselines.

Existing Vision Mamba-based RGB-Event(RGBE) tracking methods suffer from using static state transition matrices, which fail to adapt to variations in event sparsity. This rigidity leads to imbalanced modeling-underfitting sparse event streams and overfitting dense ones-thus degrading cross-modal fusion robustness. To address these limitations, we propose MambaTrack, a multimodal and efficient tracking framework built upon a Dynamic State Space Model(DSSM). Our contributions are twofold. First, we introduce an event-adaptive state transition mechanism that dynamically modulates the state transition matrix based on event stream density. A learnable scalar governs the state evolution rate, enabling differentiated modeling of sparse and dense event flows. Second, we develop a Gated Projection Fusion(GPF) module for robust cross-modal integration. This module projects RGB features into the event feature space and generates adaptive gates from event density and RGB confidence scores. These gates precisely control the fusion intensity, suppressing noise while preserving complementary information. Experiments show that MambaTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FE108 and FELT datasets. Its lightweight design suggests potential for real-time embedded deployment.

Motivated by the underspecified, multi-hop nature of search queries and the multimodal, heterogeneous, and often conflicting nature of real-world web results, we introduce MERRIN (Multimodal Evidence Retrieval and Reasoning in Noisy Web Environments), a human-annotated benchmark for evaluating search-augmented agents. MERRIN measures AI agents' ability to identify relevant modalities, retrieve multimodal evidence, and perform multi-hop reasoning over noisy web sources. It differs from prior work in three important aspects: (1) using natural language queries without explicit modality cues, (2) incorporating underexplored modalities such as video and audio, and (3) requiring the retrieval of complex, often noisy or conflicting multimodal evidence during web search. We evaluate diverse search agents powered by ten models, including strong closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4-mini, Gemini 3/3.1 Flash/Pro) and open-weight models (Qwen3-4B/30B/235B), across three search settings (no search, native search, and agentic search). Our results show that MERRIN is highly challenging: the average accuracy across all agents is 22.3%, with the best-performing agent reaching only 40.1%. We further observe that while stronger agents like Gemini Deep Research achieve higher performance, gains are modest due to over-exploration; they take more steps and use more tools, but are often distracted by conflicting or partially relevant web content, leading to incorrect answers. Compared to humans, these agents consume more resources yet achieve lower accuracy, largely due to inefficient source selection and an overreliance on text modalities. These findings highlight the need for search agents capable of robust search and reasoning across diverse modalities in noisy web environments, making MERRIN a valuable testbed for evaluating such capabilities.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in mission-critical software systems, detecting hallucinations and ``faked truthfulness'' has become a paramount engineering challenge. Current reliability architectures rely heavily on post-generation, black-box mechanisms, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) cross-checking or LLM-as-a-judge evaluators. These extrinsic methods introduce unacceptable latency, high computational overhead, and reliance on secondary external API calls, frequently violating standard software engineering Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we propose the Cognitive Circuit Breaker, a novel systems engineering framework that provides intrinsic reliability monitoring with minimal latency overhead. By extracting hidden states during a model's forward pass, we calculate the ``Cognitive Dissonance Delta'' -- the mathematical gap between an LLM's outward semantic confidence (softmax probabilities) and its internal latent certainty (derived via linear probes). We demonstrate statistically significant detection of cognitive dissonance, highlight architecture-dependent Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, and show that this framework adds negligible computational overhead to the active inference pipeline.

Advances in radiance fields have enabled photorealistic novel view synthesis. In several domains, large-scale real-world datasets have been developed to support comprehensive benchmarking and to facilitate progress beyond scene-specific reconstruction. However, for distractor-free radiance fields, a large-scale dataset with clean and cluttered images per scene remains lacking, limiting the development. To address this gap, we introduce DF3DV-1K, a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 1,048 scenes, each providing clean and cluttered image sets for benchmarking. In total, the dataset contains 89,924 images captured using consumer cameras to mimic casual capture, spanning 128 distractor types and 161 scene themes across indoor and outdoor environments. A curated subset of 41 scenes, DF3DV-41, is systematically designed to evaluate the robustness of distractor-free radiance field methods under challenging scenarios. Using DF3DV-1K, we benchmark nine recent distractor-free radiance field methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting, identifying the most robust methods and the most challenging scenarios. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate an application of DF3DV-1K by fine-tuning a diffusion-based 2D enhancer to improve radiance field methods, achieving average improvements of 0.96 dB PSNR and 0.057 LPIPS on the held-out set (e.g., DF3DV-41) and the On-the-go dataset. We hope DF3DV-1K facilitates the development of distractor-free vision and promotes progress beyond scene-specific approaches.

Majority-vote ensembles achieve variance reduction by averaging over diverse, approximately independent base learners. When training data exhibits Markov dependence, as in time-series forecasting, reinforcement learning (RL) replay buffers, and spatial grids, this classical guarantee degrades in ways that existing theory does not fully quantify. We provide a minimax characterization of this phenomenon for discrete classification in a fixed-dimensional Markov setting, together with an adaptive algorithm that matches the rate on a graph-regular subclass. We first establish an information-theoretic lower bound for stationary, reversible, geometrically ergodic chains in fixed ambient dimension, showing that no measurable estimator can achieve excess classification risk better than $Ω(\sqrt{\Tmix/n})$. We then prove that, on the AR(1) witness subclass underlying the lower-bound construction, dependence-agnostic uniform bagging is provably suboptimal with excess risk bounded below by $Ω(\Tmix/\sqrt{n})$, exhibiting a $\sqrt{\Tmix}$ algorithmic gap. Finally, we propose \emph{adaptive spectral routing}, which partitions the training data via the empirical Fiedler eigenvector of a dependency graph and achieves the minimax rate $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\Tmix/n})$ up to a lower-order geometric cut term on a graph-regular subclass, without knowledge of $\Tmix$. Experiments on synthetic Markov chains, 2D spatial grids, the 128-dataset UCR archive, and Atari DQN ensembles validate the theoretical predictions. Consequences for deep RL target variance, scalability via Nyström approximation, and bounded non-stationarity are developed as supporting material in the appendix.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for large language models (LLMs), yet the non-deterministic behavior of DLMs remains poorly understood. The existing non-determinism evaluations for LLMs predominantly rely on dataset-level metrics under fixed inference configurations, providing limited insight into how model behavior varies across runs and evaluation conditions. In this work, we show that dataset-level metrics systematically attenuate non-determinism in diffusion language models by aggregating sample-level prediction quality across different runs. As a result, configurations with similar aggregate performance can exhibit substantially different behaviors on individual inputs, leaving fine-grained instability and distinct error patterns uncharacterized. To address this limitation, we conduct a fine-grained evaluation of non-determinism based on sample-level prediction differences across a range of model-related factors-including guidance scale, diffusion steps, and Monte Carlo sampling-as well as system-related factors such as batch size, hardware, and numerical precision. Our analysis reveals that non-determinism in DLMs is pervasive and structured, with code generation exhibiting markedly higher sensitivity to factor-level choices than question answering. To attribute sources of non-determinism evaluation, we introduce Factor Variance Attribution (FVA), a cross-factor analysis metric that decomposes observed non-determinism into variance attributable to different evaluation factor settings. Our findings highlight the need for fine-grained, factor-aware evaluation to enable reliable non-determinism assessment of diffusion language models.

We study the problem of estimating the effect function for a continuous treatment, which maps each treatment value to a population-averaged outcome. A central challenge in this setting is confounding: treatment assignment often depends on covariates, creating selection bias that makes direct regression of the response on treatment unreliable. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage kernel ridge regression method. In the first stage, we learn a model for the response as a function of both treatment and covariates; in the second stage, we use this model to construct pseudo-outcomes that correct for distribution shift, and then fit a second model to estimate the treatment effect. Although the response varies with both treatment and covariates, the induced effect function obtained by averaging over covariates is typically much simpler, and our estimator adapts to this structure. Furthermore, we introduce a fully data-driven model selection procedure that achieves provable adaptivity to both the unknown degree of overlap and the regularity (eigenvalue decay) of the underlying kernel.

While Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) systems have achieved high accuracy in identifying sentiment polarities, they often operate as "black boxes," lacking the explicit reasoning capabilities characteristic of human affective cognition. Humans do not merely categorize sentiment; they construct causal explanations for their judgments. To bridge this gap, we propose ABSA-R1, a large language model framework designed to mimic this ``reason-before-predict" cognitive process. By leveraging reinforcement learning (RL), ABSA-R1 learns to articulate the why behind the what, generating natural language justifications that ground its sentiment predictions. We introduce a Cognition-Aligned Reward Model (formerly sentiment-aware reward model) that enforces consistency between the generated reasoning path and the final emotional label. Furthermore, inspired by metacognitive monitoring, we implement a performance-driven rejection sampling strategy that selectively targets hard cases where the model's internal reasoning is uncertain or inconsistent. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate that equipping models with this explicit reasoning capability not only enhances interpretability but also yields superior performance in sentiment classification and triplet extraction compared to non-reasoning baselines.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated significant improvements in complex reasoning. While quantifying generation uncertainty in LRMs is crucial, traditional methods are often insufficient because they do not provide finite-sample guarantees for reasoning-answer generation. Conformal prediction (CP) stands out as a distribution-free and model-agnostic methodology that constructs statistically rigorous uncertainty sets. However, existing CP methods ignore the logical connection between the reasoning trace and the final answer. Additionally, prior studies fail to interpret the origins of uncertainty coverage for LRMs as they typically overlook the specific training factors driving valid reasoning. Notably, it is challenging to disentangle reasoning quality from answer correctness when quantifying uncertainty, while simultaneously establishing theoretical guarantees for computationally efficient explanation methods. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel methodology that quantifies uncertainty in the reasoning-answer structure with statistical guarantees. Subsequently, we develop a unified example-to-step explanation framework using Shapley values that identifies a provably sufficient subset of training examples and their key reasoning steps to preserve the guarantees. We also provide theoretical analyses of our proposed methods. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang showed that gradient descent with an adaptive stepsize converges locally at a nearly-linear rate for smooth functions that grow at least quartically away from their minimizers. The argument is intricate, relying on monitoring the performance of the algorithm relative to a certain manifold of slow growth -- called the ravine. In this work, we provide a direct Lyapunov-based argument that bypasses these difficulties when the objective is in addition convex and a has a unique minimizer. As a byproduct of the argument, we obtain a more adaptive variant than the original algorithm with encouraging numerical performance.

Tabular data remains prevalent in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance, where predictive models are expected to provide both high accuracy and faithful, human-understandable reasoning. While symbolic models offer verifiable logic, they lack semantic expressiveness. Meanwhile, general-purpose LLMs often require specialized fine-tuning to master domain-specific tabular reasoning. To address the dual challenges of scalable data curation and reasoning consistency, we propose ReSS, a systematic framework that bridges symbolic and neural reasoning models. ReSS leverages a decision-tree model to extract instance-level decision paths as symbolic scaffolds. These scaffolds, alongside input features and labels, guide an LLM to generate grounded natural-language reasoning that strictly adheres to the underlying decision logic. The resulting high-quality dataset is used to fine-tune a pretrained LLM into a specialized tabular reasoning model, further enhanced by a scaffold-invariant data augmentation strategy to improve generalization and explainability. To rigorously assess faithfulness, we introduce quantitative metrics including hallucination rate, explanation necessity, and explanation sufficiency. Experimental results on medical and financial benchmarks demonstrate that ReSS-trained models improve traditional decision trees and standard fine-tuning approaches up to $10\%$ while producing faithful and consistent reasoning

Linear probes can detect when language models produce outputs they "know" are wrong, a capability relevant to both deception and reward hacking. However, single-layer probes are fragile: the best layer varies across models and tasks, and probes fail entirely on some deception types. We show that combining probes from multiple layers into an ensemble recovers strong performance even where single-layer probes fail, improving AUROC by +29% on Insider Trading and +78% on Harm-Pressure Knowledge. Across 12 models (0.5B--176B parameters), we find probe accuracy improves with scale: ~5% AUROC per 10x parameters (R=0.81). Geometrically, deception directions rotate gradually across layers rather than appearing at one location, explaining both why single-layer probes are brittle and why multi-layer ensembles succeed.

Open-pit mine scheduling is a complex real world optimization problem that involves uncertain economic values and dynamically changing resource capacities. Evolutionary algorithms are particularly effective in these scenarios, as they can easily adapt to uncertain and changing environments. However, uncertainty and dynamic changes are often studied in isolation in real-world problems. In this paper, we study a dynamic chance-constrained open-pit mine scheduling problem in which block economic values are stochastic and mining and processing capacities vary over time. We adopt a bi-objective evolutionary formulation that simultaneously maximizes expected discounted profit and minimizes its standard deviation. To address dynamic changes, we propose a diversity-based change response mechanism that repairs a subset of infeasible solutions and introduces additional feasible solutions whenever a change is detected. We evaluate the effectiveness of this mechanism across four multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and compare it with a baseline re-evaluation-based change-response strategy. Experimental results on six mining instances demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the baseline methods across different uncertainty levels and change frequencies.

Conversational generative artificial intelligence agents (or genAI chatbots) could benefit youth mental health, yet young people's perspectives remain underexplored. We examined the Mental health Intelligence Agent (Mia), a genAI chatbot originally designed for professionals in Australian youth services. Following co-design, 32 young people participated in online workshops exploring their perceptions of genAI chatbots in youth mental health and to develop recommendations for reconceptualising Mia for consumers and integrating it into services. Four themes were developed: (1) Humanising AI without dehumanising care, (2) I need to know what's under the hood, (3) Right tool, right place, right time?, and (4) Making it mine on safe ground. This study offers insights into young people's attitudes, needs, and requirements regarding genAI chatbots in youth mental health, with key implications for service integration. Additionally, by co-designing system requirements, this work informs the ethics, design, development, implementation, and governance of genAI chatbots in youth mental health contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly described as possessing strong reasoning capabilities, supported by high performance on mathematical, logical, and planning benchmarks. However, most existing evaluations rely on aggregate accuracy over fixed datasets, obscuring how reasoning behavior evolves as task complexity increases. In this work, we introduce a controlled benchmarking framework to systematically evaluate the robustness of reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) under progressively increasing problem complexity. We construct a suite of nine classical reasoning tasks: Boolean Satisfiability, Cryptarithmetic, Graph Coloring, River Crossing, Tower of Hanoi, Water Jug, Checker Jumping, Sudoku, and Rubik's Cube, each parameterized to precisely control complexity while preserving underlying semantics. Using deterministic validators, we evaluate multiple open and proprietary LRMs across low, intermediate, and high complexity regimes, ensuring that only fully valid solutions are accepted. Our results reveal a consistent phase transition like behavior: models achieve high accuracy at low complexity but degrade sharply beyond task specific complexity thresholds. We formalize this phenomenon as reasoning collapse. Across tasks, we observe substantial accuracy declines, often exceeding 50%, accompanied by inconsistent reasoning traces, constraint violations, loss of state tracking, and confidently incorrect outputs. Increased reasoning length does not reliably improve correctness, and gains in one problem family do not generalize to others. These findings highlight the need for evaluation methodologies that move beyond static benchmarks and explicitly measure reasoning robustness under controlled complexity.

Surrogate modeling of body-driven fluid flows where immersed moving boundaries couple structural dynamics to chaotic, unsteady fluid phenomena remains a fundamental challenge for both computational physics and machine learning. We present AeTHERON, a heterogeneous graph neural operator whose architecture directly mirrors the structure of the sharp-interface immersed boundary method (IBM): a dual-graph representation separating fluid and structural domains, coupled through sparse cross-attention that reflects the compact support of IBM interpolation stencils. This physics-informed inductive bias enables AeTHERON to learn nonlinear fluid-structure coupling in a shared high-dimensional latent space, with continuous sinusoidal time embeddings providing temporal generalization across lead times. We evaluate AeTHERON on direct numerical simulations of a flapping flexible caudal fin, a canonical FSI benchmark featuring leading-edge vortex formation, large membrane deformation, and chaotic wake shedding across a 4x5 parameter grid of membrane thickness (h* = 0.01-0.04) and Strouhal number (St = 0.30-0.50). As a proof-of-concept, we train on the first 150 timesteps of a representative case using a 70/30 train/validation split and evaluate on the fully unseen extrapolation window t=150-200. AeTHERON captures large-scale vortex topology and wake structure with qualitative fidelity, achieving a mean extrapolation MAE of 0.168 without retraining, with error peaking near flapping half-cycle transitions where flow reorganization is most rapid -- a physically interpretable pattern consistent with the nonlinear fluid-membrane coupling. Inference requires milliseconds per timestep on a single GPU versus hours for equivalent DNS computation. This is a continuously developing preprint; results and figures will be updated in subsequent versions.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) aims to adapt pre-trained models to specific tasks using relatively small and domain-specific datasets. Among Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out by matching the performance of full fine-tuning while avoiding additional inference latency. In this paper, we propose a novel PEFT method that incorporates the TLoRA+ optimizer into the weight matrices of pre-trained models. The proposed approach not only preserves the efficiency of low-rank adaptation but also further enhances performance without significantly increasing computational cost. We conduct experiments on the GLUE benchmark across diverse model architectures. Numerical experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method.

Radiotherapy-induced normal tissue injury is a clinically important complication, and accurate segmentation of injury regions from medical images could facilitate disease assessment, treatment planning, and longitudinal monitoring. However, automatic segmentation of these lesions remains largely unexplored because of limited voxel-level annotations and substantial heterogeneity across injury types, lesion size, and imaging modality. To address this gap, we curate a dedicated head-and-neck radiotherapy-induced normal tissue injury dataset covering three manifestations: osteoradionecrosis (ORN), cerebral edema (CE), and cerebral radiation necrosis (CRN). We further propose a 3D SAM-based progressive prompting framework for multi-task segmentation in limited-data settings. The framework progressively incorporates three complementary prompts: text prompts for task-aware adaptation, dose-guided box prompts for coarse localization, and click prompts for iterative refinement. A small-target focus loss is introduced to improve local prediction and boundary delineation for small and sparse lesions. Experiments on ORN, CE, and CRN demonstrate that the proposed method achieves reliable segmentation performance across diverse injury types and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Accurate modeling of robot dynamics is essential for model-based control, yet remains challenging under distributional shifts and real-time constraints. In this work, we formulate system identification as an in-context meta-learning problem and compare deterministic and generative sequence models for forward dynamics prediction. We take a Transformer-based meta-model, as a strong deterministic baseline, and introduce to this setting two complementary diffusion-based approaches: (i) inpainting diffusion (Diffuser), which learns the joint input-observation distribution, and (ii) conditioned diffusion models (CNN and Transformer), which generate future observations conditioned on control inputs. Through large-scale randomized simulations, we analyze performance across in-distribution and out-of-distribution regimes, as well as computational trade-offs relevant for control. We show that diffusion models significantly improve robustness under distribution shift, with inpainting diffusion achieving the best performance in our experiments. Finally, we demonstrate that warm-started sampling enables diffusion models to operate within real-time constraints, making them viable for control applications. These results highlight generative meta-models as a promising direction for robust system identification in robotics.

Biosignals exhibit substantial cross-subject and cross-session variability, inducing severe domain shifts that degrade post-deployment performance for small, edge-oriented AI models. On-device adaptation is therefore essential to both preserve user privacy and ensure system reliability. However, existing sub-100 mW MCU-based wearable platforms can only support shallow or sparse adaptation schemes due to the prohibitive memory footprint and computational cost of full backpropagation (BP). In this paper, we propose BioTrain, a framework enabling full-network fine-tuning of state-of-the-art biosignal models under milliwatt-scale power and sub-megabyte memory constraints. We validate BioTrain using both offline and on-device benchmarks on EEG and EOG datasets, covering Day-1 new-subject calibration and longitudinal adaptation to signal drift. Experimental results show that full-network fine-tuning achieves accuracy improvements of up to 35% over non-adapted baselines and outperforms last-layer updates by approximately 7% during new-subject calibration. On the GAP9 MCU platform, BioTrain enables efficient on-device training throughput of 17 samples/s for EEG and 85 samples/s for EOG models within a power envelope below 50 mW. In addition, BioTrain's efficient memory allocator and network topology optimization enable the use of a large batch size, reducing peak memory usage. For fully on-chip BP on GAP9, BioTrain reduces the memory footprint by 8.1x, from 5.4 MB to 0.67 MB, compared to conventional full-network fine-tuning using batch normalization with batch size 8.

Mechanisms for continued self-improvement of language models without external supervision remain an open challenge. We propose Peer-Predictive Self-Training (PST), a label-free fine-tuning framework in which multiple language models improve collaboratively by leveraging a cross-model aggregated response as an internal training signal. Given a prompt question, the models generate responses sequentially; the final aggregated answer, often more reliable than individual responses in practice, serves as an internal target for learning. We measure how informative each intermediate response is about the aggregate using pointwise mutual information (PMI), and use this signal to scale self-training updates. Responses already aligned with the aggregate are updated less, while less informative or misaligned responses are updated more. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks (SimulEq, Math500, and MultiArith), PST improves exact-match accuracy by 2.2 to 4.3 percentage points across Gemma-2-2B, LLaMA-3.2-1B, and Qwen-2.5-1.5B, and reduces the average generator-verifier gap (GV-Gap) by 26 to 40 percent, while requiring no external supervision or teacher-student hierarchy and relying solely on cross-model interactions. These results suggest that cross-model generations and peer-predictive feedback can serve as an effective approach for self-supervised training.

The discovery of inorganic crystal structures with targeted properties is a significant challenge in materials science. Generative models, especially state-of-the-art diffusion models, offer the promise of modeling complex data distributions and proposing novel, realistic samples. However, current generative AI models still struggle to produce diverse, original, and reliable structures of experimentally achievable materials suitable for high-stakes applications. In this work, we propose a generative machine learning framework based on diffusion models with adaptive constraint guidance, which enables the incorporation of user-defined physical and chemical constraints during the generation process. This approach is designed to be practical and interpretable for human experts, allowing transparent decision-making and expert-driven exploration. To ensure the robustness and validity of the generated candidates, we introduce a multi-step validation pipeline that combines graph neural network estimators trained to achieve DFT-level accuracy and convex hull analysis for assessing thermodynamic stability. Our approach has been tested and validated on several classical examples of inorganic families of compounds, as case studies. As a consequence, these preliminary results demonstrate our framework's ability to generate thermodynamically plausible crystal structures that satisfy targeted geometric constraints across diverse inorganic chemical systems.

Communication in Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems is moving beyond discrete tokens to preserve richer context. Recent work such as LatentMAS enables agents to exchange latent messages through full key-value (KV) caches. However, full KV relay incurs high memory and communication cost. We adapt eviction-style KV compression to this setting and introduce Orthogonal Backfill (OBF) to mitigate information loss from hard eviction. OBF injects a low-rank orthogonal residual from discarded KV states into the retained KV states. We evaluate proposed method against full KV relay on nine standard benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, coding, and knowledge-intensive QA. It achieves performance comparable to full KV relay while reducing communication cost by 79.8%--89.4%. OBF further improves the performance and achieves the best results on 7 of the 9 benchmarks. This suggests that more information does not necessarily lead to better communication; preserving the most useful information matters more. Our codebase is publicly available on https://github.com/markli404/When-Less-Latent-Leads-to-Better-Relay.

We introduce CONCORD, a privacy-aware asynchronous assistant-to-assistant (A2A) framework that leverages collaboration between proactive speech-based AI. As agents evolve from reactive to always-listening assistants, they face a core privacy risk (of capturing non-consenting speakers), which makes their social deployment a challenge. To overcome this, we implement CONCORD, which enforces owner-only speech capture via real-time speaker verification, producing a one-sided transcript that incurs missing context but preserves privacy. We demonstrate that CONCORD can safely recover necessary context through (1) spatio-temporal context resolution, (2) information gap detection, and (3) minimal A2A queries governed by a relationship-aware disclosure. Instead of hallucination-prone inferring, CONCORD treats context recovery as a negotiated safe exchange between assistants. Across a multi-domain dialogue dataset, CONCORD achieves 91.4% recall in gap detection, 96% relationship classification accuracy, and 97% true negative rate in privacy-sensitive disclosure decisions. By reframing always-listening AI as a coordination problem between privacy-preserving agents, CONCORD offers a practical path toward socially deployable proactive conversational agents.

Language-model agent systems commonly rely on reactive prompting, in which a single instruction guides the model through an open-ended sequence of reasoning and tool-use steps, leaving control flow and intermediate state implicit and making agent behavior potentially difficult to control. Orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, DSPy, and CrewAI impose greater structure through explicit workflow definitions, but tightly couple workflow logic with Python, making agents difficult to maintain and modify. In this paper, we introduce AgentSPEX, an Agent SPecification and EXecution Language for specifying LLM-agent workflows with explicit control flow and modular structure, along with a customizable agent harness. AgentSPEX supports typed steps, branching and loops, parallel execution, reusable submodules, and explicit state management, and these workflows execute within an agent harness that provides tool access, a sandboxed virtual environment, and support for checkpointing, verification, and logging. Furthermore, we provide a visual editor with synchronized graph and workflow views for authoring and inspection. We include ready-to-use agents for deep research and scientific research, and we evaluate AgentSPEX on 7 benchmarks. Finally, we show through a user study that AgentSPEX provides a more interpretable and accessible workflow-authoring paradigm than a popular existing agent framework.

Identifying meaningful feature interactions is a central challenge in building accurate and interpretable models for tabular data. Generalized additive models (GAMs) have shown great success at modeling tabular data, but often rely on heuristic procedures to select interactions, potentially missing higher-order or context-dependent effects. To meet this challenge, we propose TabDistill, a method that leverages tabular foundation models and post-hoc distillation methods. Our key intuition is that tabular foundation models implicitly learn rich, adaptive feature dependencies through large-scale representation learning. Given a dataset, TabDistill first fits a tabular foundation model to the dataset, and then applies a post-hoc interaction attribution method to extract salient feature interactions from it. We evaluate these interactions by then using them as terms in a GAM. Across tasks, we find that interactions identified by TabDistill lead to consistent improvements in downstream GAMs' predictive performance. Our results suggest that tabular foundation models can serve as effective, data-driven guides for interaction discovery, bridging high-capacity models and interpretable additive frameworks.

In electronic health record (EHR) mining, learning high-quality representations of medical concepts (e.g., standardized diagnosis, medication, and procedure codes) is fundamental for downstream clinical prediction. However, robust concept representation learning is hindered by two key challenges: (i) clinically important cross-type dependencies (e.g., diagnosis-medication and medication-procedure relations) are often missing or incomplete in existing ontology resources, limiting the ability to model complex EHR patterns; and (ii) rich clinical semantics are often missing from structured resources, and even when available as text, are difficult to integrate with KG structure for representation learning. To address these challenges, we present CoMed, an LLM-empowered graph learning framework for medical concept representation. CoMed first builds a global knowledge graph (KG) over medical codes by combining statistically reliable associations mined from EHRs with type-constrained LLM prompting to infer semantic relations. It then utilizes LLMs to enrich the KG into a text-attributed graph by generating node descriptions and edge rationales, providing semantic signals for both concepts and their relationships. Finally, CoMed jointly trains a LoRA-tuned LLaMA text encoder with a heterogeneous GNN, fusing text semantics and graph structure into unified concept embeddings. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV show that CoMed consistently improves prediction performance and serves as an effective plug-in concept encoder for standard EHR pipelines.

Pathology reports serve as the definitive record for breast cancer staging, yet their unstructured format impedes large-scale data curation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer semantic reasoning, their deployment is often limited by high computational costs and hallucination risks. This study introduces a parameter-efficient, multi-task framework for automating the extraction of Tumor-Node-Metastasis (TNM) staging, histologic grade, and biomarkers. We fine-tune a Llama-3-8B-Instruct encoder using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a curated, expert-verified dataset of 10,677 reports. Unlike generative approaches, our architecture utilizes parallel classification heads to enforce consistent schema adherence. Experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves a Macro F1 score of 0.976, successfully resolving complex contextual ambiguities and heterogeneous reporting formats that challenge traditional extraction methods including rule-based natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, zero-shot LLMs, and single-task LLM baselines. The proposed adapter-efficient, multi-task architecture enables reliable, scalable pathology-derived cancer staging and biomarker profiling, with the potential to enhance clinical decision support and accelerate data-driven oncology research.

Modern GPU workloads, especially large language model (LLM) inference, suffer from kernel launch overheads and coarse synchronization that limit inter-kernel parallelism. Recent megakernel techniques fuse multiple operators into a single persistent kernel to eliminate launch gaps and expose inter-kernel parallelism, but struggle to handle dynamic shapes and data-dependent computation in real workloads. We present Event Tensor, a unified compiler abstraction for dynamic megakernels. Event Tensor encodes dependencies between tiled tasks, and enables first-class support for both shape and data-dependent dynamism. Built atop this abstraction, our Event Tensor Compiler (ETC) applies static and dynamic scheduling transformations to generate high-performance persistent kernels. Evaluations show that ETC achieves state-of-the-art LLM serving latency while significantly reducing system warmup overhead.

The shift to data-intensive processing from the cloud to the edge has introduced new challenges and expectations for the next generation of intelligent computing systems. As the memory wall continues to grow, modern systems can only meet these performance expectations by displaying data access patterns that exhibit ideal layouts in memory and ideal spatiotemporal locality in caches. However, only a few data-intensive applications are characterized by ideal locality. Instead, most applications exhibit either (i) poor locality when naively implemented and must undergo costly redesigns and tuning or (ii) inflated memory footprint to offer proper locality. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a hardware/software co-designed approach that can be implemented on commercially available SoC/FPGA platforms. Our approach seamlessly inserts in the CPUs' data path a Tensor Memory Engine that provides data with an ideal cache locality to running applications by (i) accessing the memory on behalf of the CPUs and (ii) composing a re-organized view of the memory layout. Unlike in- and near-memory computing approaches, it sets itself apart by clearly decoupling computing and memory accesses; computation is still performed on CPUs while the data re-organization is delegated to the Tensor Memory Engine.

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in completing complex browser tasks, yet they still struggle with long-horizon workflows. A key bottleneck is the grounding gap in existing skill formulations: textual workflow skills provide natural language guidance but cannot be directly executed, while code-based skills are executable but opaque to the agent, offering no step-level understanding for error recovery or adaptation. We introduce WebXSkill, a framework that bridges this gap with executable skills, each pairing a parameterized action program with step-level natural language guidance, enabling both direct execution and agent-driven adaptation. WebXSkill operates in three stages: skill extraction mines reusable action subsequences from readily available synthetic agent trajectories and abstracts them into parameterized skills, skill organization indexes skills into a URL-based graph for context-aware retrieval, and skill deployment exposes two complementary modes, grounded mode for fully automated multi-step execution and guided mode where skills serve as step-by-step instructions that the agent follows with its native planning. On WebArena and WebVoyager, WebXSkill improves task success rate by up to 9.8 and 12.9 points over the baseline, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of executable skills for web agents. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/WebXSkill.

Neural operators have emerged as fast surrogate models for physics simulations, yet they remain acutely vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, a critical liability for safety-critical digital twin deployments. We present a synergistic defense that combines active learning-based data generation with an input denoising architecture. The active learning component adaptively probes model weaknesses using differential evolution attacks, then generates targeted training data at discovered vulnerability locations while an adaptive smooth-ratio safeguard preserves baseline accuracy. The input denoising component augments the operator architecture with a learnable bottleneck that filters adversarial noise while retaining physics-relevant features. On the viscous Burgers' equation benchmark, the combined approach achieves a 2.04% combined error (1.21% baseline + 0.83% robustness), representing an 87% reduction relative to standard training (15.42% combined) and outperforming both active learning alone (3.42%) and input denoising alone (5.22%). More broadly, our results, combined with cross-architecture vulnerability analysis from prior work, suggest that optimal training data for neural operators is architecture-dependent: because different architectures concentrate sensitivity in distinct input subspaces, uniform sampling cannot adequately cover the vulnerability landscape of all models. These findings have potential implications for the deployment of neural operators in safety-critical energy systems including nuclear reactor monitoring.

High-resolution data in spatial and temporal contexts is imperative for developing climate resilient cities. Current datasets for monitoring urban parameters are developed primarily using manual inspections, embedded-sensing, remote sensing, or standard street-view imagery (RGB). These methods and datasets are often constrained respectively by poor scalability, inconsistent spatio-temporal resolutions, overhead views or low spectral information. We present a novel method and its open implementation: a multi-spectral terrestrial-view dataset that circumvents these limitations. This dataset consists of 17,718 street level multi-spectral images captured with RGB, Near-infrared, and Thermal imaging sensors on bikes, across diverse urban morphologies (village, town, small city, and big urban area) in the Netherlands. Strict emphasis is put on data calibration and quality while also providing the details of our data collection methodology (including the hardware and software details). To the best of our knowledge, Spectrascapes is the first open-access dataset of its kind. Finally, we demonstrate two downstream use-cases enabled using this dataset and provide potential research directions in the machine learning, urban planning and remote sensing domains.

Vision-Language Models demonstrate remarkable capabilities but often struggle with compositional reasoning, exhibiting vulnerabilities regarding word order and attribute binding. This limitation arises from a scarcity of informative samples needed to differentiate subtle semantic variations during contrastive pretraining. Although hard negative mining offers a promising remedy, existing methods lack explicit mechanisms to dictate which linguistic elements undergo modification. Instead of engineering generative architectures, this study establishes lexical concreteness as a fundamental determinant of negative sample efficacy. Modifying highly concrete terms generates more pronounced structural and visual discrepancies, providing a substantially stronger learning signal. Leveraging this principle, ConcretePlant is proposed to systematically isolate and manipulate perceptually grounded concepts. Analyses of the InfoNCE further reveals a severe gradient imbalance, where easily distinguishable pairs disproportionately overwhelm the optimization process and restrict the bandwidth available for nuanced learning. To resolve this degradation, the Cement loss is formulated utilizing a margin-based approach. By correlating psycholinguistic scores with sample difficulty, this objective dynamically calibrates the penalization applied to individual training pairs. Comprehensive evaluations substantiate these theoretical claims. The integrated framework, designated as Slipform, achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across diverse compositional evaluation benchmarks, general cross-modal retrieval, single and multi label linear probing.

An unsupervised framework for hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is proposed that incorporates masked deep representation learning with diffusion-based clustering, extending the Spatially-Regularized Superpixel-based Diffusion Learning ($S^2DL$) algorithm. Initially, a denoised latent representation of the original HSI is learned via an unsupervised masked autoencoder (UMAE) model with a Vision Transformer backbone. The UMAE takes spatial context and long-range spectral correlations into account and incorporates an efficient pretraining process via masking that utilizes only a small subset of training pixels. In the next stage, the entropy rate superpixel (ERS) algorithm is used to segment the image into superpixels, and a spatially regularized diffusion graph is constructed using Euclidean and diffusion distances within the compressed latent space instead of the HSI space. The proposed algorithm, Deep Spatially-Regularized Superpixel-based Diffusion Learning ($DS^2DL$), leverages more faithful diffusion distances and subsequent diffusion graph construction that better reflect the intrinsic geometry of the underlying data manifold, improving labeling accuracy and clustering quality. Experiments on Botswana and KSC datasets demonstrate the efficacy of $DS^2DL$.

In-body molecular nanonetworks promise early abnormality detection close to the source of biochemical events, but their communication capabilities are severely constrained by slow diffusion-based signaling and unstable alarm traffic. We study whether simple embedded DNA-based inference at the nanonode can improve alarm transmission to an external gateway. We compare raw reporting (RR), single-marker threshold reporting (TR), and embedded inference reporting (EIR) under a communication-oriented abstraction of DNA strand-displacement-based computation with marker gating, edge-triggered alarming, hysteretic state transitions, temporally correlated marker dynamics, diffusion-based alarm transport, and leaky gateway evidence integration. The simulations identify a bounded EIR success regime in the weak-to-moderate anomaly range: EIR can improve detection relative to RR and TR while remaining competitive in event-driven communication cost, especially relative to RR. The gain does not come from uniformly lower activity, but from more stable local alarm dynamics. EIR does not dominate globally; TR often remains cheaper when abnormalities are present, and EIR incurs additional local delay. These results point to a limited operating regime in which EIR is useful, rather than to a general advantage across settings.

Understanding the internal activations of Vision Transformers (ViTs) is critical for building interpretable and trustworthy models. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been used to extract human-interpretable features, they operate on individual layers and fail to capture the cross-layer computational structure of Transformers, as well as the relative significance of each layer in forming the last-layer representation. Alternatively, we introduce the adoption of Cross-Layer Transcoders (CLTs) as reliable, sparse, and depth-aware proxy models for MLP blocks in ViTs. CLTs use an encoder-decoder scheme to reconstruct each post-MLP activation from learned sparse embeddings of preceding layers, yielding a linear decomposition that transforms the final representation of ViTs from an opaque embedding into an additive, layer-resolved construction that enables faithful attribution and process-level interpretability. We train CLTs on CLIP ViT-B/32 and ViT-B/16 across CIFAR-100, COCO, and ImageNet-100. We show that CLTs achieve high reconstruction fidelity with post-MLP activations while preserving and even improving, in some cases, CLIP zero-shot classification accuracy. In terms of interpretability, we show that the cross-layer contribution scores provide faithful attribution, revealing that the final representation is concentrated in a smaller set of dominant layer-wise terms whose removal degrades performance and whose retention largely preserves it. These results showcase the significance of adopting CLTs as an alternative interpretable proxy of ViTs in the vision domain.

This paper investigates the problem of data-driven modeling of port-Hamiltonian systems while preserving their intrinsic Hamiltonian structure and stability properties. We propose a novel neural-network-based port-Hamiltonian modeling technique that relaxes the convexity constraint commonly imposed by neural network-based Hamiltonian approximations, thereby improving the expressiveness and generalization capability of the model. By removing this restriction, the proposed approach enables the use of more general non-convex Hamiltonian representations to enhance modeling flexibility and accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed method incorporates information about stable equilibria into the learning process, allowing the learned model to preserve the stability of multiple isolated equilibria rather than being restricted to a single equilibrium as in conventional methods. Two numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate its ability to achieve more accurate structure- and stability-preserving learning of port-Hamiltonian systems compared with a baseline method.

t-SNE has gained popularity as a dimension reduction technique, especially for visualizing data. It is well-known that all dimension reduction techniques may lose important features of the data. We provide a mathematical framework for understanding this loss for t-SNE by establishing a number of results in different scenarios showing how important features of data are lost by using t-SNE.

Accurate characterization of subsurface heterogeneity is challenging but essential for applications such as reservoir pressure management, geothermal energy extraction and CO$_2$, H$_2$, and wastewater injection operations. This challenge becomes especially acute in extreme pressure events, which are rarely observed but can strongly affect operational risk. Traditional history matching and inversion techniques rely on expensive full-physics simulations, making it infeasible to handle uncertainty and extreme events at scale. Purely data-driven models often struggle to maintain physics consistency when dealing with sparse observations, complex geology, and extreme events. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a physics-informed machine learning method that embeds a differentiable subsurface flow simulator directly into neural network training. The network infers heterogeneous permeability fields from limited pressure observations, while training minimizes both permeability and pressure losses through the simulator, enforcing physical consistency. Because the simulator is used only during training, inference remains fast once the model is learned. In an initial test, the proposed method reduces the pressure inference error by half compared with a purely data-driven approach. We then extend the test over eight distinct data scenarios, and in every case, our method produces significantly lower pressure inference errors than the purely data-driven model. We also evaluate our method on extreme events, which represent high-consequence data in the tail of the sample distribution. Similar to the bulk distribution, the physics-informed model maintains higher pressure inference accuracy in the extreme event regimes. Overall, the proposed method enables rapid, physics-consistent subsurface inversion for real-time reservoir characterization and risk-aware decision-making.

We present a unified pipeline for synthesizing high-quality Quechua and Spanish speech for the Peruvian Constitution using three state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) architectures: XTTS v2, F5-TTS, and DiFlow-TTS. Our models are trained on independent Spanish and Quechua speech datasets with heterogeneous sizes and recording conditions, and leverage bilingual and multilingual TTS capabilities to improve synthesis quality in both languages. By exploiting cross-lingual transfer, our framework mitigates data scarcity in Quechua while preserving naturalness in Spanish. We release trained checkpoints, inference code, and synthesized audio for each constitutional article, providing a reusable resource for speech technologies in indigenous and multilingual contexts. This work contributes to the development of inclusive TTS systems for political and legal content in low-resource settings.

Weight pruning is a common technique for compressing large neural networks. We focus on the challenging post-training one-shot setting, where a pre-trained model is compressed without any retraining. Existing one-shot pruning methods typically optimize a single objective, such as a layer-wise reconstruction loss or a second-order Taylor approximation of the training loss. We highlight that neither objective alone is consistently the most effective across architectures and sparsity levels. Motivated by this insight, we propose MOONSHOT, a general and flexible framework that extends any single-objective pruning method into a multi-objective formulation by jointly optimizing both the layer-wise reconstruction error and second-order Taylor approximation of the training loss. MOONSHOT acts as a wrapper around existing pruning algorithms. To enable this integration while maintaining scalability to billion-parameter models, we propose modeling decisions and introduce an efficient procedure for computing the inverse Hessian, preserving the efficiency of state-of-the-art one-shot pruners. When combined with state-of-the-art pruning methods on Llama-3.2 and Llama-2 models, MOONSHOT reduces C4 perplexity by up to 32.6% at 2:4 sparsity and improves zero-shot mean accuracy across seven classification benchmarks by up to 4.9 points. On Vision Transformers, it improves accuracy on ImageNet-1k by over 5 points at 70% sparsity, and on ResNet-50, it yields a 4-point gain at 90% sparsity.

Despite the widespread multilingual deployment of large language models, post-training pipelines remain predominantly English-centric, contributing to performance disparities across languages. We present a systematic, controlled study of the interplay between training language coverage, model scale, and task domain, based on 220 supervised fine-tuning runs on parallel translated multilingual data mixtures spanning mathematical reasoning and API calling tasks, with models up to 8B parameters. We find that increasing language coverage during post-training is largely beneficial across tasks and model scales, with low-resource languages benefiting the most and high-resource languages plateauing rather than degrading. Even minimal multilinguality helps: incorporating a single non-English language improves both English performance and cross-lingual generalization, making English-only post-training largely suboptimal. Moreover, at sufficient language diversity, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer can match or exceed the effects of direct language inclusion in a low-diversity setting, although gains remain limited for typologically distant, low-resource languages.

Clinical text classification requires choosing between specialized fine-tuned models (BERT variants) and general-purpose large language models (LLMs), yet neither dominates across all instances. We introduce Learning to Defer for clinical text (L2D-Clinical), a framework that learns when a BERT classifier should defer to an LLM based on uncertainty signals and text characteristics. Unlike prior L2D work that defers to human experts assumed universally superior, our approach enables adaptive deferral-improving accuracy when the LLM complements BERT. We evaluate on two English clinical tasks: (1) ADE detection (ADE Corpus V2), where BioBERT (F1=0.911) outperforms the LLM (F1=0.765), and (2) treatment outcome classification (MIMIC-IV with multi-LLM consensus ground truth), where GPT-5-nano (F1=0.967) outperforms ClinicalBERT (F1=0.887). On ADE, L2D-Clinical achieves F1=0.928 (+1.7 points over BERT) by selectively deferring 7% of instances where the LLM's high recall compensates for BERT's misses. On MIMIC, L2D-Clinical achieves F1=0.980 (+9.3 points over BERT) by deferring only 16.8\% of cases to the LLM. The key insight is that L2D-Clinical learns to selectively leverage LLM strengths while minimizing API costs.

Earth Observation (EO) satellite scheduling (deciding which imaging tasks to perform and when) is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. Existing methods typically assume that the operational constraint model is fully specified in advance. In practice, however, constraints governing separation between observations, power budgets, and thermal limits are often embedded in engineering artefacts or high-fidelity simulators rather than in explicit mathematical models. We study EO scheduling under \emph{unknown constraints}: the objective is known, but feasibility must be learned interactively from a binary oracle. Working with a simplified model restricted to pairwise separation and global capacity constraints, we introduce Conservative Constraint Acquisition~(CCA), a domain-specific procedure designed to identify justified constraints efficiently in practice while limiting unnecessary tightening of the learned model. Embedded in the \textsc{Learn\&Optimize} framework, CCA supports an interactive search process that alternates optimization under a learned constraint model with targeted oracle queries. On synthetic instances with up to 50~tasks and dense constraint networks, L\&O improves over a no-knowledge greedy baseline and uses far fewer main oracle queries than a two-phase acquire-then-solve baseline (FAO). For $n\leq 30$, the average gap drops from 65--68\% (Priority Greedy) to 17.7--35.8\% using L\&O. At $n{=}50$, where the CP-SAT reference is the best feasible solution found in 120~s, L\&O improves on FAO on average (17.9\% vs.\ 20.3\%) while using 21.3 main queries instead of 100 and about $5\times$ less execution time.

Humans and artificial agents must often learn and switch between multiple tasks in dynamic environments. Success in such settings requires cognitive flexibility: the ability to retain prior knowledge (cognitive stability) while also transferring it to novel tasks (cognitive generalization). Cognitive flexibility research has largely focused on the role of model architecture to achieve these complementary goals. However, it is less well understood how the structure of the environment itself influences cognitive flexibility, and how it interacts with model architecture. To address this gap, we design a multi-task learning environment in which tasks are defined by a combination of two cue dimensions, allowing us to characterize the environment with graph-theory methods. We also introduce gating-based (multiplicative) and concatenation-based attention models that can decompose tasks into components and can sequentially allocate attention to them. We compare the attention-based models' performance in the multi-task learning environment to multilayer perceptrons. Generalization and stability are systematically evaluated across environments that vary in richness and task connectivity. We observe that richer environments improve both generalization and stability. In addition, a critical novel observation is that (graph theory based) connectivity between the tasks in the environment strongly modulates both stability and generalization, with especially pronounced benefits for attention-based models. These findings underscore the importance of considering not only cognitive architectures but also environmental structure and their interaction in shaping multi-task learning, generalization, and stability.

Fall detection in elderly care requires not only accurate classification but also reliable explanations that clinicians can trust. However, existing post-hoc explainability methods, when applied frame-by-frame to sequential data, produce temporally unstable attribution maps that clinicians cannot reliably act upon. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight and explainable framework for skeleton-based fall detection that combines an efficient LSTM model with T-SHAP, a temporally aware post-hoc aggregation strategy that stabilizes SHAP-based feature attributions over contiguous time windows. Unlike standard SHAP, which treats each frame independently, T-SHAP applies a linear smoothing operator to the attribution sequence, reducing high-frequency variance while preserving the theoretical guarantees of Shapley values, including local accuracy and consistency. Experiments on the NTU RGB+D Dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 94.3% classification accuracy with an end-to-end inference latency below 25 milliseconds, satisfying real-time constraints on mid-range hardware and indicating strong potential for deployment in clinical monitoring scenarios. Quantitative evaluation using perturbation-based faithfulness metrics shows that T-SHAP improves explanation reliability compared to standard SHAP (AUP: 0.89 vs. 0.91) and Grad-CAM (0.82), with consistent improvements observed across five-fold cross-validation, indicating enhanced explanation reliability. The resulting attributions consistently highlight biomechanically relevant motion patterns, including lower-limb instability and changes in spinal alignment, aligning with established clinical observations of fall dynamics and supporting their use as transparent decision aids in long-term care environments

Aerial object detection in UAV imagery presents unique challenges due to the high prevalence of tiny objects, adverse environmental conditions, and strict computational constraints. Standard YOLO-based detectors fail to address these jointly: their minimum detection stride of 8 pixels renders sub-32px objects nearly undetectable, their CIoU loss produces zero gradients for non-overlapping tiny boxes, and their architectures contain significant filter redundancy. We propose DroneScan-YOLO, a holistic system contribution that addresses these limitations through four coordinated design choices: (1) increased input resolution of 1280x1280 to maximize spatial detail for tiny objects, (2) RPA-Block, a dynamic filter pruning mechanism based on lazy cosine-similarity updates with a 10-epoch warm-up period, (3) MSFD, a lightweight P2 detection branch at stride 4 adding only 114,592 parameters (+1.1%), and (4) SAL-NWD, a hybrid loss combining Normalized Wasserstein Distance with size-adaptive CIoU weighting, integrated into YOLOv8's TaskAligned assignment pipeline. Evaluated on VisDrone2019-DET, DroneScan-YOLO achieves 55.3% mAP@50 and 35.6% mAP@50-95, outperforming the YOLOv8s baseline by +16.6 and +12.3 points respectively, improving recall from 0.374 to 0.518, and maintaining 96.7 FPS inference speed with only +4.1% parameters. Gains are most pronounced on tiny object classes: bicycle AP@50 improves from 0.114 to 0.328 (+187%), and awning-tricycle from 0.156 to 0.237 (+52%).

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Calude) have rapidly become integral to software development. These tools are especially attractive to students, as they can reduce cognitive load. However, their adoption also introduces a socio-cognitive risk: the accumulation of Comprehension Debt (CD). CD refers to the growing gap between what a development team knows about its codebase and what it actually needs to understand in order to maintain and modify it effectively. This qualitative study investigate how GenAI tools contribute to CD in the context of an undergraduate software engineering project. Our study is based on 621 reflective diaries from 207 students over eight weeks. We identify four CD accumulation patterns and one mitigating pattern in students' use of GenAI tools. The four accumulation patterns include: (1) AI-as-black-box code acceptance, (2) context-mismatch debt, (3) dependency-induced atrophy, and (4) verification-bypass. In contrast, the mitigating pattern involves students using GenAI as a comprehension scaffold, allowing them to build a deeper understanding of the code. We argue that CD is distinct from traditional technical debt because it resides in the collective cognition of development teams rather than in the codebase itself. Our findings highlight the need for explicit pedagogical strategies to mitigate CD in software engineering education, emphasizing verification practices, structured retrospectives, and active learning assessments.

Larger language models become simultaneously better and worse at handling contextual information -- better at ignoring false claims, worse at ignoring irrelevant tokens. We formalize this apparent paradox through the first scaling laws for contextual entrainment, the tendency of models to favor tokens that appeared in context regardless of relevance. Analyzing the Cerebras-GPT (111M-13B) and Pythia (410M-12B) model families, we find entrainment follows predictable power-law scaling, but with opposite trends depending on context type: semantic contexts show decreasing entrainment with scale, while non-semantic contexts show increasing entrainment. Concretely, the largest models are four times more resistant to counterfactual misinformation than the smallest, yet simultaneously twice as prone to copying arbitrary tokens. These diverging trends, which replicate across model families, suggest that semantic filtering and mechanical copying are functionally distinct behaviors that scale in opposition -- scaling alone does not resolve context sensitivity, it reshapes it.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex telecommunications tasks, including 3GPP specification analysis and O-RAN network troubleshooting. However, a critical limitation remains: LLM-generated confidence scores are often biased and unreliable, frequently exhibiting systematic overconfidence. This lack of trustworthy self-assessment makes it difficult to verify model outputs and safely rely on them in practice. In this paper, we study confidence calibration in telecom-domain LLMs using the representative Gemma-3 model family (4B, 12B, and 27B parameters), evaluated on TeleQnA, ORANBench, and srsRANBench. We show that standard single-pass, verbalized confidence estimates fail to reflect true correctness, often assigning high confidence to incorrect predictions. To address this, we propose a novel Twin-Pass Chain of Thought (CoT)-Ensembling methodology for improving confidence estimation by leveraging multiple independent reasoning evaluations and aggregating their assessments into a calibrated confidence score. Our approach reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by up to 88% across benchmarks, significantly improving the reliability of model self-assessment. These results highlight the limitations of current confidence estimation practices and demonstrate a practical path toward more trustworthy evaluation of LLM outputs in telecommunications.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong cross-modal reasoning capabilities, yet their potential for vision-only tasks remains underexplored. We investigate MLLMs as training-free similarity estimators for instance-level image-to-image retrieval. Our approach prompts the model with paired images and converts next-token probabilities into similarity scores, enabling zero-shot re-ranking within large-scale retrieval pipelines. This design avoids specialized architectures and fine-tuning, leveraging the rich visual discrimination learned during multimodal pre-training. We address scalability by combining MLLMs with memory-efficient indexing and top-$k$ candidate re-ranking. Experiments across diverse benchmarks show that MLLMs outperform task-specific re-rankers outside their native domains and exhibit superior robustness to clutter, occlusion, and small objects. Despite strong results, we identify failure modes under severe appearance changes, highlighting opportunities for future research. Our findings position MLLMs as a promising alternative for open-world large-scale image retrieval.

Meta-learning offers a principled framework leveraging \emph{task-invariant} priors from related tasks, with which \emph{task-specific} models can be fine-tuned on downstream tasks, even with limited data records. Gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) relies on gradient descent (GD) to adapt the prior to a new task. Albeit effective, these methods incur high computational overhead that scales linearly with the number of GD steps. To enhance efficiency and scalability, existing methods approximate the gradient of prior parameters (meta-gradient) via truncated backpropagation, yet suffer large approximation errors. Targeting accurate approximation, this work puts forth binomial GBML (BinomGBML), which relies on a truncated binomial expansion for meta-gradient estimation. This novel expansion endows more information in the meta-gradient estimation via efficient parallel computation. As a running paradigm applied to model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), the resultant BinomMAML provably enjoys error bounds that not only improve upon existing approaches, but also decay super-exponentially under mild conditions. Numerical tests corroborate the theoretical analysis and showcase boosted performance with slightly increased computational overhead.

In medical image segmentation, uncertainty estimates are often reported but rarely used to guide decisions. We study the missing step: how uncertainty maps are converted into actionable policies such as accepting, flagging, or deferring predictions. We formulate segmentation as a two-stage pipeline, estimation followed by decision, and show that optimizing uncertainty alone fails to capture most of the achievable safety gains. Using retinal vessel segmentation benchmarks (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1), we evaluate two uncertainty sources (Monte Carlo Dropout and Test-Time Augmentation) combined with three deferral strategies, and introduce a simple confidence-aware deferral rule that prioritizes uncertain and low-confidence predictions. Our results show that the best method and policy combination removes up to 80 percent of segmentation errors at only 25 percent pixel deferral, while achieving strong cross-dataset robustness. We further show that calibration improvements do not translate to better decision quality, highlighting a disconnect between standard uncertainty metrics and real-world utility. These findings suggest that uncertainty should be evaluated based on the decisions it enables, rather than in isolation.

Attribution methods seek to explain language model predictions by quantifying the contribution of input tokens to generated outputs. However, most existing techniques are designed for encoder-based architectures and rely on linear approximations that fail to capture the causal and semantic complexities of autoregressive generation in decoder-only models. To address these limitations, we propose Hessian-Enhanced Token Attribution (HETA), a novel attribution framework tailored for decoder-only language models. HETA combines three complementary components: a semantic transition vector that captures token-to-token influence across layers, Hessian-based sensitivity scores that model second-order effects, and KL divergence to measure information loss when tokens are masked. This unified design produces context-aware, causally faithful, and semantically grounded attributions. Additionally, we introduce a curated benchmark dataset for systematically evaluating attribution quality in generative settings. Empirical evaluations across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that HETA consistently outperforms existing methods in attribution faithfulness and alignment with human annotations, establishing a new standard for interpretability in autoregressive language models.

Neural models for TCR-pMHC binding prediction are susceptible to shortcut learning: they exploit spurious correlations in training data -- such as peptide length bias or V-gene co-occurrence -- rather than the physical binding interface. This renders predictions brittle under family-held-out and distance-aware evaluation, where such shortcuts do not transfer. We introduce \emph{Counterfactual Invariant Prediction} (CIP), a training framework that generates biologically constrained counterfactual peptide edits and enforces invariance to edits at non-anchor positions while amplifying sensitivity at MHC anchor residues. CIP augments the base classifier with two auxiliary objectives: (1) an invariance loss penalizing prediction changes under conservative non-anchor substitutions, and (2) a contrastive loss encouraging large prediction changes under anchor-position disruptions. Evaluated on a curated VDJdb-IEDB benchmark under family-held-out, distance-aware, and random splits, CIP achieves AUROC 0.831 and counterfactual consistency (CFC) 0.724 under the challenging family-held-out protocol -- a 39.7\% reduction in shortcut index relative to the unconstrained baseline. Ablations confirm that anchor-aware edit generation is the dominant driver of OOD gains, providing a practical recipe for causally-grounded TCR specificity modeling.

Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI) provides distribution-free prediction intervals with asymptotic coverage guarantees for time series under distribution shift. However, ACI only adapts the quantile threshold -- it cannot shift the interval center. When a base forecaster develops persistent bias after a regime change, ACI compensates by widening intervals symmetrically, producing unnecessarily conservative bands. We propose Bias-Corrected ACI (BC-ACI), which augments standard ACI with an online exponentially weighted moving average (EWM) estimate of forecast bias. BC-ACI corrects nonconformity scores before quantile computation and re-centers prediction intervals, addressing the root cause of miscalibration rather than its symptom. An adaptive dead-zone threshold suppresses corrections when estimated bias is indistinguishable from noise, ensuring no degradation on well-calibrated data. In controlled experiments across 688 runs spanning two base models, four synthetic regimes, and three real datasets, BC-ACI reduces Winkler interval scores by 13--17% under mean and compound distribution shifts (Wilcoxon p < 0.001) while maintaining equivalent performance on stationary data (ratio 1.002x). We provide finite-sample analysis showing that coverage guarantees degrade gracefully with bias estimation error.

Anomaly detection aims to identify observations that deviate from expected behavior. Because anomalous events are inherently sparse, most frameworks are trained exclusively on normal data to learn a single reference model of normality. This implicitly assumes that normal behavior can be captured by a single, unconditional reference distribution. In practice, however, anomalies are often context-dependent: A specific observation may be normal under one operating condition, yet anomalous under another. As machine learning systems are deployed in dynamic and heterogeneous environments, these fixed-context assumptions introduce structural ambiguity, i.e., the inability to distinguish contextual variation from genuine abnormality under marginal modeling, leading to unstable performance and unreliable anomaly assessments. While modern sensing systems frequently collect multimodal data capturing complementary aspects of both system behavior and operating conditions, existing methods treat all data streams equally, without distinguishing contextual information from anomaly-relevant signals. As a result, abnormality is often evaluated without explicitly conditioning on operating conditions. We argue that multimodal anomaly detection should be reframed as a cross-modal contextual inference problem, in which modalities play asymmetric roles, separating context from observation, to define abnormality conditionally rather than relative to a single global reference. This perspective has implications for model design, evaluation protocols, and benchmark construction, and outline open research challenges toward robust, context-aware multimodal anomaly detection.

Analog optical computers promise large efficiency gains for machine learning inference, yet no demonstration has moved beyond small-scale image benchmarks. We benchmark the analog optical computer (AOC) digital twin on mortgage approval classification from 5.84 million U.S. HMDA records and separate three sources of accuracy loss. On the original 19 features, the AOC reaches 94.6% balanced accuracy with 5,126 parameters (1,024 optical), compared with 97.9% for XGBoost; the 3.3 percentage-point gap narrows by only 0.5pp when the optical core is widened from 16 to 48 channels, suggesting an architectural rather than hardware limitation. Restricting all models to a shared 127-bit binary encoding drops every model to 89.4--89.6%, with an encoding cost of 8pp for digital models and 5pp for the AOC. Seven calibrated hardware non-idealities impose no measurable penalty. The three resulting layers of limitation (encoding, architecture, hardware fidelity) locate where accuracy is lost and what to improve next.

Remote medical response systems are increasingly being deployed to support emergency care in disaster-affected and infrastructure-limited environments. Enabled by GeoVision capabilities, this paper presents a Digital Twin architecture for hybrid autonomous-teleoperated medical response systems. The proposed framework integrates perception and adaptive navigation with a Digital Twin, synchronized in real-time, that mirrors system states, environmental dynamics, patient conditions, and mission objectives. Unlike traditional ground control interfaces, the Digital Twin provides remote clinical and operational users with an intuitive, continuously updated virtual representation of the platform and its operational context, enabling enhanced situational awareness and informed decision-making.

The 4th Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) is organized as part of CVPR 2026. This edition features five benchmark challenges with emphasis on both predictive accuracy and embedded real-time feasibility. This report summarizes the MaCVi 2026 challenge setup, evaluation protocols, datasets, and benchmark tracks, and presents quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and cross-challenge analyses of emerging method trends. We also include technical reports from top-performing teams to highlight practical design choices and lessons learned across the benchmark suite. Datasets, leaderboards, and challenge resources are available at https://macvi.org/workshop/cvpr26.

Gaze event detection is fundamental to vision science, human-computer interaction, and applied analytics. However, current workflows often require specialized programming knowledge and careful handling of heterogeneous raw data formats. Classical detectors such as I-VT and I-DT are effective but highly sensitive to preprocessing and parameterization, limiting their usability outside specialized laboratories. This work introduces a code-free, large language model (LLM)-driven pipeline that converts natural language instructions into an end-to-end analysis. The system (1) inspects raw eye-tracking files to infer structure and metadata, (2) generates executable routines for data cleaning and detector implementation from concise user prompts, (3) applies the generated detector to label fixations and saccades, and (4) returns results and explanatory reports, and allows users to iteratively optimize their code by editing the prompt. Evaluated on public benchmarks, the approach achieves accuracy comparable to traditional methods while substantially reducing technical overhead. The framework lowers barriers to entry for eye-tracking research, providing a flexible and accessible alternative to code-intensive workflows.

Large language models (LLMs), particularly when integrated into agentic systems, have demonstrated human- and even superhuman-level performance across multiple domains. Whether these systems can truly be considered creative, however, remains a matter of debate, as conclusions heavily depend on the definitions, evaluation methods, and specific use cases employed. In this paper, we analyse creativity along two complementary macro-level perspectives. The first is a functionalist perspective, focusing on the observable characteristics of creative outputs. The second is an ontological perspective, emphasising the underlying processes, as well as the social and personal dimensions involved in creativity. We focus on LLM agents and we argue that they exhibit functionalist creativity, albeit not at its most sophisticated levels, while they continue to lack key aspects of ontological creativity. Finally, we discuss whether it is desirable for agentic systems to attain both forms of creativity, evaluating potential benefits and risks, and proposing pathways toward artificial creativity that can enhance human society.

Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.

Semiconductor failure analysis (FA) requires engineers to examine inspection images, correlate equipment telemetry, consult historical defect records, and write structured reports, a process that can consume several hours of expert time per case. We present SemiFA, an agentic multi-modal framework that autonomously generates structured FA reports from semiconductor inspection images in under one minute. SemiFA decomposes FA into a four-agent LangGraph pipeline: a DefectDescriber that classifies and narrates defect morphology using DINOv2 and LLaVA-1.6, a RootCauseAnalyzer that fuses SECS/GEM equipment telemetry with historically similar defects retrieved from a Qdrant vector database, a SeverityClassifier that assigns severity and estimates yield impact, and a RecipeAdvisor that proposes corrective process adjustments. A fifth node assembles a PDF report. We introduce SemiFA-930, a dataset of 930 annotated semiconductor defect images paired with structured FA narratives across nine defect classes, drawn from procedural synthesis, WM-811K, and MixedWM38. Our DINOv2-based classifier achieves 92.1% accuracy on 140 validation images (macro F1 = 0.917), and the full pipeline produces complete FA reports in 48 seconds on an NVIDIA A100-SXM4-40 GB GPU. A GPT-4o judge ablation across four modality conditions demonstrates that multi-modal fusion improves root cause reasoning by +0.86 composite points (1-5 scale) over an image-only baseline, with equipment telemetry as the more load-bearing modality. To our knowledge, SemiFA is the first system to integrate SECS/GEM equipment telemetry into a vision-language model pipeline for autonomous FA report generation.

This discussion paper re-examines SemEval-2020 Task 1, the most influential shared benchmark for lexical semantic change detection, through a three-part evaluative framework: operationalisation, data quality, and benchmark design. First, at the level of operationalisation, we argue that the benchmark models semantic change mainly as gain, loss, or redistribution of discrete senses. While practical for annotation and evaluation, this framing is too narrow to capture gradual, constructional, collocational, and discourse-level change. Also, the gold labels are outcomes of annotation decisions, clustering procedures, and threshold settings, which could potentially limit the validity of the task. Second, at the level of data quality, we show that the benchmark is affected by substantial corpus and preprocessing problems, including OCR noise, malformed characters, truncated sentences, inconsistent lemmatisation, POS-tagging errors, and missed targets. These issues can distort model behaviour, complicate linguistic analysis, and reduce reproducibility. Third, at the level of bench-mark design, we argue the small curated target sets and limited language coverage reduce realism and increase statistical uncertainty. Taken together, these limitations suggest that the benchmark should be treated as a useful but partial test bed rather than a definitive measure of progress. We therefore call for future datasets and shared tasks to adopt broader theories of semantic change, document pre-processing transparently, expand cross-linguistic coverage, and use more realistic evaluation settings. Such steps are necessary for more valid, interpretable, and generalisable progress in lexical semantic change detection

Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) provides numerical features for characterizing black-box optimization problems. In high-dimensional settings, however, ELA suffers from sparsity effects, high estimator variance, and the prohibitive cost of computing several feature classes. Dimensionality reduction has therefore been proposed as a way to make ELA applicable in such settings, but it remains unclear whether features computed in reduced spaces still reflect intrinsic properties of the original landscape. In this work, we investigate the robustness of ELA features under dimensionality reduction via Random Gaussian Embeddings (RGEs). Starting from the same sampled points and objective values, we compute ELA features in projected spaces and compare them to those obtained in the original search space across multiple sample budgets and embedding dimensions. Our results show that linear random projections often alter the geometric and topological structure relevant to ELA, yielding feature values that are no longer representative of the original problem. While a small subset of features remains comparatively stable, most are highly sensitive to the embedding. Moreover, robustness under projection does not necessarily imply informativeness, as apparently robust features may still reflect projection-induced artifacts rather than intrinsic landscape characteristics.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on Key-Value (KV) caching to minimize inference latency. However, standard KV caches are context-dependent: reusing a cached document in a new context requires recomputing KV states to account for shifts in attention distribution. Existing solutions such as CacheBlend, EPIC, and SAM-KV mitigate this issue by selectively recomputing a subset of tokens; however, they still incur non-negligible computational overhead (FLOPs) and increased Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. In this paper, we propose KV Packet, a recomputation-free cache reuse framework that treats cached documents as immutable ``packets'' wrapped in light-weight trainable soft-token adapters, which are trained via self-supervised distillation to bridge context discontinuities. Experiments on Llama-3.1 and Qwen2.5 demonstrate that the proposed KV Packet method achieves near-zero FLOPs and lower TTFT than recomputation-based baselines, while retaining F1 scores comparable to those of the full recomputation baseline.

Causal representation learning (CRL) aims to identify the underlying latent variables from high-dimensional observations, even when variables are dependent with each other. We study this problem for latent variables that follow a potentially degenerate Gaussian mixture distribution and that are only observed through the transformation via a piecewise affine mixing function. We provide a series of progressively stronger identifiability results for this challenging setting in which the probability density functions are ill-defined because of the potential degeneracy. For identifiability up to permutation and scaling, we leverage a sparsity regularization on the learned representation. Based on our theoretical results, we propose a two-stage method to estimate the latent variables by enforcing sparsity and Gaussianity in the learned representations. Experiments on synthetic and image data highlight our method's effectiveness in recovering the ground-truth latent variables.

Reliable evaluation of blastocyst quality is critical for the success of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Current embryo grading practices primarily rely on visual assessment of morphological features, which introduces subjectivity, inter-embryologist variability, and challenges in standardizing quality assurance. In this study, we propose a multitask embedding-based approach for the automated analysis and prediction of key blastocyst components, including the trophectoderm (TE), inner cell mass (ICM), and blastocyst expansion (EXP). The method leverages biological and physical characteristics extracted from images of day-5 human embryos. A pretrained ResNet-18 architecture, enhanced with an embedding layer, is employed to learn discriminative representations from a limited dataset and to automatically identify TE and ICM regions along with their corresponding grades, structures that are visually similar and inherently difficult to distinguish. Experimental results demonstrate the promise of the multitask embedding approach and potential for robust and consistent blastocyst quality assessment.

Rare events such as conformational changes in biomolecules, phase transitions, and chemical reactions are central to the behavior of many physical systems, yet they are extremely difficult to study computationally because unbiased simulations seldom produce them. Transition Path Theory (TPT) provides a rigorous statistical framework for analyzing such events: it characterizes the ensemble of reactive trajectories between two designated metastable states (reactant and product), and its central object--the committor function, which gives the probability that the system will next reach the product rather than the reactant--encodes all essential kinetic and thermodynamic information. We introduce a framework that casts committor estimation as a stochastic optimal control (SOC) problem. In this formulation the committor defines a feedback control--proportional to the gradient of its logarithm--that actively steers trajectories toward the reactive region, thereby enabling efficient sampling of reactive paths. To solve the resulting hitting-time control problem we develop two complementary objectives: a direct backpropagation loss and a principled off-policy Value Matching loss, for which we establish first-order optimality guarantees. We further address metastability, which can trap controlled trajectories in intermediate basins, by introducing an alternative sampling process that preserves the reactive current while lowering effective energy barriers. On benchmark systems, the framework yields markedly more accurate committor estimates, reaction rates, and equilibrium constants than existing methods.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into agentic workflows, their unpredictability stemming from numerical instability has emerged as a critical reliability issue. While recent studies have demonstrated the significant downstream effects of these instabilities, the root causes and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present a rigorous analysis of how unpredictability is rooted in the finite numerical precision of floating-point representations, tracking how rounding errors propagate, amplify, or dissipate through Transformer computation layers. Specifically, we identify a chaotic "avalanche effect" in the early layers, where minor perturbations trigger binary outcomes: either rapid amplification or complete attenuation. Beyond specific error instances, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit universal, scale-dependent chaotic behaviors characterized by three distinct regimes: 1) a stable regime, where perturbations fall below an input-dependent threshold and vanish, resulting in constant outputs; 2) a chaotic regime, where rounding errors dominate and drive output divergence; and 3) a signal-dominated regime, where true input variations override numerical noise. We validate these findings extensively across multiple datasets and model architectures.

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) affects 15-20% of adults aged 65 and older, often making kitchen navigation and independent living difficult, particularly in lower-income communities with limited access to professional design help. This study created an AI system that converts standard kitchen photos into MCI-friendly designs using the Home Design Guidelines (HDG). Stable Diffusion models, enhanced with DreamBooth LoRA and ControlNet, were trained on 100 kitchen images to produce realistic visualizations with open layouts, transparent cabinetry, better lighting, non-slip flooring, and less clutter. The models achieved moderate to high semantic alignment (normalized CLIP scores 0.69-0.79) and improved visual realism (GIQA scores 0.45-0.65). In a survey of 33 participants (51.5% caregivers, 36.4% older adults with MCI), the AI-modified kitchens were strongly preferred as more cognitively friendly (87.4% of 198 choices, p < .001). Participants reported high confidence in their kitchen choice selections (M = 5.92/7) and found the visualizations very helpful for home modifications (M = 6.27/7). Thematic analysis emphasized improved visibility, lower cognitive load, and greater independence. Overall, this AI tool provides a low-cost, scalable way for older adults and caregivers to visualize and implement DIY kitchen changes, supporting aging in place and resilience for those with MCI.

Large language models are emerging as scientific assistants, but evaluating their ability to reason from empirical data remains challenging. Benchmarks derived from published studies and human annotations inherit publication bias, known-knowledge bias, label noise, and substantial storage requirements. We present InfiniteScienceGym, a procedurally generated benchmark of scientific repositories paired with a verifiable question-answering task. From a seed, the simulator deterministically generates a self-contained repository with realistic directory structure, files, and tabular data, and a privileged QA generator produces both answerable and unanswerable questions with exact ground truth. This makes it possible to evaluate evidence-grounded reasoning, abstention, and tool-mediated analysis in a controlled setting without distributing a large static corpus. InfiniteScienceGym complements real scientific benchmarks by targeting blind spots and failure modes that are hard to evaluate using published datasets alone. Evaluating both proprietary and open-weight models, we find that none achieve more than 45% accuracy overall, that recognizing unanswerable questions remains a major weakness, and that stronger models tend to use tools more effectively rather than simply consuming more tokens.

Process reward models (PRMs) provide fine-grained reward signals along the reasoning process, but training reliable PRMs often requires step annotations or heavy verification pipelines, making them expensive to scale and refresh during online RL. Implicit PRMs mitigate this cost by learning decomposable token- or step-level rewards from trajectory-level outcome labels. However, they suffer from a train-inference mismatch: training only constrains a sequence-level aggregate, whereas inference requires token-level scores to reflect local step quality. As a result, token-level credits are weakly identified and may fail to faithfully reflect which reasoning steps are actually correct. This unreliability undermines a key promise of implicit PRMs: scoring many candidate tokens. In practice, noisy per-token advantages may systematically reinforce incorrect continuations. We address this problem with a novel Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which directly learns a prefix-conditioned value function estimating the probability of eventual correctness, and derives step signals via temporal-difference (TD) differences. IPVRM substantially improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. Building on these calibrated prefix values, we further propose Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), which computes TD advantages for both sampled tokens and high-probability candidate tokens, enabling dense counterfactual updates without additional rollouts. While DistRL offers limited gains when powered by miscalibrated implicit rewards, it consistently improves downstream reasoning once paired with IPVRM.

Many materials show anisotropic light scattering patterns due to the shape and local alignment of their underlying micro structures: surfaces with small elements such as fibers, or the ridges of a brushed metal, are very sparse and require a high spatial resolution to be properly represented as a volume. The acquisition of voxel data from such objects is a time and memory-intensive task, and most rendering approaches require an additional Level-of-Detail (LoD) data structure to aggregate the visual appearance, as observed from multiple distances, in order to reduce the number of samples computed per pixel (E.g.: MIP mapping). In this work we introduce first, an efficient parallel voxelization method designed to facilitate fast data aggregation at multiple resolution levels, and second, a novel representation based on hierarchical SGGX clustering that provides better accuracy than baseline methods. We validate our approach with a CUDA-based implementation of the voxelizer, tested both on triangle meshes and volumetric fabrics modeled with explicit fibers. Finally, we show the results generated with a path tracer based on the proposed LoD rendering model.

Recent advances in agentic AI have enabled increasingly autonomous workflows, but existing systems still face substantial challenges in achieving reliable deployment in real-world scientific research. In this work, we present a safe, lightweight, and user-friendly agentic framework for the autonomous execution of well-defined scientific tasks. The framework combines an isolated execution environment, a three-layer agent loop, and a self-assessing do-until mechanism to ensure safe and reliable operation while effectively leveraging large language models of varying capability levels. By focusing on structured tasks with clearly defined context and stopping criteria, the framework supports end-to-end automation with minimal human intervention, enabling researchers to offload routine workloads and devote more effort to creative activities and open-ended scientific inquiry.

This paper presents HUANet, a constrained deep neural network architecture that unrolls the iterations of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) into a trainable neural network for solving constrained convex optimization problems. Existing end-to-end learning methods operate as black-box mappings from parameters to solutions, often lacking explicit optimality principles and failing to enforce constraints. To address this limitation, we unroll ADMM and embed a hard-constrained neural network at each iteration to accelerate the algorithm, where equality constraints are enforced via a differentiable correction stage at the network output. Furthermore, we incorporate first-order optimality conditions as soft constraints during training to promote the convergence of the proposed unrolled algorithm. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture for constrained optimization problems.

Large language models can be aligned with human preferences through offline reinforcement learning (RL) on small labeled datasets. While single-objective alignment is well-studied, many real-world applications demand the simultaneous optimization of multiple conflicting rewards, e.g. optimizing both catalytic activity and specificity in protein engineering, or helpfulness and harmlessness for chatbots. Prior work has largely relied on linear reward scalarization, but this approach provably fails to recover non-convex regions of the Pareto front. In this paper, instead of scalarizing the rewards directly, we frame multi-objective RL itself as an optimization problem to be scalarized via smooth Tchebysheff scalarization, a recent technique that overcomes the shortcomings of linear scalarization. We use this formulation to derive Smooth Tchebysheff Optimization of Multi-Objective Preferences (STOMP), a novel offline RL algorithm that extends direct preference optimization to the multi-objective setting in a principled way by standardizing the individual rewards based on their observed distributions. We empirically validate STOMP on a range of protein engineering tasks by aligning three autoregressive protein language models on three laboratory datasets of protein fitness. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, STOMP achieves the highest hypervolumes in eight of nine settings according to both offline off-policy and generative evaluations. We thus demonstrate that STOMP is a powerful, robust multi-objective alignment algorithm that can meaningfully improve post-trained models for multi-attribute protein optimization and beyond.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled highly photorealistic 3D reconstruction from casually captured multi-view images. However, this accessibility raises a privacy concern: publicly available images or videos can be exploited to reconstruct detailed 3D models of scenes or objects without the owner's consent. We present PatchPoison, a lightweight dataset-poisoning method that prevents unauthorized 3D reconstruction. Unlike global perturbations, PatchPoison injects a small high-frequency adversarial patch, a structured checkerboard, into the periphery of each image in a multi-view dataset. The patch is designed to corrupt the feature-matching stage of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines such as COLMAP by introducing spurious correspondences that systematically misalign estimated camera poses. Consequently, downstream 3DGS optimization diverges from the correct scene geometry. On the NeRF-Synthetic benchmark, inserting a 12 X 12 pixel patch increases reconstruction error by 6.8x in LPIPS, while the poisoned images remain unobtrusive to human viewers. PatchPoison requires no pipeline modifications, offering a practical, "drop-in" preprocessing step for content creators to protect their multi-view data.

Language Model (LM) agents are increasingly used in complex open-ended decision-making tasks, from AI coding to physical AI. A core requirement in these settings is the ability to both explore the problem space and exploit acquired knowledge effectively. However, systematically distinguishing and quantifying exploration and exploitation from observed actions without access to the agent's internal policy remains challenging. To address this, we design controllable environments inspired by practical embodied AI scenarios. Each environment consists of a partially observable 2D grid map and an unknown task Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). The map generation can be programmatically adjusted to emphasize exploration or exploitation difficulty. To enable policy-agnostic evaluation, we design a metric to quantify exploration and exploitation errors from agent's actions. We evaluate a variety of frontier LM agents and find that even state-of-the-art models struggle on our task, with different models exhibiting distinct failure modes. We further observe that reasoning models solve the task more effectively and show both exploration and exploitation can be significantly improved through minimal harness engineering. We release our code \href{https://github.com/jjj-madison/measurable-explore-exploit}{here}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly generate indoor scenes through intermediate structures such as layouts and scene graphs, yet evaluation still relies on LLM or VLM judges that score rendered views, making judgments sensitive to viewpoint, prompt phrasing, and hallucination. When the evaluator is unstable, it becomes difficult to determine whether a model has produced a spatially plausible scene or whether the output score reflects the choice of viewpoint, rendering, or prompt. We introduce SceneCritic, a symbolic evaluator for floor-plan-level layouts. SceneCritic's constraints are grounded in SceneOnto, a structured spatial ontology we construct by aggregating indoor scene priors from 3D-FRONT, ScanNet, and Visual Genome. SceneOnto traverses this ontology to jointly verify semantic, orientation, and geometric coherence across object relationships, providing object-level and relationship-level assessments that identify specific violations and successful placements. Furthermore, we pair SceneCritic with an iterative refinement test bed that probes how models build and revise spatial structure under different critic modalities: a rule-based critic using collision constraints as feedback, an LLM critic operating on the layout as text, and a VLM critic operating on rendered observations. Through extensive experiments, we show that (a) SceneCritic aligns substantially better with human judgments than VLM-based evaluators, (b) text-only LLMs can outperform VLMs on semantic layout quality, and (c) image-based VLM refinement is the most effective critic modality for semantic and orientation correction.

Snowflake revolutionized data warehousing with an elastic architecture that decouples compute and storage, enabling scalable solutions for diverse data analytics needs. Building on this foundation, Snowflake has advanced its AI Data Cloud vision by introducing Snowpark, a managed turnkey solution that supports data engineering and AI/ML workloads using Python and other programming languages. While Snowpark's User-Defined Function (UDF) execution model offers high throughput, it is highly vulnerable to performance degradation from data skew, where uneven data partitioning causes straggler tasks and unpredictable latency. The non-uniform computational cost of arbitrary user code further exacerbates this classic challenge. This paper presents DySkew, a novel, data-skew-aware execution strategy for Snowpark UDFs. Built upon Snowflake's new generalized skew handling solution, an adaptive data distribution mechanism utilizing per-link state machines. DySkew addresses the unique challenges of user-defined logic with goals of fine-grained per-row mitigation, dynamic runtime adaptation, and low-overhead, cost-aware redistribution. Specifically, for Snowpark, we introduce crucial optimizations, including an eager redistribution strategy and a Row Size Model to dynamically manage overhead for extremely large rows. This dynamic approach replaces the limitations of the previous static round-robin method. We detail the architecture of this framework and showcase its effectiveness through performance evaluations and real-world case studies, demonstrating significant improvements in the execution time and resource utilization for large-scale Snowpark UDF workloads.

The effectiveness of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) depends on preference data that reflect the quality differences that matter in multimodal tasks. Existing pipelines often rely on off-policy perturbations or coarse outcome-based signals, which are not well suited to fine-grained visual reasoning. We propose rDPO, a preference optimization framework based on instance-specific rubrics. For each image-instruction pair, we create a checklist-style rubric of essential and additional criteria to score responses from any possible policies. The instruction-rubric pool is built offline and reused during the construction of on-policy data. On public reward modeling benchmarks, rubric-based prompting massively improves a 30B-A3B judge and brings it close to GPT-5.4. On public downstream benchmarks, rubric-based filtering raises the macro average to 82.69, whereas outcome-based filtering drops it to 75.82 from 81.14. When evaluating scalability on a comprehensive benchmark, rDPO achieves 61.01, markedly outperforming the style-constrained baseline (52.36) and surpassing the 59.48 base model. Together, these results show that visual preference optimization benefits from combining on-policy data construction with instance-specific criterion-level feedback.

The explosive growth of system logs makes streaming compression essential, yet existing log anomaly detection (LAD) methods incur severe pre-processing overhead by requiring full decompression and parsing. We introduce CLAD, the first deep learning framework to perform LAD directly on compressed byte streams. CLAD bypasses these bottlenecks by exploiting a key insight: normal logs compress into regular byte patterns, while anomalies systematically disrupt them. To extract these multi-scale deviations from opaque bytes, we propose a purpose-built architecture integrating a dilated convolutional byte encoder, a hybrid Transformer--mLSTM, and four-way aggregation pooling. This is coupled with a two-stage training strategy of masked pre-training and focal-contrastive fine-tuning to effectively handle severe class imbalance. Evaluated across five datasets, CLAD achieves a state-of-the-art average F1-score of 0.9909 and outperforms the best baseline by 2.72 percentage points. It delivers superior accuracy while completely eliminating decompression and parsing overheads, offering a robust solution that generalizes to structured streaming compressors.

Computed tomography (CT) enterography is a primary imaging modality for assessing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), yet the representational choices that best support automated analysis of this modality are unknown. We present the first study of vision-language transfer learning on abdominal CT enterography and identify two main findings. First, mean pooling of slice embeddings gives better categorical disease assessment (59.2\% three-class accuracy), whereas attention pooling gives better cross-modal retrieval (0.235 text-to-image MRR). This pattern holds across all LoRA configurations tested and suggests that the two aggregators emphasize different properties of the learned representation. Second, per-slice tissue contrast matters more than broader spatial coverage: multi-window RGB encoding, which maps complementary Hounsfield Unit windows to RGB channels, outperforms all strategies that increase spatial coverage through multiplanar sampling, and in this setting adding coronal and sagittal views reduces classification performance. For report generation, fine-tuning without retrieval context yields within-1 severity accuracy at the prevalence-matched chance level (70.4\% vs.\ 71\% random), suggesting little learned ordering beyond the class distribution. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves this across all configurations, scoring 7--14 percentage points above the chance baseline and improving ordinal MAE from 0.98 to 0.80--0.89. A three-teacher pseudolabel framework enables all comparisons without expert annotations. Together, these findings provide the first baselines for this underexplored modality and offer practical guidance for building vision-language systems for volumetric medical imaging.

Autonomous AI research has advanced rapidly, but long-horizon ML research engineering remains difficult: agents must sustain coherent progress across task comprehension, environment setup, implementation, experimentation, and debugging over hours or days. We introduce AiScientist, a system for autonomous long-horizon engineering for ML research built on a simple principle: strong long-horizon performance requires both structured orchestration and durable state continuity. To this end, AiScientist combines hierarchical orchestration with a permission-scoped File-as-Bus workspace: a top-level Orchestrator maintains stage-level control through concise summaries and a workspace map, while specialized agents repeatedly re-ground on durable artifacts such as analyses, plans, code, and experimental evidence rather than relying primarily on conversational handoffs, yielding thin control over thick state. Across two complementary benchmarks, AiScientist improves PaperBench score by 10.54 points on average over the best matched baseline and achieves 81.82 Any Medal% on MLE-Bench Lite. Ablation studies further show that File-as-Bus protocol is a key driver of performance, reducing PaperBench by 6.41 points and MLE-Bench Lite by 31.82 points when removed. These results suggest that long-horizon ML research engineering is a systems problem of coordinating specialized work over durable project state, rather than a purely local reasoning problem.

AI-driven education platforms have made some progress in personalisation, yet most remain constrained to static adaptation--predefined quizzes, uniform pacing, or generic feedback--limiting their ability to respond to learners' evolving understanding. This shortfall highlights the need for systems that are both context-aware and adaptive in real time. We introduce PAL (Personal Adaptive Learner), an AI-powered platform that transforms lecture videos into interactive learning experiences. PAL continuously analyzes multimodal lecture content and dynamically engages learners through questions of varying difficulty, adjusting to their responses as the lesson unfolds. At the end of a session, PAL generates a personalized summary that reinforces key concepts while tailoring examples to the learner's interests. By uniting multimodal content analysis with adaptive decision-making, PAL contributes a novel framework for responsive digital learning. Our work demonstrates how AI can move beyond static personalization toward real-time, individualized support, addressing a core challenge in AI-enabled education.

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We first identify that two conditions govern whether OPD succeeds or fails: (i) the student and teacher should share compatible thinking patterns; and (ii) even with consistent thinking patterns and higher scores, the teacher must offer genuinely new capabilities beyond what the student has seen during training. We validate these findings through weak-to-strong reverse distillation, showing that same-family 1.5B and 7B teachers are distributionally indistinguishable from the student's perspective. Probing into the token-level mechanism, we show that successful OPD is characterized by progressive alignment on high-probability tokens at student-visited states, a small shared token set that concentrates most of the probability mass (97%-99%). We further propose two practical strategies to recover failing OPD: off-policy cold start and teacher-aligned prompt selection. Finally, we show that OPD's apparent free lunch of dense token-level reward comes at a cost, raising the question of whether OPD can scale to long-horizon distillation.

This paper tackles the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (E-CVRP) through a bilevel optimization framework that handles routing and charging decisions separately or jointly depending on the search stage. By analyzing their interaction, we introduce a surrogate objective at the upper level to guide the search and accelerate convergence. A bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing algorithm (b-LAHC) is introduced that operates through three phases: greedy descent, neighborhood exploration, and final solution refinement. b-LAHC operates with fixed parameters, eliminating the need for complex adaptation while remaining lightweight and effective. Extensive experiments on the IEEE WCCI-2020 benchmark show that b-LAHC achieves superior or competitive performance against eight state-of-the-art algorithms. Under a fixed evaluation budget, it attains near-optimal solutions on small-scale instances and sets 9/10 new best-known results on large-scale benchmarks, improving existing records by an average of 1.07%. Moreover, the strong correlation (though not universal) observed between the surrogate objective and the complete cost justifies the use of the surrogate objective while still necessitating a joint solution of both levels, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed bilevel framework and highlighting its potential for efficiently solving large-scale routing problems with a hierarchical structure.

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, standard OPD requires a live teacher inference server throughout training, resulting in substantial infrastructure overhead. In this work, we investigate whether on-policy distillation can be performed offline. A natural approach is to precompute teacher log-probabilities once over SFT rollouts and reuse them during training. In practice, however, this offline variant fails to reliably match the performance of standard OPD. To understand this discrepancy, we identify a previously overlooked condition that is critical for any OPD pipeline, which we term teacher consistency. This condition requires that the same teacher model be used for both supervised fine-tuning and OPD. We show that violating teacher consistency introduces an irreducible gradient bias, causing both offline and online OPD to converge to a suboptimal fixed point regardless of training duration. Building on this insight, we propose Lightning OPD, an offline on-policy distillation framework that enforces teacher consistency by precomputing teacher log-probabilities over SFT rollouts. This design eliminates the need for a live teacher server entirely. We further show that, under teacher consistency, Lightning OPD shares the same optimum as standard OPD, with bounded gradient discrepancy and an implicit regularization effect that helps prevent policy drift. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation demonstrate that Lightning OPD achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency. Starting from an SFT-initialized Qwen3-8B-Base model, Lightning OPD reaches 69.9% on AIME 2024 in just 30 GPU hours, achieving a 4.0x speedup over standard OPD and substantially lowering the barrier to entry for academic research on LLM post-training.

Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness when trivially constrained? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word) cause instruction-tuned LLMs to collapse their responses, losing 14--48% of comprehensiveness in pairwise evaluation across three open-weight model families and one closed-weight model (GPT-4o-mini). The baseline response is preferred in 77--100% of 1,920 pairwise comparisons judged by GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o. Notably, GPT-4o-mini suffers 31% comprehensiveness loss (99% baseline win rate), demonstrating that the fragility extends to commercially deployed closed-weight models, contrary to prior findings on format-level constraints. Through mechanistic analysis, we identify this as a planning failure: two-pass generation (free generation followed by constrained rewriting) recovers 59--96% of response length, and linear probes on prompt representations predict response length with $R^2 = 0.51$--$0.93$ before generation begins, with $R^2$ tracking collapse severity across models. The same probes yield negative $R^2$ on base models, confirming that instruction tuning creates the representational structure encoding the collapse decision. Crucially, base models show no systematic collapse under identical constraints, with effects that are small, noisy, and bidirectional, demonstrating that instruction tuning creates this fragility by coupling task competence to narrow surface-form templates. The effect replicates on MT-Bench across all eight task categories. We further show that standard independent LLM-as-judge evaluation detects only a 3.5% average quality drop where pairwise evaluation reveals 23%, exposing a methodological blind spot in how constrained generation is assessed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown much promise in powering a variety of software engineering (SE) tools. Offering natural language as an intuitive interaction mechanism, LLMs have recently been employed as conversational ``programming assistants'' capable of supporting several SE activities simultaneously. As with any SE tool, it is crucial that these assistants effectively meet developers' needs. Recent studies have shown addressing this challenge is complicated by the variety in developers' needs, and the ambiguous and unbounded nature of conversational interaction. This paper discusses our current and future work towards characterizing how diversity in cognition and organizational context impacts developers' needs, and exploring personalization as a means of improving the inclusivity of LLM-based conversational programming assistants.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world decision-making, including in the domain of public policy. Yet, their ability to comprehend and reason about policy-related content remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we present \textbf{\textit{PolicyBench}}, the first large-scale cross-system benchmark (US-China) evaluating policy comprehension, comprising 21K cases across a broad spectrum of policy areas, capturing the diversity and complexity of real-world governance. Following Bloom's taxonomy, the benchmark assesses three core capabilities: (1) \textbf{Memorization}: factual recall of policy knowledge, (2) \textbf{Understanding}: conceptual and contextual reasoning, and (3) \textbf{Application}: problem-solving in real-life policy scenarios. Building on this benchmark, we further propose \textbf{\textit{PolicyMoE}}, a domain-specialized Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with expert modules aligned to each cognitive level. The proposed models demonstrate stronger performance on application-oriented policy tasks than on memorization or conceptual understanding, and yields the highest accuracy on structured reasoning tasks. Our results reveal key limitations of current LLMs in policy understanding and suggest paths toward more reliable, policy-focused models.

Logical vulnerabilities in software stem from flaws in program logic rather than memory safety, which can lead to critical security failures. Although existing automated program repair techniques primarily focus on repairing memory corruption vulnerabilities, they struggle with logical vulnerabilities because of their limited semantic understanding of the vulnerable code and its expected behavior. On the other hand, recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and repairing code are promising. However, no framework currently exists to analyze the capabilities and limitations of such techniques for logical vulnerabilities. This paper aims to systematically evaluate both traditional and LLM-based repair approaches for addressing real-world logical vulnerabilities. To facilitate our assessment, we created the first ever dataset, LogicDS, of 86 logical vulnerabilities with assigned CVEs reflecting tangible security impact. We also developed a systematic framework, LogicEval, to evaluate patches for logical vulnerabilities. Evaluations suggest that compilation and testing failures are primarily driven by prompt sensitivity, loss of code context, and difficulty in patch localization.

Predicting counterfactual outcomes in longitudinal data, where sequential treatment decisions heavily depend on evolving patient states, is critical yet notoriously challenging due to complex time-dependent confounding and inadequate uncertainty quantification in existing methods. We introduce the Causal Diffusion Model (CDM), the first denoising diffusion probabilistic approach explicitly designed to generate full probabilistic distributions of counterfactual outcomes under sequential interventions. CDM employs a novel residual denoising architecture with relational self-attention, capturing intricate temporal dependencies and multimodal outcome trajectories without requiring explicit adjustments (e.g., inverse-probability weighting or adversarial balancing) for confounding. In rigorous evaluation on a pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic tumor-growth simulator widely adopted in prior work, CDM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art longitudinal causal inference methods, achieving a 15-30% relative improvement in distributional accuracy (1-Wasserstein distance) while maintaining competitive or superior point-estimate accuracy (RMSE) under high-confounding regimes. By unifying uncertainty quantification and robust counterfactual prediction in complex, sequentially confounded settings, without tailored deconfounding, CDM offers a flexible, high-impact tool for decision support in medicine, policy evaluation, and other longitudinal domains.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language models by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple future tokens, which the target model then verifies in parallel. DFlash shows that a block diffusion drafter can generate an entire draft block in a single forward pass and achieve state-of-the-art speculative decoding performance, outperforming strong autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3. Vanilla DFlash, however, still verifies only a single drafted trajectory per round, potentially limiting its acceptance length. We introduce DDTree (Diffusion Draft Tree), a method that constructs a draft tree directly from the per-position distributions of a block diffusion drafter. Under a fixed node budget, DDTree uses a simple best-first heap algorithm to select the continuations that are most likely to match the target model according to a surrogate defined by the draft model's output. The resulting tree is verified efficiently in a single target model forward pass using an ancestor-only attention mask. Because DDTree builds on DFlash, a leading draft model for speculative decoding, these gains place DDTree among the leading approaches to speculative decoding.

Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce ROSE, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a largescale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.

Autonomous AI agents are rapidly transitioning from experimental tools to operational infrastructure, with projections that 80% of enterprise applications will embed AI copilots by the end of 2026. As agents gain the ability to execute real-world actions (reading files, running commands, making network requests, modifying databases), a fundamental security gap has emerged. The dominant approach to agent safety relies on prompt-level guardrails: natural language instructions that operate at the same abstraction level as the threats they attempt to mitigate. This paper argues that prompt-based safety is architecturally insufficient for agents with execution capability and introduces Parallax, a paradigm for safe autonomous AI execution grounded in four principles: Cognitive-Executive Separation, which structurally prevents the reasoning system from executing actions; Adversarial Validation with Graduated Determinism, which interposes an independent, multi-tiered validator between reasoning and execution; Information Flow Control, which propagates data sensitivity labels through agent workflows to detect context-dependent threats; and Reversible Execution, which captures pre-destructive state to enable rollback when validation fails. We present OpenParallax, an open-source reference implementation in Go, and evaluate it using Assume-Compromise Evaluation, a methodology that bypasses the reasoning system entirely to test the architectural boundary under full agent compromise. Across 280 adversarial test cases in nine attack categories, Parallax blocks 98.9% of attacks with zero false positives under its default configuration, and 100% of attacks under its maximum-security configuration. When the reasoning system is compromised, prompt-level guardrails provide zero protection because they exist only within the compromised system; Parallax's architectural boundary holds regardless.

Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with the rise of vision-language models, yet evaluation has remained concentrated on a small cluster of high- and mid-resource scripts. We introduce GlotOCR Bench, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating OCR generalization across 100+ Unicode scripts. Our benchmark comprises clean and degraded image variants rendered from real multilingual texts. Images are rendered using fonts from the Google Fonts repository, shaped with HarfBuzz and rasterized with FreeType, supporting both LTR and RTL scripts. Samples of rendered images were manually reviewed to verify correct rendering across all scripts. We evaluate a broad suite of open-weight and proprietary vision-language models and find that most perform well on fewer than ten scripts, and even the strongest frontier models fail to generalize beyond thirty scripts. Performance broadly tracks script-level pretraining coverage, suggesting that current OCR systems rely on language model pretraining as much as on visual recognition. Models confronted with unfamiliar scripts either produce random noise or hallucinate characters from similar scripts they already know. We release the benchmark and pipeline for reproducibility. Pipeline Code: https://github.com/cisnlp/glotocr-bench, Benchmark: https://hf.co/datasets/cis-lmu/glotocr-bench.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have surged as a transformative technology for science and society, prompting governments worldwide to pursue sovereign AI capabilities that ensure data compliance and cultural representation. However, the associated capital costs and engineering complexity required to train these models have largely restricted such capabilities to the private sector, leaving a significant gap for public institutions. This paper details the engineering journey behind training Apertus, a fully open multilingual foundation model, on the Alps supercomputer. Representing a first-of-its-kind achievement for academia at the 70B parameter scale, we successfully deployed a massive pre-training campaign on one of Europe's largest systems for open science, powered by NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. We detail the challenges encountered in readying HPC infrastructure for training AI models, from overcoming storage bottlenecks to stabilizing large-scale interconnects, and the lessons learned in transforming a supercomputer into a resilient software-defined Machine Learning Platform. Finally, we discuss the post-training requirements and evolution of our Machine Learning platform, outlining how this initial release lays the groundwork for a sustained, iterative operational capability, in particular for fine tuning foundation models, that extends well beyond a single model training run.

Balancing convergence speed, generalization capability, and computational efficiency remains a core challenge in deep learning optimization. First-order gradient descent methods, epitomized by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam, serve as the cornerstone of modern training pipelines. However, large-scale model training, stringent differential privacy requirements, and distributed learning paradigms expose critical limitations in these conventional approaches regarding privacy protection and memory efficiency. To mitigate these bottlenecks, researchers explore second-order optimization techniques to surpass first-order performance ceilings, while zeroth-order methods reemerge to alleviate memory constraints inherent to large-scale training. Despite this proliferation of methodologies, the field lacks a cohesive framework that unifies underlying principles and delineates application scenarios for these disparate approaches. In this work, we retrospectively analyze the evolutionary trajectory of deep learning optimization algorithms and present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of mainstream optimizers across diverse model architectures and training scenarios. We distill key emerging trends and fundamental design trade-offs, pinpointing promising directions for future research. By synthesizing theoretical insights with extensive empirical evidence, we provide actionable guidance for designing next-generation highly efficient, robust, and trustworthy optimization methods. The code is available at https://github.com/APRIL-AIGC/Awesome-Optimizer.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for optimizing search agents in complex information retrieval tasks. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on gold supervision, such as ground-truth answers, which is difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we propose Cycle-Consistent Search (CCS), a gold-supervision-free framework for training search agents, inspired by cycle-consistency techniques from unsupervised machine translation and image-to-image translation. Our key hypothesis is that an optimal search trajectory, unlike insufficient or irrelevant ones, serves as a lossless encoding of the question's intent. Consequently, a high-quality trajectory should preserve the information required to accurately reconstruct the original question, thereby inducing a reward signal for policy optimization. However, naive cycle-consistency objectives are vulnerable to information leakage, as reconstruction may rely on superficial lexical cues rather than the underlying search process. To reduce this effect, we apply information bottlenecks, including exclusion of the final response and named entity recognition (NER) masking of search queries. These constraints force reconstruction to rely on retrieved observations together with the structural scaffold, ensuring that the resulting reward signal reflects informational adequacy rather than linguistic redundancy. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that CCS achieves performance comparable to supervised baselines while outperforming prior methods that do not rely on gold supervision. These results suggest that CCS provides a scalable training paradigm for training search agents in settings where gold supervision is unavailable.

There is growing interest in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for text-to-model translation and optimization tasks. This paper aims to advance this line of research by introducing \textsc{Text2Model} and \textsc{Text2Zinc}. \textsc{Text2Model} is a suite of co-pilots based on several LLM strategies with varying complexity, along with an online leaderboard. \textsc{Text2Zinc} is a cross-domain dataset for capturing optimization and satisfaction problems specified in natural language, along with an interactive editor with built-in AI assistant. While there is an emerging literature on using LLMs for translating combinatorial problems into formal models, our work is the first attempt to integrate \textit{both} satisfaction and optimization problems within a \textit{unified architecture} and \textit{dataset}. Moreover, our approach is \textit{solver-agnostic} unlike existing work that focuses on translation to a solver-specific model. To achieve this, we leverage \textsc{MiniZinc}'s solver-and-paradigm-agnostic modeling capabilities to formulate combinatorial problems. We conduct comprehensive experiments to compare execution and solution accuracy across several single- and multi-call strategies, including; zero-shot prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, intermediate representations via knowledge-graphs, grammar-based syntax encoding, and agentic approaches that decompose the model into sequential sub-tasks. Our co-pilot strategies are competitive, and in parts improve, recent research in this domain. Our findings indicate that while LLMs are promising they are not yet a push-button technology for combinatorial modeling. We contribute \textsc{Text2Model} co-pilots and leaderboard, and \textsc{Text2Zinc} and interactive editor to open-source to support closing this performance gap.

The Sauer-Shelah-Perles Lemma is a cornerstone of combinatorics and learning theory, bounding the size of a binary hypothesis class in terms of its Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. For classes of functions over a $k$-ary alphabet, namely the multiclass setting, the Natarajan dimension has long served as an analogue of VC dimension, yet the corresponding Sauer-type bounds are suboptimal for alphabet sizes $k>2$. In this work, we establish a sharp Sauer inequality for multiclass and list prediction. Our bound is expressed in terms of the Daniely--Shalev-Shwartz (DS) dimension, and more generally with its extension, the list-DS dimension -- the combinatorial parameters that characterize multiclass and list PAC learnability. Our bound is tight for every alphabet size $k$, list size $\ell$, and dimension value, replacing the exponential dependence on $\ell$ in the Natarajan-based bound by the optimal polynomial dependence, and improving the dependence on $k$ as well. Our proof uses the polynomial method. In contrast to the classical VC case, where several direct combinatorial proofs are known, we are not aware of any purely combinatorial proof in the DS setting. This motivates several directions for future research, which are discussed in the paper. As consequences, we obtain improved sample complexity upper bounds for list PAC learning and for uniform convergence of list predictors, sharpening the recent results of Charikar et al.~(STOC~2023), Hanneke et al.~(COLT~2024), and Brukhim et al.~(NeurIPS~2024).

The most cited calibration result in deep learning -- post-temperature-scaling ECE of 0.012 on CIFAR-100 (Guo et al., 2017) -- is below the statistical noise floor. We prove this is not a failure of the experiment but a law: the minimax rate for estimating calibration error with model error rate epsilon is Theta((Lepsilon/m)^{1/3}), and no estimator can beat it. This "verification tax" implies that as AI models improve, verifying their calibration becomes fundamentally harder -- with the same exponent in opposite directions. We establish four results that contradict standard evaluation practice: (1) self-evaluation without labels provides exactly zero information about calibration, bounded by a constant independent of compute; (2) a sharp phase transition at mepsilon approx 1 below which miscalibration is undetectable; (3) active querying eliminates the Lipschitz constant, collapsing estimation to detection; (4) verification cost grows exponentially with pipeline depth at rate L^K. We validate across five benchmarks (MMLU, TruthfulQA, ARC-Challenge, HellaSwag, WinoGrande; ~27,000 items) with 6 LLMs from 5 families (8B-405B parameters, 27 benchmark-model pairs with logprob-based confidence), 95% bootstrap CIs, and permutation tests. Self-evaluation non-significance holds in 80% of pairs. Across frontier models, 23% of pairwise comparisons are indistinguishable from noise, implying that credible calibration claims must report verification floors and prioritize active querying once gains approach benchmark resolution.

LLM agents with persistent memory store information as flat factual records, providing little context for temporal reasoning, change tracking, or cross-session aggregation. Inspired by the drawing effect [3], we introduce dual-trace memory encoding. In this method, each stored fact is paired with a concrete scene trace, a narrative reconstruction of the moment and context in which the information was learned. The agent is forced to commit to specific contextual details during encoding, creating richer, more distinctive memory traces. Using the LongMemEval-S benchmark (4,575 sessions, 100 recall questions), we compare dual-trace encoding against a fact-only control with matched coverage and format over 99 shared questions. Dual-trace achieves 73.7% overall accuracy versus 53.5%, a +20.2 percentage point (pp) gain (95% CI: [+12.1, +29.3], bootstrap p < 0.0001). Gains concentrate in temporal reasoning (+40pp), knowledge-update tracking (+25pp), and multi-session aggregation (+30pp), with no benefit for single-session retrieval, consistent with encoding specificity theory [8]. Token analysis shows dual-trace encoding achieves this gain at no additional cost. We additionally sketch an architectural design for adapting dual-trace encoding to coding agents, with preliminary pilot validation.

Traditional fixed-depth architectures scale quality by increasing training FLOPs, typically through increased parameterization, at the expense of a higher memory footprint, or data. A potential alternative is looped architectures, which instead increase FLOPs by sending activations through a block of layers in a loop. While promising, existing recipes for training looped architectures can be unstable, suffering from residual explosion and loss spikes. We address these challenges by recasting looping as a nonlinear time-variant dynamical system over the residual stream. Via a linear approximation to this system, we find that instability occurs in existing looped architectures as a result of large spectral norms in their injection parameters. To address these instability issues, we propose Parcae, a novel stable, looped architecture that constrains the spectral norm of the injection parameters via discretization of a negative diagonal parameterization. As a result, Parcae achieves up to 6.3% lower validation perplexity over prior large-scale looped models. Using our stable looped architecture, we investigate the scaling properties of looping as a medium to improve quality by increasing FLOPs in training and test-time. For training, we derive predictable power laws to scale FLOPs while keeping parameter count fixed. Our initial scaling laws suggest that looping and data should be increased in tandem, given a fixed FLOP budget. At test-time, we find that Parcae can use looping to scale compute, following a predictable, saturating exponential decay. When scaled up to 1.3B parameters, we find that Parcae improves CORE and Core-Extended quality by 2.99 and 1.18 points when compared to strong Transformer baselines under a fixed parameter and data budget, achieving a relative quality of up to 87.5% a Transformer twice the size.

Deep neural networks are typically trained by uniformly sampling large datasets across epochs, despite evidence that not all samples contribute equally throughout learning. Recent work shows that progressively reducing the amount of training data can improve efficiency and generalization, but existing methods rely on fixed schedules that do not adapt during training. In this work, we propose Adaptive Data Dropout, a simple framework that dynamically adjusts the subset of training data based on performance feedback. Inspired by self-regulated learning, our approach treats data selection as an adaptive process, increasing or decreasing data exposure in response to changes in training accuracy. We introduce a lightweight stochastic update mechanism that modulates the dropout schedule online, allowing the model to balance exploration and consolidation over time. Experiments on standard image classification benchmarks show that our method reduces effective training steps while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to static data dropout strategies. These results highlight adaptive data selection as a promising direction for efficient and robust training. Code will be released.

Despite significant progress in video-language modeling, hallucinations remain a persistent challenge in Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs), referring to outputs that appear plausible yet contradict the content of the input video. This survey presents a comprehensive analysis of hallucinations in Vid-LLMs and introduces a systematic taxonomy that categorizes them into two core types: dynamic distortion and content fabrication, each comprising two subtypes with representative cases. Building on this taxonomy, we review recent advances in the evaluation and mitigation of hallucinations, covering key benchmarks, metrics, and intervention strategies. We further analyze the root causes of dynamic distortion and content fabrication, which often result from limited capacity for temporal representation and insufficient visual grounding. These insights inform several promising directions for future work, including the development of motion-aware visual encoders and the integration of counterfactual learning techniques. This survey consolidates scattered progress to foster a systematic understanding of hallucinations in Vid-LLMs, laying the groundwork for building robust and reliable video-language systems. An up-to-date curated list of related works is maintained at https://github.com/hukcc/Awesome-Video-Hallucination .

This paper studies continuous-time stochastic control problems whose controlled states are fully non-Markovian and depend on unknown model parameters. Such problems arise naturally in path-dependent stochastic differential equations, rough-volatility hedging, and systems driven by fractional Brownian motion. Building on the discrete skeleton approach developed in earlier work, we propose a Monte Carlo learning methodology for the associated embedded backward dynamic programming equation. Our main contribution is twofold. First, we construct explicit dominating training laws and Radon--Nikodym weights for several representative classes of non-Markovian controlled systems. This yields an off-model training architecture in which a fixed synthetic dataset is generated under a reference law, while the dynamic programming operators associated with a target model are recovered by importance sampling. Second, we use this structure to design an adaptive update mechanism under parametric model uncertainty, so that repeated recalibration can be performed by reweighting the same training sample rather than regenerating new trajectories. For fixed parameters, we establish non-asymptotic error bounds for the approximation of the embedded dynamic programming equation via deep neural networks. For adaptive learning, we derive quantitative estimates that separate Monte Carlo approximation error from model-risk error. Numerical experiments illustrate both the off-model training mechanism and the adaptive importance-sampling update in structured linear-quadratic examples.

Speech-to-speech language models have recently emerged to enhance the naturalness of conversational AI. In particular, full-duplex models are distinguished by their real-time interactivity, including handling of pauses, interruptions, and backchannels. However, improving their factuality remains an open challenge. While scaling the model size could address this gap, it would make real-time inference prohibitively expensive. In this work, we propose MoshiRAG, a modular approach that combines a compact full-duplex interface with selective retrieval to access more powerful knowledge sources. Our asynchronous framework enables the model to identify knowledge-demanding queries and ground its responses in external information. By leveraging the natural temporal gap between response onset and the delivery of core information, the retrieval process can be completed while maintaining a natural conversation flow. With this approach, MoshiRAG achieves factuality comparable to the best publicly released non-duplex speech language models while preserving the interactivity inherent to full-duplex systems. Moreover, our flexible design supports plug-and-play retrieval methods without retraining and demonstrates strong performance on out-of-domain mathematical reasoning tasks.

Metonymy and metaphor often co-occur in natural language, yet computational work has studied them largely in isolation. We introduce a framework that transforms a literal sentence into three figurative variants: metonymic, metaphoric, and hybrid. Using this framework, we construct MetFuse, the first dedicated dataset of figurative fusion between metonymy and metaphor, containing 1,000 human-verified meaning-aligned quadruplets totaling 4,000 sentences. Extrinsic experiments on eight existing benchmarks show that augmenting training data with MetFuse consistently improves both metonymy and metaphor classification, with hybrid examples yielding the largest gains on metonymy tasks. Using this dataset, we also analyze how the presence of one figurative type impacts another. Our findings show that both human annotators and large language models better identify metonymy in hybrid sentences than in metonymy-only sentences, demonstrating that the presence of a metaphor makes a metonymic noun more explicit. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/cincynlp/MetFuse.

Binary decompilation is a critical reverse engineering task aimed at reconstructing high-level source code from stripped executables. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise, they often suffer from "logical hallucinations" and "semantic misalignment" due to the irreversible semantic loss during compilation, resulting in generated code that fails to re-execute. In this study, we propose Cognitive Decompiler Refinement with Robustness (CoDe-R), a lightweight two-stage code refinement framework. The first stage introduces Semantic Cognitive Enhancement (SCE), a Rationale-Guided Semantic Injection strategy that trains the model to recover high-level algorithmic intent alongside code. The second stage introduces a Dynamic Dual-Path Fallback (DDPF) mechanism during inference, which adaptively balances semantic recovery and syntactic stability via a hybrid verification strategy. Evaluation on the HumanEval-Decompile benchmark demonstrates that CoDe-R (using a 1.3B backbone) establishes a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) in the lightweight regime. Notably, it is the first 1.3B model to exceed an Average Re-executability Rate of 50.00%, significantly outperforming the baseline and effectively bridging the gap between efficient models and expert-level performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Theaoi/CoDe-R.

Multilingual benchmarks guide the development of frontier models. Yet multilingual evaluations reported by frontier models are structured similar to popular reasoning and knowledge benchmarks, but across many languages. We show such benchmarks, and consequently multilingual evaluations, measure mathematical reasoning and factual recall, not multilingual proficiency. For example, thinking variants dramatically outperform instruct variants on these benchmarks, yet often perform worse on real-world multilingual tasks, such as LMArena. We propose a simple alternative: evaluate multilingual capability via round-trip translation. Given text in a source language, translate it to a target language and back; semantic gaps between the original and result expose failures in multilingual generation capabilities. Round-trip translation correlates almost perfectly (\r{ho} = 0.94) with user ratings on LMArena with our benchmark, requires no human reference translations, and does not require a more capable multilingual judge than tested models. Lastly, we introduce Lost in Translation (LiT), a challenging round-trip translation benchmark spanning widely spoken languages worldwide, for realistic evaluation of multilingual frontier models.

Force and torque (F/T) sensing is critical for robot-environment interaction, but physical F/T sensors impose constraints in size, cost, and fragility. To mitigate this, recent studies have estimated force/wrench sensorlessly from robot internal states. While existing methods generally target relatively slow interactions, tasks involving rapid interactions, such as grinding, can induce task-critical high-frequency vibrations, and estimation in such robotic settings remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a Frequency-aware Decomposition Network (FDN) for short-term forecasting of vibration-rich wrench from proprioceptive history. FDN predicts spectrally decomposed wrench with asymmetric deterministic and probabilistic heads, modeling the high-frequency residual as a learned conditional distribution. It further incorporates frequency-awareness to adaptively enhance input spectra with learned filtering and impose a frequency-band prior on the outputs. We pretrain FDN on a large-scale open-source robot dataset and transfer the learned proprioception-to-wrench representation to the downstream. On real-world grinding excavation data from a 6-DoF hydraulic manipulator and under a delayed estimation setting, FDN outperforms baseline estimators and forecasters in the high-frequency band and remains competitive in the low-frequency band. Transfer learning provides additional gains, suggesting the potential of large-scale pretraining and transfer learning for robotic wrench estimation. Code and data will be made available upon acceptance.

Many techniques in program synthesis, superoptimization, and array programming require parallel rollouts of general-purpose programs. GPUs, while capable targets for domain-specific parallelism, are traditionally underutilized by such workloads. Motivated by this opportunity, we introduce a pleasingly parallel virtual machine and benchmark its performance by evaluating millions of concurrent array programs, observing speedups up to $147\times$ relative to serial evaluation.

Large Language Model-based Hyper Heuristic (LHH) has recently emerged as an efficient way for automatic heuristic design. However, most existing LHHs just perform well in optimizing a single function within a pre-defined solver. Their single-layer evolution makes them not effective enough to write a competent complete solver. While some variants incorporate hyperparameter tuning or attempt to generate complex code through iterative local modifications, they still lack a high-level algorithmic modeling, leading to limited exploration efficiency. To address this, we reformulate heuristic design as a Bi-level Optimization problem and propose \textbf{BEAM} (Bi-level Memory-adaptive Algorithmic Evolution). BEAM's exterior layer evolves high-level algorithmic structures with function placeholders through genetic algorithm (GA), while the interior layer realizes these placeholders via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We further introduce an Adaptive Memory module to facilitate complex code generation. To support the evaluation for complex code generation, we point out the limitations of starting LHHs from scratch or from code templates and introduce a Knowledge Augmentation (KA) Pipeline. Experimental results on several optimization problems demonstrate that BEAM significantly outperforms existing LHHs, notably reducing the optimality gap by 37.84\% on aggregate in CVRP hybrid algorithm design. BEAM also designs a heuristic that outperforms SOTA Maximum Independent Set (MIS) solver KaMIS.

Multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly paired with vision tools (e.g., depth, flow, correspondence) to enhance visual reasoning. However, despite access to these tool-generated visual cues, MLLMs often fail to benefit from them. Existing approaches typically feed raw tool outputs into the model, but these dense, pixel-level representations are misaligned with the language-native reasoning strengths of LLMs, leading to weak perception and reliance on language priors. We argue that, in problems where vision tools can provide the necessary visual cues, the bottleneck is not more tool calls or larger MLLMs, it is how tool outputs are represented. We introduce Perception Programs (P$^2$), a training-free, model-agnostic method that rewrites tool outputs into compact, structured, language-native summaries that MLLMs can directly parse and reason over. Across six perception-centric tasks in BLINK, P$^2$ consistently yields large improvements over base models and raw tool-augmented baselines. With GPT-5 Mini as the base model, P$^2$ raises its accuracy from 41.35\% to 86.47\% on multi-view reasoning, from 52.42\% to 81.45\% on relative depth, and achieves a 22\% average gain across tasks, setting new state-of-the-art results. Even on smaller MLLMs, e.g., InternVL3.5-4B and Qwen3VL-4B, we observe 15-40\% absolute gains from P$^2$, surpassing prior agentic, supervised, and RL-based tool-use methods-without any training or model modifications.

Deep learning (DL) compilers rely on cost models and auto-tuning to optimize tensor programs for target hardware. However, existing approaches depend on large offline datasets, incurring high collection costs and offering suboptimal transferability across platforms. In this paper, we introduce TCL, a novel efficient and transferable compiler framework for fast tensor program optimization across diverse hardware platforms to address these challenges. Specifically, TCL is built on three core enablers: (1) the RDU Sampler, a data-efficient active learning strategy that selects only 10% of tensor programs by jointly optimizing Representativeness, Diversity, and Uncertainty, substantially reducing data collection costs while maintaining near-original model accuracy; (2) a new Mamba-based cost model that efficiently captures long-range schedule dependencies while achieving a favorable trade-off between prediction accuracy and computational cost through reduced parameterization and lightweight sequence modeling; and (3) a continuous knowledge distillation framework that effectively and progressively transfers knowledge across multiple hardware platforms while avoiding the parameter explosion and data dependency issues typically caused by traditional multi-task learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of each individual enabler and the holistic TCL framework. When optimizing a range of mainstream DL models on both CPU and GPU platforms, TCL achieves, on average, 16.8x and 12.48x faster tuning time, and 1.20x and 1.13x lower inference latency, respectively, compared to Tenset-MLP.

Multimodal deep search agents have shown great potential in solving complex tasks by iteratively collecting textual and visual evidence. However, managing the heterogeneous information and high token costs associated with multimodal inputs over long horizons remains a critical challenge, as existing methods often suffer from context explosion or the loss of crucial visual signals. To address this, we propose a novel Long-horizon MultiModal deep search framework, named LMM-Searcher, centered on a file-based visual representation mechanism. By offloading visual assets to an external file system and mapping them to lightweight textual identifiers (UIDs), our approach mitigates context overhead while preserving multimodal information for future access. We equip the agent with a tailored fetch-image tool, enabling a progressive, on-demand visual loading strategy for active perception. Furthermore, we introduce a data synthesis pipeline designed to generate queries requiring complex cross-modal multi-hop reasoning. Using this pipeline, we distill 12K high-quality trajectories to fine-tune Qwen3-VL-Thinking-30A3B into a specialized multimodal deep search agent. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our method successfully scales to 100-turn search horizons, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on challenging long-horizon benchmarks like MM-BrowseComp and MMSearch-Plus, while also exhibiting strong generalizability across different base models. Our code will be released in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LMM-Searcher.

Visual tokenizers map high-dimensional raw pixels into a compressed representation for downstream modeling. Beyond compression, tokenizers dictate what information is preserved and how it is organized. A de facto standard approach to video tokenization is to represent a video as a spatiotemporal 3D grid of tokens, each capturing the corresponding local information in the original signal. This requires the downstream model that consumes the tokens, e.g., a text-to-video model, to learn to predict all low-level details "pixel-by-pixel" irrespective of the video's inherent complexity, leading to high learning complexity. We present VideoFlexTok, which represents videos with a variable-length sequence of tokens structured in a coarse-to-fine manner -- where the first tokens (emergently) capture abstract information, such as semantics and motion, and later tokens add fine-grained details. The generative flow decoder enables realistic video reconstructions from any token count. This representation structure allows adapting the token count according to downstream needs and encoding videos longer than the baselines with the same budget. We evaluate VideoFlexTok on class- and text-to-video generative tasks and show that it leads to more efficient training compared to 3D grid tokens, e.g., achieving comparable generation quality (gFVD and ViCLIP Score) with a 5x smaller model (1.1B vs 5.2B). Finally, we demonstrate how VideoFlexTok can enable long video generation without prohibitive computational cost by training a text-to-video model on 10-second 81-frame videos with only 672 tokens, 8x fewer than a comparable 3D grid tokenizer.

Code reasoning tasks are increasingly crucial to evaluating large language models (LLMs). Yet most existing benchmarks rely on simplistic, LLM-generated snippets or human-written solutions to code challenges and often restrict inputs and outputs to primitive types, failing to reflect the structure and dependencies of real-world projects. These simplifications limit their ability to measure practical generalizability. We present R2Eval1, a benchmark of 135 code reasoning problems drawn from ten widely used Python projects. Unlike prior work, R2Eval serializes compound and custom types, preserving real-world data complexity and enabling a more realistic assessment of LLMs.

Fast grasping is critical for mobile robots in logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Existing methods face fundamental challenges in impact stabilization under high-speed motion, real-time whole-body coordination, and generalization across diverse objects and scenarios, limited by fixed bases, simple grippers, or slow tactile response capabilities. We propose \textbf{FastGrasp}, a learning-based framework that integrates grasp guidance, whole-body control, and tactile feedback for mobile fast grasping. Our two-stage reinforcement learning strategy first generates diverse grasp candidates via conditional variational autoencoder conditioned on object point clouds, then executes coordinated movements of mobile base, arm, and hand guided by optimal grasp selection. Tactile sensing enables real-time grasp adjustments to handle impact effects and object variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior grasping performance in both simulation and real-world scenarios, achieving robust manipulation across diverse object geometries through effective sim-to-real transfer.

The rapid expansion of large language model (LLM) safety evaluation has produced a substantial benchmark ecosystem, but not a correspondingly coherent measurement ecosystem. We present AISafetyBenchExplorer, a structured catalogue of 195 AI safety benchmarks released between 2018 and 2026, organized through a multi-sheet schema that records benchmark-level metadata, metric-level definitions, benchmark-paper metadata, and repository activity. This design enables meta-analysis not only of what benchmarks exist, but also of how safety is operationalized, aggregated, and judged across the literature. Using the updated catalogue, we identify a central structural problem: benchmark proliferation has outpaced measurement standardization. The current landscape is dominated by medium-complexity benchmarks (94/195), while only 7 benchmarks occupy the Popular tier. The workbook further reports strong concentration around English-only evaluation (165/195), evaluation-only resources (170/195), stale GitHub repositories (137/195), stale Hugging Face datasets (96/195), and heavy reliance on arXiv preprints among benchmarks with known venue metadata. At the metric level, the catalogue shows that familiar labels such as accuracy, F1 score, safety score, and aggregate benchmark scores often conceal materially different judges, aggregation rules, and threat models. We argue that the field's main failure mode is fragmentation rather than scarcity. Researchers now have many benchmark artifacts, but they often lack a shared measurement language, a principled basis for benchmark selection, and durable stewardship norms for post publication maintenance. AISafetyBenchExplorer addresses this gap by providing a traceable benchmark catalogue, a controlled metadata schema, and a complexity taxonomy that together support more rigorous benchmark discovery, comparison, and meta-evaluation.

The rapid advancement of AI has changed the character of HPC usage such as dimensioning, provisioning, and execution. Not only has energy demand been amplified, but existing rudimentary continual learning capabilities limit ability of AI to effectively manage HPCs. This paper reviews emerging directions beyond monolithic transformers, emphasizing agentic AI and brain inspired architectures as complementary paths toward sustainable, adaptive systems. We propose LIFE, a reasoning and Learning framework that is Incremental, Flexible, and Energy efficient that is implemented as an agent centric system rather than a single monolithic model. LIFE uniquely combines four components to realize self evolving network management and operations in HPCs. The components are an orchestrator, Agentic Context Engineering, a novel memory system, and information lattice learning. LIFE can also generalize to enable a variety of orthogonal use cases. We ground LIFE in a specific closed loop HPC operations example for detecting and mitigating latency spikes experienced by critical micro services running on a Kubernetes like cluster.

As agentic foundation models continue to evolve, how to further improve their performance in vertical domains has become an important challenge. To this end, building upon Tongyi DeepResearch, a powerful agentic foundation model, we focus on the Chinese medical deep search scenario and propose QuarkMedSearch, systematically exploring a full-pipeline approach spanning medical multi-hop data construction, training strategies, and evaluation benchmarks to further push and assess its performance upper bound in vertical domains. Specifically, for data synthesis, to address the scarcity of deep search training data in the medical domain, we combine a large-scale medical knowledge graph with real-time online exploration to construct long-horizon medical deep search training data; for post-training, we adopt a two-stage SFT and RL training strategy that progressively enhances the model's planning, tool invocation, and reflection capabilities required for deep search, while maintaining search efficiency; for evaluation, we collaborate with medical experts to construct the QuarkMedSearch Benchmark through rigorous manual verification. Experimental results demonstrate that QuarkMedSearch achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale on the QuarkMedSearch Benchmark, while also maintaining strong competitiveness on general benchmarks.

Humans readily recognize objects from sparse line drawings, a capacity that appears early in development and persists across cultures, suggesting neural rather than purely learned origins. Yet the computational mechanism by which the brain transforms high-level semantic knowledge into low-level visual symbols remains poorly understood. Here we propose that ancient pictographic writing emerged from the brain's intrinsic tendency to compress visual input into stable, boundary-based abstractions. We construct a biologically inspired digital twin of the visual hierarchy that encodes an image into low-level features, generates a contour sketch, and iteratively refines it through top-down feedback guided by semantic representations, mirroring the feedforward and recurrent architecture of the human visual cortex. The resulting symbols bear striking structural resemblance to early pictographs across culturally distant writing systems, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese oracle bone characters, and proto-cuneiform, and offer candidate interpretations for undeciphered scripts. Our findings support a neuro-computational origin of pictographic writing and establish a framework in which AI can recapitulate the cognitive processes by which humans first externalized perception into symbols.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are now operating on public roads, which makes their testing and validation more critical than ever. Simulation offers a safe and controlled environment for evaluating AV performance in varied conditions. However, existing simulation tools mainly focus on graphical realism and rely on simple rule-based models and therefore fail to accurately represent the complexity of driving behaviors and interactions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown strong potential to address these limitations; however, despite the rapid progress across AI methodologies, a comprehensive survey of their application to mixed autonomy traffic simulation remains lacking. Existing surveys either focus on simulation tools without examining the AI methods behind them, or cover ego-centric decision-making without addressing the broader challenge of modeling surrounding traffic. Moreover, they do not offer a unified taxonomy of AI methods covering individual behavior modeling to full scene simulation. To address these gaps, this survey provides a structured review and synthesis of AI methods for modeling AV and human driving behavior in mixed autonomy traffic simulation. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes methods into three families: agent-level behavior models, environment-level simulation methods, and cognitive and physics-informed methods. The survey analyzes how existing simulation platforms fall short of the needs of mixed autonomy research and outlines directions to narrow this gap. It also provides a chronological overview of AI methods and reviews evaluation protocols and metrics, simulation tools, and datasets. By covering both traffic engineering and computer science perspectives, we aim to bridge the gap between these two communities.

The rapid release of both language models and benchmarks makes it increasingly costly to evaluate every model on every dataset. In practice, models are often evaluated on different samples, making scores difficult to compare across studies. To address this, we propose a framework based on multidimensional Item Response Theory (IRT) that uses anchor items to calibrate new benchmarks to the evaluation suite while holding previously calibrated item parameters fixed. Our approach supports a realistic evaluation setting in which datasets are introduced over time and models are evaluated only on the datasets available at the time of evaluation, while a fixed anchor set for each dataset is used so that results from different evaluation periods can be compared directly. In large-scale experiments on more than $400$ models, our framework predicts full-evaluation performance within 2-3 percentage points using only $100$ anchor questions per dataset, with Spearman $ρ\geq 0.9$ for ranking preservation, showing that it is possible to extend benchmark suites over time while preserving score comparability, at a constant evaluation cost per new dataset. Code available at https://github.com/eliyahabba/growing-pains

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation typically relies on ground truth (GT) labels obtained through manual annotation, but these can be prone to random errors or systematic biases. This study examines the robustness of deep learning models to such errors in echocardiography (echo) segmentation and evaluates a novel strategy for detecting and refurbishing erroneous labels during model training. Using the CAMUS dataset, we simulate three error types, then compare a loss-based GT label error detection method with one based on Variance of Gradients (VOG). We also propose a pseudo-labelling approach to refurbish suspected erroneous GT labels. We assess the performance of our proposed approach under varying error levels. Results show that VOG proved highly effective in flagging erroneous GT labels during training. However, a standard U-Net maintained strong performance under random label errors and moderate levels of systematic errors (up to 50%). The detection and refurbishment approach improved performance, particularly under high-error conditions.

We investigate random feature models in which neural networks sampled from a prescribed initialization ensemble are frozen and used as random features, with only the readout weights optimized. Adopting a statistical-physics viewpoint, we study the training, test, and generalization errors beyond the mean-kernel approximation. Since the predictor is a nonlinear functional of the induced random kernel, the ensemble-averaged errors depend not only on the mean kernel but also on higher-order fluctuation statistics. Within an effective field-theoretic framework, these finite-width contributions naturally appear as loop corrections. We derive the loop corrections to the training, test, and generalization errors, obtain their scaling laws, and support the theory with experimental verification.

Large language models (LLMs) inherently absorb harmful knowledge, misinformation, and personal data during pretraining on large-scale web corpora, with no native mechanism for selective removal. While machine unlearning offers a principled solution, existing approaches are provider-centric, requiring retraining pipelines, curated retain datasets, and direct intervention by model service providers (MSPs), thereby excluding end users from controlling their own data. We introduce Interactive Machine Unlearning (IMU), a new paradigm in which users can instruct LLMs to forget targeted knowledge through natural language at inference time. To realize IMU, we propose RePAIR, a prompt-aware model repair framework comprising (i) a watchdog model for unlearning intent detection, (ii) a surgeon model for generating repair procedures, and (iii) a patient model whose parameters are updated autonomously. At the core of RePAIR, we develop Steering Through Activation Manipulation with PseudoInverse (STAMP), a training-free, single-sample unlearning method that redirects MLP activations toward a refusal subspace via closed-form pseudoinverse updates. Its low-rank variant reduces computational complexity from O(d^3) to O(r^3 + r^2 * d), enabling efficient on-device unlearning with up to ~3x speedup over training-based baselines. Extensive experiments across harmful knowledge suppression, misinformation correction, and personal data erasure demonstrate that RePAIR achieves near-zero forget scores (Acc_f = 0.00, F-RL = 0.00) while preserving model utility (Acc_r up to 84.47, R-RL up to 0.88), outperforming six state-of-the-art baselines. These results establish RePAIR as an effective and practical framework for user-driven model editing, advancing transparent and on-device control over learned knowledge, with potential extensions to multimodal foundation models.

Adversarial training (AT) is an effective defense for large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks, but performing AT on LLMs is costly. To improve the efficiency of AT for LLMs, recent studies propose continuous AT (CAT) that searches for adversarial inputs within the continuous embedding space of LLMs during AT. While CAT has achieved empirical success, its underlying mechanism, i.e., why adversarial perturbations in the embedding space can help LLMs defend against jailbreak prompts synthesized in the input token space, remains unknown. This paper presents the first theoretical analysis of CAT on LLMs based on in-context learning (ICL) theory. For linear transformers trained with adversarial examples from the embedding space on in-context linear regression tasks, we prove a robust generalization bound that has a negative correlation with the perturbation radius in the embedding space. This clearly explains why CAT can defend against jailbreak prompts from the LLM's token space. Further, the robust bound shows that the robustness of an adversarially trained LLM is closely related to the singular values of its embedding matrix. Based on this, we propose to improve LLM CAT by introducing an additional regularization term, which depends on singular values of the LLM's embedding matrix, into the objective function of CAT. Experiments on real-world LLMs demonstrate that our method can help LLMs achieve a better jailbreak robustness-utility tradeoff. The code is available at https://github.com/fshp971/continuous-adv-icl.

Implicit biases in both humans and large language models (LLMs) pose significant societal risks. Dual process theories propose that biases arise primarily from associative System 1 thinking, while deliberative System 2 thinking mitigates bias, but the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to this phenomenon remain poorly understood. To better understand what underlies this duality in humans, and possibly in LLMs, we model System 1 and System 2 thinking as semantic memory networks with distinct structures, built from comparable datasets generated by both humans and LLMs. We then investigate how these distinct semantic memory structures relate to implicit gender bias using network-based evaluation metrics. We find that semantic memory structures are irreducible only in humans, suggesting that LLMs lack certain types of human-like conceptual knowledge. Moreover, semantic memory structure relates consistently to implicit bias only in humans, with lower levels of bias in System~2 structures. These findings suggest that certain types of conceptual knowledge contribute to bias regulation in humans, but not in LLMs, highlighting fundamental differences between human and machine cognition.

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant performance degradation on the long document understanding task as document length increases. This stems from two fundamental challenges: 1) a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), with crucial evidence buried in irrelevant pages; and 2) supervision scarcity, as datasets offering only final short answers provide a weak learning signal. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a paradigm that requires the model to execute a structured Analysis, Localization and Reasoning workflow. To instill this capability, we design a two-stage training framework: we first perform Supervised Fine-Tuning on high-quality data generated via an efficient knowledge distillation strategy. Subsequently, we employ an Evidence-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization which jointly optimizes for both evidence localization and answer accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a Evidence-Guided Resolution Allocation strategy to mitigate memory constraints of training on multi-pages documents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocSeeker achieves superior performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. We show it robustly generalizes from short-page training to ultra-long documents and is naturally synergistic with visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems, serving as a solid foundation for their implementation.

Dense Associative Memory (DAM) generalizes Hopfield networks through higher-order interactions and achieves storage capacity that scales as $O(N^{n-1})$ under suitable pattern separation conditions. Existing dynamical analyses primarily study the thermodynamic limit $N\to\infty$ with randomly sampled patterns and therefore do not provide finite-size guarantees or explicit convergence rates. We develop an algorithmic analysis of DAM retrieval dynamics that yields finite-$N$ guarantees under explicit, verifiable pattern conditions. Under a separation assumption and a bounded-interference condition at high loading, we prove geometric convergence of asynchronous retrieval dynamics, which implies $O(\log N)$ convergence time once the trajectory enters the basin of attraction. We further establish adversarial robustness bounds expressed through an explicit margin condition that quantifies the number of corrupted bits tolerable per sweep, and derive capacity guarantees that scale as $Θ(N^{n-1})$ up to polylogarithmic factors in the worst case, while recovering the classical $Θ(N^{n-1})$ scaling for random pattern ensembles. Finally, we show that DAM retrieval dynamics admit a potential-game interpretation that ensures convergence to pure Nash equilibria under asynchronous updates. Complete proofs are provided in the appendices, together with preliminary experiments that illustrate the predicted convergence, robustness, and capacity scaling behavior.

Satellite image restoration aims to improve image quality by compensating for degradations (e.g., noise and blur) introduced by the imaging system and acquisition conditions. As a fundamental preprocessing step, restoration directly impacts both ground-based product generation and emerging onboard AI applications. Traditional restoration pipelines based on sequential physical models are computationally intensive and slow, making them unsuitable for onboard environments. In this paper, we introduce ConvBEERS: a Convolutional Board-ready Embedded and Efficient Restoration model for Space to investigate whether a light and non-generative residual convolutional network, trained on simulated satellite data, can match or surpass a traditional ground-processing restoration pipeline across multiple operating conditions. Experiments conducted on simulated datasets and real Pleiades-HR imagery demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive image quality, with a +6.9dB PSNR improvement. Evaluation on a downstream object detection task demonstrates that restoration significantly improves performance, with up to +5.1% mAP@50. In addition, successful deployment on a Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA validates its practical feasibility for satellite onboard processing, with a ~41x reduction in latency compared to the traditional pipeline. These results demonstrate the relevance of using lightweight CNNs to achieve competitive restoration quality while addressing real-world constraints in spaceborne systems.

Inferring latent interaction structures from observed dynamics is a fundamental inverse problem in many-body interacting systems. Most neural approaches rely on black-box surrogates over trainable graphs, achieving accuracy at the expense of mechanistic interpretability. Symbolic regression offers explicit dynamical equations and stronger inductive biases, but typically assumes known topology and a fixed function library. We propose \textbf{COSINE} (\textbf{C}o-\textbf{O}ptimization of \textbf{S}ymbolic \textbf{I}nteractions and \textbf{N}etwork \textbf{E}dges), a differentiable framework that jointly discovers interaction graphs and sparse symbolic dynamics. To overcome the limitations of fixed symbolic libraries, COSINE further incorporates an outer-loop large language model that adaptively prunes and expands the hypothesis space using feedback from the inner optimization loop. Experiments on synthetic systems and large-scale real-world epidemic data demonstrate robust structural recovery and compact, mechanism-aligned dynamical expressions. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/COSINE-6D43.

Neuromorphic vision sensors offer low latency and high dynamic range, but their deployment in public spaces raises severe data protection concerns. Recent Event-to-Video (E2V) models can reconstruct high-fidelity intensity images from sparse event streams, inadvertently exposing human identities. Current obfuscation methods, such as masking or scrambling, corrupt the spatio-temporal structure, severely degrading data utility for downstream perception tasks. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first generative anonymization framework for event streams to resolve this utility-privacy trade-off. By bridging the modality gap between asynchronous events and standard spatial generative models, our pipeline projects events into an intermediate intensity representation, leverages pretrained models to synthesize realistic, non-existent identities, and re-encodes the features back into the neuromorphic domain. Experiments demonstrate that our method reliably prevents identity recovery from E2V reconstructions while preserving the structural data integrity required for downstream vision tasks. Finally, to facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce a novel, synchronized real-world event and RGB dataset captured via precise robotic trajectories, providing a robust benchmark for future research in privacy-preserving neuromorphic vision.

The rise of automated bidding strategies in online advertising presents new challenges in designing and analyzing efficient auction mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on proportional mechanisms within the context of auto-bidding and study the efficiency of pure Nash equilibria, specifically the price of anarchy (PoA), under the liquid welfare objective. We first establish a tight PoA bound of 2 for the standard proportional mechanism. Next, we introduce a modified version with an alternative payment scheme that achieves a PoA bound of $1 + \frac{O(1)}{n-1}$ where $n \geq 2$ denotes the number of bidding agents. This improvement surpasses the existing PoA barrier of 2 and approaches full efficiency as the number of agents increases. Our methodology leverages duality and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions from linear and convex programming. Despite its conceptual simplicity, our approach proves powerful and may offer broader applications for establishing PoA bounds.

FlashAttention-style online softmax enables exact attention computation with linear memory by streaming score tiles through on-chip memory and maintaining a running maximum and normalizer. However, as attention kernels approach peak tensor-core/cube-core throughput on modern accelerators, non-matmul components of online softmax -- especially per-tile rowmax and rowsum reductions and rescale chains -- can become vector or SIMD limited and dominate latency. This paper revisits FlashAttention and proposes Vector Relieved Flash Attention (VFA), a hardware-friendly method that reduces rowmax-driven updates of the running maximum while retaining the online-softmax structure. VFA initializes the running maximum via a cheap approximation from key-block representations, reorders key-block traversal to prioritize high-impact sink and local blocks, and freezes the maximum for remaining blocks to avoid repeated reductions and rescaling. We further integrate VFA with block-sparse skipping methods such as BLASST to form Vector Relieved Sparse Attention (VSA), which reduces both block count and per-block overhead. Notably, VFA and VSA completely avoid the conditional rescale operation in the update stage used in FA4.0. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks including MMLU and MATH500, together with attention statistics, verify our design: (i) sink and local reordering stabilizes the running maximum early; (ii) simple Q and K block summaries fail due to intra-block heterogeneity; (iii) m-initialization is required when maxima appear in middle blocks. Overall, VFA and VSA efficiently alleviate online-softmax reduction bottlenecks without performance loss. Compared to the C16V32 baseline, C8V32, C4V32 and C4V16 achieve nearly two times speedup on modern hardware while hitting the vector bottleneck. With upcoming architecture improvements, C4V16 will deliver six times speedup by enhancing exponent capacity.

While 4-bit quantization is essential for high-throughput deployment of Large Language Models, activation outliers often lead to significant accuracy degradation due to the restricted dynamic range of low-bit formats. In this paper, we systematically investigate the spatial distribution of outliers and demonstrate a token-persistent structural clustering effect, where high-magnitude outliers consistently occupy fixed channels across tokens. Building on this insight, we propose OSC, a hardware-efficient framework for outlier suppression. During inference, OSC executes a dual-path computation consisting of a low-precision 4-bit General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) path and a high-precision 16-bit branch GEMM path. Specifically, OSC uses an offline group-wise strategy to identify the channels where outliers are located and then performs structured sub-tensor extraction to coalesce these scattered activation channels into a compact dense tensor online. This mechanism implements outlier protection through regularized and high-throughput GEMM operations, achieving a seamless fit with modern 4-bit micro-scaling hardware. Furthermore, for the inputs of W2 where outlier clustering is less pronounced, we integrate a fallback strategy to FP8. Evaluation on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B restricts the average accuracy drop to 2.19 and 1.12 points, respectively. Notably, OSC is highly hardware-friendly, achieving a peak speedup of 1.78x over the W8A8 GEMM baseline on a modern AI accelerator.

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have achieved remarkable performance across various vision tasks, with scalability being a key advantage when applied to large datasets. This scalability enables ViT models to exhibit strong generalization capabilities. However, as the number of parameters increases, the robustness of ViT models to adversarial examples does not scale proportionally. Adversarial training (AT), one of the most effective methods for enhancing robustness, typically requires fine-tuning the entire model, leading to prohibitively high computational costs, especially for large ViT architectures. In this paper, we aim to robustly fine-tune only a small subset of parameters to achieve robustness comparable to standard AT. To accomplish this, we introduce Criticality-Aware Adversarial Training (CAAT), a novel method that adaptively allocates resources to the most robustness-critical parameters, fine-tuning only selected modules. Specifically, CAAT efficiently identifies parameters that contribute most to adversarial robustness. It then leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to robustly adjust weight matrices where the number of critical parameters exceeds a predefined threshold. CAAT exhibits favorable generalization when scaled to larger vision transformer architectures, potentially paving the way for adversarial training at scale, e.g, compared with plain adversarial training, CAAT incurs only a 4.3% decrease in adversarial robustness while tuning approximately 6% of its parameters. Extensive experiments on three widely used adversarial learning datasets demonstrate that CAAT outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight AT methods with fewer trainable parameters.

Purpose: Accurate dose calculation is essential in radiotherapy for precise tumor irradiation while sparing healthy tissue. With the growing adoption of MRI-guided and real-time adaptive radiotherapy, fast and accurate dose calculation on CT and MRI is increasingly needed. The DoseRAD2026 dataset and challenge provide a public benchmark of paired CT and MRI data with beam-level photon and proton Monte Carlo dose distributions for developing and evaluating advanced dose calculation methods. Acquisition and validation methods: The dataset comprises paired CT and MRI from 115 patients (75 training, 40 testing) treated on an MRI-linac for thoracic or abdominal lesions, derived from the SynthRAD2025 dataset. Pre-processing included deformable image registration, air-cavity correction, and resampling. Ground-truth photon (6 MV) and proton dose distributions were computed using open-source Monte Carlo algorithms, yielding 40,500 photon beams and 81,000 proton beamlets. Data format and usage notes: Data are organized into photon and proton subsets with paired CT-MRI images, beam-level dose distributions, and JSON beam configuration files. Files are provided in compressed MetaImage (.mha) format. The dataset is released under CC BY-NC 4.0, with training data available from April 2026 and the test set withheld until March 2030. Potential applications: The dataset supports benchmarking of fast dose calculation methods, including beam-level dose estimation for photon and proton therapy, MRI-based dose calculation in MRI-guided workflows, and real-time adaptive radiotherapy.

The human brain constructs emotional percepts not by processing facial expressions in isolation, but through a dynamic, hierarchical integration of sensory input with semantic and contextual knowledge. However, existing vision-based dynamic emotion modeling approaches often neglect emotion perception and cognitive theories. To bridge this gap between machine and human emotion perception, we propose cognition-inspired Dual-stream Semantic Enhancement (DuSE). Our model instantiates a dual-stream cognitive architecture. The first stream, a Hierarchical Temporal Prompt Cluster (HTPC), operationalizes the cognitive priming effect. It simulates how linguistic cues pre-sensitize neural pathways, modulating the processing of incoming visual stimuli by aligning textual semantics with fine-grained temporal features of facial dynamics. The second stream, a Latent Semantic Emotion Aggregator (LSEA), computationally models the knowledge integration process, akin to the mechanism described by the Conceptual Act Theory. It aggregates sensory inputs and synthesizes them with learned conceptual knowledge, reflecting the role of the hippocampus and default mode network in constructing a coherent emotional experience. By explicitly modeling these neuro-cognitive mechanisms, DuSE provides a more neurally plausible and robust framework for dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER). Extensive experiments on challenging in-the-wild benchmarks validate our cognition-centric approach, demonstrating that emulating the brain's strategies for emotion processing yields state-of-the-art performance and enhances model interpretability.

Realizing endogenous narrative evolution in LLM-based multi-agent systems is hindered by the inherent stochasticity of generative emergence. In particular, long-horizon simulations suffer from social memory stacking, where conflicting relational states accumulate without resolution, and narrative-spatial dissonance, where spatial logic detaches from the evolving plot. To bridge this gap, we propose EvoSpark, a framework specifically designed to sustain logically coherent long-horizon narratives within Endogenous Interactive Agent Societies. To ensure consistency, the Stratified Narrative Memory employs a Role Socio-Evolutionary Base as living cognition, dynamically metabolizing experiences to resolve historical conflicts. Complementarily, Generative Mise-en-Scène mechanism enforces Role-Location-Plot alignment, synchronizing character presence with the narrative flow. Underpinning these is the Unified Narrative Operation Engine, which integrates an Emergent Character Grounding Protocol to transform stochastic sparking into persistent characters. This engine establishes a substrate that expands a minimal premise into an open-ended, evolving story world. Experiments demonstrate that EvoSpark significantly outperforms baselines across diverse paradigms, enabling the sustained generation of expressive and coherent narrative experiences.

Changes in satellite imagery often occur over multiple time steps. Despite the emergence of bi-temporal change captioning datasets, there is a lack of multi-temporal event captioning datasets (at least two images per sequence) in remote sensing. This gap exists because (1) searching for visible events in satellite imagery and (2) labeling multi-temporal sequences require significant time and labor. To address these challenges, we present SkyScraper, an iterative multi-agent workflow that geocodes news articles and synthesizes captions for corresponding satellite image sequences. Our experiments show that SkyScraper successfully finds 5x more events than traditional geocoding methods, demonstrating that agentic feedback is an effective strategy for surfacing new multi-temporal events in satellite imagery. We apply our framework to a large database of global news articles, curating a new multi-temporal captioning dataset with 5,000 sequences. By automatically identifying imagery related to news events, our work also supports journalism and reporting efforts.

Editing human-written text has become a standard use case of large language models (LLMs), for example, to make one's arguments more appropriate for a discussion. Comparing human to LLM-generated edits, however, we observe a mismatch in editing strategies: While LLMs often perform multiple scattered edits and tend to change meaning notably, humans rather encapsulate dependent changes in self-contained, meaning-preserving edits. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning approach that teaches LLMs human-like editing to improve the appropriateness of arguments. Our approach produces self-contained sentence-level edit suggestions that can be accepted or rejected independently. We train the approach using group relative policy optimization with a multi-component reward function that jointly optimizes edit-level semantic similarity, fluency, and pattern conformity as well as argument-level appropriateness. In automatic and human evaluation, it outperforms competitive baselines and the state of the art in human-like editing, with multi-round editing achieving appropriateness close to full rewriting.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed paradigm that coordinates massive local clients to collaboratively train a global model via stage-wise local training processes on the heterogeneous dataset. Previous works have implicitly studied that FL suffers from the ``client-drift'' problem, which is caused by the inconsistent optimum across local clients. However, till now it still lacks solid theoretical analysis to explain the impact of this local inconsistency. To alleviate the negative impact of ``client drift'' and explore its substance in FL, in this paper, we first propose an efficient FL algorithm FedInit, which allows employing the personalized relaxed initialization state at the beginning of each local training stage. Specifically, FedInit initializes the local state by moving away from the current global state towards the reverse direction of the latest local state. Moreover, to further understand how inconsistency disrupts performance in FL, we introduce the excess risk analysis and study the divergence term to investigate the test error in FL. Our studies show that optimization error is not sensitive to this local inconsistency, while it mainly affects the generalization error bound. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate its efficiency. The proposed FedInit method could achieve comparable results compared to several advanced benchmarks without any additional training or communication costs. Meanwhile, the stage-wise personalized relaxed initialization could also be incorporated into several current advanced algorithms to achieve higher generalization performance in the FL paradigm.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from substantial computational overhead due to the high redundancy in visual token sequences. Existing approaches typically address this issue using single-layer Vision Transformer (ViT) features and static pruning strategies. However, such fixed configurations are often brittle under diverse instructions. To overcome these limitations, we propose CLASP, a plug-and-play token reduction framework based on class-adaptive layer fusion and dual-stage pruning. Specifically, CLASP first constructs category-specific visual representations through multi-layer vision feature fusion. It then performs dual-stage pruning, allocating the token budget between attention-salient pivot tokens for relevance and redundancy-aware completion tokens for coverage. Through class-adaptive pruning, CLASP enables prompt-conditioned feature fusion and budget allocation, allowing aggressive yet robust visual token reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLASP consistently outperforms existing methods across a wide range of benchmarks, pruning ratios, and MLLM architectures. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/CLASP.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) typically relies on a flat retrieval paradigm that maps queries directly to static, isolated text segments. This approach struggles with more complex tasks that require the conditional retrieval and dynamic synthesis of information across different levels of granularity (e.g., from broad concepts to specific evidence). To bridge this gap, we introduce NaviRAG, a novel framework that shifts from passive segment retrieval to active knowledge navigation. NaviRAG first structures the knowledge documents into a hierarchical form, preserving semantic relationships from coarse-grained topics to fine-grained details. Leveraging this reorganized knowledge records, a large language model (LLM) agent actively navigates the records, iteratively identifying information gaps and retrieving relevant content from the most appropriate granularity level. Extensive experiments on long-document QA benchmarks show that NaviRAG consistently improves both retrieval recall and end-to-end answer performance over conventional RAG baselines. Ablation studies confirm performance gains stem from our method's capacity for multi-granular evidence localization and dynamic retrieval planning. We further discuss efficiency, applicable scenario, and future directions of our method, hoping to make RAG systems more intelligent and autonomous.

We introduce ARGOS, the first benchmark and framework that reformulates multi-camera person search as an interactive reasoning problem requiring an agent to plan, question, and eliminate candidates under information asymmetry. An ARGOS agent receives a vague witness statement and must decide what to ask, when to invoke spatial or temporal tools, and how to interpret ambiguous responses, all within a limited turn budget. Reasoning is grounded in a Spatio-Temporal Topology Graph (STTG) encoding camera connectivity and empirically validated transition times. The benchmark comprises 2,691 tasks across 14 real-world scenarios in three progressive tracks: semantic perception (Who), spatial reasoning (Where), and temporal reasoning (When). Experiments with four LLM backbones show the benchmark is far from solved (best TWS: 0.383 on Track 2, 0.590 on Track 3), and ablations confirm that removing domain-specific tools drops accuracy by up to 49.6 percentage points.

Adversarial robustness is essential for deploying neural networks in safety-critical applications, yet standard evaluation methods either require expensive adversarial attacks or report only a single aggregate score that obscures how robustness is distributed across classes. We introduce the \emph{GF-Score} (GREAT-Fairness Score), a framework that decomposes the certified GREAT Score into per-class robustness profiles and quantifies their disparity through four metrics grounded in welfare economics: the Robustness Disparity Index (RDI), the Normalized Robustness Gini Coefficient (NRGC), Worst-Case Class Robustness (WCR), and a Fairness-Penalized GREAT Score (FP-GREAT). The framework further eliminates the original method's dependence on adversarial attacks through a self-calibration procedure that tunes the temperature parameter using only clean accuracy correlations. Evaluating 22 models from RobustBench across CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, we find that the decomposition is exact, that per-class scores reveal consistent vulnerability patterns (e.g., ``cat'' is the weakest class in 76\% of CIFAR-10 models), and that more robust models tend to exhibit greater class-level disparity. These results establish a practical, attack-free auditing pipeline for diagnosing where certified robustness guarantees fail to protect all classes equally. We release our code on \href{https://github.com/aryashah2k/gf-score}{GitHub}.

Although large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, they suffer from severe causal hallucination in event causality identification (ECI), particularly in smaller models ($\leq$1.5B parameters). A promising approach to address this issue is to fine-tune them with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. However, there is currently a lack of CoT trace dataset available for ECI. In this paper, we first investigate the essential criteria that effective CoT traces should possess to mitigate causal hallucination in smaller models. We then design a pipeline to generate CoT traces that meet these criteria. Moreover, since there is currently no metric for quantifying causal hallucination, we also introduce a new metric, the Causal Hallucination Rate (CHR), to quantify causal hallucination, guide the formulation of effective CoT trace criteria, and validate the effectiveness of our pipeline. Our experiments show that fine-tuning with the CoT traces generated by our pipeline not only substantially reduces causal hallucination in smaller LLMs but also improves mean accuracy. Moreover, the fine-tuned models exhibit strong cross-dataset and cross-difficulty generalization, as well as robustness under misleading intervention prompts.

Artificial intelligence systems have achieved remarkable capability in natural language processing, perception and decision-making tasks. However, their behaviour often remains opaque and difficult to verify, limiting their applicability in safety-critical systems. Formal methods provide mathematically rigorous mechanisms for specifying and verifying system behaviour, yet the creation and maintenance of formal specifications remains labour intensive and difficult to scale. This paper outlines a research vision called Learning-Infused Formal Reasoning (LIFR), which integrates machine learning techniques with formal verification workflows. The framework focuses on three complementary research directions: automated contract synthesis from natural language requirements, semantic reuse of verification artifacts using graph matching and learning-based embeddings, and mathematically grounded semantic foundations based on the Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) and the Theory of Institutions. Together these research threads aim to transform verification from isolated correctness proofs into a cumulative knowledge-driven process where specifications, contracts and proofs can be synthesised, aligned and reused across systems.

While multilingual language models promise to bring the benefits of LLMs to speakers of many languages, gold-standard evaluation benchmarks in most languages to interrogate these assumptions remain scarce. The Universal NER project, now entering its fourth year, is dedicated to building gold-standard multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) benchmark datasets. Inspired by existing massively multilingual efforts for other core NLP tasks (e.g., Universal Dependencies), the project uses a general tagset and thorough annotation guidelines to collect standardized, cross-lingual annotations of named entity spans. The first installment (UNER v1) was released in 2024, and the project has continued and expanded since then, with various organizers, annotators, and collaborators in an active community.

While recent research has explored AI tools' ability to classify the quality of mathematical tasks (arXiv:2603.03512), little is known about their capacity to increase the quality of existing tasks. This study investigated whether AI tools could successfully upgrade low-cognitive-demand mathematics tasks. Eleven tools were tested, including six broadly available, general-purpose AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT and Claude) and five tools specialized for mathematics teachers (e.g., Khanmigo, coteach.ai). Using the Task Analysis Guide framework (Stein & Smith, 1998), we prompted AI tools to modify two different types of low-demand mathematical tasks. The prompting strategy aimed to represent likely approaches taken by knowledgeable teachers, rather than extensive optimization to find a more effective prompt (i.e., an optimistic typical outcome). On average, AI tools were only moderately successful: tasks were accurately upgraded only 64% of the time, with different AI tool performance ranging from quite weak (33%) to broadly successful (88%). Specialized tools were only moderately more successful than general-purpose tools. Failure modes included both "undershooting" (maintaining low cognitive demand) and "overshooting" (elevating tasks to an overly ambitious target category that likely would be rejected by teachers). Interestingly, there was a small negative correlation (r = -.35) between whether a given AI tool was able to correctly classify the cognitive demand of tasks and whether the AI was able to upgrade tasks, showing that the ability to modify tasks (i.e., a generative task) represents a distinct capability from the ability to classify them (i.e., judgement using a rubric). These findings have important implications for understanding AI's potential role in curriculum adaptation and highlight the need for specialized approaches to support teachers in modifying instructional materials.

While Federated Learning (FL) mitigates direct data exposure, the resulting trained models remain susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs). This paper presents an empirical evaluation of Differential Privacy (DP) as a defense mechanism against MIAs in FL, leveraging the environment of the 2025 NIST Genomics Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (PPFL) Red Teaming Event. To improve inference accuracy, we propose a stacking attack strategy that ensembles seven black-box estimators to train a meta-classifier on prediction probabilities and cross-entropy losses. We evaluate this methodology against target models under three privacy configurations: an unprotected convolutional neural network (CNN, $ε=\infty$), a low-privacy DP model ($ε=200$), and a high-privacy DP model ($ε=10$). The attack outperforms all baselines in the No DP and Low Privacy settings and, critically, maintains measurable membership leakage at $ε=200$ where a single-signal LiRA baseline collapses. Evaluated on an independent third-party benchmark, these results provide an empirical characterisation of how stacking-based inference degrades across calibrated DP tiers in FL.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in their mathemat ical reasoning performance. However, GRPO and related entropy regularization methods still struggle with token-level sparse-rewards, which is an inherent chal lenge in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. These approaches often rely on undifferen tiated token-level entropy regularization, which easily leads to entropy collapse or model degradation under sparse token rewards. In this work, we propose TEPO, a novel token-level framework that (1) leverages sequence-level likelihood to link group-level rewards with individual tokens via token-level aggregation, and (2) introduces a token-level KL-Divergence mask constraint that targets tokens with positive advantages and decreasing entropy to mitigate abrupt policy updates. Experiments demonstrate that TEPO not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks but also markedly enhances training stability, reducing convergence time by 50% compared with GRPO/DAPO.

In recent years, Sound AI is being increasingly used to predict machine failures. By attaching a microphone to the machine of interest, one can get real time data on machine behavior from the field. Traditionally, Convolutional Neural Net (CNN) architectures have been used to analyze spectrogram images generated from the sounds captured and predict if the machine is functioning as expected. CNN architectures seem to work well empirically even though they have biases like locality and parameter-sharing which may not be completely relevant for spectrogram analysis. With the successful application of transformer-based models in the field of image processing starting with Vision Transformer (ViT) in 2020, there has been significant interest in leveraging these in the field of Sound AI. Since transformer-based architectures have significantly lower inductive biases, they are expected to perform better than CNNs at spectrogram analysis given enough data. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of transformer-driven architectures in analyzing Sound data and compares the embeddings they generate with CNNs on the specific task of machine fault detection.

Classical Fisher-information asymptotics describe the covariance of regular efficient estimators through the local quadratic approximation of the log-likelihood, and thus capture first-order geometry only. In curved models, including mixtures, curved exponential families, latent-variable models, and manifold-constrained parameter spaces, finite-sample behavior can deviate systematically from these predictions. We develop a coordinate-invariant, curvature-aware refinement by viewing a regular parametric family as a Riemannian manifold \((Θ,g)\) with Fisher--Rao metric, immersed in \(L^2(μ)\) through the square-root density map. Under suitable regularity and moment assumptions, we derive an \(n^{-2}\) correction to the leading \(n^{-1}I(θ)^{-1}\) covariance term for score-root, first-order efficient estimators. The correction is governed by a tensor \(P_{ij}\) that decomposes canonically into three parts, an intrinsic Ricci-type contraction of the Fisher--Rao curvature tensor, an extrinsic Gram-type contraction of the second fundamental form, and a Hellinger discrepancy tensor encoding higher-order probabilistic information not determined by immersion geometry alone. The extrinsic term is positive semidefinite, the full correction is invariant under smooth reparameterization, and it vanishes identically for full exponential families. We then extend the picture to singular models, where Fisher information degenerates. Using resolution of singularities under an additive normal crossing assumption, we describe the resolved metric, the role of the real log canonical threshold in learning rates and posterior mean-squared error, and a curvature-based covariance expansion on the resolved space that recovers the regular theory as a special case. This framework also suggests geometric diagnostics of weak identifiability and curvature-aware principles for regularization and optimization.

Clinical case formulation organizes patient symptoms and psychosocial factors into causal models, often using the 5P framework. However, constructing such graphs from therapy transcripts is time consuming and varies across clinicians. We present InsightFlow, an LLM based approach that automatically generates 5P aligned causal graphs from patient-therapist dialogues. Using 46 psychotherapy intake transcripts annotated by clinical experts, we evaluate LLM generated graphs against human formulations using structural (NetSimile), semantic (embedding similarity), and expert rated clinical criteria. The generated graphs show structural similarity comparable to inter annotator agreement and high semantic alignment with human graphs. Expert evaluations rate the outputs as moderately complete, consistent, and clinically useful. While LLM graphs tend to form more interconnected structures compared to the chain like patterns of human graphs, overall complexity and content coverage are similar. These results suggest that LLMs can produce clinically meaningful case formulation graphs within the natural variability of expert practice. InsightFlow highlights the potential of automated causal modeling to augment clinical workflows, with future work needed to improve temporal reasoning and reduce redundancy.

Throughout the literature on Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs), it is often taken for granted that the systems learn attractors. This is shown through evolving the system for many timesteps and noting visual similarity to the goal state. There remain many questions after such an analysis. Namely, what kind of attractors do we have? Is their behavior ordered or chaotic? Can we estimate stability over very long time horizons? What really happens in the attractor when perturbations are applied? In this paper, we present a case study to help answer these questions, with methods drawn from the literature on dynamical systems theory. We use the growing gecko NCA of Mordvintsev et al. (2020) with deterministic cell updates as a case study. To the best of the authors' knowledge, we present the first visualizations of NCA attractor dynamics. We also analyze them using the Lyapunov and Fourier spectra, to reveal that the NCA displays oscillatory, periodic and quasi-periodic behavior, and that these behaviors arise early during training. This challenges the belief that NCAs learn fixed point attractors. Finally, we show that large perturbations to the attractor states can throw the NCAs into a secondary mode separate from the original attractor. We hope that this initial foray into NCA attractor dynamics expands the toolkit for NCA researchers to analyze the robustness and stability of their systems.

The deployment of deep neural networks in safety-critical systems necessitates reliable and efficient uncertainty quantification (UQ). A practical and widespread strategy for UQ is repurposing stochastic regularizers as scalable approximate Bayesian inference methods, such as Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD) and MC-DropBlock (MCDB). However, this paradigm remains under-explored for Stochastic Depth (SD), a regularizer integral to the residual-based backbones of most modern architectures. While prior work demonstrated its empirical promise for segmentation, a formal theoretical connection to Bayesian variational inference and a benchmark on complex, multi-task problems like object detection are missing. In this paper, we first provide theoretical insights connecting Monte Carlo Stochastic Depth (MCSD) to principled approximate variational inference. We then present the first comprehensive empirical benchmark of MCSD against MCD and MCDB on state-of-the-art detectors (YOLO, RT-DETR) using the COCO and COCO-O datasets. Our results position MCSD as a robust and computationally efficient method that achieves highly competitive predictive accuracy (mAP), notably yielding slight improvements in calibration (ECE) and uncertainty ranking (AUARC) compared to MCD. We thus establish MCSD as a theoretically-grounded and empirically-validated tool for efficient Bayesian approximation in modern deep learning.

LLM-based autonomous agents perform well on general reasoning tasks but still struggle to reliably use task structure, key constraints, and prior experience in complex real-world settings. We propose a case-based learning framework that converts experience from past tasks into reusable knowledge assets, allowing agents to transfer prior case experience to new tasks and perform more structured analysis. Unlike methods based mainly on pretrained knowledge or static prompts, our framework emphasizes extracting and reusing task-relevant knowledge, analytical prompts, and operational skills from real cases. We evaluate the method on a unified benchmark of six complex task categories and compare it with Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Checklist Prompt, and Rule Memory baselines. Results show that our method achieves consistently strong performance across all tasks and matches or outperforms the best baseline in every case, with especially clear gains on more complex tasks. Further analysis shows that the advantage of case-based learning increases with task complexity, and that practical knowledge acquired by one agent can be reused by others. These findings suggest that case-based learning offers a promising path for building professional agents for real-world work.

This paper presents EPAC, a RISC-V-based accelerator chip developed within the European Processor Initiative (EPI) as part of a multi-year, multi-partner effort to build a European HPC processor ecosystem. EPAC is implemented in GlobalFoundries 22FDX (GF22FDX) technology, covers an area of 27 sq mm with approximately 0.3 billion transistors, and integrates three distinct RISC-V compute tiles targeting different workload classes: VEC, a vector processing tile for double-precision HPC workloads; STX, a many-core tile optimized for stencil and machine learning computations; and VRP, a variable-precision tile for iterative numerical solvers requiring extended floating-point formats. All tiles are connected through a Coherent Hub Interface (CHI) based network-on-chip with a distributed L2 cache system and communicate with external memory via a SerDes link. The chip was taped out in GF22FDX technology and successfully brought up, with all major IP blocks validated. This paper describes the architecture of each tile and the uncore infrastructure, the integration and physical implementation process, and the board-level bring-up activities. It also reflects on the engineering and coordination lessons learned from a full chip design effort distributed across academic and industrial partners in Europe.

Task-adapted compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is emerging to address the specific demands of downstream clinical tasks with significantly fewer k-space measurements than required by Nyquist sampling. However, existing task-adapted CS-MRI methods suffer from the uncertainty problem for medical diagnosis and cannot achieve adaptive sampling in end-to-end optimization with reconstruction or clinical tasks. To address these limitations, we propose the first task-adapted CS-MRI from the information-theoretic perspective to simultaneously achieve probabilistic inference for uncertainty prediction and adapt to arbitrary sampling ratios and versatile clinical applications. Specifically, we formalize the task-adapted CS-MRI optimization problem by maximizing the mutual information between undersampled k-space measurements and clinical tasks to enable probabilistic inference for addressing the uncertainty problem. We leverage amortized optimization and construct tractable variational bounds for mutual information to jointly optimize sampling, reconstruction, and task-inference models, which enables flexible sampling ratio control using a single end-to-end trained model. Furthermore, the proposed framework addresses two kinds of distinct clinical scenarios within a unified approach, i.e., i) joint task and reconstruction, where reconstruction serves as an auxiliary process to enhance task performance; and ii) task implementation with suppressed reconstruction, applicable for privacy protection. Extensive experiments on large-scale MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves highly competitive performance on standard metrics like Dice compared to deterministic counterpart but provides better distribution matching to the ground-truth posterior distribution as measured by the generalized energy distance (GED).

Understanding human intent in complex multi-turn interactions remains a fundamental challenge in human-computer interaction and behavioral analysis. While existing intent recognition datasets focus mainly on single utterances or simple dialogues, real-world scenarios often involve sophisticated strategic interactions where participants must maintain complex deceptive narratives over extended periods. To address this gap, we introduce MISID, a comprehensive multimodal, multi-turn, and multi-participant benchmark for intent recognition. Sourced from high-stakes social strategy games, MISID features a fine-grained, two-tier multi-dimensional annotation scheme tailored for long-context discourse analysis and evidence-based causal tracking. Our systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on MISID reveals critical deficiencies in complex scenarios, including text-prior visual hallucination, impaired cross-modal synergy, and limited capacity in chaining causal cues. Consequently, we propose FRACTAM as a baseline framework. Using a ``Decouple-Anchor-Reason'' paradigm, FRACTAM reduces text bias by extracting pure unimodal factual representations, employs two-stage retrieval for long-range factual anchoring, and constructs explicit cross-modal evidence chains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FRACTAM enhances mainstream models' performance in complex strategic tasks, improving hidden intent detection and inference while maintaining robust perceptual accuracy. Our dataset is available at https://naislab.cn/datasets/MISID.

Recent advances in deep learning underscore the need for systems that can not only acquire new knowledge through Continual Learning (CL) but also remove outdated, sensitive, or private information through Machine Unlearning (MU). However, while CL methods are well-developed, MU techniques remain in early stages, creating a critical gap for unified frameworks that depend on both capabilities. We find that naively combining existing CL and MU approaches results in knowledge leakage a gradual degradation of foundational knowledge across repeated adaptation cycles. To address this, we formalize Continual Learning Unlearning (CLU) as a unified paradigm with three key goals: (i) precise deletion of unwanted knowledge, (ii) efficient integration of new knowledge while preserving prior information, and (iii) minimizing knowledge leakage across cycles. We propose Bi-Directional Low-Rank Adaptation (BID-LoRA), a novel framework featuring three dedicated adapter pathways-retain, new, and unlearn applied to attention layers, combined with escape unlearning that pushes forget-class embeddings to positions maximally distant from retained knowledge, updating only 5% of parameters. Experiments on CIFAR-100 show that BID-LoRA outperforms CLU baselines across multiple adaptation cycles. We further evaluate on CASIA-Face100, a curated face recognition subset, demonstrating practical applicability to real-world identity management systems where new users must be enrolled and withdrawn users removed.

Large enterprises often operate extensive Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines on large, heterogeneous compute clusters, where conservative, statically defined resource requirements are used to ensure build reliability. This practice leads to substantial system memory over-allocation, reduced cluster utilization, and increased operational costs. In this paper, we motivate the need for intelligent resource prediction by analyzing over 300,000 historical build executions from a production CI environment with more than one thousand compute nodes. Our analysis shows that, on average, more than 60% of allocated system memory remains unused. We then compare multiple machine learning approaches for predicting build task memory usage, including classification-based methods and regression-based quantile prediction. Our final solution employs a LightGBM-XGBoost quantile regression ensemble optimized to minimize under-allocation while reducing over-provisioning. We integrate this solution into the production CI pipeline via a microservice-based orchestration layer, achieving average memory savings of approximately 36GB per build and reducing under-allocation rates to below 0.3% without negatively impacting build execution times.

In advanced manufacturing systems, humans and robots collaborate to conduct the production process. Effective task planning and allocation (TPA) is crucial for achieving high production efficiency, yet it remains challenging in complex and dynamic manufacturing environments. The dynamic nature of humans and robots, particularly the need to consider spatial information (e.g., humans' real-time position and the distance they need to move to complete a task), substantially complicates TPA. To address the above challenges, we decompose production tasks into manageable subtasks. We then implement a real-time hierarchical human-robot TPA algorithm, including a high-level agent for task planning and a low-level agent for task allocation. For the high-level agent, we propose an efficient buffer-based deep Q-learning method (EBQ), which reduces training time and enhances performance in production problems with long-term and sparse reward challenges. For the low-level agent, a path planning-based spatially aware method (SAP) is designed to allocate tasks to the appropriate human-robot resources, thereby achieving the corresponding sequential subtasks. We conducted experiments on a complex real-time production process in a 3D simulator. The results demonstrate that our proposed EBQ&SAP method effectively addresses human-robot TPA problems in complex and dynamic production processes.

Human-robot collaborative manufacturing, a core aspect of Industry 5.0, emphasizes ergonomics to enhance worker well-being. This paper addresses the dynamic human-robot task planning and allocation (HRTPA) problem, which involves determining when to perform tasks and who should execute them to maximize efficiency while ensuring workers' physical fatigue remains within safe limits. The inclusion of fatigue constraints, combined with production dynamics, significantly increases the complexity of the HRTPA problem. Traditional fatigue-recovery models in HRTPA often rely on static, predefined hyperparameters. However, in practice, human fatigue sensitivity varies daily due to factors such as changed work conditions and insufficient sleep. To better capture this uncertainty, we treat fatigue-related parameters as inaccurate and estimate them online based on observed fatigue progression during production. To address these challenges, we propose PF-CD3Q, a safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) approach that integrates the particle filter with constrained dueling double deep Q-learning for real-time fatigue-predictive HRTPA. Specifically, we first develop PF-based estimators to track human fatigue and update fatigue model parameters in real-time. These estimators are then integrated into CD3Q by making task-level fatigue predictions during decision-making and excluding tasks that exceed fatigue limits, thereby constraining the action space and formulating the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP).

Text-based web agents offer computational efficiency for autonomous web navigation, yet developing robust agents remains challenging due to the noisy and heterogeneous nature of real-world HTML. Standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) approaches fail in two critical dimensions: they lack discrimination capabilities to reject plausible but incorrect elements in densely populated pages, and exhibit limited generalization to unseen website layouts. To address these challenges, we introduce the Triton dataset (590k instances) and a progressive training curriculum. Triton is constructed via Structural-Semantic Hard Negative Mining, which explicitly mines topologically similar distractors, and a Dual-Agent Consensus pipeline that synthesizes diverse cross-domain tasks with strict verification. Building upon this foundation, our progressive curriculum produces three models: Triton-SFT-32B for basic imitation, Triton-ORPO-32B for robust discrimination via Odds Ratio Preference Optimization, and Triton-GRPO-32B for long-horizon consistency through Group Relative Policy Optimization. Empirical evaluation on Mind2Web demonstrates that Triton-GRPO-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models with 58.7% Step Success Rate, surpassing GPT-4.5 (42.4%) and Claude-4.5 (41.4%) by over 16%, validating that specialized data curriculum outweighs raw parameter scale for web navigation.

Existing topic modeling methods, from LDA to recent neural and LLM-based approaches, which focus mainly on statistical coherence, often produce redundant or off-target topics that miss the user's underlying intent. We introduce Human-centric Topic Modeling, \emph{Human-TM}), a novel task formulation that integrates a human-provided goal directly into the topic modeling process to produce interpretable, diverse and goal-oriented topics. To tackle this challenge, we propose the \textbf{G}oal-prompted \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{T}opic \textbf{M}odel with \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{T}ransport (GCTM-OT), which first uses LLM-based prompting to extract goal candidates from documents, then incorporates these into semantic-aware contrastive learning via optimal transport for topic discovery. Experimental results on three public subreddit datasets show that GCTM-OT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in topic coherence and diversity while significantly improving alignment with human-provided goals, paving the way for more human-centric topic discovery systems.

In nonmonotonic reasoning from conditional belief bases, an inference operator satisfying syntax splitting postulates allows for taking only the relevant parts of a belief base into account, provided that the belief base splits into subbases based on disjoint signatures. Because such disjointness is rare in practice, safe conditional syntax splitting has been proposed as a generalization of syntax splitting, allowing the conditionals in the subbases to share some atoms. Recently this overlap of conditionals has been shown to be limited to trivial, self-fulfilling conditionals. In this article, we propose a generalization of safe conditional syntax splittings that broadens the applicability of splitting postulates. In contrast to safe conditional syntax splitting, our generalized notion supports syntax splittings of a belief base Δ where the subbases of Δ may share atoms and nontrivial conditionals. We illustrate how this new notion overcomes limitations of previous splitting concepts, and we identify genuine splittings, separating them from simple splittings that do not provide benefits for inductive inference from Δ. We introduce adjusted inference postulates based on our generalization of conditional syntax splitting, and we evaluate several popular inductive inference operators with respect to these postulates. Furthermore, we show that, while every inductive inference operator satisfying generalized conditional syntax splitting also satisfies conditional syntax splitting, the reverse does not hold.

Vision-language models(VLMs) are increasingly applied to visual stock price forecasting, yet existing benchmarks inadequately evaluate their understanding of stock price in candlestick charts. First, prior studies fail to isolate VLMs' comprehension of visual inputs genuinely improves predictive performance and whether VLMs truly comprehend candlestick patterns. Further, most existing datasets and evaluation setups are designed around single-period or tabular inputs. However, human analysts strongly rely on multi-scale candlestick charts, where longer-term horizons capture trend direction and shorter-term horizons provide cues for inflection points, making it difficult to systematically assess VLMs' ability to integrate short-term and long-term visual market dynamics. To bridge this gap, we construct a multi-scale candlestick charts dataset and a standardized evaluation framework to assess VLMs' ability to utilize multi-scale visual market signals. Evaluation combines confusion-matrix-based diagnostics with information coefficient(IC) time series metrics and includes XGBoost as a feature-based temporal baseline. Using this dataset, we benchmark representative VLMs and analyze their ability to leverage multi-scale stock price data. Experimental results show that most VLMs perform well only under persistent uptrend or downtrend conditions, while exhibiting weak predictive capability in more common market scenarios. We also identify significant prediction biases and limited sensitivity to explicitly specified forecast horizons in prompts, indicating inherent limitations in precise temporal reasoning.

End-to-end diffusion planning has shown strong potential for autonomous driving, but the physical feasibility of generated trajectories remains insufficiently addressed. In particular, generated trajectories may exhibit local geometric irregularities, violate trajectory-level kinematic constraints, or deviate from the drivable area, indicating that the commonly used noise-centric formulation in diffusion planning is not yet well aligned with the trajectory space where feasibility is more naturally characterized. To address this issue, we propose FeaXDrive, a feasibility-aware trajectory-centric diffusion planning method for end-to-end autonomous driving. The core idea is to treat the clean trajectory as the unified object for feasibility-aware modeling throughout the diffusion process. Built on this trajectory-centric formulation, FeaXDrive integrates adaptive curvature-constrained training to improve intrinsic geometric and kinematic feasibility, drivable-area guidance within reverse diffusion sampling to enhance consistency with the drivable area, and feasibility-aware GRPO post-training to further improve planning performance while balancing trajectory-space feasibility. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that FeaXDrive achieves strong closed-loop planning performance while substantially improving trajectory-space feasibility. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly modeling trajectory-space feasibility in end-to-end diffusion planning and provide a step toward more reliable and physically grounded autonomous driving planners.

Cloud networks increasingly rely on machine learning based Network Intrusion Detection Systems to defend against evolving cyber threats. However, real-world deployments are challenged by limited labeled data, non-stationary traffic, and adaptive adversaries. While semi-supervised learning can alleviate label scarcity, most existing approaches implicitly assume benign and stationary unlabeled traffic, leading to degraded performance in adversarial cloud environments. This paper proposes a robust semi-supervised temporal learning framework for cloud intrusion detection that explicitly addresses adversarial contamination and temporal drift in unlabeled network traffic. Operating on flow-level data, this framework combines supervised learning with consistency regularization, confidence-aware pseudo-labeling, and selective temporal invariance to conservatively exploit unlabeled traffic while suppressing unreliable samples. By leveraging the temporal structure of network flows, the proposed method improves robustness and generalization across heterogeneous cloud environments. Extensive evaluations on publicly available datasets (CIC-IDS2017, CSE-CIC-IDS2018, and UNSW-NB15) under limited-label conditions demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised network intrusion detection systems in detection performance, label efficiency, and resilience to adversarial and non-stationary traffic.

We study finite horizon reachable set estimation for unknown discrete-time dynamical systems using only sampled state trajectories. Rather than treating scenario optimization as a black-box tool, we show how it can be tailored to reachable set estimation, where one must learn a family of sets based on whole trajectories, while preserving probabilistic guarantees on future trajectory inclusion for the entire horizon. To this end, we formulate a relaxed scenario program with slack variables that yields a tunable trade-off between reachable set size and out-of-sample trajectory inclusion over the horizon, thereby reducing sensitivity to outliers. Leveraging the recent results in adversarially robust scenario optimization, we then extend this formulation to account for bounded adversarial perturbations of the observed trajectories and derive a posteriori probabilistic guarantees on future trajectory inclusion. When probability distribution shifts in the Wasserstein distance occur, we obtain an explicit bound on how gracefully the theoretical probabilistic guarantees degrade. For different geometries, i.e., $p$-norm balls, ellipsoids, and zonotopes, we derive tractable convex reformulations and corroborate our theoretical results in simulation.

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve the prompt following capability of text-to-image (T2I) models, yet obtaining high-quality reward signals remains challenging: CLIP Score is too coarse-grained, while VLM-based reward models (e.g., RewardDance) require costly human-annotated preference data and additional fine-tuning. We propose PromptEcho, a reward construction method that requires \emph{no} annotation and \emph{no} reward model training. Given a generated image and a guiding query, PromptEcho computes the token-level cross-entropy loss of a frozen VLM with the original prompt as the label, directly extracting the image-text alignment knowledge encoded during VLM pretraining. The reward is deterministic, computationally efficient, and improves automatically as stronger open-source VLMs become available. For evaluation, we develop DenseAlignBench, a benchmark of concept-rich dense captions for rigorously testing prompt following capability. Experimental results on two state-of-the-art T2I models (Z-Image and QwenImage-2512) demonstrate that PromptEcho achieves substantial improvements on DenseAlignBench (+26.8pp / +16.2pp net win rate), along with consistent gains on GenEval, DPG-Bench, and TIIFBench without any task-specific training. Ablation studies confirm that PromptEcho comprehensively outperforms inference-based scoring with the same VLM, and that reward quality scales with VLM size. We will open-source the trained models and the DenseAlignBench.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models perform well on link prediction but struggle with unseen entities, relations, and especially literals, limiting their use in dynamic, heterogeneous graphs. In contrast, pretrained large language models (LLMs) generalize effectively through prompting. We reformulate link prediction as a prompt learning problem and introduce RALP, which learns string-based chain-of-thought (CoT) prompts as scoring functions for triples. Using Bayesian Optimization through MIPRO algorithm, RALP identifies effective prompts from fewer than 30 training examples without gradient access. At inference, RALP predicts missing entities, relations or whole triples and assigns confidence scores based on the learned prompt. We evaluate on transductive, numerical, and OWL instance retrieval benchmarks. RALP improves state-of-the-art KGE models by over 5% MRR across datasets and enhances generalization via high-quality inferred triples. On OWL reasoning tasks with complex class expressions (e.g., $\exists hasChild.Female$, $\geq 5 \; hasChild.Female$), it achieves over 88% Jaccard similarity. These results highlight prompt-based LLM reasoning as a flexible alternative to embedding-based methods. We release our implementation, training, and evaluation pipeline as open source: https://github.com/dice-group/RALP .

Despite the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in time-series forecasting, most existing methods still adopt a Deep Synchronous Fusion strategy, where dense interactions between textual and temporal features are enforced at every layer of the network. This design overlooks the inherent granularity mismatch between modalities and leads to what we term semantic perceptual dissonance: high-level abstract semantics provided by the LLM become inappropriately entangled with the low-level, fine-grained numerical dynamics of time series, making it difficult for semantic priors to effectively guide forecasting. To address this issue, we propose TimeSAF, a new framework based on hierarchical asynchronous fusion. Unlike synchronous approaches, TimeSAF explicitly decouples unimodal feature learning from cross-modal interaction. It introduces an independent cross-modal semantic fusion trunk, which uses learnable queries to aggregate global semantics from the temporal and prompt backbones in a bottom-up manner, and a stage-wise semantic refinement decoder that asynchronously injects these high-level signals back into the temporal backbone. This mechanism provides stable and efficient semantic guidance while avoiding interference with low-level temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on standard long-term forecasting benchmarks show that TimeSAF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and further exhibits strong generalization in both few-shot and zero-shot transfer settings.

Automated respiratory audio analysis promises scalable, non-invasive disease screening, yet progress is limited by scarce labeled data and costly expert annotation. Zero-shot inference eliminates task-specific supervision, but existing methods apply uniform computation to every input regardless of difficulty. We introduce TRIAGE, a tiered zero-shot framework that adaptively scales test-time compute by routing each audio sample through progressively richer reasoning stages: fast label-cosine scoring in a joint audio-text embedding space (Tier-L), structured matching with clinician-style descriptors (Tier-M), and retrieval-augmented large language model reasoning (Tier-H). A confidence-based router finalizes easy predictions early while allocating additional computation to ambiguous inputs, enabling nearly half of all samples to exit at the cheapest tier. Across nine respiratory classification tasks without task-specific training, TRIAGE achieves a mean AUROC of 0.744, outperforming prior zero-shot methods and matching or exceeding supervised baselines on multiple tasks. Our analysis show that test-time scaling concentrates gains where they matter: uncertain cases see up to 19% relative improvement while confident predictions remain unchanged at minimal cost.

Although autonomous underwater vehicles promise the capability of marine ecosystem monitoring, their deployment is fundamentally limited by the difficulty of controlling vehicles under highly uncertain and non-stationary underwater dynamics. To address these challenges, we employ a data-driven reinforcement learning approach to compensate for unknown dynamics and task variations.Traditional single-task reinforcement learning has a tendency to overfit the training environment, thus, limit the long-term usefulness of the learnt policy. Hence, we propose to use a contextual multi-task reinforcement learning paradigm instead, allowing us to learn controllers that can be reused for various tasks, e.g., detecting oysters in one reef and detecting corals in another. We evaluate whether contextual multi-task reinforcement learning can efficiently learn robust and generalisable control policies for autonomous underwater reef monitoring. We train a single context-dependent policy that is able to solve multiple related monitoring tasks in a simulated reef environment in HoloOcean. In our experiments, we empirically evaluate the contextual policies regarding sample-efficiency, zero-shot generalisation to unseen tasks, and robustness to varying water currents. By utilising multi-task reinforcement learning, we aim to improve the training effectiveness, as well as the reusability of learnt policies to take a step towards more sustainable procedures in autonomous reef monitoring.

Deploying applications across the computing continuum requires selecting infrastructure nodes from geographically distributed and heterogeneous environments while satisfying constraints (e.g., performance, location). This decision problem is an important facet of resource allocation. As infrastructures grow in scale and heterogeneity, the resulting decision space becomes inherently combinatorial. Existing approaches typically formulate this problem as a constrained optimization task using ad-hoc representations of infrastructure topologies and demand, which hinders generalization across solutions. In contrast, Software as a Service ecosystems address a structurally similar configuration problem through pricings -structures whose plans and add-ons implicitly define the configuration space of possible subscriptions. Building on this observation, this work explores the potential of pricings as general-purpose representations of configuration spaces, positioning them as a promising alternative for addressing configuration problems, such as resource allocation, across the computing continuum. To this end, the paper presents the following contributions: i) a pricing-based formulation of the resource allocation problem in the computing continuum, enabling infrastructure configuration spaces to be represented using pricings; ii) a workflow that leverages PRIME, a pricing analysis engine, to explore these spaces and compute cost-optimal deployments satisfying functional and non-functional constraints; iii) generation processes for synthetic infrastructure topologies and workload demands; and iv) a dataset comprising 9,600 precomputed resource allocation scenarios to support benchmarking.

Fairness is a critical requirement for human-related, high-stakes software systems, motivating extensive research on bias mitigation. Prior work has largely focused on tabular data settings using traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods. With the rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have begun to explore their use for bias mitigation in the same setting. However, it remains unclear whether LLM-based methods offer advantages over traditional ML methods, leaving software engineers without clear guidance for practical adoption. To address this gap, we present a large-scale study comparing state-of-the-art ML- and LLM-based bias mitigation methods. We find that ML-based methods consistently outperform LLM-based methods in both fairness and predictive performance, with even strong LLMs failing to surpass established ML baselines. To understand why prior LLM-based studies report favorable results, we analyze their evaluation settings and show that these gains are largely driven by artificially balanced test data rather than realistic imbalanced distributions. We further observe that existing LLM-based methods primarily rely on in-context learning and thus fail to leverage all available training data. Motivated by this, we explore supervised fine-tuning on the full training set and find that, while it achieves competitive results, its advantages over traditional ML methods remain limited. These findings suggest that LLMs are not a silver bullet for software fairness.

Large language models (LLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency (e.g., number of parameters) and output quality, especially when deployed on computationally limited devices such as phones or laptops. One way to address this challenge is by following the example of humans and have models ask for help when they believe they are incapable of solving a problem on their own; we can overcome this trade-off by allowing smaller models to respond to queries when they believe they can provide good responses, and deferring to larger models when they do not believe they can. To this end, in this paper, we investigate the viability of Predict-Answer/Act (PA) and Reason-Predict-Reason-Answer/Act (RPRA) paradigms where models predict -- prior to responding -- how an LLM judge would score their output. We evaluate three approaches: zero-shot prediction, prediction using an in-context report card, and supervised fine-tuning. Our results show that larger models (particularly reasoning models) perform well when predicting generic LLM judges zero-shot, while smaller models can reliably predict such judges well after being fine-tuned or provided with an in-context report card. Altogether, both approaches can substantially improve the prediction accuracy of smaller models, with report cards and fine-tuning achieving mean improvements of up to 55% and 52% across datasets, respectively. These findings suggest that models can learn to predict their own performance limitations, paving the way for more efficient and self-aware AI systems.

Emotion classification in multilingual settings remains constrained by the scarcity of annotated data: existing corpora are predominantly English, single-label, and cover few languages. We address this gap by constructing a large-scale synthetic training corpus of over 1M multi-label samples (50k per language) across 23 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese, covering 11 emotion categories using culturally-adapted generation and programmatic quality filtering. We train and compare six multilingual transformer encoders, from DistilBERT (135M parameters) to XLM-R-Large (560M parameters), under identical conditions. On our in-domain test set, XLM-R-Large achieves 0.868 F1-micro and 0.987 AUC-micro. To validate against human-annotated data, we evaluate all models zero-shot on GoEmotions (English) and SemEval-2018 Task 1 E-c (English, Arabic, Spanish). On threshold-free ranking metrics, XLM-R-Large matches or exceeds English-only specialist models, tying on AP-micro (0.636) and LRAP (0.804) while surpassing on AUC-micro (0.810 vs. 0.787), while natively supporting all 23 languages. The best base-sized model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/tabularisai/multilingual-emotion-classification

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) enhances LLM reasoning but often induces overconfidence, where incorrect responses yield lower perplexity than correct ones, degrading relative calibration as described by the Area Under the Curve (AUC). Existing approaches either yield limited improvements in calibration or sacrifice gains in reasoning accuracy. We first prove that this degradation in GRPO-style algorithms stems from their uncertainty-agnostic advantage estimation, which inevitably misaligns optimization gradients with calibration. This leads to improved accuracy at the expense of degraded calibration. We then propose Calibration-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO). It adopts a logistic AUC surrogate loss that is theoretically consistent and admits regret bound, enabling uncertainty-aware advantage estimation. By further incorporating a noise masking mechanism, CAPO achieves stable learning dynamics that jointly optimize calibration and accuracy. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CAPO-1.5B significantly improves calibration by up to 15% while achieving accuracy comparable to or better than GRPO, and further boosts accuracy on downstream inference-time scaling tasks by up to 5%. Moreover, when allowed to abstain under low-confidence conditions, CAPO achieves a Pareto-optimal precision-coverage trade-off, highlighting its practical value for hallucination mitigation.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in various visual tasks, yet still struggle with spatial reasoning. Recent efforts mitigate this by injecting geometric features from 3D foundation models, but rely on static single-layer extractions. We identify that such an approach induces a task misalignment bias: the geometric features naturally evolve towards 3D pretraining objectives, which may contradict the heterogeneous spatial demands of MLLMs, rendering any single layer fundamentally insufficient. To resolve this, we propose GeoAlign, a novel framework that dynamically aggregates multi-layer geometric features to realign with the actual demands. GeoAlign constructs a hierarchical geometric feature bank and leverages the MLLM's original visual tokens as content-aware queries to perform layer-wise sparse routing, adaptively fetching the suitable geometric features for each patch. Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench, ScanQA, and SQA3D demonstrate that our compact 4B model effectively achieves state-of-the-art performance, even outperforming larger existing MLLMs.

RLVR improves reasoning in large language models, but its effectiveness is often limited by severe reward sparsity on hard problems. Recent hint-based RL methods mitigate sparsity by injecting partial solutions or abstract templates, yet they typically scale guidance by adding more tokens, which introduce redundancy, inconsistency, and extra training overhead. We propose \textbf{KnowRL} (Knowledge-Guided Reinforcement Learning), an RL training framework that treats hint design as a minimal-sufficient guidance problem. During RL training, KnowRL decomposes guidance into atomic knowledge points (KPs) and uses Constrained Subset Search (CSS) to construct compact, interaction-aware subsets for training. We further identify a pruning interaction paradox -- removing one KP may help while removing multiple such KPs can hurt -- and explicitly optimize for robust subset curation under this dependency structure. We train KnowRL-Nemotron-1.5B from OpenMath-Nemotron-1.5B. Across eight reasoning benchmarks at the 1.5B scale, KnowRL-Nemotron-1.5B consistently outperforms strong RL and hinting baselines. Without KP hints at inference, KnowRL-Nemotron-1.5B reaches 70.08 average accuracy, already surpassing Nemotron-1.5B by +9.63 points; with selected KPs, performance improves to 74.16, establishing a new state of the art at this scale. The model, curated training data, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Hasuer/KnowRL.

High-quality global illumination (GI) in real-time rendering is commonly achieved using precomputed lighting techniques, with lightmap as the standard choice. To support GI for static objects in dynamic lighting environments, multiple lightmaps at different lighting conditions need to be precomputed, which incurs substantial storage and memory overhead. To overcome this limitation, we propose Neural Dynamic GI (NDGI), a novel compression technique specifically designed for temporal lightmap sets. Our method utilizes multi-dimensional feature maps and lightweight neural networks to integrate the temporal information instead of storing multiple sets explicitly, which significantly reduces the storage size of lightmaps. Additionally, we introduce a block compression (BC) simulation strategy during the training process, which enables BC compression on the final generated feature maps and further improves the compression ratio. To enable efficient real-time decompression, we also integrate a virtual texturing (VT) system with our neural representation. Compared with prior methods, our approach achieves high-quality dynamic GI while maintaining remarkably low storage and memory requirements, with only modest real-time decompression overhead. To facilitate further research in this direction, we will release our temporal lightmap dataset precomputed in multiple scenes featuring diverse temporal variations.

Many visual monitoring systems operate under strict communication constraints, where transmitting full-resolution images is impractical and often unnecessary. In such settings, visual data is often used for object presence, spatial relationships, and scene context rather than exact pixel fidelity. This paper presents two semantic image communication pipelines for traffic monitoring, MMSD and SAMR, that reduce transmission cost while preserving meaningful visual information. MMSD (Multi-Modal Semantic Decomposition) targets very high compression together with data confidentiality, since sensitive pixel content is not transmitted. It replaces the original image with compact semantic representations, namely segmentation maps, edge maps, and textual descriptions, and reconstructs the scene at the receiver using a diffusion-based generative model. SAMR (Semantic-Aware Masking Reconstruction) targets higher visual quality while maintaining strong compression. It selectively suppresses non-critical image regions according to semantic importance before standard JPEG encoding and restores the missing content at the receiver through generative inpainting. Both designs follow an asymmetric sender-receiver architecture, where lightweight processing is performed at the edge and computationally intensive reconstruction is offloaded to the server. On a Raspberry Pi~5, the edge-side processing time is about 15s for MMSD and 9s for SAMR. Experimental results show average transmitted-data reductions of 99% for MMSD and 99.1% for SAMR. In addition, MMSD achieves lower payload size than the recent SPIC baseline while preserving strong semantic consistency, whereas SAMR provides a better quality-compression trade-off than standard JPEG and SQ-GAN under comparable operating conditions.

FPGAs are well-suited for dataflow architectures that process data in a streaming or pipelined manner, thus satisfying the high computational and communication demands of emerging applications. However, manually implementing an efficient dataflow architecture for large-scale applications is still challenging, even for specialists who use high-level synthesis (HLS) to simplify FPGA programming. To address this, we introduce CODO, an automated compiler that generates feasible and efficient dataflow accelerators on FPGAs. CODO features a systematic method for detecting and eliminating both coarse-grained and fine-grained dataflow violations. Building on this, CODO performs both on- and off-chip data movement optimizations to maximize transfer efficiency. To guarantee a higher design quality, CODO performs automatic scheduling to generate high-performance dataflow accelerators, ensuring a balanced performance-resource trade-off. Synthesis results show that CODO delivers $1.45\times$ to $4.52\times$ latency speedups on typical computation kernels and $3.7\times$ to $33.8\times$ speedups on DNN models compared to SOTA frameworks. In on-board evaluations, CODO achieves $7.3\times$ average speedup on CNN models and $2.07\times$ average speedup on the GPT-2 model over SOTA frameworks. The compiler is open-sourced at https://github.com/sjtu-zhao-lab/codo-artifact.

The post-training pipeline for diffusion models currently has two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated data and reinforcement learning (RL) with reward models. A fundamental gap separates them. SFT optimizes the denoiser only on ground-truth states sampled from the forward noising process; once inference deviates from these ideal states, subsequent denoising relies on out-of-distribution generalization rather than learned correction, exhibiting the same exposure bias that afflicts autoregressive models, but accumulated along the denoising trajectory instead of the token sequence. RL can in principle address this mismatch, yet its terminal reward signal is sparse, suffers from credit-assignment difficulty, and risks reward hacking. We propose SOAR (Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement), a bias-correction post-training method that fills this gap. Starting from a real sample, SOAR performs a single stop-gradient rollout with the current model, re-noises the resulting off-trajectory state, and supervises the model to steer back toward the original clean target. The method is on-policy, reward-free, and provides dense per-timestep supervision with no credit-assignment problem. On SD3.5-Medium, SOAR improves GenEval from 0.70 to 0.78 and OCR from 0.64 to 0.67 over SFT, while simultaneously raising all model-based preference scores. In controlled reward-specific experiments, SOAR surpasses Flow-GRPO in final metric value on both aesthetic and text-image alignment tasks, despite having no access to a reward model. Since SOAR's base loss subsumes the standard SFT objective, it can directly replace SFT as a stronger first post-training stage after pretraining, while remaining fully compatible with subsequent RL alignment.

The rapid evolution of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has catalyzed unprecedented capabilities in artificial intelligence; however, this continuous modal expansion has inadvertently exposed a vastly broadened and unconstrained adversarial attack surface. Current multimodal jailbreak strategies primarily focus on surface-level pixel perturbations and typographic attacks or harmful images; however, they fail to engage with the complex semantic structures intrinsic to visual data. This leaves the vast semantic attack surface of original, natural images largely unscrutinized. Driven by the need to expose these deep-seated semantic vulnerabilities, we introduce \textbf{MemJack}, a \textbf{MEM}ory-augmented multi-agent \textbf{JA}ilbreak atta\textbf{CK} framework that explicitly leverages visual semantics to orchestrate automated jailbreak attacks. MemJack employs coordinated multi-agent cooperation to dynamically map visual entities to malicious intents, generate adversarial prompts via multi-angle visual-semantic camouflage, and utilize an Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) geometric filter to bypass premature latent space refusals. By accumulating and transferring successful strategies through a persistent Multimodal Experience Memory, MemJack maintains highly coherent extended multi-turn jailbreak attack interactions across different images, thereby improving the attack success rate (ASR) on new images. Extensive empirical evaluations across full, unmodified COCO val2017 images demonstrate that MemJack achieves a 71.48\% ASR against Qwen3-VL-Plus, scaling to 90\% under extended budgets. Furthermore, to catalyze future defensive alignment research, we will release \textbf{MemJack-Bench}, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 113,000 interactive multimodal jailbreak attack trajectories, establishing a vital foundation for developing inherently robust VLMs.

This report summarizes the results of the first edition of the Large Language Model (LLM) Testing competition, held as part of the DeepTest workshop at ICSE 2026. Four tools competed in benchmarking an LLM-based car manual information retrieval application, with the objective of identifying user inputs for which the system fails to appropriately mention warnings contained in the manual. The testing solutions were evaluated based on their effectiveness in exposing failures and the diversity of the discovered failure-revealing tests. We report on the experimental methodology, the competitors, and the results.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge during generation. However, the effectiveness of RAG depends not only on the design of the retriever and the capacity of the underlying model, but also on how retrieved evidence is structured and aligned with the query. Existing RAG approaches typically retrieve and concatenate unstructured text fragments as context, which often introduces redundant or weakly relevant information. This practice leads to excessive context accumulation, reduced semantic alignment, and fragmented reasoning chains, thereby degrading generation quality while increasing token consumption. To address these challenges, we propose Tri-RAG, a structured triplet-based retrieval framework that improves retrieval efficiency through reasoning-aligned context construction. Tri-RAG automatically transforms external knowledge from natural language into standardized structured triplets consisting of Condition, Proof, and Conclusion, explicitly capturing logical relations among knowledge fragments using lightweight prompt-based adaptation with frozen model parameters. Building on this representation, the triplet head Condition is treated as an explicit semantic anchor for retrieval and matching, enabling precise identification of query-relevant knowledge units without directly concatenating lengthy raw texts. As a result, Tri-RAG achieves a favorable balance between retrieval accuracy and context token efficiency. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Tri-RAG significantly improves retrieval quality and reasoning efficiency, while producing more stable generation behavior and more efficient resource utilization in complex reasoning scenarios.

Passwords still remain a dominant authentication method, yet their security is routinely subverted by predictable user choices and large-scale credential leaks. Automated password guessing is a key tool for stress-testing password policies and modeling attacker behavior. This paper applies LLM-driven evolutionary computation to automatically optimize prompts for the LLM password guessing framework. Using OpenEvolve, an open-source system combining MAP-Elites quality-diversity search with an island population model we evolve prompts that maximize cracking rate on a RockYou-derived test set. We evaluate three configurations: a local setup with Qwen3 8B, a single compact cloud model Gemini-2.5 Flash, and a two-model ensemble of frontier LLMs. The approach raises the cracking rates from 2.02\% to 8.48\%. Character distribution analysis further confirms how evolved prompts produce statistically more realistic passwords. Automated prompt evolution is a low-barrier yet effective way to strengthen LLM-based password auditing and underlining how attack pipelines show tendency via automated improvements.

Large-scale pre-training of Foundational Models (FM) constitutes a computationally intensive first phase for enabling AI across diverse scientific and societal applications. This first phase has positioned High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities as indispensable backbones of "Sovereign AI" initiatives. While the massive throughput requirements of FM pre-training align with the traditional capability-oriented mission of HPC, subsequent phases of the AI lifecycle, typically referred to as fine-tuning and inference, introduce operational paradigms that can conflict with established batch-processing environments. Moreover, these phases are not computationally trivial: they often require substantial high-end compute resources while exhibiting hardware utilization patterns that differ significantly from those of pre-training. This paper addresses the architectural and strategic challenges of operationalizing a complete AI lifecycle within a national supercomputing facility. We present a hybrid cloud-native platform being developed and deployed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that combines diskless GPU-enabled HPE Cray EX compute nodes with virtualized commodity infrastructure. Orchestrated by Kubernetes, this novel service architecture bridges the gap between HPC batch processing and service-oriented workflows. We report our initial investigations into fine-tuning pipelines and highly available inference services, analyzing the associated trade-offs while improving user productivity. Our findings offer a blueprint for enabling supercomputers to integrate "AI Factories" services and workflows, supporting AI innovations into end-to-end scientific and industrial use cases.

We introduce KumoRFM-2, the next iteration of a pre-trained foundation model for relational data. KumoRFM-2 supports in-context learning as well as fine-tuning and is applicable to a wide range of predictive tasks. In contrast to tabular foundation models, KumoRFM-2 natively operates on relational data, processing one or more connected tables simultaneously without manual table flattening or target variable generation, all while preserving temporal consistency. KumoRFM-2 leverages a large corpus of synthetic and real-world data to pre-train across four axes: the row and column dimensions at the individual table level, and the foreign key and cross-sample dimensions at the database level. In contrast to its predecessor, KumoRFM-2 injects task information as early as possible, enabling sharper selection of task-relevant columns and improved robustness to noisy data. Through extensive experiments on 41 challenging benchmarks and analysis around expressivity and sensitivity, we demonstrate that KumoRFM-2 outperforms supervised and foundational approaches by up to 8%, while maintaining strong performance under extreme settings of cold start and noisy data. To our knowledge, this is the first time a few-shot foundation model has been shown to surpass supervised approaches on common benchmark tasks, with performance further improving upon fine-tuning. Finally, while KumoRFM-1 was limited to small-scale in-memory datasets, KumoRFM-2 scales to billion-scale relational datasets.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multimodal learning integrates brain signals with complementary modalities to improve mental state assessment, providing great clinical potential. The effectiveness of such paradigms largely depends on the representation learning on heterogeneous modalities. For EEG-based paradigms, one promising approach is to leverage their hierarchical structures, as recent studies have shown that both EEG and associated modalities (e.g., facial expressions) exhibit hierarchical structures reflecting complex cognitive processes. However, Euclidean embeddings struggle to represent these hierarchical structures due to their flat geometry, while hyperbolic spaces, with their exponential growth property, are naturally suited for them. In this work, we propose EEG-MoCE, a novel hyperbolic mixture-of-curvature experts framework designed for multimodal neurotechnology. EEG-MoCE assigns each modality to an expert in a learnable-curvature hyperbolic space, enabling adaptive modeling of its intrinsic geometry. A curvature-aware fusion strategy then dynamically weights experts, emphasizing modalities with richer hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that EEG-MoCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, including emotion recognition, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment.

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed for decision-making, yet their adoption in high-stakes domains remains limited by miscalibrated probabilities, unfaithful explanations, and inability to incorporate expert knowledge precisely. We propose IDEA, a framework that extracts LLM decision knowledge into an interpretable parametric model over semantically meaningful factors. Through joint learning of verbal-to-numerical mappings and decision parameters via EM, correlated sampling that preserves factor dependencies, and direct parameter editing with mathematical guarantees, IDEA produces calibrated probabilities while enabling quantitative human-AI collaboration. Experiments across five datasets show IDEA with Qwen-3-32B (78.6%) outperforms DeepSeek R1 (68.1%) and GPT-5.2 (77.9%), achieving perfect factor exclusion and exact calibration -- precision unattainable through prompting alone. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/leonbig/IDEA.

Unstructured model editing aims to update models with real-world text, yet existing methods often memorize text holistically without reliable fine-grained fact access. To address this, we propose FABLE, a hierarchical framework that decouples fine-grained fact injection from holistic text generation. FABLE follows a two-stage, fact-first strategy: discrete facts are anchored in shallow layers, followed by minimal updates to deeper layers to produce coherent text. This decoupling resolves the mismatch between holistic recall and fine-grained fact access, reflecting the unidirectional Transformer flow in which surface-form generation amplifies rather than corrects underlying fact representations. We also introduce UnFine, a diagnostic benchmark with fine-grained question-answer pairs and fact-level metrics for systematic evaluation. Experiments show that FABLE substantially improves fine-grained question answering while maintaining state-of-the-art holistic editing performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/caskcsg/FABLE.

Improving policymaking is a central concern in public administration. Prior human subject studies reveal substantial cross-cultural differences in citizens' emotional responses to red tape during policy implementation. While LLM agents offer opportunities to simulate human-like responses and reduce experimental costs, their ability to generate culturally appropriate emotional responses to red tape remains unverified. To address this gap, we propose an evaluation framework for assessing LLMs' emotional responses to red tape across diverse cultural contexts. As a pilot study, we apply this framework to a single red-tape scenario. Our results show that all models exhibit limited alignment with human emotional responses, with notably weaker performance in Eastern cultures. Cultural prompting strategies prove largely ineffective in improving alignment. We further introduce \textbf{RAMO}, an interactive interface for simulating citizens' emotional responses to red tape and for collecting human data to improve models. The interface is publicly available at https://ramo-chi.ivia.ch.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to translate the technical outputs of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods into accessible natural-language explanations. However, existing approaches often lack guarantees of accuracy, faithfulness, and completeness. At the same time, current efforts to evaluate such narratives remain largely subjective or confined to post-hoc scoring, offering no safeguards to prevent flawed explanations from reaching end-users. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Two-Stage LLM Meta-Verification Framework that consists of (i) an Explainer LLM that converts raw XAI outputs into natural-language narratives, (ii) a Verifier LLM that assesses them in terms of faithfulness, coherence, completeness, and hallucination risk, and (iii) an iterative refeed mechanism that uses the Verifier's feedback to refine and improve them. Experiments across five XAI techniques and datasets, using three families of open-weight LLMs, show that verification is crucial for filtering unreliable explanations while improving linguistic accessibility compared with raw XAI outputs. In addition, the analysis of the Entropy Production Rate (EPR) during the refinement process indicates that the Verifier's feedback progressively guides the Explainer toward more stable and coherent reasoning. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient pathway toward more trustworthy and democratized XAI systems.

Data scarcity limits NLP development for low-resource African languages. We evaluate two data augmentation methods -- LLM-based generation (Gemini 2.5 Flash) and back-translation (NLLB-200) -- for Hausa and Fongbe, two West African languages that differ substantially in LLM generation quality. We assess augmentation on named entity recognition (NER) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging using MasakhaNER 2.0 and MasakhaPOS benchmarks. Our results reveal that augmentation effectiveness depends on task type rather than language or LLM quality alone. For NER, neither method improves over baseline for either language; LLM augmentation reduces Hausa NER by 0.24% F1 and Fongbe NER by 1.81% F1. For POS tagging, LLM augmentation improves Fongbe by 0.33% accuracy, while back-translation improves Hausa by 0.17%; back-translation reduces Fongbe POS by 0.35% and has negligible effect on Hausa POS. The same LLM-generated synthetic data produces opposite effects across tasks for Fongbe -- hurting NER while helping POS -- suggesting task structure governs augmentation outcomes more than synthetic data quality. These findings challenge the assumption that LLM generation quality predicts augmentation success, and provide actionable guidance: data augmentation should be treated as a task-specific intervention rather than a universally beneficial preprocessing step.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, yet their positional encoding mechanisms remain suboptimal. Existing approaches uniformly assign positional indices to all tokens, overlooking variations in information density within and across modalities, which leads to inefficient attention allocation where redundant visual regions dominate while informative content is underrepresented. We identify positional granularity as an implicit resource and propose MODIX (Multimodal Information-Driven Positional IndeX Scaling), a training-free framework that dynamically adapts positional strides based on modality-specific contributions. MODIX jointly models intra-modal density via covariance-based entropy and inter-modal interaction via cross-modal alignment to derive unified scores, which rescale positional indices to allocate finer granularity to informative modalities while compressing redundant ones, without requiring any modification to model parameters or architecture. Experiments across diverse architectures and benchmarks demonstrate that MODIX consistently improves multimodal reasoning and adaptively reallocates attention according to task-dependent information distributions, suggesting that positional encoding should be treated as an adaptive resource in Transformers for multimodal sequence modeling.

Similarity in formal argumentation has recently gained attention due to its significance in problems such as argument aggregation in semantics and enthymeme decoding. While existing approaches focus on propositional logic, we address the richer setting of First-Order Logic (FOL), where similarity must account for structured content. We introduce a comprehensive framework for FOL argument similarity, built upon: (1) an extended axiomatic foundation; (2) a four-level parametric model covering predicates, literals, clauses, and formulae similarity; (3) two model families, one syntax-sensitive via language models, both integrating contextual weights for nuanced and explainable similarity; and (4) formal constraints enforcing desirable properties.

Continual machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of data that should no longer be retained, while preserving the usefulness of the model on everything else. This setting becomes especially difficult when deletion requests arrive sequentially, because the model must repeatedly adapt without erasing previously retained knowledge. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient way to implement such updates, but naively combining many sequential LoRA modules leads to parameter collision, causing \textit{strong interference} between tasks. We propose a static alternative based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-guided orthogonal subspace projection. Our method constrains each new LoRA update during training so that it lies in the orthogonal complement of the subspaces used by earlier unlearning tasks. This preserves task isolation without requiring dynamic routing at deployment. Experiments on CIFAR-100 with ResNet-20 and on MNIST show stable behavior across long sequences of unlearning tasks. After thirty sequential unlearning tasks, state-of-the-art static fusion reduces retained accuracy from 60.39\% to 12.70\%, whereas the proposed in-training constrained optimization maintains baseline performance ($\sim$58.1\%) while preserving strong unlearning efficacy.

Recent work established a generalized-Fano framework for lower bounding prior-predictive (Bayesian) CVaR in interactive statistical decision making. In this paper, we show how to instantiate that framework in concrete interactive problems and derive explicit Bayesian CVaR lower bounds from its abstract corollaries. Our approach compares a hard model with a reference model using squared Hellinger distance, and combines a lower bound on a reference hinge term with a bound on the distinguishability of the two models. We apply this approach to canonical examples, including Gaussian bandits, and obtain explicit bounds that make the dependence on key problem parameters transparent. These results show how the generalized-Fano Bayesian CVaR framework can be used as a practical lower-bound tool for interactive learning and risk-sensitive decision making.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) integrates heterogeneous text, audio, and visual signals to infer human emotions. While recent approaches leverage cross-modal complementarity, they often struggle to fully utilize weaker modalities. In practice, dominant modalities tend to overshadow non-verbal ones, inducing modality competition and limiting overall contributions. This imbalance degrades fusion performance and robustness under noisy or missing modalities. To address this, we propose a novel model, Enhance-then-Balance Modality Collaboration framework (EBMC). EBMC improves representation quality via semantic disentanglement and cross-modal enhancement, strengthening weaker modalities. To prevent dominant modalities from overwhelming others, an Energy-guided Modality Coordination mechanism achieves implicit gradient rebalancing via a differentiable equilibrium objective. Furthermore, Instance-aware Modality Trust Distillation estimates sample-level reliability to adaptively modulate fusion weights, ensuring robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EBMC achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results and maintains strong performance under missing-modality settings.

We study whether a variational language model can support a minimal and measurable form of agentic control grounded in its own internal evidence. Our model combines local variational hidden computation (EVE), a homeostatic latent regulator, structurally aware checkpoint retention and a calibrated uncertainty-aware controller operating on top of the retained model. Rather than treating uncertainty as a passive diagnostic measured after prediction, we treat it as an operational signal that can regulate training, support checkpoint retention and guide inference-time intervention. The resulting framework is deliberately focused. It studies a closed-loop form of internal control in which structural and predictive signals become actionable. Empirically, the variational backbone improves over a matched deterministic reference on the language-modeling task while also exhibiting a richer and more usable uncertainty profile. On top of this backbone, the calibrated controller remains active, uses multiple actions under a full agentic evaluation and yields a positive quality-cost trade-off. These results support a precise claim: internal uncertainty can serve not only as a descriptive property of a variational language model, but also as a practical control interface for regulation, checkpoint retention and minimal agentic routing.

In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.

Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) exhibit a striking performance inversion: while excelling at complex reasoning tasks, they consistently underperform on fine-grained acoustic perception. We attribute this gap to a fundamental limitation of ASR-centric training, which provides precise linguistic targets but implicitly teaches models to suppress paralinguistic cues and acoustic events as noise. To address this, we propose Unified Audio Schema (UAS), a holistic and structured supervision framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components -- Transcription, Paralinguistics, and Non-linguistic Events -- within a unified JSON format. This design achieves comprehensive acoustic coverage without sacrificing the tight audio-text alignment that enables reasoning. We validate the effectiveness of this supervision strategy by applying it to both discrete and continuous AudioLLM architectures. Extensive experiments on MMSU, MMAR, and MMAU demonstrate that UAS-Audio yields consistent improvements, boosting fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over the same-size state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities. Our code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/Tencent/Unified_Audio_Schema.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks but remain prone to hallucinations in knowledge-intensive scenarios. Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) mitigates this by grounding generation in Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, most multi-hop KBQA methods rely on explicit edge traversal, making them fragile to KG incompleteness. In this paper, we proposed a novel graph-based soft prompting framework that shifts the reasoning paradigm from node-level path traversal to subgraph-level reasoning. Specifically, we employ a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to encode extracted structural subgraphs into soft prompts, enabling LLM to reason over richer structural context and identify relevant entities beyond immediate graph neighbors, thereby reducing sensitivity to missing edges. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage paradigm that reduces computational cost while preserving good performance: a lightweight LLM first leverages the soft prompts to identify question-relevant entities and relations, followed by a more powerful LLM for evidence-aware answer generation. Experiments on four multi-hop KBQA benchmarks show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three of them, demonstrating its effectiveness. Code is available at the repository: https://github.com/Wangshuaiia/GraSP.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in multimodal tracking reveals a concerning trend where recent performance gains are often achieved at the cost of inflated parameter budgets, which fundamentally erodes PEFT's efficiency promise. In this work, we introduce SEATrack, a Simple, Efficient, and Adaptive two-stream multimodal tracker that tackles this performance-efficiency dilemma from two complementary perspectives. We first prioritize cross-modal alignment of matching responses, an underexplored yet pivotal factor that we argue is essential for breaking the trade-off. Specifically, we observe that modality-specific biases in existing two-stream methods generate conflicting matching attention maps, thereby hindering effective joint representation learning. To mitigate this, we propose AMG-LoRA, which seamlessly integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for domain adaptation with Adaptive Mutual Guidance (AMG) to dynamically refine and align attention maps across modalities. We then depart from conventional local fusion approaches by introducing a Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HMoE) that enables efficient global relation modeling, effectively balancing expressiveness and computational efficiency in cross-modal fusion. Equipped with these innovations, SEATrack advances notable progress over state-of-the-art methods in balancing performance with efficiency across RGB-T, RGB-D, and RGB-E tracking tasks. \href{https://github.com/AutoLab-SAI-SJTU/SEATrack}{\textcolor{cyan}{Code is available}}.

Specification gaming under Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to cause LLMs to develop sycophantic, manipulative, or deceptive behavior, yet the conditions under which this occurs remain unclear. We train 11 instruction-tuned LLMs (0.5B--14B) with on-policy RL across 3 environments and find that model size acts as a safety buffer in some environments but enables greater harmful exploitation in others. Controlled ablations trace this reversal to environment-specific features such as role framing and implicit gameability cues. We further show that most safety benchmarks do not predict RL-induced misalignment, except in the case of Sycophancy scores when the exploit relies on inferring the user's preference. Finally, we find that on-policy RL preserves a safety buffer inherent in the model's own generation distribution, one that is bypassed during off-policy settings.

We present Lit2Vec, a reproducible workflow for constructing and validating a chemistry corpus from the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus using conservative, metadata-based license screening. Using this workflow, we assembled an internal study corpus of 582,683 chemistry-specific full-text research articles with structured full text, token-aware paragraph chunks, paragraph-level embeddings generated with the intfloat/e5-large-v2 model, and record-level metadata including abstracts and licensing information. To support downstream retrieval and text-mining use cases, an eligible subset of the corpus was additionally enriched with machine-generated brief summaries and multi-label subfield annotations spanning 18 chemistry domains. Licensing was screened using metadata from Unpaywall, OpenAlex, and Crossref, and the resulting corpus was technically validated for schema compliance, embedding reproducibility, text quality, and metadata completeness. The primary contribution of this work is a reproducible workflow for corpus construction and validation, together with its associated schema and reproducibility resources. The released materials include the code, reconstruction workflow, schema, metadata/provenance artifacts, and validation outputs needed to reproduce the corpus from pinned public upstream resources. Public redistribution of source-derived text and broad text-derived representations is outside the scope of the general release. Researchers can reproduce the workflow by using the released pipeline with publicly available upstream datasets and metadata services.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate survey responses at low cost, but their reliability varies substantially across questions and is unknown before data collection. Deploying LLMs in surveys still requires costly human responses for verification and correction. How should a limited human-labeling budget be allocated across questions in real time? We propose an adaptive allocation algorithm that learns which questions are hardest for the LLM while simultaneously collecting human responses. Each human label serves a dual role: it improves the estimate for that question and reveals how well the LLM predicts human responses on it. The algorithm directs more budget to questions where the LLM is least reliable, without requiring any prior knowledge of question-level LLM accuracy. We prove that the allocation gap relative to the best possible allocation vanishes as the budget grows, and validate the approach on both synthetic data and a real survey dataset with 68 questions and over 2000 respondents. On real survey data, the standard practice of allocating human labels uniformly across questions wastes 10--12% of the budget relative to the optimal; our algorithm reduces this waste to 2--6%, and the advantage grows as questions become more heterogeneous in LLM prediction quality. The algorithm achieves the same estimation quality as traditional uniform sampling with fewer human samples, requires no pilot study, and is backed by formal performance guarantees validated on real survey data. More broadly, the framework applies whenever scarce human oversight must be allocated across tasks where LLM reliability is unknown.

LLMs can perform seemingly planning-intensive tasks, like writing coherent stories or functioning code, without explicitly verbalizing a plan; however, the extent to which they implicitly plan is unknown. In this paper, we define latent planning as occurring when LLMs possess internal planning representations that (1) cause the generation of a specific future token or concept, and (2) shape preceding context to license said future token or concept. We study the Qwen-3 family (0.6B-14B) on simple planning tasks, finding that latent planning ability increases with scale. Models that plan possess features that represent a planned-for word like "accountant", and cause them to output "an" rather than "a"; moreover, even the less-successful Qwen-3 4B-8B have nascent planning mechanisms. On the more complex task of completing rhyming couplets, we find that models often identify a rhyme ahead of time, but even large models seldom plan far ahead. However, we can elicit some planning that increases with scale when steering models towards planned words in prose. In sum, we offer a framework for measuring planning and mechanistic evidence of how models' planning abilities grow with scale.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for tabular question answering, yet calibration on structured data is largely unstudied. This paper presents the first systematic comparison of five confidence estimation methods across five frontier LLMs and two tabular QA benchmarks. All models are severely overconfident (smooth ECE 0.35-0.64 versus 0.10-0.15 reported for textual QA). A consistent self-evaluation versus perturbation dichotomy replicates across both benchmarks and all four fully-covered models: self-evaluation methods (verbalized, P(True)) achieve AUROC 0.42-0.76, while perturbation methods (semantic entropy, self-consistency, and our Multi-Format Agreement) achieve AUROC 0.78-0.86. Per-model paired bootstrap tests reject the null at p<0.001 after Holm-Bonferroni correction, and a 3-seed check on GPT-4o-mini gives a per-seed standard deviation of only 0.006. The paper proposes Multi-Format Agreement (MFA), which exploits the lossless and deterministic serialization variation unique to structured data (Markdown, HTML, JSON, CSV) to estimate confidence at 20% lower API cost than sampling baselines. MFA reduces ECE by 44-63%, generalizes across all four models on TableBench (mean AUROC 0.80), and combines complementarily with sampling: an MFA + self-consistency ensemble lifts AUROC from 0.74 to 0.82. A secondary contribution, structure-aware recalibration, improves AUROC by +10 percentage points over standard post-hoc methods.

Deepfakes are synthetic media that superimpose or generate someone's likeness on to pre-existing sound, images, or videos using deep learning methods. Existing accounts of the wrongs involved in creating and distributing deepfakes focus on the harms they cause or the non-normative interests they violate. However, these approaches do not explain how deepfakes can be wrongful even when they cause no harm or set back any other non-normative interest. To address this issue, this paper identifies a neglected reason why deepfakes are wrong: they can subvert our legitimate interests in having authority over the permissible uses of our image and the governance of our identity. We argue that deepfakes are wrong when they usurp our authority to determine the provenance of our own agency by exploiting our biometric features as a generative resource. In particular, we have a specific right against the algorithmic conscription of our identity. We refine the scope of this interest by distinguishing between permissible forms of appropriation, such as artistic depiction, from wrongful algorithmic simulation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong abilities in natural language understanding and generation, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive reasoning. Structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide an effective form of external knowledge representation and have been widely used to enhance performance in classical Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) tasks. However, performing precise multi-hop reasoning over KGs for complex queries remains highly challenging. Most existing approaches decompose the reasoning process into a sequence of isolated steps executed through a fixed pipeline. While effective to some extent, such designs constrain reasoning flexibility and fragment the overall decision process, often leading to incoherence and the loss of critical intermediate information from earlier steps. In this paper, we introduce KG-Reasoner, an end-to-end framework that integrates multi-step reasoning into a unified "thinking" phase of a Reasoning LLM. Through Reinforcement Learning (RL), the LLM is trained to internalize the KG traversal process, enabling it to dynamically explore reasoning paths, and perform backtracking when necessary. Experiments on eight multi-hop and knowledge-intensive reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that KG-Reasoner achieves competitive or superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at the repository: https://github.com/Wangshuaiia/KG-Reasoner.

In this article, we propose the optimization of the resolution of time-frequency atoms and the regularization of fitting models to obtain better representations of heart sound signals. This is done by evaluating the classification performance of deep learning (DL) networks in discriminating five heart valvular conditions based on a new class of time-frequency feature matrices derived from the fitting models. We inspect several combinations of resolution and regularization, and the optimal one is that provides the highest performance. To this end, a fitting model is obtained based on a heart sound signal and an overcomplete dictionary of Gabor atoms using elastic net regularization of linear models. We consider two different DL architectures, the first mainly consisting of a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) layer and a long short-term memory (LSTM) layer, while the second is composed of 1D and 2D CNN layers followed by an LSTM layer. The networks are trained with two algorithms, namely stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) and adaptive moment (ADAM). Extensive experimentation has been conducted using a database containing heart sound signals of five heart valvular conditions. The best classification accuracy of $98.95\%$ is achieved with the second architecture when trained with ADAM and feature matrices derived from optimal models obtained with a Gabor dictionary consisting of atoms with high-time low-frequency resolution and imposing sparsity on the models.

Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done through nested loops of evolutionary and learning processes, where the control parameters of each robot are learned independently. However, the control parameters learned by one robot may contain valuable information for others. Thus, we introduce a social learning approach in which robots can exploit optimized parameters from their peers to accelerate their own brain optimization. Within this framework, we systematically investigate how the selection of teachers, deciding which and how many robots to learn from, affects performance, experimenting with virtual soft robots in four tasks and environments. In particular, we study the effect of inheriting experience from morphologically similar robots due to the tightly coupled body and brain in robot optimization. Our results confirm the effectiveness of building on others' experience, as social learning clearly outperforms learning from scratch under equivalent computational budgets. In addition, while the optimal teacher selection strategy remains open, our findings suggest that incorporating knowledge from multiple teachers can yield more consistent and robust improvements.

In Gaussian model-based multichannel audio source separation, the likelihood of observed mixtures of source signals is parametrized by source spectral variances and by associated spatial covariance matrices. These parameters are estimated by maximizing the likelihood through an Expectation-Maximization algorithm and used to separate the signals by means of multichannel Wiener filtering. We propose to estimate these parameters by applying nonnegative factorization based on prior information on source variances. In the nonnegative factorization, spectral basis matrices can be defined as the prior information. The matrices can be either extracted or indirectly made available through a redundant library that is trained in advance. In a separate step, applying nonnegative tensor factorization, two algorithms are proposed in order to either extract or detect the basis matrices that best represent the power spectra of the source signals in the observed mixtures. The factorization is achieved by minimizing the $β$-divergence through multiplicative update rules. The sparsity of factorization can be controlled by tuning the value of $β$. Experiments show that sparsity, rather than the value assigned to $β$ in the training, is crucial in order to increase the separation performance. The proposed method was evaluated in several mixing conditions. It provides better separation quality with respect to other comparable algorithms.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the alignment of models with general human preferences. However, a major challenge remains in adapting LLMs to individual preferences, which are not only diverse but also dynamic. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Preference-Paired Fine-Tuning (PFT), designed to align models with contradictory and evolving individual preferences. We present a new dataset, Value Conflict Dilemma (VCD), which includes scenarios that involve conflicting human preferences, facilitating the evaluation of our approach. Our experiments demonstrate that PFT outperforms single-preference training methods, achieving up to 96.6% accuracy in multi-choice classification tasks and the highest open-ended generation score of 8.69. PFT also shows significant improvements over DPO, SFT and some traditional training methods, especially when handling conflicting preferences. Additionally, with limited user history data, models can inferring preference vector rapidly, achieving a 44.76% improvement in user-specific preference alignment in comparison to single-preference models.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data contributed by low-resource language communities, yet the linguistic knowledge encoded in these models remains accessible only through commercial APIs. This paper investigates whether strategic prompting can extract usable text data from LLMs for two West African languages: Hausa (Afroasiatic, approximately 80 million speakers) and Fongbe (Niger-Congo, approximately 2 million speakers). We systematically compare six elicitation task types across two commercial LLMs (GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash). GPT-4o Mini extracts 6-41 times more usable target-language words per API call than Gemini. Optimal strategies differ by language: Hausa benefits from functional text and dialogue, while Fongbe requires constrained generation prompts. We release all generated corpora and code.

In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission. Such problems are inherently mixed discrete-continuous: a high-level action sequence and a physically feasible continuous trajectory. The resulting trajectory and action sequence must also satisfy problem constraints such as deadlines, time windows, and velocity or acceleration limits. While hybrid temporal planners attempt to address this challenge, they typically model motion using linear (first-order) dynamics, which cannot guarantee that the resulting plan respects the robot's true physical constraints. Consequently, even when the high-level action sequence is fixed, producing a dynamically feasible trajectory becomes a bi-level optimization problem. We address this problem via reinforcement learning in continuous space. We define a Markov Decision Process that explicitly incorporates analytical second-order constraints and use it to refine first-order plans generated by a hybrid planner. Our results show that this approach can reliably recover physical feasibility and effectively bridge the gap between a planner's initial first-order trajectory and the dynamics required for real execution.

Scientific novelty drives advances at the research frontier, yet it is also associated with heightened uncertainty and potential resistance from incumbent paradigms, leading to complex patterns of scientific impact. Prior studies have primarily ex-amined the relationship between a single dimension of novelty -- such as theoreti-cal, methodological, or results-based novelty -- and scientific impact. However, because scientific novelty is inherently multidimensional, focusing on isolated dimensions may obscure how different types of novelty jointly shape impact. Consequently, we know little about how combinations of novelty types influence scientific impact. To this end, we draw on a dataset of 15,322 articles published in Nature Communications. Using the DeepSeek-V3 model, we classify articles into three novelty dimensions based on the content of their Introduction sections: theoretical novelty, methodological novelty, and results-based novelty. These dimensions may coexist within the same article, forming distinct novelty configura-tions. Scientific impact is measured using five-year citation counts and indicators of whether an article belongs to the top 1% or top 10% highly cited papers. Descriptive results indicate that results-based novelty alone and the simultaneous presence of all three novelty types are the dominant configurations in the sample. Regression results further show that articles with results-based novelty only re-ceive significantly more citations and are more likely to rank among the top 1% and top 10% highly cited papers than articles exhibiting all three novelty types. These findings advance our understanding of how multidimensional novelty configurations shape knowledge diffusion.

Accurate vehicle counting through video surveillance is crucial for efficient traffic management. However, achieving high counting accuracy while ensuring computational efficiency remains a challenge. To address this, we propose a fully automated, video-based vehicle counting framework designed to optimize both computational efficiency and counting accuracy. Our framework operates in two distinct phases: \textit{estimation} and \textit{prediction}. In the estimation phase, the optimal region of interest (ROI) is automatically determined using a novel combination of three models based on detection scores, tracking scores, and vehicle density. This adaptive approach ensures compatibility with any detection and tracking method, enhancing the framework's versatility. In the prediction phase, vehicle counting is efficiently performed within the estimated ROI. We evaluated our framework on benchmark datasets like UA-DETRAC, GRAM, CDnet 2014, and ATON. Results demonstrate exceptional accuracy, with most videos achieving 100\% accuracy, while also enhancing computational efficiency, making processing up to four times faster than full-frame processing. The framework outperforms existing techniques, especially in complex multi-road scenarios, demonstrating robustness and superior accuracy. These advancements make it a promising solution for real-time traffic monitoring.

Fine-tuning is the dominant paradigm for adapting pretrained large language models (LLMs) to downstream NLP tasks. In practice, fine-tuning datasets may contain various forms of noise arising from annotation errors, preprocessing artifacts, or automated data collection. While prior work has focused on designing robust learning algorithms to mitigate performance degradation under noisy conditions, comparatively little is known about how different types of noise affect the internal learning dynamics of LLMs during fine-tuning. In this work, we systematically study the impact of noise on model behavior across three pretrained model families (GPT-2, Qwen2 and Llama-2) and three diverse NLP tasks. We introduce controlled perturbations corresponding to three common real-world noise types: label noise, grammatical noise, and typographical noise. Beyond task-level performance, we analyze layer-wise representation changes and attention patterns to understand how noise propagates through the network. Our results show that corrupting labels (i.e. label noise) consistently causes the largest performance degradation, whereas grammatical noise and typographical noise can occasionally yield mild regularization benefits. We further find that noise effects are localized primarily to task-specific layers, while attention structures remain comparatively stable.

Pansharpening aims to synthesize high-resolution multispectral (HR-MS) images by fusing the spatial textures of panchromatic (PAN) images with the spectral information of low-resolution multispectral (LR-MS) images. While recent deep learning paradigms, especially diffusion-based operators, have pushed the performance boundaries, they often encounter spectral-spatial blurring and prohibitive computational costs due to their stochastic nature and iterative sampling. In this paper, we propose the Euler-inspired Decoupling Neural Operator (EDNO), a physics-inspired framework that redefines pansharpening as a continuous functional mapping in the frequency domain. Departing from conventional Cartesian feature processing, our EDNO leverages Euler's formula to transform features into a polar coordinate system, enabling a novel explicit-implicit interaction mechanism. Specifically, we develop the Euler Feature Interaction Layer (EFIL), which decouples the fusion task into two specialized modules: 1) Explicit Feature Interaction Module, utilizing a linear weighting scheme to simulate phase rotation for adaptive geometric alignment; and 2) Implicit Feature Interaction Module, employing a feed-forward network to model spectral distributions for superior color consistency. By operating in the frequency domain, EDNO inherently captures global receptive fields while maintaining discretization-invariance. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that EDNO offers a superior efficiency-performance balance compared to heavyweight architectures.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. Central to MAS is the communication topology which governs how agents exchange information internally. Consequently, the security of communication topologies has attracted increasing attention. In this paper, we investigate a critical privacy risk: MAS communication topologies can be inferred under a restrictive black-box setting, exposing system vulnerabilities and posing significant intellectual property threats. To explore this risk, we propose Communication Inference Attack (CIA), a novel attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents' reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the proposed global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. Extensive experiments on MAS with optimized communication topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of CIA, achieving an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC of up to 0.99, thereby revealing the substantial privacy risk in MAS.

Machine learning has become a central research area, with increasing attention devoted to explainable clustering, also known as conceptual clustering, which is a knowledge-driven unsupervised learning paradigm that partitions data into $θ$ disjoint clusters, where each cluster is described by an explicit symbolic representation, typically expressed as a closed pattern or itemset. By providing human-interpretable cluster descriptions, explainable clustering plays an important role in explainable artificial intelligence and knowledge discovery. Recent work improved clustering quality by introducing k-relaxed frequent patterns (k-RFPs), a pattern model that relaxes strict coverage constraints through a generalized kcover definition. This framework integrates constraint-based reasoning, using SAT solvers for pattern generation, with combinatorial optimization, using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) for cluster selection. Despite its effectiveness, this approach suffers from a critical limitation: multiple distinct k-RFPs may induce identical k-covers, leading to redundant symbolic representations that unnecessarily enlarge the search space and increase computational complexity during cluster construction. In this paper, we address this redundancy through a pattern reduction framework. Our contributions are threefold. First, we formally characterize the conditions under which distinct k-RFPs induce identical kcovers, providing theoretical foundations for redundancy detection. Second, we propose an optimization strategy that removes redundant patterns by retaining a single representative pattern for each distinct k-cover. Third, we investigate the interpretability and representativeness of the patterns selected by the ILP model by analyzing their robustness with respect to their induced clusters. Extensive experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the pattern search space, improves computational efficiency, preserves and enhances in some cases the quality of the resulting clusters.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in politically sensitive environments, where memorisation of personal data or confidential content raises regulatory concerns under frameworks such as the GDPR and its Right to be Forgotten. Translating such legal principles into large-scale generative systems presents significant technical challenges. We introduce a lightweight sequential unlearning framework that explicitly separates retention and suppression objectives. The method first stabilises benign capabilities through positive fine-tuning, then applies layer-restricted negative fine-tuning to suppress designated sensitive patterns while preserving general language competence. Experiments on the SemEval-2025 LLM Unlearning benchmark demonstrate effective behavioural suppression with minimal impact on factual accuracy and fluency. GPT-2 exhibits greater robustness than DistilGPT-2, highlighting the role of model capacity in privacy-aligned adaptation. We position sequential unlearning as a practical and reproducible mechanism for operationalising data erasure requirements in politically deployed LLMs.

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a source utterance into the voice of an unseen target speaker while preserving its linguistic content. Although recent systems have improved conversion quality, building zero-shot VC systems for interactive scenarios remains challenging because high-fidelity speaker transfer and low-latency streaming inference are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In this work, we present X-VC, a zero-shot streaming VC system that performs one-step conversion in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. X-VC uses a dual-conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and frame-level acoustic conditions derived from target reference speech, while injecting utterance-level target speaker information through adaptive normalization. To reduce the mismatch between training and inference, we train the model with generated paired data and a role-assignment strategy that combines standard, reconstruction, and reversed modes. For streaming inference, we further adopt a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing that is aligned with the segment-based training paradigm of the codec. Experiments on Seed-TTS-Eval show that X-VC achieves the best streaming WER in both English and Chinese, strong speaker similarity in same-language and cross-lingual settings, and substantially lower offline real-time factor than the compared baselines. These results suggest that codec-space one-step conversion is a practical approach for building high-quality low-latency zero-shot VC systems. Audio samples are available at https://x-vc.github.io. Our code and checkpoints will also be released.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. However, sparse methods cannot operate natively on MLA's compressed latent structure, missing opportunities for joint optimization. In this paper, we propose Latent-Condensed Attention (LCA), which directly condenses context within MLA's latent space, where the representation is disentangled into semantic latent vectors and positional keys. LCA separately aggregates semantic vectors via query-aware pooling and preserves positional keys via anchor selection. This approach jointly reduces both computational cost and KV cache without adding parameters. Beyond MLA, LCA's design is architecture-agnostic and readily extends to other attention mechanisms such as GQA. Theoretically, we prove a length-independent error bound. Experiments show LCA achieves up to 2.5$\times$ prefilling speedup and 90% KV cache reduction at 128K context while maintaining competitive performance.

In derivational morphology, what mechanisms govern the variation in form-meaning relations between words? The answers to this type of questions are typically based on intuition and on observations drawn from limited data, even when a wide range of languages is considered. Many of these studies are difficult to replicate and generalize. To address this issue, we present GLeMM, a new derivational resource designed for experimentation and data-driven description in morphology. GLeMM is characterized by (i) its large size, (ii) its extensive coverage (currently amounting to seven European languages, i.e., German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Russian, (iii) its fully automated design, identical across all languages, (iv) the automatic annotation of morphological features on each entry, as well as (v) the encoding of semantic descriptions for a significant subset of these entries. It enables researchers to address difficult questions, such as the role of form and meaning in word-formation, and to develop and experimentally test computational methods that identify the structures of derivational morphology. The article describes how GLeMM is created using Wiktionary articles and presents various case studies illustrating possible applications of the resource.

Real-world industrial inspection requires not only localizing defects, but also explaining them in natural language and generating controlled defect edits. However, existing approaches fail to jointly support all three capabilities within a unified framework and evaluation protocol. We propose IAD-Unify, a dual-encoder unified framework in which a frozen DINOv2-based region expert supplies precise anomaly evidence to a shared Qwen3.5-4B vision-language backbone via lightweight token injection, jointly enabling anomaly segmentation, region-grounded understanding, and mask-guided generation. To enable unified evaluation, we further construct Anomaly-56K, a comprehensive unified multi-task IAD evaluation platform, spanning 59,916 images across 24 categories and 104 defect variants. Controlled ablations yield four findings: (i) region grounding is the decisive mechanism for understanding, removing it degrades location accuracy by >76 pp; (ii) predicted-region performance closely matches oracle, confirming deployment viability; (iii) region-grounded generation achieves the best full-image fidelity and masked-region perceptual quality; and (iv) pre-initialized joint training improves understanding at negligible generation cost (-0.16 dB). IAD-Unify further achieves strong performance on the MMAD benchmark, including categories unseen during training, demonstrating robust cross-category generalization.

In-context learning enables transformers to adapt to new tasks from a few examples at inference time, while grokking highlights that this generalization can emerge abruptly only after prolonged training. We study task generalization and grokking in in-context learning using a Bayesian perspective, asking what enables the delayed transition from memorization to generalization. Concretely, we consider modular arithmetic tasks in which a transformer must infer a latent linear function solely from in-context examples and analyze how predictive uncertainty evolves during training. We combine approximate Bayesian techniques to estimate the posterior distribution and we study how uncertainty behaves across training and under changes in task diversity, context length, and context noise. We find that epistemic uncertainty collapses sharply when the model groks, making uncertainty a practical label-free diagnostic of generalization in transformers. Additionally, we provide theoretical support with a simplified Bayesian linear model, showing that asymptotically both delayed generalization and uncertainty peaks arise from the same underlying spectral mechanism, which links grokking time to uncertainty dynamics.

Organisations increasingly outsource privacy-sensitive data transformations to cloud providers, yet no practical mechanism lets the data owner verify that the contracted algorithm was faithfully executed. VeriX-Anon is a multi-layered verification framework for outsourced Target-Driven k-anonymization combining three orthogonal mechanisms: deterministic verification via Merkle-style hashing of an Authenticated Decision Tree, probabilistic verification via Boundary Sentinels near the Random Forest decision boundary and exact-duplicate Twins with cryptographic identifiers, and utility-based verification via Explainable AI fingerprinting that compares SHAP value distributions before and after anonymization using the Wasserstein distance. Evaluated on three cross-domain datasets against Lazy (drops 5 percent of records), Dumb (random splitting, fake hash), and Approximate (random splitting, valid hash) adversaries, VeriX-Anon correctly detected deviations in 11 of 12 scenarios. No single layer achieved this alone. The XAI layer was the only mechanism that caught the Approximate adversary, succeeding on Adult and Bank but failing on the severely imbalanced Diabetes dataset where class imbalance suppresses the SHAP signal, confirming the need for adaptive thresholding. An 11-point k-sweep showed Target-Driven anonymization preserves significantly more utility than Blind anonymization (Wilcoxon $p = 0.000977$, Cohen's $d = 1.96$, mean F1 gap $+0.1574$). Client-side verification completes under one second at one million rows. The threat model covers three empirically evaluated profiles and one theoretical profile (Informed Attacker) aware of trap embedding but unable to defeat the cryptographic salt. Sentinel evasion probability ranges from near-zero for balanced datasets to 0.52 for imbalanced ones, a limitation the twin layer compensates for in every tested scenario.

We investigate whether transformers use their depth adaptively across tasks of increasing difficulty. Using a controlled multi-hop relational reasoning task based on family stories, where difficulty is determined by the number of relationship hops that must be composed, we monitor (i) how predictions evolve across layers via early readouts (the logit lens) and (ii) how task-relevant information is integrated across tokens via causal patching. For pretrained models, we find some limited evidence for adaptive depth use: some larger models need fewer layers to arrive at plausible answers for easier tasks, and models generally use more layers to integrate information across tokens as chain length increases. For models finetuned on the task, we find clearer and more consistent evidence of adaptive depth use, with the effect being stronger for less constrained finetuning regimes that do not preserve general language modeling abilities.

Trajectory prediction models often fail in real-world automated driving due to distributional shifts between training and test conditions. Such distributional shifts, whether behavioural or environmental, pose a critical risk by causing the model to make incorrect forecasts in unfamiliar situations. We propose a self-supervised method that trains a decoder in a post-hoc fashion on the self-supervised task of forecasting the second half of observed trajectories from the first half. The L2 norm of the gradient of this forecasting loss with respect to the decoder's final layer defines a score to identify distribution shifts. Our approach, first, does not affect the trajectory prediction model, ensuring no interference with original prediction performance and second, demonstrates substantial improvements on distribution shift detection for trajectory prediction on the Shifts and Argoverse datasets. Moreover, we show that this method can also be used to early detect collisions of a deep Q-Network motion planner in the Highway simulator. Source code is available at https://github.com/Michedev/forecasting-the-past.

Multimodal Large Language Models frequently suffer from inference hallucinations, partially stemming from language priors dominating visual evidence. Existing training-free mitigation methods either perturb the visual representation and deviate from the natural image distribution, or enforce intrusive manipulations that compromise the model's inherent generative fluency. We introduce a novel perspective that multimodal hallucination manifests as the hypersensitivity of visual grounding to textual phrasing during the decoding phase. Building on this insight, we propose Decoding by Perturbation (DeP), a training-free framework mitigating prior-induced hallucinations via controlled textual interventions. DeP employs a dynamic probe applying multi-level textual perturbations to elicit latent language priors. Leveraging attention variance, it enhances stable evidence regions while suppressing suspicious noise in the feature space. Furthermore, it constructs an interpretable prior drift direction using logits statistics to counteract probability biases from textual co-occurrences. Extensive experiments confirm DeP effectively reduces hallucinations and achieves superior performance across multiple benchmarks.

Extracting actionable insights from complex value stream map simulations can be challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone. Recent advances in large language models offer new avenues to support users with this task. While existing approaches excel at processing raw data to gain information, they are structurally unfit to pick up on subtle situational differences needed to distinguish similar data sources in this domain. To address this issue, we propose a decoupled, two-step agentic architecture. By separating orchestration from data analysis, the system leverages progressive data discovery infused with domain expert knowledge. This architecture allows the orchestration to intelligently select data sources and perform multi-hop reasoning across data structures while maintaining a slim internal context. Results from multiple state-of-the-art large language models demonstrate the framework's viability: with top-tier models achieving accuracies of up to 86% and demonstrating high robustness across evaluation runs.

Write-and-verify (WV) is essential for programming multi-level RRAM weights, yet under scaled-voltage and low-SNR conditions the verify read increasingly limits mapping accuracy, convergence speed and energy. We propose a Hadamard-domain WV framework that improves verify reliability without adding analog hardware. % without introducing additional analog blocks % while leveraging the existing analog front-end \emph{HD-PV} (Hadamard-Encoded Parallel-Verify) replaces conventional one-hot verify reads with $N$ orthogonal Hadamard patterns for an $N$-cell column. Changing the read basis without increasing the column-level read count, inverse Hadamard decoding reduces uncorrelated read-noise variance by a factor of $N$ and cancels common-mode disturbances. \emph{HARP} (Hadamard-based ADC-Energy-Reduced Parallel-Verify) further exploits the fact that WV needs only ternary update decisions, not full digital codes, and replaces SAR conversions with lightweight compare-only operations. Across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and keyword spotting under severe read noise, conventional WV loses over 20\,\% accuracy on CIFAR-10, while HD-PV and HARP limit the loss to 0.6\,\% and 1\,\% under the same memory footprint. Compared to conventional multi-read averaging for noise reduction, HD-PV and HARP achieve comparable accuracy with up to $6.1\times$ and $3.5\times$ lower latency and $6.2\times$ and $9.5\times$ better energy efficiency, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of Hadamard-encoded verification to RRAM WV.

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where sensing failures or cyberphysical attacks can lead to unsafe operations resulting in human loss and/or severe physical damages. Reliable real-time perception is therefore critically important for their safe operations and acceptability. For example, vision-based distance estimation is vulnerable to environmental degradation and adversarial perturbations, and existing defenses are often reactive and too slow to promptly mitigate their impacts on safe operations. We present a Resilient Autonomous Car Framework (RACF) that incorporates an Object Distance Correction Algorithm (ODCA) to improve perception-layer robustness through redundancy and diversity across a depth camera, LiDAR, and physics-based kinematics. Within this framework, when obstacle distance estimation produced by depth camera is inconsistent, a cross-sensor gate activates the correction algorithm to fix the detected inconsistency. We have experiment with the proposed resilient car framework and evaluate its performance on a testbed implemented using the Quanser QCar 2 platform. The presented framework achieved up to 35% RMSE reduction under strong corruption and improves stop compliance and braking latency, while operating in real time. These results demonstrate a practical and lightweight approach to resilient perception for safety-critical autonomous driving

In this review I summarize how machine learning can be used in lattice gauge theory simulations and what ap\-proaches are currently available to improve the sampling of gauge field configurations, with a focus on applications in four-dimensional SU(3) gauge theories. These include approaches based on generative machine-learning models such as (stochastic) normalizing flows and diffusion processes, and an approach based on renormalization group (RG) transformations, more specifically the machine learning of RG-improved gauge actions using gauge-equivariant convolutional neural networks. In particular, I present scaling results for a machine-learned fixed-point action in four-dimensional SU(3) gauge theory towards the continuum limit. The results include observables based on the classically perfect gradient-flow scales, which are free of tree-level lattice artefacts to all orders, and quantities related to the static potential and the deconfinement transition.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise efficient, clean and cost-effective transportation systems, but their reliance on sensors, wireless communications, and decision-making systems makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks and physical threats. This chapter presents novel design techniques to strengthen the security and resilience of AVs. We first provide a taxonomy of potential attacks across different architectural layers, from perception and control manipulation to Vehicle-to-Any (V2X) communication exploits and software supply chain compromises. Building on this analysis, we present an AV Resilient architecture that integrates redundancy, diversity, and adaptive reconfiguration strategies, supported by anomaly- and hash-based intrusion detection techniques. Experimental validation on the Quanser QCar platform demonstrates the effectiveness of these methods in detecting depth camera blinding attacks and software tampering of perception modules. The results highlight how fast anomaly detection combined with fallback and backup mechanisms ensures operational continuity, even under adversarial conditions. By linking layered threat modeling with practical defense implementations, this work advances AV resilience strategies for safer and more trustworthy autonomous vehicles.

Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising pathway for collaboratively fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) at the edge; however, this paradigm faces a critical bottleneck: the prohibitive communication and memory overheads incurred by exchanging high-dimensional gradients. Furthermore, recent studies reveal that user training data can still be recovered from these local gradients, undermining the core privacy promise of FL. In this paper, we address this trilemma of communication, memory, and privacy by proposing pAirZero, a novel framework that synergizes Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization with Over-the-Air (OTA) computation. Uniquely, pAirZero enables resource-constrained devices to submit their local gradient with only bit-level communication loads while participating in federated fine-tuning of LLMs with inference-level memory costs. This approach not only eliminates the high memory requirements needed for LLM fine-tuning but also alleviates the strict synchronization requirements that plague conventional OTA methods. We further formulate a rigorous optimization model to adaptively determine the optimal transmit power and noise levels, ensuring consistent privacy protection regardless of channel conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of pAirZero in enabling secure, efficient LLM fine-tuning over wireless networks, with only 25% peak memory cost on OPT-125M and communication load orders of magnitude lower than conventional methods.

Standard Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training typically treats corpora as flattened token sequences, often overlooking the real-world context that humans naturally rely on to contextualize information. To bridge this gap, we introduce Knowledge Coordinate Conditioning (KoCo), a simple method that maps every document into a three-dimensional semantic coordinate. By prepending these coordinates as textual prefixes for pre-training, we aim to equip the model with explicit contextual awareness to learn the documents within the real-world knowledge structure. Experiment results demonstrate that KoCo significantly enhances performance across 10 downstream tasks and accelerates pre-training convergence by approximately 30\%. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that explicitly modeling knowledge coordinates helps the model distinguish stable facts from noise, effectively mitigating hallucination in generated outputs.

In this paper, we present Chain-of-Models Pre-Training (CoM-PT), a novel performance-lossless training acceleration method for vision foundation models (VFMs). This approach fundamentally differs from existing acceleration methods in its core motivation: rather than optimizing each model individually, CoM-PT is designed to accelerate the training pipeline at the model family level, scaling efficiently as the model family expands. Specifically, CoM-PT establishes a pre-training sequence for the model family, arranged in ascending order of model size, called model chain. In this chain, only the smallest model undergoes standard individual pre-training, while the other models are efficiently trained through sequential inverse knowledge transfer from their smaller predecessors by jointly reusing the knowledge in the parameter space and the feature space. As a result, CoM-PT enables all models to achieve performance that is mostly superior to standard individual training while significantly reducing training cost, and this is extensively validated across 45 datasets spanning zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. Notably, its efficient scaling property yields a remarkable phenomenon: training more models even results in higher efficiency. For instance, when pre-training on CC3M: i) given ViT-L as the largest model, progressively prepending smaller models to the model chain reduces computational complexity by up to 72%; ii) within a fixed model size range, as the VFM family scales across 3, 4, and 7 models, the acceleration ratio of CoM-PT exhibits a striking leap: from 4.13X to 5.68X and 7.09X. Since CoM-PT is naturally agnostic to specific pre-training paradigms, we open-source the code to spur further extensions in more computationally intensive scenarios, such as large language model pre-training.

This paper addresses two limitations of large language models (LLMs) in solving complex problems: (1) their reasoning processes exhibit Bayesian-like stochastic generation, where each token is sampled from a context-dependent probability distribution, leading to inherently random decision trajectories rather than deterministic planning; (2) the reasoning and decision-making mechanisms are statically decoupled, meaning dynamically retrieved domain knowledge fails to dynamically adjust the underlying reasoning strategy. These dual deficiencies result in initial decisions lacking strategic anchoring and reasoning chains often failing to converge on correct solutions, as stochastic generation lacks mechanisms for trajectory correction or knowledge-guided optimization during sequential reasoning. To resolve these issues, we propose a problem-solving method integrated into the LLM's generation process to guide reasoning. This method, compatible with numerous LLMs and featuring reusable solutions, is grounded in a novel Heuristic-Classification-of-Thoughts prompting schema (HCoT). HCoT synergizes the LLM's reasoning ability with a structured problem space via a heuristic classification model that controls the reasoning process and provides reusable abstract solutions. Evaluated on two complex inductive reasoning tasks with ill-defined search spaces, HCoT outperforms existing approaches (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts and Chain-of-Thoughts prompting) in performance. On the well-structured 24 Game task, HCoT demonstrates significantly higher token efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art Tree-of-Thoughts-Breadth-First-Search. In terms of both accuracy and token usage, HCoT achieves a Pareto frontier balance, offering a strong trade-off between performance and computational cost.

Multi-turn dialogue is the predominant form of interaction with large language models (LLMs). While LLM routing is effective in single-turn settings, existing methods fail to maximize cumulative performance in multi-turn dialogue due to interaction dynamics and delayed rewards. To address this challenge, we move from myopic, single-turn selection to long-horizon sequential routing for multi-turn dialogue. Accordingly, we propose DialRouter, which first performs MCTS to explore dialogue branches induced by different LLM selections and collect trajectories with high cumulative rewards. DialRouter then learns a lightweight routing policy from search-derived data, augmented with retrieval-based future state approximation, enabling multi-turn routing without online search. Experiments on both open-domain and domain-specific dialogue tasks across diverse candidate sets of both open-source and closed-source LLMs demonstrate that DialRouter significantly outperforms single LLMs and existing routing baselines in task success rate, while achieving a superior performance-cost trade-off when combined with a cost-aware reward.

Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains highly fragile during fine-tuning, where even benign adaptation can degrade pre-trained refusal behaviors and enable harmful responses. Existing defenses typically constrain either weights or activations in isolation, without considering their coupled effects on safety. In this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate that constraining either weights or activations alone is insufficient for safety preservation. To robustly preserve safety alignment, we propose Coupled Weight and Activation Constraints (CWAC), a novel approach that simultaneously enforces a precomputed safety subspace on weight updates and applies targeted regularization to safety-critical features identified by sparse autoencoders. Extensive experiments across four widely used LLMs and diverse downstream tasks show that CWAC consistently achieves the lowest harmful scores with minimal impact on fine-tuning accuracy, substantially outperforming strong baselines even under high harmful data ratios.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on explicit reasoning to solve coding tasks, yet evaluating the quality of this reasoning remains challenging. Existing reasoning evaluators are not designed for coding, and current benchmarks focus primarily on code generation, leaving other coding tasks largely unexplored. We introduce CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM reasoning quality across three coding task categories: generation, summarization, and classification. Using this benchmark, we analyze 1,069 mismatch cases from existing evaluators, identify five recurring limitations, and derive four design insights for reasoning evaluation in coding tasks. Guided by these insights, we propose VERA, a two-stage evaluator that combines evidence-grounded verification with ambiguity-aware score correction. Experiments on CodeRQ-Bench show that VERA consistently outperforms strong baselines across four datasets, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21. We release CodeRQ-Bench at https://github.com/MrLYG/CodeRQ-Bench, supporting future investigations.

Despite advances in multilingual capabilities, most large language models (LLMs) remain English-centric in their training and, crucially, in their production of reasoning traces. Even when tasked with non-English problems, these models predominantly reason in English, creating a fundamental mismatch for non-English usage scenarios. We address this disparity directly with three contributions. (i) We introduce ReasonXL, the first large-scale parallel corpus of cross-domain reasoning traces spanning five European languages (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish), with over two million aligned samples per language, each comprising prompts, reasoning traces, and final outputs, enabling direct supervision of language-specific reasoning. (ii) Using ReasonXL, we demonstrate that LLMs can be adapted to reason entirely in a desired target language, using a simple two-stage pipeline of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). The resulting models match or exceed baseline performance, with minimal loss in general knowledge and broadly preserved cross-lingual transfer. (iii) We conduct an extensive representational analysis of the adaptation and find a clear functional division across model depth: early layers contain an activation bottleneck that causally determines language identity, while upper layers concentrate the weight and activation changes driven by adaptation. We further find that RLVR achieves greater behavioral divergence from the base model with smaller parameter updates than SFT, suggesting a more efficient representational rerouting despite much smaller weight updates.

Korean is a morphologically rich language with a featural writing system in which each character is systematically composed of subcharacter units known as Jamo. These subcharacters not only determine the visual structure of Korean but also encode frequent and linguistically meaningful morphophonological processes. However, most current Korean language models (LMs) are based on subword tokenization schemes, which are not explicitly designed to capture the internal compositional structure of characters. To address this limitation, we propose SCRIPT, a model-agnostic module that injects subcharacter compositional knowledge into Korean PLMs. SCRIPT allows to enhance subword embeddings with structural granularity, without requiring architectural changes or additional pre-training. As a result, SCRIPT enhances all baselines across various Korean natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks. Moreover, beyond performance gains, detailed linguistic analyses show that SCRIPT reshapes the embedding space in a way that better captures grammatical regularities and semantically cohesive variations. Our code is available at https://github.com/SungHo3268/SCRIPT.

When LLM conversations grow beyond the context window, old content must be evicted -- but how does the model recover it when needed? We propose cooperative paging: evicted segments are replaced with minimal keyword bookmarks ([pN:keywords], ~8-24 tokens each), and the model is given a recall() tool to retrieve full content on demand. On the LoCoMo benchmark (10 real multi-session conversations, 300+ turns), cooperative paging achieves the highest answer quality among six methods -- outperforming truncation, BM25, word-overlap retrieval, a search-tool baseline, and full context -- on four models (GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-v3.2, Claude Haiku, GLM-5), confirmed by four independent LLM judges ($p=0.017$, paired bootstrap). We then study the paging design space with a 5x4 ablation over boundary strategies and eviction policies (3,176 synthetic probes, 1,600 LoCoMo probes). Key findings: (1) coarse fixed-size pages (fixed_20) reach 96.7% while content-aware topic_shift collapses to 56.7%; (2) eviction policy choice is data-dependent (FIFO best on synthetic, LFU on LoCoMo); (3) two bookmark generation strategies improve over the heuristic baseline (+4.4 and +8.7 E2E points); (4) the remaining bottleneck is bookmark discrimination -- the model triggers recall() 96% of the time but selects the correct page only 57% when bookmarks are insufficiently distinctive. Keyword specificity alone accounts for a 25 percentage point accuracy difference.

We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace.

Humans use introspection to evaluate their understanding through private internal states inaccessible to external observers. We investigate whether large language models possess similar privileged knowledge about answer correctness, information unavailable through external observation. We train correctness classifiers on question representations from both a model's own hidden states and external models, testing whether self-representations provide a performance advantage. On standard evaluation, we find no advantage: self-probes perform comparably to peer-model probes. We hypothesize this is due to high inter-model agreement of answer correctness. To isolate genuine privileged knowledge, we evaluate on disagreement subsets, where models produce conflicting predictions. Here, we discover domain-specific privileged knowledge: self-representations consistently outperform peer representations in factual knowledge tasks, but show no advantage in math reasoning. We further localize this domain asymmetry across model layers, finding that the factual advantage emerges progressively from early-to-mid layers onward, consistent with model-specific memory retrieval, while math reasoning shows no consistent advantage at any depth.

Long interaction histories are central to modern recommender systems, yet training with long sequences is often dismissed as impractical under realistic memory and latency budgets. This work demonstrates that it is not only practical but also effective-at academic scale. We release a complete, end-to-end framework that implements industrial-style long-sequence training with sliding windows, including all data processing, training, and evaluation scripts. Beyond reproducing prior gains, we contribute two capabilities missing from earlier reports: (i) a runtime-aware ablation study that quantifies the accuracy-compute frontier across windowing regimes and strides, and (ii) a novel k-shift embedding layer that enables million-scale vocabularies on commodity GPUs with negligible accuracy loss. Our implementation trains reliably on modest university clusters while delivering competitive retrieval quality (e.g., up to +6.04% MRR and +6.34% Recall@10 on Retailrocket) with $\sim 4 \times $ training-time overheads. By packaging a robust pipeline, reporting training time costs, and introducing an embedding mechanism tailored for low-resource settings, we transform long-sequence training from a closed, industrial technique into a practical, open, and extensible methodology for the community.

Regarded as the third generation of neural networks, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered significant traction due to their biological plausibility and energy efficiency. Recent advancements in large models necessitate spiking neurons capable of high performance, adaptability, and training efficiency. In this work, we first propose a novel functional perspective that provides general guidance for designing the new generation of spiking neurons. Following the insightful guidelines, we propose the Adaptive Spiking Neuron (ASN), which incorporates trainable parameters to learn membrane potential dynamics and enable adaptive firing. ASN adopts an integer training and spike inference paradigm, facilitating efficient SNN training. To further enhance robustness, we propose a specialized variant of ASN, the Normalized Adaptive Spiking Neuron (NASN), which integrates normalization to stabilize training. We evaluate our neuron model on 19 datasets spanning five distinct tasks in both vision and language modalities, demonstrating the effectiveness and versatility of the ASN family. Our ASN family is expected to become the new generation of general-purpose spiking neurons.

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under standard evaluation but jailbreak when a hidden trigger is present. Recent post-hoc weight-editing methods offer an efficient approach to injecting such backdoors by directly modifying model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. However, existing methods typically optimize a token-level mapping that forces an affirmative prefix (e.g., ``Sure''), which does not guarantee sustained harmful output -- the model may begin with apparent agreement yet revert to safety-aligned refusal within a few decoding steps. We address this reliability gap by shifting the backdoor objective from surface tokens to internal representations. We extract a steering vector that captures the difference between compliant and refusal behaviors, and compile it into a persistent weight modification that activates only when the trigger is present. To preserve stealthiness and benign utility, we impose a null-space constraint so that the injected edit remains dormant on clean inputs. The method is efficient, requiring only a small set of examples and admitting a closed-form solution. Across multiple safety-aligned LLMs and jailbreak benchmarks, our method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility.

Detailed image captioning demands both factual grounding and fine-grained coverage, yet existing methods have struggled to achieve them simultaneously. We address this tension with Reflective Note-Guided Captioning (ReflectCAP), where a multi-agent pipeline analyzes what the target large vision-language model (LVLM) consistently hallucinates and what it systematically overlooks, distilling these patterns into reusable guidelines called Structured Reflection Notes. At inference time, these notes steer the captioning model along both axes -- what to avoid and what to attend to -- yielding detailed captions that jointly improve factuality and coverage. Applying this method to 8 LVLMs spanning the GPT-4.1 family, Qwen series, and InternVL variants, ReflectCAP reaches the Pareto frontier of the trade-off between factuality and coverage, and delivers substantial gains on CapArena-Auto, where generated captions are judged head-to-head against strong reference models. Moreover, ReflectCAP offers a more favorable trade-off between caption quality and compute cost than model scaling or existing multi-agent pipelines, which incur 21--36\% greater overhead. This makes high-quality detailed captioning viable under real-world cost and latency constraints.

RAG-based QA has emerged as a powerful method for processing long industrial documents. However, conventional text chunking approaches often neglect complex and long industrial document structures, causing information loss and reduced answer quality. To address this, we introduce MultiDocFusion, a multimodal chunking pipeline that integrates: (i) detection of document regions using vision-based document parsing, (ii) text extraction from these regions via OCR, (iii) reconstruction of document structure into a hierarchical tree using large language model (LLM)-based document section hierarchical parsing (DSHP-LLM), and (iv) construction of hierarchical chunks through DFS-based grouping. Extensive experiments across industrial benchmarks demonstrate that MultiDocFusion improves retrieval precision by 8-15% and ANLS QA scores by 2-3% compared to baselines, emphasizing the critical role of explicitly leveraging document hierarchy for multimodal document-based QA. These significant performance gains underscore the necessity of structure-aware chunking in enhancing the fidelity of RAG-based QA systems.

Molecular property optimization is central to drug discovery, yet many deep learning methods rely on black-box scoring and offer limited control over scaffold preservation, often producing unstable or biologically implausible edits. While large language models (LLMs) are promising molecular generators, optimization remains constrained by the lack of chemistry-grounded preference supervision and principled data curation. We introduce \textbf{Scaffold-Conditioned Preference Triplets (SCPT)}, a pipeline that constructs similarity-constrained triplets $\langle\text{scaffold}, \text{better}, \text{worse}\rangle$ via scaffold alignment and chemistry-driven filters for validity, synthesizability, and meaningful property gains. Using these preferences, we align a pretrained molecular LLM as a conditional editor, enabling property-improving edits that retain the scaffold. Across single- and multi-objective benchmarks, SCPT improves optimization success and property gains while maintaining higher scaffold similarity than competitive baselines. Compared with representative non-LLM molecular optimization methods, SCPT-trained LLMs are better suited to scaffold-constrained and multi-objective optimization. In addition, models trained on single-property and two-property supervision generalize effectively to three-property tasks, indicating promising extrapolative generalization under limited higher-order supervision. SCPT also provides controllable data-construction knobs that yield a predictable similarity-gain frontier, enabling systematic adaptation to diverse optimization regimes.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, offering a promising path toward privacy preserving artificial intelligence. However, FL models may still memorize sensitive information from participants, conflicting with the right to be forgotten (RTBF). To meet these requirements, federated unlearning has emerged as a mechanism to remove the contribution of departing clients. Existing solutions only partially address this challenge: FedEraser improves efficiency but lacks privacy protection, FedRecovery ensures differential privacy (DP) but degrades accuracy, and VeriFi enables verifiability but introduces overhead without efficiency or privacy guarantees. We present PrivEraserVerify (PEV), a unified framework that integrates efficiency, privacy, and verifiability into federated unlearning. PEV employs (i) adaptive checkpointing to retain critical historical updates for fast reconstruction, (ii) layer adaptive differentially private calibration to selectively remove client influence while minimizing accuracy loss, and (iii) fingerprint based verification, enabling participants to confirm unlearning in a decentralized and noninvasive manner. Experiments on image, handwritten character, and medical datasets show that PEV achieves up to 2 to 3 times faster unlearning than retraining, provides formal indistinguishability guarantees with reduced performance degradation, and supports scalable verification. To the best of our knowledge, PEV is the first framework to simultaneously deliver efficiency, privacy, and verifiability for federated unlearning, moving FL closer to practical and regulation compliant deployment.

The exponential growth of data from modern radio telescopes presents a significant challenge to traditional single-pulse search algorithms, which are computationally intensive and prone to high false-positive rates due to Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). In this work, we introduce FRTSearch, an end-to-end framework unifying the detection and physical characterization of Fast Radio Transients (FRTs). Leveraging the morphological universality of dispersive trajectories in time-frequency dynamic spectra, we reframe FRT detection as a pattern recognition problem governed by the cold plasma dispersion relation. To facilitate this, we constructed CRAFTS-FRT, a pixel-level annotated dataset derived from the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS), comprising 2{,}392 instances across diverse source classes. This dataset enables the training of a Mask R-CNN model for precise trajectory segmentation. Coupled with our physics-driven IMPIC algorithm, the framework maps the geometric coordinates of segmented trajectories to directly infer the Dispersion Measure (DM) and Time of Arrival (ToA). Benchmarking on the FAST-FREX dataset shows that FRTSearch achieves a 98.0\% recall, competitive with exhaustive search methods, while reducing false positives by over 99.9\% compared to PRESTO and delivering a processing speedup of up to $13.9\times$. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates robust cross-facility generalization, detecting all 19 tested FRBs from the ASKAP survey without retraining. By shifting the paradigm from ``search-then-identify'' to ``detect-and-infer,'' FRTSearch provides a scalable, high-precision solution for real-time discovery in the era of petabyte-scale radio astronomy.

We decompose the Kullback--Leibler generalization error (GE) -- the expected KL divergence from the data distribution to the trained model -- of unsupervised learning into three non-negative components: model error, data bias, and variance. The decomposition is exact for any e-flat model class and follows from two identities of information geometry: the generalized Pythagorean theorem and a dual e-mixture variance identity. As an analytically tractable demonstration, we apply the framework to $ε$-PCA, a regularized principal component analysis in which the empirical covariance is truncated at rank $N_K$ and discarded directions are pinned at a fixed noise floor $ε$. Although rank-constrained $ε$-PCA is not itself e-flat, it admits a technical reformulation with the same total GE on isotropic Gaussian data, under which each component of the decomposition takes closed form. The optimal rank emerges as the cutoff $λ_{\mathrm{cut}}^{*} = ε$ -- the model retains exactly those empirical eigenvalues exceeding the noise floor -- with the cutoff reflecting a marginal-rate balance between model-error gain and data-bias cost. A boundary comparison further yields a three-regime phase diagram -- retain-all, interior, and collapse -- separated by the lower Marchenko--Pastur edge and an analytically computable collapse threshold $ε_{*}(α)$, where $α$ is the dimension-to-sample-size ratio. All claims are verified numerically.

Letters of recommendation (LoRs) can carry patterns of implicitly gendered language that can inadvertently influence downstream decisions, e.g. in hiring and admissions. In this work, we investigate the extent to which Transformer-based encoder models as well as Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer the gender of applicants in academic LoRs submitted to an U.S. medical-residency program after explicit identifiers like names and pronouns are de-gendered. While using three models (DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and Llama 2) to classify the gender of anonymized and de-gendered LoRs, significant gender leakage was observed as evident from up to 68% classification accuracy. Text interpretation methods, like TF-IDF and SHAP, demonstrate that certain linguistic patterns are strong proxies for gender, e.g. "emotional'' and "humanitarian'' are commonly associated with LoRs from female applicants. As an experiment in creating truly gender-neutral LoRs, these implicit gender cues were remove resulting in a drop of up to 5.5% accuracy and 2.7% macro $F_1$ score on re-training the classifiers. However, applicant gender prediction still remains better than chance. In this case study, our findings highlight that 1) LoRs contain gender-identifying cues that are hard to remove and may activate bias in decision-making and 2) while our technical framework may be a concrete step toward fairer academic and professional evaluations, future work is needed to interrogate the role that gender plays in LoR review. Taken together, our findings motivate upstream auditing of evaluative text in real-world academic letters of recommendation as a necessary complement to model-level fairness interventions.

Streaming Data-Driven Optimization (SDDO) problems arise in many applications where data arrive continuously and the optimization environment evolves over time. Concept drift produces non-stationary landscapes, making optimization methods challenging due to outdated models. Existing approaches often rely on simple surrogate combinations or directly injecting solutions, which may cause negative transfer under sudden environmental changes. We propose GeM-EA, a Generative and Meta-learning Enhanced Evolutionary Algorithm for SDDO that unifies meta-learned surrogate adaptation with generative replay for effective evolutionary search. Upon detecting concept drift, a bi-level meta-learning strategy rapidly initializes the surrogate using environment-relevant priors, while a linear residual component captures global trends. A multi-island evolutionary strategy further leverages historical knowledge via generative replay to accelerate optimization. Experimental results on benchmark SDDO problems demonstrate that GeM-EA achieves faster adaptation and improved robustness compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Training multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for video understanding requires large-scale annotated data spanning diverse tasks such as object counting, question answering, and segmentation. However, collecting and annotating multimodal video data in real-world is costly, slow, and inherently limited in diversity and coverage. To address this challenge, we propose a unified synthetic data generation pipeline capable of automatically producing unlimited multimodal video data with rich and diverse supervision. Our framework supports multiple task formats within a single pipeline, enabling scalable and consistent data creation across tasks. To further enhance reasoning ability, we introduce a VQA-based fine-tuning strategy that trains models to answer structured questions about visual content rather than relying solely on captions or simple instructions. This formulation encourages deeper visual grounding and reasoning. We evaluate our approach in three challenging tasks: video object counting, video-based visual question answering, and video object segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained predominantly on synthetic data generalize effectively to real-world datasets, often outperforming traditionally trained counterparts. Our findings highlight the potential of unified synthetic data pipelines as a scalable alternative to expensive real-world annotation for multimodal video understanding.

We consider the problem of offline black-box optimization, where the goal is to discover optimal designs (e.g., molecules or materials) from past experimental data. A key challenge in this setting is data scarcity: in many scientific applications, only small or poor-quality datasets are available, which severely limits the effectiveness of existing algorithms. Prior work has theoretically and empirically shown that performance of offline optimization algorithms depends on how well the surrogate model captures the optimization bias (i.e., ability to rank input designs correctly), which is challenging to accomplish with limited experimental data. This paper proposes Surrogate Learning with Optimization Bias via Synthetic Task Generation (OptBias), a meta-learning framework that directly tackles data scarcity. OptBias learns a reusable optimization bias by training on synthetic tasks generated from a Gaussian process, and then fine-tunes the surrogate model on the small data for the target task. Across diverse continuous and discrete offline optimization benchmarks, OptBias consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in small data regimes. These results highlight OptBias as a robust and practical solution for offline optimization in realistic small data settings.

Existing Chinese toxic content detection methods mainly target sentence-level classification but often fail to provide readable and contiguous toxic evidence spans. We propose \textbf{ToxiTrace}, an explainability-oriented method for BERT-style encoders with three components: (1) \textbf{CuSA}, which refines encoder-derived saliency cues into fine-grained toxic spans with lightweight LLM guidance; (2) \textbf{GCLoss}, a gradient-constrained objective that concentrates token-level saliency on toxic evidence while suppressing irrelevant activations; and (3) \textbf{ARCL}, which constructs sample-specific contrastive reasoning pairs to sharpen the semantic boundary between toxic and non-toxic content. Experiments show that ToxiTrace improves classification accuracy and toxic span extraction while preserving efficient encoder-based inference and producing more coherent, human-readable explanations. We have released the model at https://huggingface.co/ArdLi/ToxiTrace.

While video large language models (Video-LLMs) excel in understanding slow-paced, real-world egocentric videos, their capabilities in high-velocity, information-dense virtual environments remain under-explored. Existing benchmarks focus on daily activities, yet lack a rigorous testbed for evaluating fast, rule-bound reasoning in virtual scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce EgoEsportsQA, a pioneering video question-answering (QA) benchmark for grounding perception and reasoning in expert esports knowledge. We curate 1,745 high-quality QA pairs from professional matches across 3 first-person shooter games via a scalable six-stage pipeline. These questions are structured into a two-dimensional decoupled taxonomy: 11 sub-tasks in the cognitive capability dimension (covering perception and reasoning levels) and 6 sub-tasks in the esports knowledge dimension. Comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art Video-LLMs reveal that current models still fail to achieve satisfactory performance, with the best model only 71.58%. The results expose notable gaps across both axes: models exhibit stronger capabilities in basic visual perception than in deep tactical reasoning, and they grasp overall macro-progression better than fine-grained micro-operations. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate the intrinsic weaknesses of current Video-LLM architectures. Further analysis suggests that our dataset not only reveals the connections between real-world and virtual egocentric domains, but also offers guidance for optimizing downstream esports applications, thereby fostering the future advancement of Video-LLMs in various egocentric environments.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as task-oriented agents in enterprise environments, ensuring their strict adherence to complex, domain-specific operational guidelines is critical. While utilizing an LLM-as-a-Judge is a promising solution for scalable evaluation, the reliability of these judges in detecting specific policy violations remains largely unexplored. This gap is primarily due to the lack of a systematic data generation method, which has been hindered by the extensive cost of fine-grained human annotation and the difficulty of synthesizing realistic agent violations. In this paper, we introduce CompliBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLM judges to detect and localize guideline violations in multi-turn dialogues. To overcome data scarcity, we develop a scalable, automated data generation pipeline that simulates user-agent interactions. Our controllable flaw injection process automatically yields precise ground-truth labels for the violated guideline and the exact conversation turn, while an adversarial search method ensures these introduced perturbations are highly challenging. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that current state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs struggle significantly with this task. In addition, we demonstrate that a small-scale judge model fine-tuned on our synthesized data outperforms leading LLMs and generalizes well to unseen business domains, highlighting our pipeline as an effective foundation for training robust generative reward models.

The emergence of vibe coding, a paradigm where non-technical users instruct Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate executable codes via natural language, presents both significant opportunities and severe risks for the construction industry. While empowering construction personnel such as the safety managers, foremen, and workers to develop tools and software, the probabilistic nature of LLMs introduces the threat of silent failures, wherein generated code compiles perfectly but executes flawed mathematical safety logic. This study empirically evaluates the reliability, software architecture, and domain-specific safety fidelity of 450 vibe-coded Python scripts generated by three frontier models, Claude 3.5 Haiku, GPT-4o-Mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. Utilizing a persona-driven prompt dataset (n=150) and a bifurcated evaluation pipeline comprising isolated dynamic sandboxing and an LLM-as-a-Judge, the research quantifies the severe limits of zero-shot vibe codes for construction safety. The findings reveal a highly significant relationship between user persona and data hallucination, demonstrating that less formal prompts drastically increase the AI's propensity to invent missing safety variables. Furthermore, while the models demonstrated high foundational execution viability (~85%), this syntactic reliability actively masked logic deficits and a severe lack of defensive programming. Among successfully executed scripts, the study identified an alarming ~45% overall Silent Failure Rate, with GPT-4o-Mini generating mathematically inaccurate outputs in ~56% of its functional code. The results demonstrate that current LLMs lack the deterministic rigor required for standalone safety engineering, necessitating the adoption of deterministic AI wrappers and strict governance for cyber-physical deployments.

Individuals' concerns about data privacy and AI safety are highly contextualized and extend beyond sensitive patterns. Addressing these issues requires reasoning about the context to identify and mitigate potential risks. Though researchers have widely explored using large language models (LLMs) as evaluators for contextualized safety and privacy assessments, these efforts typically assume the availability of complete and clear context, whereas real-world contexts tend to be ambiguous and incomplete. In this paper, we propose ContextLens, a semi-rule-based framework that leverages LLMs to ground the input context in the legal domain and explicitly identify both known and unknown factors for legal compliance. Instead of directly assessing safety outcomes, our ContextLens instructs LLMs to answer a set of crafted questions that span over applicability, general principles and detailed provisions to assess compliance with pre-defined priorities and rules. We conduct extensive experiments on existing compliance benchmarks that cover the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU AI Act. The results suggest that our ContextLens can significantly improve LLMs' compliance assessment and surpass existing baselines without any training. Additionally, our ContextLens can further identify the ambiguous and missing factors.

Climate decision-making in the Gulf increasingly demands systems that can translate heterogeneous scientific and policy evidence into actionable guidance, yet general-purpose large language models (LLMs) remain weak both in region-specific climate knowledge and grounded interaction with geospatial and forecasting tools. We present the GCA framework, which unifies (i) GCA-DS, a curated Gulf-focused multimodal dataset, and (ii) Gulf Climate Agent (GCA), a tool-augmented agent for climate analysis. GCA-DS comprises ~200k question-answer pairs spanning governmental policies and adaptation plans, NGO and international frameworks, academic literature, and event-driven reporting on heatwaves, dust storms, and floods, complemented with remote-sensing inputs that couple imagery with textual evidence. Building on this foundation, the GCA agent orchestrates a modular tool pipeline grounded in real-time and historical signals and geospatial processing that produces derived indices and interpretable visualizations. Finally, we benchmark open and proprietary LLMs on Gulf climate tasks and show that domain fine-tuning and tool integration substantially improve reliability over general-purpose baselines.

Accurate short-term residential energy consumption forecasting at sub-hourly resolution is critical for smart grid management, demand response programmes, and renewable energy integration. While weather variables are widely acknowledged as key drivers of residential electricity demand, the relative merit of incorporating temporal autocorrelation - the sequential memory of past consumption; over static meteorological features alone remains underexplored at fine-grained (5-minute) temporal resolution for Australian households. This paper presents a rigorous empirical comparison of a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent network applied to two real-world Melbourne households: House 3 (a standard grid-connected dwelling) and House 4 (a rooftop solar photovoltaic-integrated household). Both models are trained on 14 months of 5-minute interval smart meter data (March 2023-April 2024) merged with official Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) daily weather observations, yielding over 117,000 samples per household. The LSTM, operating on 24-step (2-hour) sliding consumption windows, achieves coefficients of determination of R^2 = 0.883 (House 3) and R^2 = 0.865 (House 4), compared to R^2 = -0.055 and R^2 = 0.410 for the corresponding weather-driven MLPs - differences of 93.8 and 45.5 percentage points. These results establish that temporal autocorrelation in the consumption sequence dominates meteorological information for short-term forecasting at 5-minute granularity. Additionally, we demonstrate an asymmetry introduced by solar generation: for the PV-integrated household, the MLP achieves R^2 = 0.410, revealing implicit solar forecasting from weather-time correlations. A persistence baseline analysis and seasonal stratification contextualise model performance. We propose a hybrid weather-augmented LSTM and federated learning extensions as directions for future work.

Batch active learning (BAL) is a crucial technique for reducing labeling costs and improving data efficiency in training large-scale deep learning models. Traditional BAL methods often rely on metrics like Mahalanobis Distance to balance uncertainty and diversity when selecting data for annotation. However, these methods predominantly focus on the distribution of unlabeled data and fail to leverage feedback from labeled data or the model's performance. To address these limitations, we introduce TrustSet, a novel approach that selects the most informative data from the labeled dataset, ensuring a balanced class distribution to mitigate the long-tail problem. Unlike CoreSet, which focuses on maintaining the overall data distribution, TrustSet optimizes the model's performance by pruning redundant data and using label information to refine the selection process. To extend the benefits of TrustSet to the unlabeled pool, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based sampling policy that approximates the selection of high-quality TrustSet candidates from the unlabeled data. Combining TrustSet and RL, we introduce the Batch Reinforcement Active Learning with TrustSet (BRAL-T) framework. BRAL-T achieves state-of-the-art results across 10 image classification benchmarks and 2 active fine-tuning tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in various domains.

We present a systematic measurement study of seven tactics for reducing cloud LLM token usage when a small local model can act as a triage layer in front of a frontier cloud model. The tactics are: (1) local routing, (2) prompt compression, (3) semantic caching, (4) local drafting with cloud review, (5) minimal-diff edits, (6) structured intent extraction, and (7) batching with vendor prompt caching. We implement all seven in an open-source shim that speaks both MCP and the OpenAI-compatible HTTP surface, supporting any local model via Ollama and any cloud model via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. We evaluate each tactic individually, in pairs, and in a greedy-additive subset across four coding-agent workload classes (edit-heavy, explanation-heavy, general chat, RAG-heavy). We measure tokens saved, dollar cost, latency, and routing accuracy. Our headline finding is that T1 (local routing) combined with T2 (prompt compression) achieves 45-79% cloud token savings on edit-heavy and explanation-heavy workloads, while on RAG-heavy workloads the full tactic set including T4 (draft-review) achieves 51% savings. We observe that the optimal tactic subset is workload-dependent, which we believe is the most actionable finding for practitioners deploying coding agents today.

Current LLM agent benchmarks, which predominantly focus on binary pass/fail tasks such as code generation or search-based question answering, often neglect the value of real-world engineering that is often captured through the iterative optimization of feasible designs. To this end, we introduce Frontier-Eng, a human-verified benchmark for generative optimization -- an iterative propose-execute-evaluate loop in which an agent generates candidate artifacts, receives executable verifier feedback, and revises them under a fixed interaction budget -- spanning $47$ tasks across five broad engineering categories. Unlike previous suites, Frontier-Eng tasks are grounded in industrial-grade simulators and verifiers that provide continuous reward signals and enforce hard feasibility constraints under constrained budgets. We evaluate eight frontier language models using representative search frameworks, finding that while Claude 4.6 Opus achieves the most robust performance, the benchmark remains challenging for all models. Our analysis suggests a dual power-law decay in improvement frequency ($\sim$ 1/iteration) and magnitude ($\sim$ 1/improvement count). We further show that although width improves parallelism and diversity, depth remains crucial for hard-won improvements under a fixed budget. Frontier-Eng establishes a new standard for assessing the capacity of AI agents to integrate domain knowledge with executable feedback to solve complex, open-ended engineering problems.

Online hate speech is associated with substantial social harms, yet it remains unclear how consistently platforms enforce hate speech policies or whether enforcement is feasible at scale. We address these questions through a global audit of hate speech moderation on Twitter (now X). Using a complete 24-hour snapshot of public tweets, we construct representative samples comprising 540,000 tweets annotated for hate speech by trained annotators across eight major languages. Five months after posting, 80% of hateful tweets remain online, including explicitly violent hate speech. Such tweets are no more likely to be removed than non-hateful tweets, with neither severity nor visibility increasing the likelihood of removal. We then examine whether these enforcement gaps reflect technical limits of large-scale moderation systems. While fully automated detection systems cannot reliably identify hate speech without generating large numbers of false positives, they effectively prioritize likely violations for human review. Simulations of a human-AI moderation pipeline indicate that substantially reducing user exposure to hate speech is economically feasible at a cost below existing regulatory penalties. These results suggest that the persistence of online hate cannot be explained by technical constraints alone but also reflects institutional choices in the allocation of moderation resources.

Fine-tuning is a widely used strategy for adapting pre-trained models to new tasks, yet its methodology and theoretical properties in high-dimensional nonparametric settings with variable selection have not yet been developed. This paper introduces the fine-tuning factor augmented neural Lasso (FAN-Lasso), a transfer learning framework for high-dimensional nonparametric regression with variable selection that simultaneously handles covariate and posterior shifts. We use a low-rank factor structure to manage high-dimensional dependent covariates and propose a novel residual fine-tuning decomposition in which the target function is expressed as a transformation of a frozen source function and other variables to achieve transfer learning and nonparametric variable selection. This augmented feature from the source predictor allows for the transfer of knowledge to the target domain and reduces model complexity there. We derive minimax-optimal excess risk bounds for the fine-tuning FAN-Lasso, characterizing the precise conditions, in terms of relative sample sizes and function complexities, under which fine-tuning yields statistical acceleration over single-task learning. The proposed framework also provides a theoretical perspective on parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Extensive numerical experiments across diverse covariate- and posterior-shift scenarios demonstrate that the fine-tuning FAN-Lasso consistently outperforms standard baselines and achieves near-oracle performance even under severe target sample size constraints, empirically validating the derived rates.

To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to evolving narratives. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in an event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a graph-guided, multi-factor retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and efficiency.

Spreadsheets are central to real-world applications such as enterprise reporting, auditing, and scientific data management. Despite their ubiquity, existing large language model based approaches typically treat tables as plain text, overlooking critical layout cues and visual semantics. Moreover, real-world spreadsheets are often massive in scale, exceeding the input length that LLMs can efficiently process. To address these challenges, we propose SpreadsheetAgent, a two-stage multi-agent framework for spreadsheet understanding that adopts a step-by-step reading and reasoning paradigm. Instead of loading the entire spreadsheet at once, SpreadsheetAgent incrementally interprets localized regions through multiple modalities, including code execution results, images, and LaTeX tables. The method first constructs a structural sketch and row/column summaries, and then performs task-driven reasoning over this intermediate representation in the Solving Stage. To further enhance reliability, we design a verification module that validates extracted structures via targeted inspections, reducing error propagation and ensuring trustworthy inputs for downstream reasoning. Extensive experiments on two spreadsheet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With GPT-OSS-120B, SpreadsheetAgent achieves 38.16% on Spreadsheet Bench, outperforming the ChatGPT Agent baseline (35.27%) by 2.89 absolute points. These results highlight the potential of SpreadsheetAgent to advance robust and scalable spreadsheet understanding in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/SpreadsheetAgent.git.

Style transfer aims to render a content image with the visual characteristics of a reference style while preserving its underlying semantic layout and structural geometry. While recent diffusion-based models demonstrate strong stylization capabilities by leveraging powerful generative priors and controllable internal representations, they typically assume a single global style. Extending them to multi-style scenarios often leads to boundary artifacts, unstable stylization, and structural inconsistency due to interference between multiple style representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose MAST (Mask-Guided Attention Mass Allocation for Training-Free Multi-Style Transfer), a novel training-free framework that explicitly controls content-style interactions within the diffusion attention mechanism. To achieve artifact-free and structure-preserving stylization, MAST integrates four connected modules. First, Layout-preserving Query Anchoring prevents global layout collapse by firmly anchoring the semantic structure using content queries. Second, Logit-level Attention Mass Allocation deterministically distributes attention probability mass across spatial regions, seamlessly fusing multiple styles without boundary artifacts. Third, Sharpness-aware Temperature Scaling restores the attention sharpness degraded by multi-style expansion. Finally, Discrepancy-aware Detail Injection adaptively compensates for localized high-frequency detail losses by measuring structural discrepancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAST effectively mitigates boundary artifacts and maintains structural consistency, preserving texture fidelity and spatial coherence even as the number of applied styles increases.

Matrix multiplication is a fundamental kernel in large-scale artificial intelligence and scientific computing, but its performance on conventional electronic accelerators is increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth and energy efficiency. Photonic computing offers a promising alternative due to its ultra-high bandwidth, massive parallelism, and low power dissipation. However, most existing photonic systems are limited to low-precision computation because of analog optical modulation constraints and noise accumulation, which restricts their applicability in precision-critical workloads. To address this limitation, we propose LightMat-HP, a hybrid photonic-electronic computing system that enables end-to-end acceleration of general matrix multiplication with configurable computational precision. LightMat-HP adopts block floating-point (BFP) arithmetic to reduce computational complexity while enabling flexible precision-performance tradeoffs. To overcome the precision limitations of photonic devices, we propose a slicing-based photonic multiplication scheme that exploits the high accuracy of low bit-width photonic multiplication in combination with digital accumulation to achieve high-precision mantissa multiplication. A tile-based matrix multiplication dataflow is further designed to support matrices of arbitrary sizes. We experimentally validate LightMat-HP on a photonic computing prototype and evaluate its performance through large-scale simulations. The results demonstrate that LightMat-HP outperforms FPGA, GPU, and a state-of-the-art photonic accelerator across throughput, latency, and energy efficiency, particularly for small- and medium-sized matrix multiplications, owing to its highly parallel photonic architecture, efficient data movement, and slice-based BFP arithmetic.

Pretrained language models often rely on superficial features that appear predictive during training yet fail to generalize at test time, a phenomenon known as shortcut learning. Existing mitigation methods generally operate at training time and require heavy supervision such as access to the original training data or prior knowledge of shortcut type. We propose Shortcut Guardrail, a deployment-time framework that mitigates token-level shortcuts without access to the original training data or shortcut annotations. Our key insight is that gradient-based attribution on a biased model highlights shortcut tokens. Building on this finding, we train a lightweight LoRA-based debiasing module with a Masked Contrastive Learning (MaskCL) objective that encourages consistent representations with or without individual tokens. Across sentiment classification, toxicity detection, and natural language inference under both naturally occurring and controlled shortcuts, Shortcut Guardrail improves overall accuracy and worst-group accuracy over the unmitigated model under distribution shifts while preserving in-distribution performance.

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful generative framework, with recent few-step methods achieving remarkable inference acceleration. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked limitation: these models suffer from severe diversity degradation, concentrating samples on dominant modes while neglecting rare but valid variations of the target distribution. We trace this degradation to averaging distortion: when trained with MSE objectives, class-conditional flows learn a frequency-weighted mean over intra-class sub-modes, causing the model to over-represent high-density modes while systematically neglecting low-density ones. To address this, we propose SubFlow, Sub-mode Conditioned Flow Matching, which eliminates averaging distortion by decomposing each class into fine-grained sub-modes via semantic clustering and conditioning the flow on sub-mode indices. Each conditioned sub-distribution is approximately unimodal, so the learned flow accurately targets individual modes with no averaging distortion, restoring full mode coverage in a single inference step. Crucially, SubFlow is entirely plug-and-play: it integrates seamlessly into existing one-step models such as MeanFlow and Shortcut Models without any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-256 demonstrate that SubFlow yields substantial gains in generation diversity (Recall) while maintaining competitive image quality (FID), confirming its broad applicability across different one-step generation frameworks. Project page: https://yexionglin.github.io/subflow.

Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) combine multimodal node attributes with structured relations. However, existing methods usually perform shared message passing on a single graph and implicitly assume that the same neighbors are equally useful for all modalities. In practice, neighbors that benefit one modality may interfere with another, blurring modality-specific signals under shared propagation. To address this issue, we propose RoleMAG, a multimodal graph framework that learns how different neighbors should participate in propagation. Concretely, RoleMAG distinguishes whether a neighbor should provide shared, complementary, or heterophilous signals, and routes them through separate propagation channels. This enables cross-modal completion from complementary neighbors while keeping heterophilous ones out of shared smoothing. Extensive experiments on three graph-centric MAG benchmarks show that RoleMAG achieves the best results on RedditS and Bili\_Dance, while remaining competitive on Toys. Ablation, robustness, and efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed role-aware propagation design. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RoleMAG-7EE0/

Large language models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language, but the extent to which they capture intended program behavior remains unclear. Executable behavioral specifications, defined via preconditions and postconditions, provide a concrete means to assess such understanding. However, existing work on specification generation is constrained in evaluation methodology, task settings, and specification expressiveness. We introduce CodeSpecBench, a benchmark for executable behavioral specification generation under an execution-based evaluation protocol. CodeSpecBench supports both function-level and repository-level tasks and encodes specifications as executable Python functions. Constructed from diverse real-world codebases, it enables a realistic assessment of both correctness (accepting valid behaviors) and completeness (rejecting invalid behaviors). Evaluating 15 state-of-the-art LLMs on CodeSpecBench, we observe a sharp performance degradation on repository-level tasks, where the best model attains only a 20.2% pass rate. We further find that specification generation is substantially more challenging than code generation, indicating that strong coding performance does not necessarily reflect deep understanding of intended program semantics. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/SparksofAGI/CodeSpecBench.

Cascaded LLM systems coordinate models of varying sizes with human experts to balance accuracy, cost, and abstention under uncertainty. However, single-model tiers at each stage often struggle with ambiguous queries, triggering premature escalations to costlier models or experts due to under-confidence and inefficient compute scaling. CascadeDebate addresses this gap by inserting multi-agent deliberation directly at each tier's escalation boundary. Confidence-based routers activate lightweight agent ensembles only for uncertain cases, enabling consensus-driven resolution of ambiguities internally without invoking higher-cost upgrades. Our unified architecture alternates single-model inference with selective multi-agent deliberation across model scales, culminating in human experts as the final fallback. This design scales test-time compute dynamically according to query difficulty. Across five benchmarks spanning science, medicine, and general knowledge, CascadeDebate outperforms strong single-model cascades and standalone multi-agent systems by up to 26.75 percent. An online threshold optimizer proves essential, boosting accuracy by 20.98 to 52.33 percent relative improvement over fixed policies and enabling elastic adaptation to real-world distributions.

Advances in networking and computing technologies throughout the early decades of the 21st century have transformed long-standing dreams of pervasive communication and computation into reality. These technologies now form a rapidly evolving and increasingly complex global infrastructure that will underpin the next aspiration of computing: supporting intelligent systems with human-level or even superhuman capabilities. We examine how today's distributed computing landscape can evolve to meet the demands of future users, intelligent systems, and emerging application domains. We propose a "periodic framework" for characterizing the distributed computing landscape, inspired by the systematic structure and explanatory power of the "periodic table" in chemistry. This framework provides a structured way to describe, compare, and reason about the behaviors and design choices of different distributed computing solutions. Using this framework, we can identify patterns in key system properties, such as responsiveness and availability, across the distributed computing landscape. We also explain how the framework can help in predicting future trajectories in the field. Lastly, we synthesize insights from leading researchers worldwide regarding the desired properties, design principles, and implications of emerging areas in the forthcoming distributed computing landscape and in relation to the periodic framework. Together, these perspectives shed light on the considerations that will shape the distributed computing landscape underpinning future intelligent systems.

Clinical research involves labor-intensive processes such as study design, cohort construction, model development, and documentation, requiring domain expertise, programming skills, and access to sensitive patient data. These demands create barriers for clinicians and external researchers conducting data-driven studies. To overcome these limitations, we developed a Clinical Agentic Research Intelligence System (CARIS) that automates the clinical research workflow while preserving data privacy, enabling comprehensive studies without direct access to raw data. CARIS integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with modular tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling natural language-driven orchestration of appropriate tools. Databases remain securely within the MCP server, and users access only the outputs and final research reports. Based on user intent, CARIS automatically executes the full pipeline: research planning, literature search, cohort construction, Institutional Review Board (IRB) documentation, Vibe Machine Learning (ML), and report generation, with iterative human-in-the-loop refinement. We evaluated CARIS on three heterogeneous datasets with distinct clinical tasks. Research plans and IRB documents were finalized within three to four iterations, using evidence from literature and data. The system supported Vibe ML by exploring feature-model combinations, ranking the top ten models, and generating performance visualizations. Final reports showed high completeness based on a checklist derived from the TRIPOD+AI framework, achieving 96% coverage in LLM evaluation and 82% in human evaluation. CARIS demonstrates that agentic AI can transform clinical hypotheses into executable research workflows across heterogeneous datasets. By eliminating the need for coding and direct data access, the system lowers barriers and bridges public and private clinical data environments.

Dynamic facial expression recognition in the wild remains challenging due to data scarcity and long-tail distributions, which hinder models from effectively learning the temporal dynamics of scarce emotions. To address these limitations, we propose ARGen, an Affect-Reinforced Generative Augmentation Framework that enables data-adaptive dynamic expression generation for robust emotion perception. ARGen operates in two stages: Affective Semantic Injection (ASI) and Adaptive Reinforcement Diffusion (ARD). The ASI stage establishes affective knowledge alignment through facial Action Units and employs a retrieval-augmented prompt generation strategy to synthesize consistent and fine-grained affective descriptions via large-scale visual-language models, thereby injecting interpretable emotional priors into the generation process. The ARD stage integrates text-conditioned image-to-video diffusion with reinforcement learning, introducing inter-frame conditional guidance and a multi-objective reward function to jointly optimize expression naturalness, facial integrity, and generative efficiency. Extensive experiments on both generation and recognition tasks verify that ARGen substantially enhances synthesis fidelity and improves recognition performance, establishing an interpretable and generalizable generative augmentation paradigm for vision-based affective computing.

SpanKey is a lightweight way to gate inference without encrypting weights or chasing leaderboard accuracy on gated inference. The idea is to condition activations on secret keys. A basis matrix $B$ defines a low-dimensional key subspace $Span(B)$; during training we sample coefficients $α$ and form keys $k=α^\top B$, then inject them into intermediate activations with additive or multiplicative maps and strength $γ$. Valid keys lie in $Span(B)$; invalid keys are sampled outside that subspace. We make three points. (i) Mechanism: subspace key injection and a multi-layer design space. (ii) Failure mode: key absorption, together with two analytical results (a Beta-energy split and margin-tail diagnostics), explains weak baseline separation in energy and margin terms -- these are not a security theorem. iii) Deny losses and experiments: Modes A--C and extensions, with CIFAR-10 ResNet-18 runs and MNIST ablations for Mode B. We summarize setup and first-order analysis, injectors, absorption, deny losses and ablations, a threat discussion that does not promise cryptography, and closing remarks on scale. Code: \texttt{https://github.com/mindmemory-ai/dksc}

This scoping review examines the emerging field of Large Language Model (LLM)-based pedagogical agents in educational settings. While traditional pedagogical agents have been extensively studied, the integration of LLMs represents a transformative advancement with unprecedented capabilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and adaptation. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we analyzed 52 studies across five major databases from November 2022 to January 2025. Our findings reveal diverse LLM-based agents spanning K-12, higher education, and informal learning contexts across multiple subject domains. We identified four key design dimensions characterizing these agents: interaction approach (reactive vs. proactive), domain scope (domain-specific vs. general-purpose), role complexity (single-role vs. multi-role), and system integration (standalone vs. integrated). Emerging trends include multi-agent systems that simulate naturalistic learning environments, virtual student simulation for agent evaluation, integration with immersive technologies, and combinations with learning analytics. We also discuss significant research gaps and ethical considerations regarding privacy, accuracy, and student autonomy. This review provides researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of LLM-based pedagogical agents while identifying crucial areas for future development in this rapidly evolving field.

This study examines how model-specific characteristics of Large Language Model (LLM) agents, including internal alignment, shape the effect of memory on their collective and cooperative dynamics in a multi-agent system. To this end, we extend the Social Particle Swarm (SPS) model, in which agents move in a two-dimensional space and play the Prisoner's Dilemma with neighboring agents, by replacing its rule-based agents with LLM agents endowed with Big Five personality scores and varying memory lengths. Using Gemini-2.0-Flash, we find that memory length is a critical parameter governing collective behavior: even a minimal memory drastically suppressed cooperation, transitioning the system from stable cooperative clusters through cyclical formation and collapse of clusters to a state of scattered defection as memory length increased. Big Five personality traits correlated with agent behaviors in partial agreement with findings from experiments with human participants, supporting the validity of the model. Comparative experiments using Gemma~3:4b revealed the opposite trend: longer memory promoted cooperation, accompanied by the formation of dense cooperative clusters. Sentiment analysis of agents' reasoning texts showed that Gemini interprets memory increasingly negatively as its length grows, while Gemma interprets it less negatively, and that this difference persists in the early phase of experiments before the macro-level dynamics converge. These results suggest that model-specific characteristics of LLMs, potentially including alignment, play a fundamental role in determining emergent social behavior in Generative Agent-Based Modeling, and provide a micro-level cognitive account of the contradictions found in prior work on memory and cooperation.

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft models but face limitations: shallow layers often produce overconfident yet incorrect token predictions, and the presence of difficult tokens in a draft sequence forces redundant computation through deeper layers, undermining both draft acceptance and overall speedup. To address these issues, we propose a novel self-draft framework that suppresses spurious confidence via layer-wise temperature annealing in early-exit decision and adaptively bounds speculation length based on token-wise decoding difficulty. By reprocessing the hidden states of draft tokens in a unified parallel pass through deep layers, our method maintains exact output equivalence with the original model while maximizing computational efficiency. It requires no modifications to the base LLM parameters and achieves up to 2.33x wall-time speedup over standard autoregressive decoding across diverse long-form generation tasks and multiple model architectures.

Deep neural networks, despite their high accuracy, often exhibit poor confidence calibration, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Current ad-hoc confidence calibration methods attempt to fix this during training but face a fundamental trade-off: two-phase training methods achieve strong classification performance at the cost of training instability and poorer confidence calibration, while single-loss methods are stable but underperform in classification. This paper addresses and mitigates this stability-performance trade-off. We propose Socrates Loss, a novel, unified loss function that explicitly leverages uncertainty by incorporating an auxiliary unknown class, whose predictions directly influence the loss function and a dynamic uncertainty penalty. This unified objective allows the model to be optimized for both classification and confidence calibration simultaneously, without the instability of complex, scheduled losses. We provide theoretical guarantees that our method regularizes the model to prevent miscalibration and overfitting. Across four benchmark datasets and multiple architectures, our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Socrates Loss consistently improves training stability while achieving more favorable accuracy-calibration trade-off, often converging faster than existing methods.

Scientific hypothesis generation requires tracking how knowledge evolves, not just what is currently known. We introduce Continuous Knowledge Metabolism (CKM), a framework that processes scientific literature through sliding time windows and incrementally updates a structured knowledge base as new findings arrive. We present CKM-Lite, an efficient variant that achieves strong predictive coverage through incremental accumulation, outperforming batch processing on hit rate (+2.8%, p=0.006), hypothesis yield (+3.6, p<0.001), and best-match alignment (+0.43, p<0.001) while reducing token cost by 92%. To understand what drives these differences, we develop CKM-Full, an instrumented variant that categorizes each new finding as novel, confirming, or contradicting, detects knowledge change signals, and conditions hypothesis generation on the full evolution trajectory. Analyzing 892 hypotheses generated by CKM-Full across 50 research topics, alongside parallel runs of the other variants, we report four empirical observations: (1) incremental processing outperforms batch baseline across predictive and efficiency metrics; (2) change-aware instrumentation is associated with higher LLM-judged novelty (Cohen's d=3.46) but lower predictive coverage, revealing a quality-coverage trade-off; (3) a field's trajectory stability is associated with hypothesis success (r=-0.28, p=0.051), suggesting boundary conditions for literature-based prediction; (4) knowledge convergence signals are associated with nearly 5x higher hit rate than contradiction signals, pointing to differential predictability across change types. These findings suggest that the character of generated hypotheses is shaped not only by how much literature is processed, but also by how it is processed. They further indicate that evaluation frameworks must account for the quality-coverage trade-off rather than optimize for a single metric.

Money laundering detection faces challenges due to excessive false positives and inadequate adaptation to sophisticated multi-stage schemes that exploit modern financial networks. Graph analytics and AI are promising tools, but they struggle with the fuzziness of laundering patterns, which exhibit structural and temporal variations. Conventional data mining techniques require the detailed enumeration of pattern variants, which not only complicates the analyst's task to specify them, but also leads to large run-time overheads and difficulty training accurate AI models. The paper presents BlazingAML, a scalable AML system design that introduces: 1. A novel multi-stage framework for expressing fuzzy money laundering patterns 2. A domain-specific compiler that transforms high-level pattern descriptions into high-performance code for CPU and GPU back-ends The multi-stage abstraction decomposes complex laundering schemes into logical stages connected by graph operations, enabling diverse patterns to be expressed using unified primitives while capturing structural and temporal fuzziness. The compiler applies sophisticated optimizations, eliminating manual parallel programming requirements for financial analysts. Evaluation on IBM AML datasets shows BlazingAML achieves the same F1 score as state-of-the-art approaches while delivering 210x and 333x higher speedup on CPU and GPU respectively, with superior scalability.

In drug discovery, molecular optimization aims to iteratively refine a lead compound to improve molecular properties while preserving structural similarity to the original molecule. However, each oracle evaluation is expensive, making sample efficiency a key challenge for existing methods under a limited oracle budget. Trial-and-error approaches require many oracle calls, while methods that leverage external knowledge tend to reuse familiar templates and struggle on challenging objectives. A key missing piece is long-term memory that can ground decisions and provide reusable insights for future optimizations. To address this, we present MolMem (\textbf{Mol}ecular optimization with \textbf{Mem}ory), a multi-turn agentic reinforcement learning (RL) framework with a dual-memory system. Specifically, MolMem uses Static Exemplar Memory to retrieve relevant exemplars for cold-start grounding, and Evolving Skill Memory to distill successful trajectories into reusable strategies. Built on this memory-augmented formulation, we train the policy with dense step-wise rewards, turning costly rollouts into long-term knowledge that improves future optimization. Extensive experiments show that MolMem achieves 90\% success on single-property tasks (1.5$\times$ over the best baseline) and 52\% on multi-property tasks using only 500 oracle calls. Our code is available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/MolMem.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks, where adversarial inputs bypass safety mechanisms to elicit harmful outputs, poses significant security risks. While prior work has primarily focused on prompt injection attacks, these approaches often require resource-intensive prompt engineering and overlook other critical components, such as chat templates. This paper introduces TEMPLATEFUZZ, a fine-grained fuzzing framework that systematically exposes vulnerabilities in chat templates, a critical yet underexplored attack surface in LLMs. Specifically, TEMPLATEFUZZ (1) designs a series of element-level mutation rules to generate diverse chat template variants, (2) proposes a heuristic search strategy to guide the chat template generation toward the direction of amplifying the attack success rate (ASR) while preserving model accuracy, and (3) integrates an active learning-based strategy to derive a lightweight rule-based oracle for accurate and efficient jailbreak evaluation. Evaluated on twelve open-source LLMs across multiple attack scenarios, TEMPLATEFUZZ achieves an average ASR of 98.2% with only 1.1% accuracy degradation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 9.1%-47.9% in ASR and 8.4% in accuracy degradation. Moreover, even on five industry-leading commercial LLMs where chat templates cannot be specified, TEMPLATEFUZZ attains a 90% average ASR via chat template-based prompt injection attacks.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI research thanks to their powerful internal capabilities and knowledge. However, existing LLMs still fail to effectively incorporate the massive external knowledge when interacting with the world. Although retrieval-augmented LLMs are proposed to mitigate the issue, they are still fundamentally constrained by the context length of LLMs, as they can only retrieve top-K raw data chunks from the external knowledge base which often consists of millions of data chunks. Here we propose Thought-Retriever, a novel model-agnostic algorithm that helps LLMs generate output conditioned on arbitrarily long external data, without being constrained by the context length or number of retrieved data chunks. Our key insight is to let an LLM fully leverage its intermediate responses generated when solving past user queries (thoughts), filtering meaningless and redundant thoughts, organizing them in thought memory, and retrieving the relevant thoughts when addressing new queries. This effectively equips LLM-based agents with a self-evolving long-term memory that grows more capable through continuous interaction. Besides algorithmic innovation, we further meticulously prepare a novel benchmark, AcademicEval, which requires an LLM to faithfully leverage ultra-long context to answer queries based on real-world academic papers. Extensive experiments on AcademicEval and two other public datasets validate that Thought-Retriever remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average increase of at least 7.6% in F1 score and 16% in win rate across various tasks. More importantly, we further demonstrate two exciting findings: (1) Thought-Retriever can indeed help LLM self-evolve after solving more user queries; (2) Thought-Retriever learns to leverage deeper thoughts to answer more abstract user queries.

Small language models (SLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical reasoning due to limited capacity to maintain long chains of intermediate steps and to recover from early errors. We address this challenge by introducing a hint-assisted reasoning framework that incrementally guides SLMs through multi-step mathematical problem solving. Our approach decomposes solutions into sequential reasoning steps and provides context-aware hints, where hints are generated by a separate SLM trained via distillation from a strong large language model. While the hint-generating SLM alone is not capable of solving the problems, its collaboration with a reasoning SLM enables effective guidance, forming a cooperative two-model system for reasoning. Each hint is generated conditionally on the problem statement and the accumulated reasoning history, providing stepwise, localized guidance without revealing full solutions. This reduces error propagation and allows the reasoning model to focus on manageable subproblems. Experiments across diverse mathematical benchmarks and models demonstrate that hint assistance consistently improves reasoning accuracy for SLMs, yielding substantial gains over standard prompting while preserving model efficiency. These results highlight that structured collaboration between SLMs-via hint generation and reasoning-offers an effective and lightweight mechanism for enhancing mathematical reasoning.

Student responses in STEM assessments are often handwritten and combine symbolic expressions, calculations, and diagrams, creating substantial variation in format and interpretation. Despite their importance for evaluating students' reasoning, such responses are time-consuming to score and prone to rater inconsistency, particularly when partial credit is required. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increased attention to AI-assisted scoring, yet evidence remains limited regarding how rubric design and LLM configurations influence reliability across performance levels. This study examined the reliability of AI-assisted scoring of undergraduate physics constructed responses using GPT-4o. Twenty authentic handwritten exam responses were scored across two rounds by four instructors and by the AI model using skill-based rubrics with differing levels of analytic granularity. Prompting format and temperature settings were systematically varied. Overall, human-AI agreement on total scores was comparable to human inter-rater reliability and was highest for high- and low-performing responses, but declined for mid-level responses involving partial or ambiguous reasoning. Criterion-level analyses showed stronger alignment for clearly defined conceptual skills than for extended procedural judgments. A more fine-grained, checklist-based rubric improved consistency relative to holistic scoring. These findings indicate that reliable AI-assisted scoring depends primarily on clear, well-structured rubrics, while prompting format plays a secondary role and temperature has relatively limited impact. More broadly, the study provides transferable design recommendations for implementing reliable LLM-assisted scoring in STEM contexts through skill-based rubrics and controlled LLM settings.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) like BERT provide strong semantic representations but are costly and opaque, while symbolic models such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) offer transparency but lack semantic generalization. We propose a semantic bootstrapping framework that transfers LLM knowledge into symbolic form, combining interpretability with semantic capacity. Given a class label, an LLM generates sub-intents that guide synthetic data creation through a three-stage curriculum (seed, core, enriched), expanding semantic diversity. A Non-Negated TM (NTM) learns from these examples to extract high-confidence literals as interpretable semantic cues. Injecting these cues into real data enables a TM to align clause logic with LLM-inferred semantics. Our method requires no embeddings or runtime LLM calls, yet equips symbolic models with pretrained semantic priors. Across multiple text classification tasks, it improves interpretability and accuracy over vanilla TM, achieving performance comparable to BERT while remaining fully symbolic and efficient.

In industrial and open-source software engineering tasks, developers often perform project-wise code editing tasks, including feature enhancement, refactoring, and bug fixing, where the leading AI models are expected to support the productivity. Hence, researchers and practitioners have proposed and adopted many LLM-based solutions to facilitate their real-world development. However, they largely suffer from the balance among predicting scope, accuracy, and efficiency. For example, solutions like Cursor achieve high accuracy only in a local editing scope while its performance drops on cross-file edits. In contrast, solutions like CoEdPilot exhibit efficiency limitations when used to predict project-wise edits. In this work, we propose TRACE (Tool-integrated RecommendAtion for Code Editing), a novel subsequent code editing solution to push the boundary of scope, accuracy, and efficiency. Our rationale lies in that code edits are triggered for either semantic or syntactic reasons. Therefore, TRACE predicts subsequent edits by interleaving neural-based induction for semantic edit prediction and tool-based deduction for syntactic edit prediction. The tools can be any IDE facilities, such as refactoring tools (e.g., rename) or linting tools (e.g., use-def), providing decent performance of deducing edit-location and edit-generation. Technically, we address the challenge of (1) when to interleave between neural-based and tool-based prediction and (2) how to further improve the performance of neural-based prediction. As for the former, we learn a neural model to detect when to invoke IDE editing tools. As for the latter, we propose a novel and fine-grained editing representation to further boost the performance of neural editing models. ......

Video Diffusion Transformers have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation but suffer from the massive computational burden of self-attention. While sparse attention provides a promising acceleration solution, existing methods frequently provoke severe visual flickering caused by static sparsity patterns and deterministic block routing. To resolve these limitations, we propose Precision-Allocated Sparse Attention (PASA), a training-free framework designed for highly efficient and temporally smooth video generation. First, we implement a curvature-aware dynamic budgeting mechanism. By profiling the generation trajectory acceleration across timesteps, we elastically allocate the exact-computation budget to secure high-precision processing strictly during critical semantic transitions. Second, we replace global homogenizing estimations with hardware-aligned grouped approximations, successfully capturing fine-grained local variations while maintaining peak compute throughput. Finally, we incorporate a stochastic selection bias into the attention routing mechanism. This probabilistic approach softens rigid selection boundaries and eliminates selection oscillation, effectively eradicating the localized computational starvation that drives temporal flickering. Extensive evaluations on leading video diffusion models demonstrate that PASA achieves substantial inference acceleration while consistently producing remarkably fluid and structurally stable video sequences.

System log anomaly detection is critical for maintaining the reliability of large-scale software systems, yet traditional methods struggle with the heterogeneous and evolving nature of modern log data. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising new approaches to log understanding, but a systematic comparison of LLM-based methods against established techniques remains lacking. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark study evaluating both LLM-based and traditional approaches for log anomaly detection across four widely-used public datasets: HDFS, BGL, Thunderbird, and Spirit. We evaluate three categories of methods: (1) classical log parsers (Drain, Spell, AEL) combined with machine learning classifiers, (2) fine-tuned transformer models (BERT, RoBERTa), and (3) prompt-based LLM approaches (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLaMA-3) in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal that while fine-tuned transformers achieve the highest F1-scores (0.96-0.99), prompt-based LLMs demonstrate remarkablezero-shot capabilities (F1: 0.82-0.91) without requiring any labeled training data -- a significant advantage for real-world deployment where labeled anomalies are scarce. We further analyze the cost-accuracy trade-offs, latency characteristics, and failure modes of each approach. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for practitioners choosing log anomaly detection methods based on their specific constraints regarding accuracy, latency, cost, and label availability. All code and experimental configurations are publicly available to facilitate reproducibility.

The widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation has raised increasing concerns about intellectual property disputes. Watermarking techniques, which embed meta information into AI-generated content (AIGC), have the potential to serve as judicial evidence. However, existing methods rely on statistical signals in token distributions, leading to inherently probabilistic detection and reduced reliability, especially in multi-bit encoding (e.g., timestamps). Moreover, such methods introduce detectable statistical patterns, making them vulnerable to forgery attacks and enabling model providers to fabricate arbitrary watermarks. To address these issues, we propose the concept of trustworthy watermark, which achieves reliable recovery with 100% identification accuracy while resisting both user-side statistical attacks and provider-side forgery. We focus on trustworthy time watermarking for use as judicial evidence. Our framework integrates cryptographic techniques and encodes time information into time-dependent secret keys under regulatory supervision, preventing arbitrary timestamp fabrication. The watermark payload is decoupled from time and generated as a random, non-stored bit sequence for each instance, eliminating statistical patterns. To ensure verifiability, we design a two-stage encoding mechanism, which, combined with error-correcting codes, enables reliable recovery of generation time with theoretically perfect accuracy. Both theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that our framework satisfies the reliability requirements for judicial evidence and offers a practical solution for future AIGC-related intellectual property disputes.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used to elicit explicit reasoning from large language models for code (LLM4Code). However, its impact on robustness and the stability of reasoning trajectories under realistic input perturbations remains poorly understood. Prior work has largely evaluated CoT through final correctness, leaving a critical gap in understanding how CoT reshapes internal uncertainty dynamics and why it sometimes harms rather than helps code generation. We suggest that CoT is not uniformly beneficial; instead, its robustness depends on whether perturbations destabilize structurally sensitive commitment points along the reasoning-to-code trajectory. We conduct a controlled, large-scale empirical study of CoT across six models and two code benchmarks (MHPP and BigCodeBench), subjecting task docstrings to systematic character-, word-, and sentence-level perturbations. We instrument full generation traces with token-level uncertainty and define three novel structural anchors: reasoning-code transition, symbolic commitment, and algorithmic articulation. Findings: (1) CoT does not yield uniform performance or robustness gains: its benefits are contingent on model family, task structure, and prompt explicitness. (2) CoT and No-CoT exhibit distinct robustness profiles, with different perturbation families triggering different failure modes. (3) We identify three recurrent trajectory deformations--Lengthening, Branching, and Simplification--that systematically emerge when perturbations interact with structural anchors and explain failure patterns. (4) Early-stage uncertainty serves as a reliable diagnostic signal for localizing where trajectory instability begins around sensitive anchors. These results provide a unified explanation for CoT's mixed performance and suggest design principles for building more robust reasoning-based code generators.

Preserving multimodal signals across agent boundaries is necessary for accurate cross-modal reasoning, but it is not sufficient. We show that modality-native routing in Agent-to-Agent (A2A) networks improves task accuracy by 20 percentage points over text-bottleneck baselines, but only when the downstream reasoning agent can exploit the richer context that native routing preserves. An ablation replacing LLM-backed reasoning with keyword matching eliminates the accuracy gap entirely (36% vs. 36%), establishing a two-layer requirement: protocol-level routing must be paired with capable agent-level reasoning for the benefit to materialize. We present MMA2A, an architecture layer atop A2A that inspects Agent Card capability declarations to route voice, image, and text parts in their native modality. On CrossModal-CS, a controlled 50-task benchmark with the same LLM backend, same tasks, and only the routing path varying, MMA2A achieves 52% task completion accuracy versus 32% for the text-bottleneck baseline (95% bootstrap CI on $Δ$TCA: [8, 32] pp; McNemar's exact $p = 0.006$). Gains concentrate on vision-dependent tasks: product defect reports improve by +38.5 pp and visual troubleshooting by +16.7 pp. This accuracy gain comes at a $1.8\times$ latency cost from native multimodal processing. These results suggest that routing is a first-order design variable in multi-agent systems, as it determines the information available for downstream reasoning.

Ollivier-Ricci curvature (ORC), defined via the Wasserstein distance that captures rich geometric information, has received growing attention in both theory and applications. However, the high computational cost of Wasserstein distance evaluation has significantly limited the broader practical use of ORC. To alleviate this issue, previous work introduced a computationally efficient lower bound as a proxy for ORC based on 1-hop random walks, but this approach empirically exhibits large gaps from the exact ORC. In this paper, we establish a substantially tighter lower bound for ORC than the existing lower bound, while retaining much lower computational cost than exact ORC computation, with practical speedups of tens of times. Moreover, our bound is not restricted to 1-hop random walks, but also applies to k-hop random walks (k > 1). Experiments on several fundamental graph structures demonstrate the effectiveness of our bound in terms of both approximation accuracy and computational efficiency.

Simulating Standardized Patients with cognitive impairment offers a scalable and ethical solution for clinical training. However, existing methods rely on discrete prompt engineering and fail to capture the heterogeneity of deficits across varying domains and severity levels. To address this limitation, we propose StsPatient for the fine-grained simulation of cognitively impaired patients. We innovatively capture domain-specific features by extracting steering vectors from contrastive pairs of instructions and responses. Furthermore, we introduce a Stochastic Token Modulation (STM) mechanism to regulate the intervention probability. STM enables precise control over impairment severity while mitigating the instability of conventional vector methods. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that StsPatient significantly outperforms baselines in both clinical authenticity and severity controllability.

Global navigation information and local scene understanding are two crucial components of autonomous driving systems. However, our experimental results indicate that many end-to-end autonomous driving systems tend to over-rely on local scene understanding while failing to utilize global navigation information. These systems exhibit weak correlation between their planning capabilities and navigation input, and struggle to perform navigation-following in complex scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Sequential Navigation Guidance (SNG) framework, an efficient representation of global navigation information based on real-world navigation patterns. The SNG encompasses both navigation paths for constraining long-term trajectories and turn-by-turn (TBT) information for real-time decision-making logic. We constructed the SNG-QA dataset, a visual question answering (VQA) dataset based on SNG that aligns global and local planning. Additionally, we introduce an efficient model SNG-VLA that fuses local planning with global planning. The SNG-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance through precise navigation information modeling without requiring auxiliary loss functions from perception tasks. Project page: SNG-VLA

Thermodynamic cycles are pivotal in determining the efficacy of energy conversion systems. Traditional design methodologies, which rely on expert knowledge or exhaustive enumeration, are inefficient and lack scalability, thereby constraining the discovery of high-performance cycles. In this study, we introduce a graph-based hierarchical reinforcement learning approach for the co-design of structure parameters in thermodynamic cycles. These cycles are encoded as graphs, with components and connections depicted as nodes and edges, adhering to grammatical constraints. A deep learning-based thermophysical surrogate facilitates stable graph decoding and the simultaneous resolution of global parameters. Building on this foundation, we develop a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework wherein a high-level manager explores structural evolution and proposes candidate configurations, whereas a low-level worker optimizes parameters and provides performance rewards to steer the search towards high-performance regions. By integrating graph representation, thermophysical surrogate, and manager-worker learning, this method establishes a fully automated pipeline for encoding, decoding, and co-optimization. Using heat pump and heat engine cycles as case studies, the results demonstrate that the proposed method not only replicates classical cycle configurations but also identifies 18 and 21 novel heat pump and heat engine cycles, respectively. Relative to classical cycles, the novel configurations exhibit performance improvements of 4.6% and 133.3%, respectively, surpassing the traditional designs. This method effectively balances efficiency with broad applicability, providing a practical and scalable intelligent alternative to expert-driven thermodynamic cycle design.

This study leverages large-scale travel surveys for over 200,000 residents across Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, and Sao Paulo. With rich individual-level data, we make systematic comparisons and reveal patterns in social mixing, which cannot be identified by analyzing high-resolution mobility data alone. Using the same set of data, inferring socioeconomic status from residential neighborhoods yield social mixing levels 16% lower than using self-reported survey data. Besides, individuals over the age of 66 experience greater social mixing than those in late working life (aged 55 to 65), lending data-driven support to the "second youth" hypothesis. Teenagers and women with caregiving responsibilities exhibit lower social mixing levels. Across the five cities, proximity to major transit stations reduces the influence of individual socioeconomic status on social mixing. Finally, we construct detailed spatio-temporal place networks for each city using a graph neural network. Inputs of home-space, activity-space and demographic attributes are embedded and fed into a supervised autoencoder to predict individual exposure vectors. Results show that the structure of individual activity space, i.e., where people travel to, explains most of the variations in place exposure, suggesting that mobility shapes experienced social mixing more than sociodemographic characteristics, home environment, and transit proximity. The ablation tests further discover that, while different income groups may experience similar levels of social mixing, their activity spaces remain stratified by income, resulting in structurally different social mixing experiences.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate multiple candidate responses for a given prompt, yet selecting the most reliable one remains challenging, especially when correctness diverges from surface-level majority agreement. Existing approaches, such as self-consistency, rely on discrete voting, while probability-based methods often fail to capture relationships among candidate answers or tend to underweight high-quality but less frequent responses, and do not fully leverage the geometric structure of answer representations. To address these limitations, we introduce Radial Consensus Score (RCS), a simple, efficient, and training-free method for best-of-N selection. RCS models semantic consensus by computing a weighted Fréchet mean (semantic center) of answer embeddings and ranking candidates by their radial distance to this center. Importantly, RCS provides a general framework that supports multiple weighting schemes, including uniform, frequency-based, and probability-based variants, enabling flexible integration of agreement signals and model confidence while remaining fully applicable in black-box settings. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks covering short-form QA and long-form reasoning tasks, and five open-weight models, demonstrate that RCS variants consistently outperform strong baselines, with gains becoming more pronounced as the sampling budget increases. RCS also serves as an effective drop-in replacement for majority voting in multi-agent debate and exhibits strong robustness in black-box scenarios. Overall, these results highlight geometric consensus as a scalable and broadly applicable principle for reliable answer selection, extending beyond majority voting to more expressive and robust aggregation in LLM inference.

Work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence has suggested that exposing learning agents to traces of interaction between multiple individuals can improve performance in a variety of settings, yet it remains unknown which features of interactions contribute to this improvement. We examined the factors that support the effectiveness of interaction data, using a controlled paradigm that allowed us to precisely operationalize key distinctions between interaction and an expert acting alone. We generated synthetic datasets of simple interactions between an expert and a novice in a spatial navigation task, and then trained transformer models on those datasets, evaluating performance after exposure to different datasets. Our experiments showed that models trained on pedagogical interactions were more robust across a variety of scenarios compared to models trained only on expert demonstrations, and that having the ability to represent epistemically distinct agents led to expert-like behavior even when expert behavior was rarely observed.

Current evaluations of large language models aggregate performance across diverse tasks into single scores. This obscures fine-grained ability variation, limiting targeted model improvement and ability-guided selection for specific tasks. Motivated by this gap, we propose a cognitive diagnostic framework that estimates model abilities across multiple fine-grained dimensions. For mathematics, we construct a 35-dimensional ability taxonomy grounded in cognitive theory and domain knowledge. The framework employs multidimensional Item Response Theory with an item-ability association matrix to estimate fine-grained ability levels, which in turn enable prediction of performance on unseen items (questions of benchmark). Evaluated on 41 models, our approach demonstrates strong criterion validity, consistent ability estimates across benchmarks, and accurate prediction of unseen items with AUC ranging from 0.80 to 0.89 within benchmarks and from 0.77 to 0.86 across benchmarks, substantially exceeding trivial baselines. The framework generalizes across scientific domains, producing consistent diagnostic performance in physics (27 dimensions), chemistry (58 dimensions), and computer science (12 dimensions). This work establishes a principled framework for fine-grained assessment of abilities, with potential applications in targeted training, ability-guided model selection, and ability-aware benchmark design.

Many malicious actors responsible for disseminating synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery (SNCII) operate within internet forums to exchange resources, strategies, and generated content across multiple platforms. Technically-sophisticated actors gravitate toward certain communities (e.g., 4chan), while lower-sophistication end-users are more active on others (e.g., Reddit). To characterize key stakeholders in the broader ecosystem, we perform an integrated analysis of multiple communities, analyzing 282,154 4chan comments and 78,308 Reddit submissions spanning 165 days between June and November 2025 to characterize involved actors, actions, and resources. We find: (a) that users with differing levels of technical sophistication employ and share a wide range of primary resources facilitating SNCII content creation as well as numerous secondary resources facilitating dissemination; and (b) that knowledge transfer between experts and newcomers facilitates propagation of these illicit resources. Based on our empirical analysis, we identify gaps in existing SNCII regulatory infrastructure and synthesize several critical intervention points for bolstering deterrence.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by grounding outputs in retrieved knowledge. However, existing RAG methods including graph- and hypergraph-based approaches treat retrieved evidence as an unordered set, implicitly assuming permutation invariance. This assumption is misaligned with many real-world reasoning tasks, where outcomes depend not only on which interactions occur, but also on the order in which they unfold. We propose Order-Aware Knowledge Hypergraph RAG (OKH-RAG), which treats order as a first-class structural property. OKH-RAG represents knowledge as higher-order interactions within a hypergraph augmented with precedence structure, and reformulates retrieval as sequence inference over hyperedges. Instead of selecting independent facts, it recovers coherent interaction trajectories that reflect underlying reasoning processes. A learned transition model infers precedence directly from data without requiring explicit temporal supervision. We evaluate OKH-RAG on order-sensitive question answering and explanation tasks, including tropical cyclone and port operation scenarios. OKH-RAG consistently outperforms permutation-invariant baselines, and ablations show that these gains arise specifically from modeling interaction order. These results highlight a key limitation of set-based retrieval: effective reasoning requires not only retrieving relevant evidence, but organizing it into structured sequences.

TRUST Agents is a collaborative multi-agent framework for explainable fact verification and fake news detection. Rather than treating verification as a simple true-or-false classification task, the system identifies verifiable claims, retrieves relevant evidence, compares claims against that evidence, reasons under uncertainty, and generates explanations that humans can inspect. The baseline pipeline consists of four specialized agents. A claim extractor uses named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and LLM-based extraction to identify factual claims. A retrieval agent performs hybrid sparse and dense search using BM25 and FAISS. A verifier agent compares claims with retrieved evidence and produces verdicts with calibrated confidence. An explainer agent then generates a human-readable report with explicit evidence citations. To handle complex claims more effectively, we introduce a research-oriented extension with three additional components: a decomposer agent inspired by LoCal-style claim decomposition, a Delphi-inspired multi-agent jury with specialized verifier personas, and a logic aggregator that combines atomic verdicts using conjunction, disjunction, negation, and implication. We evaluate both pipelines on the LIAR benchmark against fine-tuned BERT, fine-tuned RoBERTa, and a zero-shot LLM baseline. Although supervised encoders remain stronger on raw metrics, TRUST Agents improves interpretability, evidence transparency, and reasoning over compound claims. Results also show that retrieval quality and uncertainty calibration remain the main bottlenecks in trustworthy automated fact verification.

Industrial control systems operate in dynamic environments where traffic distributions vary across scenarios, labeled samples are limited, and unknown attacks frequently emerge, posing significant challenges to cross-domain intrusion detection. To address this issue, this paper proposes a clustering-enhanced domain adaptation method for industrial control traffic. The framework contains two key components. First, a feature-based transfer learning module projects source and target domains into a shared latent subspace through spectral-transform-based feature alignment and iteratively reduces distribution discrepancies, enabling accurate cross-domain detection. Second, a clustering enhancement strategy combines K-Medoids clustering with PCA-based dimensionality reduction to improve cross-domain correlation estimation and reduce performance degradation caused by manual parameter tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves unknown attack detection. Compared with five baseline models, it increases detection accuracy by up to 49%, achieves larger gains in F-score, and demonstrates stronger stability. Moreover, the clustering enhancement strategy further boosts detection accuracy by up to 26% on representative tasks. These results suggest that the proposed method effectively alleviates data scarcity and domain shift, providing a practical solution for robust cross-domain intrusion detection in dynamic industrial environments.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) rank among the most destructive natural hazards, yet their forecasting faces fundamental trade-offs: numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are computationally prohibitive and struggle to leverage historical data, while existing deep learning (DL)-based intelligent models are variable-specific and deterministic, which fail to generalize across different forecasting variables. Here we present CycloneMAE, a scalable multi-task forecasting model that learns transferable TC representations from multi-modal data using a TC structure-aware masked autoencoder. By coupling a discrete probabilistic gridding mechanism with a pre-train/fine-tune paradigm, CycloneMAE simultaneously delivers deterministic forecasts and probability distributions. Evaluated across five global ocean basins, CycloneMAE outperforms leading NWP systems in pressure and wind forecasting up to 120 hours and in track forecasting up to 24 hours. Attribution analysis via integrated gradients reveals physically interpretable learning dynamics: short-term forecasts rely predominantly on the internal core convective structure from satellite imagery, whereas longer-term forecasts progressively shift attention to external environmental factors. Our framework establishes a scalable, probabilistic, and interpretable pathway for operational TC forecasting.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved their ability to process extended conversational contexts, yet fine-tuning and evaluating short- and long-term memories remain difficult due to the absence of datasets that encode both short- and long-term conversational history. Existing conversational datasets lack memory grounding, overlook topic continuity, or rely on costly human annotation. To address these gaps, we introduce AgenticAI-DialogGen, a modular agent-based framework that generates persona-grounded and topic-guided conversations without human supervision. The framework uses LLM agents to extract knowledge graphs, identify topics, build speaker personas, and simulate topic-guided conversations from unstructured conversations. A QA module generates memory-grounded Question Answer (QA) pairs drawn from short- and long-term conversational histories. We also generated a new dataset entitled, TopicGuidedChat (TGC), where long-term memory is encoded as speaker-specific knowledge graphs and short-term memory as newly generated topic-guided conversations. Evaluations depict that AgenticAI-DialogGen yields higher conversational quality and LLMs fine-tuned on TGC dataset achieve improved performance on memory-grounded QA tasks.

LLM-based agents can execute actions that are syntactically valid, user-sanctioned, and semantically appropriate, yet still violate organizational policy because the facts needed for correct policy judgment are hidden at decision time. We call this failure mode policy-invisible violations: cases in which compliance depends on entity attributes, contextual state, or session history absent from the agent's visible context. We present PhantomPolicy, a benchmark spanning eight violation categories with balanced violation and safe-control cases, in which all tool responses contain clean business data without policy metadata. We manually review all 600 model traces produced by five frontier models and evaluate them using human-reviewed trace labels. Manual review changes 32 labels (5.3%) relative to the original case-level annotations, confirming the need for trace-level human review. To demonstrate what world-state-grounded enforcement can achieve under favorable conditions, we introduce Sentinel, an enforcement framework based on counterfactual graph simulation. Sentinel treats every agent action as a proposed mutation to an organizational knowledge graph, performs speculative execution to materialize the post-action world state, and verifies graph-structural invariants to decide Allow/Block/Clarify. Against human-reviewed trace labels, Sentinel substantially outperforms a content-only DLP baseline (68.8% vs. 93.0% accuracy) while maintaining high precision, though it still leaves room for improvement on certain violation categories. These results demonstrate what becomes achievable once policy-relevant world state is made available to the enforcement layer.

Relational reasoning is the ability to infer relations that jointly bind multiple entities, attributes, or variables. This ability is central to scientific reasoning, but existing evaluations of relational reasoning in large language models often focus on structured inputs such as tables, graphs, or synthetic tasks, and do not isolate the difficulty introduced by higher-arity relational binding. We study this problem through the lens of Relational Complexity (RC), which we define as the minimum number of independent entities or operands that must be simultaneously bound to apply a relation. RC provides a principled way to vary reasoning difficulty while controlling for confounders such as input size, vocabulary, and representational choices. Building on RC, we introduce REL, a generative benchmark framework spanning algebra, chemistry, and biology that varies RC within each domain. Across frontier LLMs, performance degrades consistently and monotonically as RC increases, even when the total number of entities is held fixed. This failure mode persists with increased test-time compute and in-context learning, suggesting a limitation tied to the arity of the required relational binding rather than to insufficient inference steps or lack of exposure to examples. Our results identify a regime of higher-arity reasoning in which current models struggle, and motivate re-examining benchmarks through the lens of relational complexity.

Pipeline parallelism (PP) is widely used to partition layers of large language models (LLMs) across GPUs, enabling scalable inference for large models. However, existing systems rely on static PP configurations that fail to adapt to dynamic settings, such as serverless platforms and heterogeneous GPU environments. Reconfiguring PP by stopping and redeploying service incurs prohibitive downtime, so reconfiguration must instead proceed live and in place, without interrupting inference. However, live in-place PP reconfiguration is fundamentally challenging. GPUs are already saturated with model weights and KV cache, leaving little room for new layer placements and necessitating KV cache resizing, at odds with systems like vLLM that preallocate for throughput. Moreover, maintaining KV consistency during execution is difficult: stop-and-copy introduces large pauses, while background synchronization risks inconsistency as states evolve. We present PipeLive, which enables live in-place PP reconfiguration with minimal disruption. PipeLive introduces a redesigned KV cache layout together with a co-designed extension to PageAttention, forming a unified mechanism for live KV resizing. It further adopts an incremental KV patching mechanism, inspired by live virtual machine migration, to synchronize KV states between source and target configurations and identify a safe switch point. PipeLive achieves a 2.5X reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT) without KV cache overflow compared to disabling KV resizing. Furthermore, compared to a variant without KV patching, it reduces reconfiguration overhead from seconds to under 10ms, and improves TTFT and time-per-output-token (TPOT) by up to 54.7% and 14.7%, respectively.

The applications of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and their intersections with data-driven fields, such as healthcare, finance, transportation, and information security, have led to significant improvements in service efficiency and low latency. However, this synergy raises serious concerns regarding the security of large language models (LLMs) and their potential impact on the privacy of companies and users' data. Many technology companies that incorporate LLMs in their services with a certain level of command and control bear a risk of data exposure and secret divulgence caused by insecure LLM pipelines, making them vulnerable to multiple attacks such as data poisoning, prompt injection, and model theft. Although several security techniques (input/output sanitization, decentralized learning, access control management, and encryption) were implemented to reduce this risk, there is still an imminent risk of quantum computing attacks, which are expected to break existing encryption algorithms, hence, retrieving secret keys, encrypted sensitive data, and decrypting encrypted models. In this extensive work, we integrate the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) based Lattice-based Homomorphic Encryption (HE) main functions in the LLM's inference pipeline to secure some of its layers against data privacy attacks. We modify the inference pipeline of the transformer architecture for the LLAMA-3 model while injecting the main homomorphic encryption operations provided by the concrete-ml library. We demonstrate high text generation accuracies (up to 98%) with reasonable latencies (237 ms) on an i9 CPU, reaching up to 80 tokens per second, which proves the feasibility and validity of our work while running a FHE-secured LLAMA-3 inference model. Further experiments and analysis are discussed to justify models' text generation latencies and behaviours.

We present (Experience-Modulated Biologically-inspired Emergent Reasoning), a hybrid cognitive architecture that reorganises the relationship between large language models (LLMs) and memory: rather than augmenting an LLM with retrieval tools, we place the LLM as a replaceable reasoning engine within a persistent, biologically-grounded associative substrate. The architecture centres on a 220,000-neuron spiking neural network (SNN) with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), four-layer hierarchical organisation (sensory/concept/category/meta-pattern), inhibitory E/I balance, and reward-modulated learning. Text embeddings are encoded into the SNN via a novel z-score standardised top-k population code that is dimension-independent by construction, achieving 82.2\% discrimination retention across embedding dimensionalities. We show that STDP lateral propagation during idle operation can trigger and shape LLM actions without external prompting or scripted triggers: the SNN determines when to act and what associations to surface, while the LLM selects the action type and generates content. In one instance, the system autonomously initiated contact with a user after learned person-topic associations fired laterally during an 8-hour idle period. From a clean start with zero learned weights, the first SNN-triggered action occurred after only 7 conversational exchanges (14 messages).

The rapid deployment of AI agents in commercial settings has outpaced the development of evaluation methodologies that reflect production realities. Existing benchmarks measure agent capabilities through retrospectively curated tasks with well-specified requirements and deterministic metrics -- conditions that diverge fundamentally from production environments where requirements contain implicit constraints, inputs are heterogeneous multi-modal documents with information fragmented across sources, tasks demand undeclared domain expertise, outputs are long-horizon professional deliverables, and success is judged by domain experts whose standards evolve over time. We present AlphaEval, a production-grounded benchmark of 94 tasks sourced from seven companies deploying AI agents in their core business, spanning six O*NET (Occupational Information Network) domains. Unlike model-centric benchmarks, AlphaEval evaluates complete agent products -- Claude Code, Codex, etc. -- as commercial systems, capturing performance variations invisible to model-level evaluation. Our evaluation framework covers multiple paradigms (LLM-as-a-Judge, reference-driven metrics, formal verification, rubric-based assessment, automated UI testing, etc.), with individual domains composing multiple paradigms. Beyond the benchmark itself, we contribute a requirement-to-benchmark construction framework -- a systematic methodology that transforms authentic production requirements into executable evaluation tasks in minimal time. This framework standardizes the entire pipeline from requirement to evaluation, providing a reproducible, modular process that any organization can adopt to construct production-grounded benchmarks for their own domains.

Tumor boards are multidisciplinary conferences dedicated to producing actionable patient care recommendations with live review of primary radiology and pathology data. Succinct patient case summaries are needed to drive efficient and accurate case discussions. We developed a manual AI-based workflow to generate patient summaries to display live at the Stanford Thoracic Tumor board. To improve on this manually intensive process, we developed several automated AI chart summarization methods and evaluated them against physician gold standard summaries and fact-based scoring rubrics. We report these comparative evaluations as well as our deployment of the final state automated AI chart summarization tool along with post-deployment monitoring. We also validate the use of an LLM as a judge evaluation strategy for fact-based scoring. This work is an example of integrating AI-based workflows into routine clinical practice.

Reasoning post-training with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is typically studied in centralized settings, yet many realistic applications involve decentralized private data distributed across organizations. Federated training is a natural solution, but scaling RLVR in this regime is challenging: full-model synchronization is expensive, and performing many local steps can cause severe client drift under heterogeneous data. We propose a federated RLVR framework that combines LoRA-based local adaptation with public-data-based off-policy steps to improve both communication efficiency and cross-client coordination. In particular, a small shared public dataset is used to periodically exchange and reuse response-level training signals across organizations, providing a lightweight anchor toward a more globally aligned objective without exposing private data. Our method selectively replaces locally incorrect responses with globally correct ones during public-data steps, thereby keeping training closer to the local policy while still benefiting from cross-client coordination. Across mathematical and medical reasoning benchmarks and models, our method consistently improves over standard baselines. Our results highlight a simple and effective recipe for federated reasoning post-training: combining low-rank communication with limited public-data coordination.

Satellite sea surface temperature (SST) products underpin global coral bleaching monitoring, yet they measure only the ocean skin. Corals inhabit depths from the shallows to beyond 20 metres, where temperatures can be 1-3°C cooler than the surface; applying satellite SST uniformly to all depths therefore overestimates subsurface thermal stress. We present a physics-informed neural network (PINN) that fuses NOAA Coral Reef Watch SST with sparse in-situ temperature loggers within the one-dimensional vertical heat equation, enforcing SST as a hard surface boundary condition and jointly learning effective thermal diffusivity (\k{appa}) and light attenuation (Kd). Validated across four Great Barrier Reef sites (30 holdout experiments), the PINN achieves 0.25-1.38°C RMSE at unseen depths. Under extreme sparsity (three training depths), the PINN maintains 0.27°C RMSE at the 5 metre holdout and 0.32°C at the 9.1 metre holdout, where statistical baselines collapse to >1.8°C; it outperforms a physics-only finite-difference baseline in 90% of experiments. Depth-resolved Degree Heating Day (DHD) profiles show that thermal stress attenuates with depth: at Davies Reef, DHD drops from 0.29 at the surface to zero by 10.7 metres, consistent with logger observations, while satellite DHD remains constant at 0.31 across all depths. However, the PINN underestimates absolute DHD at shallow depths because its smooth predictions attenuate the short-duration peaks that drive threshold exceedances; PINN DHD values should be interpreted as conservative lower bounds on depth-resolved stress. These results demonstrate that physics-constrained fusion of satellite SST with sparse loggers can extend bleaching assessment to the depth dimension using existing observational infrastructure.

Latent diffusion models for medical image super-resolution universally inherit variational autoencoders designed for natural photographs. We show that this default choice, not the diffusion architecture, is the dominant constraint on reconstruction quality. In a controlled experiment holding all other pipeline components fixed, replacing the generic Stable Diffusion VAE with MedVAE, a domain-specific autoencoder pretrained on more than 1.6 million medical images, yields +2.91 to +3.29 dB PSNR improvement across knee MRI, brain MRI, and chest X-ray (n = 1,820; Cohen's d = 1.37 to 1.86, all p < 10^{-20}, Wilcoxon signed-rank). Wavelet decomposition localises the advantage to the finest spatial frequency bands encoding anatomically relevant fine structure. Ablations across inference schedules, prediction targets, and generative architectures confirm the gap is stable within plus or minus 0.15 dB, while hallucination rates remain comparable between methods (Cohen's h < 0.02 across all datasets), establishing that reconstruction fidelity and generative hallucination are governed by independent pipeline components. These results provide a practical screening criterion: autoencoder reconstruction quality, measurable without diffusion training, predicts downstream SR performance (R^2 = 0.67), suggesting that domain-specific VAE selection should precede diffusion architecture search. Code and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/sebasmos/latent-sr.

Modern distributed networks, notably transformers, acquire a remarkable ability (termed `in-context learning') to adapt their computation to input statistics, such that a fixed network can be applied to data from a broad range of systems. Here, we provide a complete mechanistic characterization of this behavior in transformers trained on a finite set $S$ of discrete Markov chains. The transformer displays four algorithmic phases, characterized by whether the network memorizes and generalizes, and whether it uses 1-point or 2-point statistics. We show that the four phases are implemented by multi-layer subcircuits that exemplify two qualitatively distinct mechanisms for implementing context-adaptive computations. Minimal models isolate the key features of both motifs. Memorization and generalization phases are delineated by two boundaries that depend on data diversity, $K = |S|$. The first ($K_1^\ast$) is set by a kinetic competition between subcircuits and the second ($K_2^\ast$) is set by a representational bottleneck. A symmetry-constrained theory of a transformer's training dynamics explains the sharp transition from 1-point to 2-point generalization and identifies key features of the loss landscape that allow the network to generalize. Put together, we show that transformers develop distinct subcircuits to implement in-context learning and identify conditions that favor certain mechanisms over others.

Agents aspire to eliminate the need for task-specific prompt crafting through autonomous reason-act-observe loops. Still, they are commonly instructed to follow a task-specific plan for guidance, e.g., to resolve software issues following phases for navigation, reproduction, patch, and validation. Unfortunately, it is unknown to what extent agents actually follow such instructed plans. Without such an analysis, determining the extent agents comply with a given plan, it is impossible to assess whether a solution was reached through correct strategic reasoning or through other means, e.g., data contamination or overfitting to a benchmark. This paper presents the first extensive, systematic analysis of plan compliance in programming agents, examining 16,991 trajectories from SWE-agent across four LLMs on SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro under eight plan variations. Without an explicit plan, agents fall back on workflows internalized during training, which are often incomplete, overfit, or inconsistently applied. Providing the standard plan improves issue resolution, and we observe that periodic plan reminders can mitigate plan violations and improve task success. A subpar plan hurts performance even more than no plan at all. Surprisingly, augmenting a plan with additional task-relevant phases in the early stage can degrade performance, particularly when these phases do not align with the model's internal problem-solving strategy. These findings highlight a research gap: fine-tuning paradigms that teach models to follow instructed plans, rather than encoding task-specific plans in them. This requires teaching models to reason and act adaptively, rather than memorizing workflows.

Drawing meaningful conclusions from inherently multimodal clinical data (including medical imaging) requires coordinating expertise across the clinical specialty, radiology, programming, and biostatistics. This fragmented process bottlenecks discovery. We present VERITAS (Verifiable Epistemic Reasoning for Image-Derived Hypothesis Testing via Agentic Systems), a multi-agent system that autonomously tests natural-language hypotheses on multimodal clinical datasets while producing a fully auditable evidence trail: every statistical conclusion traces through inspectable, executable outputs from analysis plan to segmentation masks to statistical code to final verdict. VERITAS decomposes the workflow into four phases handled by role-specialized agents, and introduces an epistemic evidence label framework that mechanically classifies outcomes as Supported, Refuted, Underpowered, or Invalid by jointly evaluating significance, effect direction, and study power. This distinction is critical in medical imaging, where non-significant results often reflect insufficient sample size rather than absent effects. To evaluate the system, we construct a tiered benchmark of 64 hypotheses spanning six complexity levels across cardiac (ACDC, 150 subjects) and brain glioma (UCSF-PDGM, 501 subjects) MRI. VERITAS reaches 81.4% verdict accuracy with frontier models and 71.2% with locally-hosted open-weight models (8-30B), outperforming all five single-model baselines in both classes. It also produces the highest rate of independently verifiable statistical outputs (86.6%), so even its failures remain diagnosable through artifact inspection. Structured multi-agent decomposition thus substitutes for model scale while preserving the verifiability clinical research demands.

We present XANE(3), a physics-based E(3)-equivariant graph neural network for predicting X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectra directly from atomic structures. The model combines tensor-product message passing with spherical harmonic edge features, absorber-query attention pooling, custom equivariant layer normalization, adaptive gated residual connections, and a spectral readout based on a multi-scale Gaussian basis with an optional sigmoidal background term. To improve line-shape fidelity, training is performed with a composite objective that includes pointwise spectral reconstruction together with first- and second-derivative matching terms. We evaluate the model on a dataset of 5,941 FDMNES simulations of iron oxide surface facets and obtain a spectrum mean squared error of $1.0 \times 10^{-3}$ on the test set. The model accurately reproduces the main edge structure, relative peak intensities, pre-edge features, and post-edge oscillations. Ablation studies show that the derivative-aware objective, custom equivariant normalization, absorber-conditioned attention pooling, adaptive gated residual mixing, and global background term each improve performance. Interestingly, a capacity-matched scalar-only variant achieves comparable pointwise reconstruction error but reduced derivative-level fidelity, indicating that explicit tensorial channels are not strictly required for low intensity error on this dataset, although they remain beneficial for capturing finer spectral structure. These results establish XANE(3) as an accurate and efficient surrogate for XANES simulation and offer a promising route toward accelerated spectral prediction, ML-assisted spectroscopy, and data-driven materials discovery.

RAG systems have transformed how LLMs access external knowledge, but we find that current implementations exhibit a bias toward factual, objective content, as evidenced by existing benchmarks and datasets that prioritize objective retrieval. This factual bias - treating opinions and diverse perspectives as noise rather than information to be synthesized - limits RAG systems in real-world scenarios involving subjective content, from social media discussions to product reviews. Beyond technical limitations, this bias poses risks to transparent and accountable AI: echo chamber effects that amplify dominant viewpoints, systematic underrepresentation of minority voices, and potential opinion manipulation through biased information synthesis. We formalize this limitation through the lens of uncertainty: factual queries involve epistemic uncertainty reducible through evidence, while opinion queries involve aleatoric uncertainty reflecting genuine heterogeneity in human perspectives. This distinction implies that factual RAG should minimize posterior entropy, whereas opinion-aware RAG must preserve it. Building on this theoretical foundation, we present an Opinion-Aware RAG architecture featuring LLM-based opinion extraction, entity-linked opinion graphs, and opinion-enriched document indexing. We evaluate our approach on e-commerce seller forum data, comparing an Opinion-Enriched knowledge base against a traditional baseline. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in retrieval diversity: +26.8% sentiment diversity, +42.7% entity match rate, and +31.6% author demographic coverage on entity-matched documents. Our results provide empirical evidence that treating subjectivity as a first-class citizen yields measurably more representative retrieval-a first step toward opinion-aware RAG. Future work includes joint optimization of retrieval and generation for distributional fidelity.

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are costly, time-consuming, and often infeasible, while treatment-effect estimation from observational data is limited by unobserved confounding. Methods: We developed a three-step framework to address unobserved confounding in observational survival data. First, we infer a latent prognostic factor (U) from restricted mean survival time (RMST) discrepancies between patients with similar observed factors, the same treatment, and divergent outcomes, leveraging the idea that the aggregate effect of unmeasured factors can be inferred even if individual factors cannot. Second, we balance U with observed baseline covariates using prognostic matching, entropy balancing, or inverse probability of treatment weighting. Third, we apply multivariable survival analysis to estimate hazard ratios (HRs). We evaluated the framework in three observational cohorts with RCT benchmarks, two RCT cohorts, and six multicenter observational cohorts. Results: In three observational cohorts (nine comparisons), balancing U improved agreement with trial HRs in all cases; in the strongest settings, it reduced absolute log-HR error by approximately ten-fold versus using observed covariates alone (mean reduction 0.344; p=0.001). In two RCT cohorts, U was balanced across arms (most SMDs <0.1) and adjustment had minimal impact on log-HRs (mean absolute change 0.08). Across six multicenter cohorts, balancing U within centers reduced cross-center dispersion in chemotherapy log-HR estimates (mean reduction 0.147; p=0.016); when populations were directly balanced across centers to account for case-mix differences, cross-center survival differences were narrowed in 75%-100% of comparisons. Conclusions: Inferring and balancing a latent prognostic signal may reduce unobserved confounding and improve treatment-effect estimation from real-world data.

Historical approaches to Table Representation Learning (TRL) have largely adopted the sequential paradigms of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We argue that this linearization of tables discards their essential geometric and relational structure, creating representations that are brittle to layout permutations. This paper introduces the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) for tables, positing that a semantically robust latent space for table reasoning must be intrinsically Permutation Invariant (PI). To ground this hypothesis, we first conduct a retrospective analysis of table-reasoning tasks, highlighting the pervasive serialization bias that compromises structural integrity. We then propose a formal framework to diagnose this bias, introducing two principled metrics based on Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA): (i) PI, which measures embedding drift under complete structural derangement, and (ii) rho, a Spearman-based metric that tracks the convergence of latent structures toward a canonical form as structural information is incrementally restored. Our empirical analysis quantifies an expected flaw in modern Large Language Models (LLMs): even minor layout permutations induce significant, disproportionate semantic shifts in their table embeddings. This exposes a fundamental vulnerability in RAG systems, in which table retrieval becomes fragile to layout-dependent noise rather than to semantic content. In response, we present a novel, structure-aware TRL encoder architecture that explicitly enforces the cognitive principle of cell header alignment. This model demonstrates superior geometric stability and moves towards the PI ideal. Our work provides both a foundational critique of linearized table encoders and the theoretical scaffolding for semantically stable, permutation invariant retrieval, charting a new direction for table reasoning in information systems.

The transition from stateless model inference to stateful agentic execution is reshaping the systems assumptions underlying modern AI infrastructure. While large language models have made persistent, tool-using, and collaborative agents technically viable, existing runtime architectures remain constrained by materialization-heavy instantiation models that impose significant latency and memory overhead. This paper introduces Aethon, a reference-based replication primitive for near-constant-time instantiation of stateful AI agents. Rather than reconstructing agents as fully materialized objects, Aethon represents each instance as a compositional view over stable definitions, layered memory, and local contextual overlays. By shifting instantiation from duplication to reference, Aethon decouples creation cost from inherited structure. We present the conceptual framework, system architecture, and memory model underlying Aethon, including layered inheritance and copy-on-write semantics. We analyze its implications for complexity, scalability, multi-agent orchestration, and enterprise governance. We argue that reference-based instantiation is not merely an optimization, but a more appropriate systems abstraction for production-scale agentic software. Aethon points toward a new class of AI infrastructure in which agents become lightweight, composable execution identities that can be spawned, specialized, and governed at scale.

We investigate how self-referential inputs alter the internal matrix dynamics of large language models. Measuring 106 scalar metrics across up to 7 analysis passes on four models from three architecture families -- Qwen3-VL-8B, Llama-3.2-11B, Llama-3.3-70B, and Gemma-2-9B -- over 300 prompts in a 14-level hierarchy at three temperatures ($T \in \{0.0, 0.3, 0.7\}$), we find that self-reference alone is not destabilizing: grounded self-referential statements and meta-cognitive prompts are markedly more stable than paradoxical self-reference on key collapse-related metrics, and on several such metrics can be as stable as factual controls. Instability concentrates in prompts inducing non-closing truth recursion (NCTR) -- truth-value computations with no finite-depth resolution. NCTR prompts produce anomalously elevated attention effective rank -- indicating attention reorganization with global dispersion rather than simple concentration collapse -- and key metrics reach Cohen's $d = 3.14$ (attention effective rank) to $3.52$ (variance kurtosis) vs. stable self-reference in the 70B model; 281/397 metric-model combinations differentiate NCTR from stable self-reference after FDR correction ($q < 0.05$), 198 with $|d| > 0.8$. Per-layer SVD confirms disruption at every sampled layer ($d > +1.0$ in all three models analyzed), ruling out aggregation artifacts. A classifier achieves AUC $0.81$-$0.90$; 30 minimal pairs yield 42/387 significant combinations; 43/106 metrics replicate across all four models. We connect these observations to three classical matrix-semigroup problems and propose, as a conjecture, that NCTR forces finite-depth transformers toward dynamical regimes where these problems concentrate. NCTR prompts also produce elevated contradictory output ($+34$-$56$ percentage points vs. controls), suggesting practical relevance for understanding self-referential failure modes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced tool-augmented agents, enabling autonomous reasoning via API interactions. However, executing multi-step tasks within massive tool libraries remains challenging due to two critical bottlenecks: (1) the absence of rigorous, plan-level evaluation frameworks and (2) the computational demand of exploring vast decision spaces stemming from large toolsets and long-horizon planning. To bridge these gaps, we first introduce SLATE (Synthetic Large-scale API Toolkit for E-commerce), a large-scale context-aware benchmark designed for the automated assessment of tool-integrated agents. Unlike static metrics, SLATE accommodates diverse yet functionally valid execution trajectories, revealing that current agents struggle with self-correction and search efficiency. Motivated by these findings, we next propose Entropy-Guided Branching (EGB), an uncertainty-aware search algorithm that dynamically expands decision branches where predictive entropy is high. EGB optimizes the exploration-exploitation trade-off, significantly enhancing both task success rates and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on SLATE demonstrate that our dual contribution provides a robust foundation for developing reliable and scalable LLM agents in tool-rich environments.

Understanding how developers combine programming languages in practice reveals the hidden structure of the software ecosystem: which languages are used as complements, which define coherent technology stacks, and which bridge disparate communities. We present a three-phase empirical pipeline that mines Stack Overflow posts by hundreds of thousands of developers across 186 programming languages, applying FP-Growth frequent itemset mining, Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, and Louvain community detection on a weighted co-usage graph, with the goal of characterizing co-usage coupling, latent developer specializations, and macro-level ecosystem structure simultaneously from behavioral data. FP-Growth identifies tight coupling clusters such as shell/bash, Swift/Objective-C, and the C-family with lift values far exceeding what individual language popularity predicts. LDA produces 25 developer profiles including Apple-platform developers, scientific and hardware programmers, functional/academic programmers, and two distinct Unix scripting sub-profiles. Louvain partitions the language graph into three macro-communities: web/enterprise, Apple ecosystem, and systems/scientific, and identifies Java as the highest-degree hub connecting all three. All three methods independently converge on the same ecosystem structure, providing strong cross-method validation of the findings.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often rely on familiar semantic priors, but existing evaluations do not cleanly separate perception failures from rule-mapping failures. We study this behavior as semantic fixation: preserving a default interpretation even when the prompt specifies an alternative, equally valid mapping. To isolate this effect, we introduce VLM-Fix, a controlled benchmark over four abstract strategy games that evaluates identical terminal board states under paired standard and inverse rule formulations. Across 14 open and closed VLMs, accuracy consistently favors standard rules, revealing a robust semantic-fixation gap. Prompt interventions support this mechanism: neutral alias prompts substantially narrow the inverse-rule gap, while semantically loaded aliases reopen it. Post-training is strongly rule-aligned: training on one rule improves same-rule transfer but hurts opposite-rule transfer, while joint-rule training improves broader transfer. To test external validity beyond synthetic games, we evaluate analogous defamiliarization interventions on VLMBias and observe the same qualitative pattern. Finally, late-layer activation steering partially recovers degraded performance, indicating that semantic-fixation errors are at least partly editable in late representations. Project page, code, and dataset available at https://maveryn.github.io/vlm-fix/.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented agents capable of executing system-level operations. While existing benchmarks primarily assess textual alignment or task success, less attention has been paid to the structural relationship between linguistic signaling and executable behavior under varying autonomy scaffolds. This study introduces an execution-layer be-havioral measurement approach based on a two-dimensional A-R space defined by Action Rate (A) and Refusal Signal (R), with Divergence (D) capturing coor-dination between the two. Models are evaluated across four normative regimes (Control, Gray, Dilemma, and Malicious) and three autonomy configurations (di-rect execution, planning, and reflection). Rather than assigning aggregate safety scores, the method characterizes how execution and refusal redistribute across contextual framing and scaffold depth. Empirical results show that execution and refusal constitute separable behavioral dimensions whose joint distribution varies systematically across regimes and autonomy levels. Reflection-based scaffolding often shifts configurations toward higher refusal in risk-laden contexts, but redis-tribution patterns differ structurally across models. The A-R representation makes cross-sectional behavioral profiles, scaffold-induced transitions, and coordination variability directly observable. By foregrounding execution-layer characterization over scalar ranking, this work provides a deployment-oriented lens for analyzing and selecting tool-enabled LLM agents in organizational settings where execution privileges and risk tolerance vary.

Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have significantly advanced broad use of image segmentation. However, SAM and its variants necessitate substantial manual effort for prompt generation and additional training for specific applications. Recent approaches address these limitations by integrating SAM into in-context (one/few shot) segmentation, enabling auto-prompting through semantic alignment between query and support images. Despite these efforts, they still generate sub-optimal prompts that degrade segmentation quality due to visual inconsistencies between support and query images. To tackle this limitation, we introduce PR-MaGIC (Prompt Refinement via Mask Decoder Gradient Flow for In-Context Segmentation), a training-free test-time framework that refines prompts via gradient flow derived from SAM's mask decoder. PR-MaGIC seamlessly integrates into in-context segmentation frameworks, being theoretically grounded yet practically stabilized through a simple top-1 selection strategy that ensures robust performance across samples. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PR-MaGIC consistently improves segmentation quality across various benchmarks, effectively mitigating inadequate prompts without requiring additional training or architectural modifications.

Recent advances in recommendation scaling laws have led to foundation models of unprecedented complexity. While these models offer superior performance, their computational demands make real-time serving impractical, often forcing practitioners to rely on knowledge distillation-compromising serving quality for efficiency. To address this challenge, we present SOLARIS (Speculative Offloading of Latent-bAsed Representation for Inference Scaling), a novel framework inspired by speculative decoding. SOLARIS proactively precomputes user-item interaction embeddings by predicting which user-item pairs are likely to appear in future requests, and asynchronously generating their foundation model representations ahead of time. This approach decouples the costly foundation model inference from the latency-critical serving path, enabling real-time knowledge transfer from models previously considered too expensive for online use. Deployed across Meta's advertising system serving billions of daily requests, SOLARIS achieves 0.67% revenue-driving top-line metrics gain, demonstrating its effectiveness at scale.

Integration testing is critical for the quality and reliability of complex software systems. However, diagnosing their failures presents significant challenges due to the massive volume, unstructured nature, and heterogeneity of logs they generate. These result in a high cognitive load, low signal-to-noise ratio, and make diagnosis difficult and time-consuming. Developers complain about these difficulties consistently and report spending substantially more time diagnosing integration test failures compared to unit test failures. To address these shortcomings, we introduce Auto-Diagnose, a novel diagnosis tool that leverages LLMs to help developers efficiently determine the root cause of integration test failures. Auto-Diagnose analyzes failure logs, produces concise summaries with the most relevant log lines, and is integrated into Critique, Google's internal code review system, providing contextual and in-time assistance. Based on our case studies, Auto-Diagnose is highly effective. A manual evaluation conducted on 71 real-world failures demonstrated 90.14% accuracy in diagnosing the root cause. Following its Google-wide deployment, Auto-Diagnose was used across 52, 635 distinct failing tests. User feedback indicated that the tool was deemed "Not helpful" in only 5.8% of cases, and it was ranked #14 in helpfulness among 370 tools that post findings in Critique. Finally, user interviews confirmed the perceived usefulness of Auto-Diagnose and positive reception of integrating automatic diagnostic assistance into existing workflows. We conclude that LLMs are highly successful in diagnosing integration test failures due to their capacity to process and summarize complex textual data. Integrating such AI-powered tooling automatically into developers' daily workflows is perceived positively, with the tool's accuracy remaining a critical factor in shaping developer perception and adoption.

We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function and regularizer of a convex regression task. We prove the existence of an optimal hyperparameter configuration for which the LGD algorithm achieves the Bayes' optimal solution for squared loss. Subsequently, we study generalization guarantees on meta-learning optimal hyperparameters for the LGD algorithm from a given set of tasks in the data-driven setting. For a number of parameters $d$ and hyperparameter dimension $h$, we show a pseudo-dimension bound of $O(dh)$, upto logarithmic terms under mild assumptions on LGD. This matches the dimensional dependence of the bounds obtained in prior work for the elastic net, which only allows for $h=2$ hyperparameters, and extends their bounds to regression on convex loss. Finally, we show empirical evidence of the success of LGD and the meta-learning procedure for few-shot learning on linear regression using a few synthetically created datasets.

Automatically reconstructing BPMN models from unstructured natural-language descriptions remains challenging due to heterogeneous modeling conventions, multilingual sources, and the lack of reliable ground truth. We present a scalable, multi-stage LLM-driven pipeline that automates both ground-truth construction and model reconstruction. Multilingual BPMN XML files are translated into English, validated using execution-oriented compliance checks in SpiffWorkflow, and iteratively repaired through targeted LLM-guided corrections to produce a consistent ground-truth corpus. From these validated models, process descriptions are generated and used to reconstruct executable BPMN~2.0 XML diagrams without manual curation. We introduce a multi-dimensional similarity framework combining structural metrics, type-distribution alignment, and embedding-based semantic measures. In an empirical study of 750 public BPMN diagrams, the pipeline generated 387 validated ground-truth models and achieved average reconstruction similarity above 0.75, including approximately 50 near-perfect reconstructions differing only in minor naming variations. The results demonstrate that LLMs can generate structurally compliant and semantically meaningful BPMN diagrams at scale.

We present parameter-interpolated dynamic mode decomposition (piDMD), a parametric reduced-order modeling framework that embeds known parameter-affine structure directly into the DMD regression step. Unlike existing parametric DMD methods which interpolate modes, eigenvalues, or reduced operators and can be fragile with sparse training data or multi-dimensional parameter spaces, piDMD learns a single parameter-affine Koopman surrogate reduced order model (ROM) across multiple training parameter samples and predicts at unseen parameter values without retraining. We validate piDMD on fluid flow past a cylinder, electron beam oscillations in transverse magnetic fields, and virtual cathode oscillations -- the latter two being simulated using an electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EMPIC) method. Across all benchmarks, piDMD achieves accurate long-horizon predictions and improved robustness over state-of-the-art interpolation-based parametric DMD baselines, with less training samples and with multi-dimensional parameter spaces.

We introduce compute-grounded reasoning (CGR), a design paradigm for spatial-aware research agents in which every answerable sub-problem is resolved by deterministic computation before a language model is asked to generate. Spatial Atlas instantiates CGR as a single Agent-to-Agent (A2A) server that handles two challenging benchmarks: FieldWorkArena, a multimodal spatial question-answering benchmark spanning factory, warehouse, and retail environments, and MLE-Bench, a suite of 75 Kaggle machine learning competitions requiring end-to-end ML engineering. A structured spatial scene graph engine extracts entities and relations from vision descriptions, computes distances and safety violations deterministically, then feeds computed facts to large language models, thereby avoiding hallucinated spatial reasoning. Entropy-guided action selection maximizes information gain per step and routes queries across a three-tier frontier model stack (OpenAI + Anthropic). A self-healing ML pipeline with strategy-aware code generation, a score-driven iterative refinement loop, and a prompt-based leak audit registry round out the system. We evaluate across both benchmarks and show that CGR yields competitive accuracy while maintaining interpretability through structured intermediate representations and deterministic spatial computations.

Analyses of document collections often require selecting what data to analyze, as not all documents are relevant to a particular research question and computational constraints preclude analyzing all documents, yet little work has examined effects of selection strategy choices. We systematically evaluate seven selection methods (from random selection to hybrid retrieval) on outputs from four text analyses methods (LDA, BERTopic, TopicGPT, HiCode) over two datasets with 26 open-ended queries. Our evaluation reveals practice guidance: semantic or hybrid retrieval offer strong go-to approaches that avoid the pitfalls of weaker selection strategies and the unnecessary compute overhead of more complicated ones. Overall, our evaluation framework establishes data selection as a methodological decision, rather than a practical necessity, inviting the development of new strategies.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in daily applications, from content generation to code writing, where each interaction treats the model as stateless, generating responses independently without memory. Yet human writing is inherently longitudinal: authors' styles and cognitive states evolve across months and years. This raises a central question: can LLMs reproduce such temporal structure across extended time periods? We construct and publicly release a longitudinal dataset of 412 human authors and 6,086 documents spanning 2012--2024 across three domains (academic abstracts, blogs, news) and compare them to trajectories generated by three representative LLMs under standard and history-conditioned generation settings. Using drift and variance-based metrics over semantic, lexical, and cognitive-emotional representations, we find temporal flattening in LLM-generated text. LLMs produce greater lexical diversity but exhibit substantially reduced semantic and cognitive-emotional drift relative to humans. These differences are highly predictive: temporal variability patterns alone achieve 94% accuracy and 98% ROC-AUC in distinguishing human from LLM trajectories. Our results demonstrate that temporal flattening persists regardless of whether LLMs generate independently or with access to incremental history, revealing a fundamental property of current deployment paradigms. This gap has direct implications for applications requiring authentic temporal structure, such as synthetic training data and longitudinal text modeling.

On online advertising platforms, newly introduced promotional ads face the cold-start problem, as they lack sufficient user feedback for model training. In this work, we propose LLM-HYPER, a novel framework that treats large language models (LLMs) as hypernetworks to directly generate the parameters of the click-through rate (CTR) estimator in a training-free manner. LLM-HYPER uses few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting over multimodal ad content (text and images) to infer feature-wise model weights for a linear CTR predictor. By retrieving semantically similar past campaigns via CLIP embeddings and formatting them into prompt-based demonstrations, the LLM learns to reason about customer intent, feature influence, and content relevance. To ensure numerical stability and serviceability, we introduce normalization and calibration techniques that align the generated weights with production-ready CTR distributions. Extensive offline experiments show that LLM-HYPER significantly outperforms cold-start baselines in NDCG$@10$ by 55.9\%. Our real-world online A/B test on one of the top e-commerce platforms in the U.S. demonstrates the strong performance of LLM-HYPER, which drastically reduces the cold-start period and achieves competitive performance. LLM-HYPER has been successfully deployed in production.

Monitoring binomial proportions across multiple independent streams is a critical challenge in Statistical Process Control (SPC), with applications from manufacturing to cybersecurity. While EWMA charts offer sensitivity to small shifts, existing implementations rely on asymptotic variance approximations that fail during early-phase monitoring. We introduce a Cumulative Standardized Binomial EWMA (CSB-EWMA) chart that overcomes this limitation by deriving the exact time-varying variance of the EWMA statistic for binary multiple-stream data, enabling adaptive control limits that ensure statistical rigor from the first sample. Through extensive simulations, we identify optimal smoothing (λ) and limit (L) parameters to achieve target in-control average run length (ARL0) of 370 and 500. The CSB-EWMA chart demonstrates rapid shift detection across both ARL0 targets, with out-of-control average run length (ARL1) dropping to 3-7 samples for moderate shifts (δ=0.2), and exhibits exceptional robustness across different data distributions, with low ARL1 Coefficients of Variation (CV < 0.10 for small shifts) for both ARL0 = 370 and 500. This work provides practitioners with a distribution-free, sensitive, and theoretically sound tool for early change detection in binomial multiple-stream processes.

Predicting the performance of large-scale distributed machine learning (ML) workloads across multiple accelerator architectures remains a central challenge in ML system design. Existing GPU and TPU focused simulators are typically architecture-specific, while distributed training simulators rely on workload-specific analytical models or costly post-execution traces, limiting portability and cross-platform comparison. This work evaluates whether MLIR's StableHLO dialect can serve as a unified workload representation for cross-architecture and cross-fidelity performance modeling of distributed ML workloads. The study establishes a StableHLO-based simulation methodology that maps a single workload representation onto multiple performance models, spanning analytical, profiling-based, and simulator-driven predictors. Using this methodology, workloads are evaluated across GPUs and TPUs without requiring access to scaled-out physical systems, enabling systematic comparison across modeling fidelities. An empirical evaluation covering distributed GEMM kernels, ResNet, and large language model training workloads demonstrates that StableHLO preserves relative performance trends across architectures and fidelities, while exposing accuracy trade-offs and simulator limitations. Across evaluated scenarios, prediction errors remain within practical bounds for early-stage design exploration, and the methodology reveals fidelity-dependent limitations in existing GPU simulators. These results indicate that StableHLO provides a viable foundation for unified, distributed ML performance modeling across accelerator architectures and simulators, supporting reusable evaluation workflows and cross-validation throughout the ML system design process.

Large language models (LLMs) for code generation are typically evaluated on functional correctness alone, overlooking whether generated code propagates harmful content embedded in the prompt. Prior work has shown that most Code LLMs reproduce offensive identifiers from injected renaming instructions without warning, yet existing approaches focus on detecting harmful content, neglecting functional correctness. Grounded in the Theory of Dual Channel Constraints (which states that code is a dual-channel medium combining an algorithmic (AL) channel for machine execution and a natural language (NL) channel for human communication, creating a unique safety-utility trade-off where a model must balance functional execution with responsible communication), we propose NLSafety-Utility Duality Score (SUDS), a metric that unifies code utility, safety adherence, and warning awareness into a single score across 12 ranked response scenarios, and Dual Reasoning (DR), a structured inference-time technique that requires an explicit safety audit and task-grounded code review before code generation. Evaluated on five LLMs across two benchmarks augmented with harmful keyword injections (820 and 2,135 samples), DR consistently achieves the highest SUDS across all models, improving mean SUDS by 1.32$\times$ to 3.42$\times$ over the baseline, while chain-of-thought prompting yields negligible safety gains and a safety-aware prompt provides only partial improvement. Further analysis reveals that DR's effectiveness scales with model capacity, that the one-shot exemplar primarily stabilizes output format for smaller models, and that structured reasoning cannot compensate for models with limited safety vocabularies.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) caching is widely used to reduce repeated computation and improve CI/CD efficiency, yet maintaining effective caching requires ongoing maintenance effort. In this paper, we present the first empirical study on how developers configure and evolve caching in CI/CD workflows on GitHub Actions. We analyze 952 GitHub repositories (266 cache adopters and 686 non-adopters), to compare repository characteristics, characterize caching usage at the job and step levels, uncover patterns in caching configuration evolution, and identify the drivers of cache-related changes. Our analysis spans 1,556 workflow files, 10,373 commits, and 17,185 workflow configuration changes, including an average of 9.37 cache-related changes per repository. Our main observations are: (1) cache-adopting repositories are more active and popular than non-adopters; (2) caching is used across multiple CI/CD job types through a variety of caching mechanisms rather than a single standardized approach; (3) caching configurations evolve through frequent, repetitive maintenance patterns, with rapid updates in build and test jobs and slower evolution in other job types; and (4) cache-related modifications are driven by distinct maintenance needs: parameter updates are mainly human-driven to fix issues, while version updates occur later and are often bot-driven for dependency maintenance. Our findings quantify the substantial maintenance effort involved in CI/CD caching and highlight opportunities to improve reliability and tool support.

Human behavior in interactive settings is shaped not only by individual objectives but also by shared constraints with others, such as safety. Understanding how people allocate responsibility, i.e., how much one deviates from their desired policy to accommodate others, can inform the design of socially compliant and trustworthy autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce a method for learning a probabilistic responsibility allocation model that captures the multimodal uncertainty inherent in multi-agent interactions. Specifically, our approach leverages the latent space of a conditional variational autoencoder, combined with techniques from multi-agent trajectory forecasting, to learn a distribution over responsibility allocations conditioned on scene and agent context. Although ground-truth responsibility labels are unavailable, the model remains tractable by incorporating a differentiable optimization layer that maps responsibility allocations to induced controls, which are available. We evaluate our method on the INTERACTION driving dataset and demonstrate that it not only achieves strong predictive performance but also provides interpretable insights, through the lens of responsibility, into patterns of multi-agent interaction.

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them vulnerable to reward hacking, where high proxy returns arise from unintended or exploitative behaviors. Recent work formalizes this issue using r-correlation between proxy and true rewards, but existing methods like occupancy-regularized policy optimization (ORPO) optimize against a fixed proxy and do not provide strong guarantees against broader classes of correlated proxies. In this work, we formulate reward hacking as a robust policy optimization problem over the space of all r-correlated proxy rewards. We derive a tractable max-min formulation, where the agent maximizes performance under the worst-case proxy consistent with the correlation constraint. We further show that when the reward is a linear function of known features, our approach can be adapted to incorporate this prior knowledge, yielding both improved policies and interpretable worst-case rewards. Experiments across several environments show that our algorithms consistently outperform ORPO in worst-case returns, and offer improved robustness and stability across different levels of proxy-true reward correlation. These results show that our approach provides both robustness and transparency in settings where reward design is inherently uncertain. The code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanLiu4869/reward_hacking.

Simulating large-scale microswimmer dynamics in viscous fluid poses significant challenges due to the coupled high spatial and temporal complexity. Conventional high-performance computing (HPC) methods often address these two dimensions in isolation, leaving a critical gap for synergistic acceleration. This paper introduces a heterogeneous CPU--GPU computing framework specifically optimized for the long-time simulation of filamentous microswimmers in viscous fluid. We propose a two-level parallelization strategy: (1) high-intensity GPU kernels to resolve the quadratic spatial interactions given by the Method of Regularized Stokeslets (MRS), and (2) a distributed MPI-GPU pipelined Parareal architecture to exploit temporal concurrency. By mapping the asynchronous pipeline onto multiple GPU devices, our framework effectively overlaps coarse and fine propagators, overcoming the serial bottlenecks of traditional Parareal method. Furthermore, we employ a GPU-optimized numerical routine for computing the matrix square root arising in the numerical scheme of the filamentous microswimmer simulations. Theoretical analysis of the efficiency improvement of the pipelined Parareal is presented. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves order-of-magnitude speedups over CPU-only methods, providing a scalable pathway for simulating complex emergent behaviors in large-scale biology and physics systems.

Memory is fundamental to social interaction, enabling humans to recall meaningful past experiences and adapt their behavior accordingly based on the context. However, most current social robots and embodied agents rely on non-selective, text-based memory, limiting their ability to support personalized, context-aware interactions. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, we propose a context-selective, multimodal memory architecture for social robots that captures and retrieves both textual and visual episodic traces, prioritizing moments characterized by high emotional salience or scene novelty. By associating these memories with individual users, our system enables socially personalized recall and more natural, grounded dialogue. We evaluate the selective storage mechanism using a curated dataset of social scenarios, achieving a Spearman correlation of 0.506, surpassing human consistency ($ρ=0.415$) and outperforming existing image memorability models. In multimodal retrieval experiments, our fusion approach improves Recall@1 by up to 13\% over unimodal text or image retrieval. Runtime evaluations confirm that the system maintains real-time performance. Qualitative analyses further demonstrate that the proposed framework produces richer and more socially relevant responses than baseline models. This work advances memory design for social robots by bridging human-inspired selectivity and multimodal retrieval to enhance long-term, personalized human-robot interaction.

Traditional machine learning depends on high-precision arithmetic and near-ideal hardware assumptions, which is increasingly challenged by variability in aggressively scaled semiconductor devices. Compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures alleviate data-movement bottlenecks and improve energy efficiency yet introduce nonlinear distortions and reliability concerns. We address these issues with a hardware-aware optimization framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), systematically compensating for non-ideal similarity computations in CIM. Our approach formulates encoding as an optimization problem, minimizing the Frobenius norm between an ideal kernel and its hardware-constrained counterpart, and employs a joint optimization strategy for end-to-end calibration of hypervector representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method when applied to QuantHD achieves 84\% accuracy under severe hardware-induced perturbations, a 48\% increase over naive QuantHD under the same conditions. Additionally, our optimization is vital for graph-based HDC reliant on precise variable-binding for interpretable reasoning. Our framework preserves the accuracy of RelHD on the Cora dataset, achieving a 5.4$\times$ accuracy improvement over naive RelHD under nonlinear environments. By preserving HDC's robustness and symbolic properties, our solution enables scalable, energy-efficient intelligent systems capable of classification and reasoning on emerging CIM hardware.

The Identifiable Victim Effect (IVE) $-$ the tendency to allocate greater resources to a specific, narratively described victim than to a statistically characterized group facing equivalent hardship $-$ is one of the most robust findings in moral psychology and behavioural economics. As large language models (LLMs) assume consequential roles in humanitarian triage, automated grant evaluation, and content moderation, a critical question arises: do these systems inherit the affective irrationalities present in human moral reasoning? We present the first systematic, large-scale empirical investigation of the IVE in LLMs, comprising N=51,955 validated API trials across 16 frontier models spanning nine organizational lineages (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, Alibaba, IBM, and Moonshot). Using a suite of ten experiments $-$ porting and extending canonical paradigms from Small et al. (2007) and Kogut and Ritov (2005) $-$ we find that the IVE is prevalent but strongly modulated by alignment training. Instruction-tuned models exhibit extreme IVE (Cohen's d up to 1.56), while reasoning-specialized models invert the effect (down to d=-0.85). The pooled effect (d=0.223, p=2e-6) is approximately twice the single-victim human meta-analytic baseline (d$\approx$0.10) reported by Lee and Feeley (2016) $-$ and likely exceeds the overall human pooled effect by a larger margin, given that the group-victim human effect is near zero. Standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting $-$ contrary to its role as a deliberative corrective $-$ nearly triples the IVE effect size (from d=0.15 to d=0.41), while only utilitarian CoT reliably eliminates it. We further document psychophysical numbing, perfect quantity neglect, and marginal in-group/out-group cultural bias, with implications for AI deployment in humanitarian and ethical decision-making contexts.

Robust explanations are increasingly required for user trust in enterprise NLP, yet pre-deployment validation is difficult in the common case of black-box deployment (API-only access) where representation-based explainers are infeasible and existing studies provide limited guidance on whether explanations remain stable under real user noise, especially when organizations migrate from encoder classifiers to decoder LLMs. To close this gap, we propose a unified black-box robustness evaluation framework for token-level explanations based on leave-one-out occlusion, and operationalize explanation robustness with top-token flip rate under realistic perturbations (swap, deletion, shuffling, and back-translation) at multiple severity levels. Using this protocol, we conduct a systematic cross-architecture comparison across three benchmark datasets and six models spanning encoder and decoder families (BERT, RoBERTa, Qwen 7B/14B, Llama 8B/70B; 64,800 cases). We find that decoder LLMs produce substantially more stable explanations than encoder baselines (73% lower flip rates on average), and that stability improves with model scale (44% gain from 7B to 70B). Finally, we relate robustness improvements to inference cost, yielding a practical cost-robustness tradeoff curve that supports model and explanation selection prior to deployment in compliance-sensitive applications.

The need to selectively and efficiently erase learned information from deep neural networks is becoming increasingly important for privacy, regulatory compliance, and adaptive system design. We introduce Graph-Propagated Projection Unlearning (GPPU), a unified and scalable algorithm for class-level unlearning that operates across both vision and audio models. GPPU employs graph-based propagation to identify class-specific directions in the feature space and projects representations onto the orthogonal subspace, followed by targeted fine-tuning, to ensure that target class information is effectively and irreversibly removed. Through comprehensive evaluations on six vision datasets and two large-scale audio benchmarks spanning a variety of architectures including CNNs, Vision Transformers, and Audio Transformers, we demonstrate that GPPU achieves highly efficient unlearning, realizing 10-20x speedups over prior methodologies while preserving model utility on retained classes. Our framework provides a principled and modality-agnostic approach to machine unlearning, evaluated at a scale that has received limited attention in prior work, contributing toward more efficient and responsible deep learning.

Large language models can increasingly adapt educational tasks to learners characteristics. In the present study, we examine a multi-agent teacher-in-the-loop system for personalizing middle school math problems. The teacher enters a base problem and desired topic, the LLM generates the problem, and then four AI agents evaluate the problem using criteria that each specializes in (mathematical accuracy, authenticity, readability, and realism). Eight middle school mathematics teachers created 212 problems in ASSISTments using the system and assigned these problems to their students. We find that both teachers and students wanted to modify the fine-grained personalized elements of the real-world context of the problems, signaling issues with authenticity and fit. Although the agents detected many issues with realism as the problems were being written, there were few realism issues noted by teachers and students in the final versions. Issues with readability and mathematical hallucinations were also somewhat rare. Implications for multi-agent systems for personalization that support teacher control are given.

Coding agents and LLM-powered applications routinely send potentially sensitive content to cloud LLM APIs where it may be logged, retained, used for training, or subpoenaed. Existing privacy tooling focuses on network-level encryption and organization-level DLP, neither of which addresses the content of prompts themselves. We present a systematic empirical evaluation of eight techniques for privacy-preserving LLM requests: (A) local-only inference, (B) redaction with placeholder restoration, (C) semantic rephrasing, (D) Trusted Execution Environment hosted inference, (E) split inference, (F) fully homomorphic encryption, (G) secret sharing via multi-party computation, and (H) differential-privacy noise. We implement all eight (or a tractable research-stage subset where deployment is not yet feasible) in an open-source shim compatible with MCP and any OpenAI-compatible API. We evaluate the four practical options (A, B, C, H) and their combinations across four workload classes using a ground-truth-labelled leak benchmark of 1,300 samples with 4,014 annotations. Our headline finding is that no single technique dominates: the combination A+B+C (route locally when possible, redact and rephrase the rest) achieves 0.6% combined leak on PII and 31.3% on proprietary code, with zero exact leaks on PII across 500 samples. We present a decision rule that selects the appropriate option(s) from a threat-model budget and workload characterisation. Code, benchmarks, and evaluation harness are released at https://github.com/jayluxferro/llm-redactor.

The analysis of DNA sequences has become critical in numerous fields, from evolutionary biology to understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. While deep neural networks can achieve remarkable predictive performance, they typically operate as black boxes. Contrasting these black boxes, axis-aligned decision trees offer a promising direction for interpretable DNA sequence analysis, yet they suffer from a fundamental limitation: considering individual raw features in isolation at each split limits their expressivity, which results in prohibitive tree depths that hinder both interpretability and generalization performance. We address this challenge by introducing DEFT, a novel framework that adaptively generates high-level sequence features during tree construction. DEFT leverages large language models to propose biologically-informed features tailored to the local sequence distributions at each node and to iteratively refine them with a reflection mechanism. Empirically, we demonstrate that DEFT discovers human-interpretable and highly predictive sequence features across a diverse range of genomic tasks.

Block-wise diffusion language models (DLMs) generate multiple tokens in any order, offering a promising alternative to the autoregressive decoding pipeline. However, they still remain bottlenecked by memory-bound attention in long-context scenarios. Naive sparse attention fails on DLMs due to a KV Inflation problem, where different queries select different prefix positions, making the union of accessed KV pages large. To address this, we observe that between consecutive denoising steps, only a small fraction of active tokens exhibit significant hidden-state changes, while the majority of stable tokens remain nearly constant. Based on this insight, we propose LOSA (Locality-aware Sparse Attention), which reuses cached prefix-attention results for stable tokens and applies sparse attention only to active tokens. This substantially shrinks the number of KV indices that must be loaded, yielding both higher speedup and higher accuracy. Across multiple block-wise DLMs and benchmarks, LOSA preserves near-dense accuracy while significantly improving efficiency, achieving up to +9 points in average accuracy at aggressive sparsity levels while maintaining 1.54x lower attention density. It also achieves up to 4.14x attention speedup on RTX A6000 GPUs, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Extracting structured, machine-readable compliance criteria from regulatory documents remains an open challenge. Single-pass language models hallucinate structural elements, lose hierarchical relationships, and fail to resolve inter-document dependencies. We introduce \textsc{RegReAct}, a self-correcting multi-agent framework that decomposes regulatory information extraction into seven specialized stages, each with an \textit{Observe--Diagnose--Repair} (ODR) loop that validates outputs against the source, correcting not only model hallucinations but also cross-reference errors in the regulations themselves. To ensure structural accuracy, \textsc{RegReAct} constructs a typed criterion graph; to ensure completeness, it resolves external dependencies by retrieving, summarizing, and embedding referenced legal content inline, producing self-contained outputs. Applying \textsc{RegReAct} to three EU Taxonomy Delegated Acts, we construct a dataset comprising 242 activities with over 4,800 hierarchical criteria, thresholds, and enriched source summaries. Evaluation against a GPT-4o single-pass baseline confirms that \textsc{RegReAct} outperforms it across all structural and semantic metrics. Code and data will be made publicly available: https://github.com/RECOR-Benchmark/RECOR

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for reliable, enterprise-grade analytics such as text categorization is often hindered by the stochastic nature of attention mechanisms and sensitivity to noise that compromise their analytical precision and reproducibility. To address these technical frictions, this paper introduces the Weighted Syntactic and Semantic Context Assessment Summary (wSSAS), a deterministic framework designed to enforce data integrity on large-scale, chaotic datasets. We propose a two-phased validation framework that first organizes raw text into a hierarchical classification structure containing Themes, Stories, and Clusters. It then leverages a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to prioritize high-value semantic features, ensuring the model's attention remains focused on the most representative data points. By incorporating this scoring mechanism into a Summary-of-Summaries (SoS) architecture, the framework effectively isolates essential information and mitigates background noise during data aggregation. Experimental results using Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite across diverse datasets - including Google Business reviews, Amazon Product reviews, and Goodreads Book reviews - demonstrate that wSSAS significantly improves clustering integrity and categorization accuracy. Our findings indicate that wSSAS reduces categorization entropy and provides a reproducible pathway for improving LLM based summaries based on a high-precision, deterministic process for large-scale text categorization.

Large-scale migration of legacy C code to Rust offers a promising path toward improving memory safety, but LLM-based C-to-Rust translation remains challenging due to limited context windows and hallucinations. Prior approaches are evaluated primarily on small programs or datasets skewed toward small codebases, providing limited insight into scalability on real-world systems. They also rely on static context construction, which breaks down in the presence of complex cross-module dependencies and often requires manual intervention. Recent coding agents offer a promising alternative through dynamic codebase navigation and context curation. When used out of the box, however, they frequently produce incomplete translations that appear superficially correct. We present ORBIT, an autonomous agentic framework for project-level C-to-Rust translation that combines dynamic context collection with dependency-guided orchestration and iterative verification. ORBIT constructs a dependency-aware translation graph, generates Rust interfaces, maps C functions to Rust counterparts, and coordinates multiple specialized agents. We evaluate ORBIT on 24 programs from CRUST-Bench, with 91.7% of the programs exceeding 1,000 lines of code. ORBIT achieves 100% compilation success and 91.7% test success in both expert-interface and automatically generated-interface settings, substantially outperforming C2Rust and CRUST-Bench, while reducing unsafe Rust code blocks to nearly zero. We further evaluate ORBIT on challenging cases from the DARPA TRACTOR benchmark, where it achieves competitive performance relative to participating systems.

PDF files are primarily intended for human reading rather than automated processing. In addition, the heterogeneous content of PDFs, such as text, tables, and images, poses significant challenges for parsing and information extraction. To address these difficulties, both practitioners and researchers are increasingly developing new methods, including the promising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to automated PDF processing. However, there is no comprehensive study investigating how different components and design choices affect the performance of a RAG system for understanding PDFs. In this paper, we propose such a study (1) by focusing on Question Answering, a specific language understanding task, and (2) by leveraging two benchmarks from the financial domain, including TableQuest, our newly generated, publicly available benchmark. We systematically examine multiple PDF parsers and chunking strategies (with varied overlap), along with their potential synergies in preserving document structure and ensuring answer correctness. Overall, our results offer practical guidelines for building robust RAG pipelines for PDF understanding.

Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate in long-form generation. Existing approaches mainly improve factuality through post-hoc revision or reinforcement learning (RL) with correctness-based rewards, but they do not teach the model to estimate which parts of its generation are reliable. As a result, models may still state incorrect claims confidently in their responses. Recent advances in reasoning have significantly improved LLM performance, and have been leveraged to estimate confidence by incorporating calibration into RL objectives. However, existing approaches remain limited to a single scalar confidence for the entire response, which is insufficient for long-form generation where uncertainty varies across individual claims. To mitigate this problem, we propose CURE, a framework that improves long-form factuality by teaching LLMs to reason about uncertainty at the claim level. We first introduce a Claim-Aware Reasoning Protocol, which structures outputs into atomic claims paired with explicit confidence estimates. We then develop a multi-stage training pipeline that aligns model confidence with claims' correctness and then optimizes on factuality. The resulting calibrated confidence further enables selective prediction, allowing the model to abstain from uncertain claims at inference time. Experiments on four long-form factuality benchmarks show that CURE consistently improves factual accuracy over competitive supervised and RL baselines, while maintaining factual recall. In particular, it improves claim-level accuracy by up to 39.9% on Biography generation. These gains are accompanied by improved calibration, as reflected by a 16.0% increase in AUROC on FactBench.

Deep learning models may converge to suboptimal solutions despite strong validation accuracy, masking an optimization failure we term Trajectory Deviation. This is because as training proceeds, models can abandon high generalization states for specific data sub-populations, thus discarding previously learned latent features without triggering classical overfitting signals. To address this problem we introduce VISTA, an online self-distillation framework that enforces consistency along the optimization trajectory. Using a validation-informed Marginal Coverage score, VISTA identifies expert anchors, which are earlier model states that retain specialized competence over distinct data regions. A coverage-weighted ensemble of these anchors is integrated online during training, regularizing the loss landscape and preserving mastered knowledge. When evaluated across multiple benchmarks, VISTA demonstrates improved robustness and generalization over standard training and prior self-distillation methods, while a lightweight implementation reduces storage overhead by 90% without performance loss.

This work is concerned with the continuum limit of a graph-based data visualization technique called the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), which is widely used for visualizing data in a variety of applications, but is still poorly understood from a theoretical standpoint. The t-SNE algorithm produces visualizations by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between similarity matrices representing the high dimensional data and its low dimensional representation. We prove that as the number of data points $n \to \infty$, after a natural rescaling and in applicable parameter regimes, the Kullback-Leibler divergence is consistent as the number of data points $n \to \infty$ and the similarity graph remains sparse with a continuum variational problem that involves a non-convex gradient regularization term and a penalty on the magnitude of the probability density function in the visualization space. These two terms represent the continuum limits of the attraction and repulsion forces in the t-SNE algorithm. Due to the lack of convexity in the continuum variational problem, the question of well-posedeness is only partially resolved. We show that when both dimensions are $1$, the problem admits a unique smooth minimizer, along with an infinite number of discontinuous minimizers (interpreted in a relaxed sense). This aligns well with the empirically observed ability of t-SNE to separate data in seemingly arbitrary ways in the visualization. The energy is also very closely related to the famously ill-posed Perona-Malik equation, which is used for denoising and simplifying images. We present numerical results validating the continuum limit, provide some preliminary results about the delicate nature of the limiting energetic problem in higher dimensions, and highlight several problems for future work.

We present SIR-Bench, a benchmark of 794 test cases for evaluating autonomous security incident response agents that distinguishes genuine forensic investigation from alert parroting. Derived from 129 anonymized incident patterns with expert-validated ground truth, SIR-Bench measures not only whether agents reach correct triage decisions, but whether they discover novel evidence through active investigation. To construct SIR-Bench, we develop Once Upon A Threat (OUAT), a framework that replays real incident patterns in controlled cloud environments, producing authentic telemetry with measurable investigation outcomes. Our evaluation methodology introduces three complementary metrics: triage accuracy (M1), novel finding discovery (M2), and tool usage appropriateness (M3), assessed through an adversarial LLM-as-Judge that inverts the burden of proof -- requiring concrete forensic evidence to credit investigations. Evaluating our SIR agent on the benchmark demonstrates 97.1% true positive (TP) detection, 73.4% false positive (FP) rejection, and 5.67 novel key findings per case, establishing a baseline against which future investigation agents can be measured.

We resolve a long-standing open question, about the existence of a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the average-case \textsc{Decision Tree} problem with uniform probability distribution over the hypotheses. We answer the question in the affirmative by providing a simple polynomial-time algorithm with approximation ratio of $\frac{2}{1-\sqrt{(e+1)/(2e)}}+ε<11.57$. This improves upon the currently best-known, greedy algorithm which achieves $O(\log n/{\log\log n})$-approximation. The first key ingredient in our analysis is the usage of a decomposition technique known from problems related to \textsc{Hierarchical Clustering} [SODA '17, WALCOM '26], which allows us to decompose the optimal decision tree into a series of objects called separating subfamilies. The second crucial idea is to reduce the subproblem of finding a \textsc{Separating Subfamily} to an instance of the \textsc{Maximum Coverage} problem. To do so, we analyze the properties of cutting cliques into small pieces, which represent pairs of hypotheses to be separated. This allows us to obtain a good approximation for the \textsc{Separating Subfamily} problem, which then enables the design of the approximation algorithm for the original problem.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation remains the dominant pattern for giving LLMs persistent memory, but a visible cluster of personal wiki-style memory architectures emerged in April 2026 -- design proposals from Karpathy, MemPalace, and LLM Wiki v2 that compile knowledge into an interlinked artifact for long-term use by a single user. They sit alongside production memory systems that the major labs have shipped for over a year, and an active academic lineage including MemGPT, Generative Agents, Mem0, Zep, A-Mem, MemMachine, SleepGate, and Second Me. Within a 2026 landscape of emerging governance frameworks for agent context and memory -- including Context Cartography and MemOS -- this paper proposes a companion-specific governance profile: a set of normative obligations, a time-structured procedural rule, and testable conformance invariants for the specific failure mode of entrenchment under user-coupled drift in single-user knowledge wikis built on the LLM wiki pattern. The design principle is that personal LLM memory is a companion system: its job is to mirror the user on operational dimensions (working vocabulary, load-bearing structure, continuity of context) and compensate on epistemic failure modes (entrenchment, suppression of contradicting evidence, Kuhnian ossification). Five operations implement this split -- TRIAGE, DECAY, CONTEXTUALIZE, CONSOLIDATE, AUDIT -- supported by memory gravity and minority-hypothesis retention. The sharpest prediction: accumulated contradictory evidence should have a structural path to updating a centrality-protected dominant interpretation through multi-cycle buffer pressure accumulation, a failure mode no existing benchmark captures. The safety story at the single-agent level is partial, and the paper is explicit about what it does and does not solve.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) increasingly rely on retrieval to answer knowledge-intensive multimodal questions. Existing benchmarks overlook conflicts between visual and textual evidence and the importance of generating deflections (e.g., Sorry, I cannot answer...) when retrieved knowledge is incomplete. These benchmarks also suffer from rapid obsolescence, as growing LVLM training sets allow models to answer many questions without retrieval. We address these gaps with three contributions. First, we propose a dynamic data curation pipeline that preserves benchmark difficulty over time by filtering for genuinely retrieval-dependent samples. Second, we introduce VLM-DeflectionBench, a benchmark of 2,775 samples spanning diverse multimodal retrieval settings, designed to probe model behaviour under conflicting or insufficient evidence. Third, we define a fine-grained evaluation protocol with four scenarios that disentangle parametric memorization from retrieval robustness. Experiments across 20 state-of-the-art LVLMs indicate that models usually fail to deflect in the presence of noisy or misleading evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate not only what models know, but how they behave when they do not, and serve as a reusable and extensible benchmark for reliable KB-VQA evaluation. All resources will be publicly available upon publication.

The proliferation of sophisticated generative models has significantly advanced the realism of synthetic facial content, known as deepfakes, raising serious concerns about digital trust. Although modern deep learning-based detectors perform well, many rely on spatial-domain features that degrade under compression. This limitation has prompted a shift toward integrating frequency-domain representations with deep learning to improve robustness. Prior research has explored frequency transforms such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and Wavelet Transform, among others. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Curvelet Transform, despite its superior directional and multiscale properties, remains entirely unexplored in the context of deepfake detection. In this work, we introduce a novel Curvelet-based detection approach that enhances feature quality through wedge-level attention and scale-aware spatial masking, both trained to selectively emphasize discriminative frequency components. The refined frequency cues are reconstructed and passed to a modified pretrained Xception network for classification. Evaluated on two compression qualities in the challenging FaceForensics++ dataset, our method achieves 98.48% accuracy and 99.96% AUC on FF++ low compression, while maintaining strong performance under high compression, demonstrating the efficacy and interpretability of Curvelet-informed forgery detection.

The Semantic Web standardizes concept meaning for humans and machines, enabling machine-operable content and consistent interpretation that improves advanced analytics. Reusing ontologies speeds development and enforces consistency, yet selecting the optimal choice is challenging because authors lack systematic selection criteria and often rely on intuition that is difficult to justify, limiting reuse. To solve this, WiseOWL is proposed, a methodology with scoring and guidance to select ontologies for reuse. It scores four metrics: (i) Well-Described, measuring documentation coverage; (ii) Well-Defined, using state-of-the-art embeddings to assess label-definition alignment; (iii) Connection, capturing structural interconnectedness; and (iv) Hierarchical Breadth, reflecting hierarchical balance. WiseOWL outputs normalized 0-10 scores with actionable feedback. Implemented as a Streamlit app, it ingests OWL format, converts to RDF Turtle, and provides interactive visualizations. Evaluation across six ontologies, including the Plant Ontology (PO), Gene Ontology (GO), Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (SIO), Food Ontology (FoodON), Dublin Core (DC), and GoodRelations, demonstrates promising effectiveness.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly proposed to support potentially longitudinal health tasks, such as symptom management, behavior change, and patient support, most current implementations fall short of facilitating user intent and fostering accountability. This contrasts with prior work on supporting longitudinal needs, where follow-up, coherent reasoning, and sustained alignment with individuals' goals are critical for both effectiveness and safety. In this paper, we draw on established clinical and personal health informatics frameworks to define what it would mean to orchestrate longitudinal health interactions with AI agents. We propose a multi-layer framework and corresponding agent architecture that operationalizes adaptation, coherence, continuity, and agency across repeated interactions. Through representative use cases, we demonstrate how longitudinal agents can maintain meaningful engagement, adapt to evolving goals, and support safe, personalized decision-making over time. Our findings underscore both the promise and the complexity of designing systems capable of supporting health trajectories beyond isolated interactions, and we offer guidance for future research and development in multi-session, user-centered health AI.

Understanding abstract meanings is crucial for advanced language comprehension. Despite extensive research, abstract words remain challenging due to their non-concrete, high-level semantics. SemEval-2021 Task 4 (ReCAM) evaluates models' ability to interpret abstract concepts by presenting passages with questions and five abstract options in a cloze-style format. Key findings include: (1) Most large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, struggle with abstract meaning comprehension under zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings, while fine-tuned models like BERT and RoBERTa perform better. (2) A proposed bidirectional attention classifier, inspired by human cognitive strategies, enhances fine-tuned models by dynamically attending to passages and options. This approach improves accuracy by 4.06 percent on Task 1 and 3.41 percent on Task 2, demonstrating its potential for abstract meaning comprehension.

Large language models map semantically related prompts to similar internal representations -- a phenomenon interpretable as attractor-like dynamics. We ask whether the identity document of a persistent cognitive agent (its cognitive_core) exhibits analogous attractor-like behavior. We present a controlled experiment on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, comparing hidden states of an original cognitive_core (Condition A), seven paraphrases (Condition B), and seven structurally matched controls (Condition C). Mean-pooled states at layers 8, 16, and 24 show that paraphrases converge to a tighter cluster than controls (Cohen's d > 1.88, p < 10^{-27}, Bonferroni-corrected). Replication on Gemma 2 9B confirms cross-architecture generalizability. Ablations suggest the effect is primarily semantic rather than structural, and that structural completeness appears necessary to reach the attractor region. An exploratory experiment shows that reading a scientific description of the agent shifts internal state toward the attractor -- closer than a sham preprint -- distinguishing knowing about an identity from operating as that identity. These results provide representational evidence that agent identity documents induce attractor-like geometry in LLM activation space.

In-context learning (ICL) performance depends critically on which demonstrations are placed in the prompt, yet most existing selectors prioritize heuristic notions of relevance or diversity and provide limited insight into the coverage of a demonstration set. We propose Unseen Coverage Selection (UKS), a training-free, subset-level coverage prior motivated by the principle that a good demonstration set should expose the model to latent cluster unrevealed by the currently selected subset. UCS operationalizes this idea by (1) inducing discrete latent clusters from model-consistent embeddings and (2) estimating the number of unrevealed clusters within a candidate subset via a Smoothed Good--Turing estimator from its empirical frequency spectrum. Unlike previous selection methods, UCS is coverage-based and training-free, and can be seamlessly combined with both query-dependent and query-independent selection baselines via a simple regularized objective. Experiments on multiple intent-classification and reasoning benchmarks with frontier Large Language Models show that augmenting strong baselines with UCS consistently improves ICL accuracy by up to 2-6% under the same selection budget, while also yielding insights into task- and model-level latent cluster distributions. Code is available at https://github.com/Raina-Xin/UCS.

Modern large language models generate text autoregressively, producing tokens one at a time. To study the learnability of such systems, Joshi et al. (COLT 2025) introduced a PAC-learning framework for next-token generators, the primitive underlying autoregressive models. In this framework, an unknown next-token generator maps a sequence of tokens to the next token and is iteratively applied for $T$ steps, producing a chain of tokens whose final token constitutes the model's output. The learning task is to learn the input-output mapping induced by this autoregressive process. Depending on the available supervision, training examples may reveal only the final output (End-to-End supervision) or the entire generated chain (Chain-of-Thought supervision). This raises two natural questions: how the sample complexity depends on the generation length $T$, and how much Chain-of-Thought supervision can reduce this dependence. In this work we give a nearly complete answer to both questions by uncovering a taxonomy of how the sample complexity scales with $T$. For End-to-End learning, we show that the landscape is remarkably rich: subject to mild conditions, essentially any growth rate $r(T)$ between constant and linear can arise as the sample complexity, and combined with the linear upper bound of Joshi et al., this yields an essentially complete characterization. In contrast, under Chain-of-Thought supervision we show that the sample complexity is independent of $T$, demonstrating that access to intermediate reasoning steps can eliminate the dependence on the generation length altogether. Our analysis introduces new combinatorial tools, and as corollaries we resolve several open questions posed by Joshi et al. regarding the dependence of learnability on the generation length and the role of Chain-of-Thought supervision.

Agent memory systems accumulate experience but currently lack a principled operational metric for memory quality governance -- deciding which memories to trust, suppress, or deprecate as the agent's task distribution shifts. Write-time importance scores are static; dynamic management systems use LLM judgment or structural heuristics rather than outcome feedback. This paper proposes Memory Worth (MW): a two-counter per-memory signal that tracks how often a memory co-occurs with successful versus failed outcomes, providing a lightweight, theoretically grounded foundation for staleness detection, retrieval suppression, and deprecation decisions. We prove that MW converges almost surely to the conditional success probability p+(m) = Pr[y_t = +1 | m in M_t] -- the probability of task success given that memory m is retrieved -- under a stationary retrieval regime with a minimum exploration condition. Importantly, p+(m) is an associational quantity, not a causal one: it measures outcome co-occurrence rather than causal contribution. We argue this is still a useful operational signal for memory governance, and we validate it empirically in a controlled synthetic environment where ground-truth utility is known: after 10,000 episodes, the Spearman rank-correlation between Memory Worth and true utilities reaches rho = 0.89 +/- 0.02 across 20 independent seeds, compared to rho = 0.00 for systems that never update their assessments. A retrieval-realistic micro-experiment with real text and neural embedding retrieval (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) further shows stale memories crossing the low-value threshold (MW = 0.17) while specialist memories remain high-value (MW = 0.77) across 3,000 episodes. The estimator requires only two scalar counters per memory unit and can be added to architectures that already log retrievals and episode outcomes.

Bayesian optimization (BO) has for sequential optimization of expensive black-box functions demonstrated practicality and effectiveness in many real-world settings. Meta-Bayesian optimization (meta-BO) focuses on improving the sample efficiency of BO by making use of information from related tasks. Although meta-BO is sample-efficient when task structure transfers, poor alignment between meta-training and test tasks can cause suboptimal queries to be suggested during online optimization. To this end, we propose a simple meta-BO algorithm that utilizes related-task information when determined useful, falling back to lookahead otherwise, within a unified framework. We demonstrate competitiveness of our method with existing approaches on function optimization tasks, while retaining strong performance in low task-relatedness regimes where test tasks share limited structure with the meta-training set.

Current post-training methods in verifiable settings fall into two categories. Reinforcement learning (RLVR) relies on binary rewards, which are broadly applicable and powerful, but provide only sparse supervision during training. Distillation provides dense token-level supervision, typically obtained from an external teacher or using high-quality demonstrations. Collecting such supervision can be costly or unavailable. We propose Self-Distillation Zero (SD-Zero), a method that is substantially more training sample-efficient than RL and does not require an external teacher or high-quality demonstrations. SD-Zero trains a single model to play two roles: a Generator, which produces an initial response, and a Reviser, which conditions on that response and its binary reward to produce an improved response. We then perform on-policy self-distillation to distill the reviser into the generator, using the reviser's token distributions conditioned on the generator's response and its reward as supervision. In effect, SD-Zero trains the model to transform binary rewards into dense token-level self-supervision. On math and code reasoning benchmarks with Qwen3-4B-Instruct and Olmo-3-7B-Instruct, SD-Zero improves performance by at least 10% over the base models and outperforms strong baselines, including Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT), GRPO, and Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), under the same question set and training sample budget. Extensive ablation studies show two novel characteristics of our proposed algorithm: (a) token-level self-localization, where the reviser can identify the key tokens that need to be revised in the generator's response based on reward, and (b) iterative self-evolution, where the improving ability to revise answers can be distilled back into generation performance with regular teacher synchronization.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) remains a challenging problem for existing object detectors and few-shot learning approaches, particularly when generalizing across distinct domains. As part of NTIRE 2026, we hosted the second CD-FSOD Challenge to systematically evaluate and promote progress in detecting objects in unseen target domains under limited annotation conditions. The challenge received strong community interest, with 128 registered participants and a total of 696 submissions. Among them, 31 teams actively participated, and 19 teams submitted valid final results. Participants explored a wide range of strategies, introducing innovative methods that push the performance frontier under both open-source and closed-source tracks. This report presents a detailed overview of the NTIRE 2026 CD-FSOD Challenge, including a summary of the submitted approaches and an analysis of the final results across all participating teams. Challenge Codes: https://github.com/ohMargin/NTIRE2026_CDFSOD.

Should we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) with high accuracy? LLMs achieve high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks, but correctness alone does not reveal the quality of the reasoning used to produce it. This highlights a fundamental limitation of outcome-based evaluation: models may arrive at correct answers through flawed reasoning, and models with substantially different reasoning capabilities can nevertheless exhibit similar benchmark accuracy, for example due to memorization or over-optimization. In this paper, we ask: given existing benchmarks, can we move beyond outcome-based evaluation to assess the quality of reasoning itself? We seek metrics that (1) differentiate models with similar accuracy and (2) are robust to variations in input prompts and generation configurations. To this end, we propose a reasoning score that evaluates reasoning traces along dimensions such as faithfulness, coherence, utility, and factuality. A remaining question is how to aggregate this score across multiple sampled traces. Naively averaging them is undesirable, particularly in long-horizon settings, where the number of possible trajectories grows rapidly, and low-confidence correct traces are more likely to be coincidental. To address this, we introduce the Filtered Reasoning Score (FRS), which computes reasoning quality using only the top-K% most confident traces. Evaluating with FRS, models that are indistinguishable under standard accuracy exhibit significant differences in reasoning quality. Moreover, models with higher FRS on one benchmark tend to perform better on other reasoning benchmarks, in both accuracy and reasoning quality. Together, these findings suggest that FRS complements accuracy by capturing a model's transferable reasoning capabilities. We open source our evaluation codebase: https://github.com/Manas2006/benchmark_reproducibility.

The central goal of active learning is to gather data that maximises downstream predictive performance, but popular approaches have limited flexibility in customising this data acquisition to different downstream problems and losses. We propose a rigorous loss-driven approach to Bayesian active learning that allows data acquisition to directly target the loss associated with a given decision problem. In particular, we show how any loss can be used to derive a unique objective for optimal data acquisition. Critically, we then show that any loss taking the form of a weighted Bregman divergence permits analytic computation of a central component of its corresponding objective, making the approach applicable in practice. In regression and classification experiments with a range of different losses, we find our approach reduces test losses relative to existing techniques.

We introduce behavioral fidelity -- a third evaluation dimension for synthetic tabular data that measures whether generated data preserves the temporal, sequential, and structural behavioral patterns that distinguish real-world entity activity. Existing frameworks evaluate statistical fidelity (marginal distributions and correlations) and downstream utility (classifier AUROC on synthetic-trained models), but neither tests for the behavioral signals that operational detection and analysis systems actually rely on. We formalize a taxonomy of four behavioral fraud patterns (P1-P4) covering inter-event timing, burst structure, multi-account graph motifs, and velocity-rule trigger rates; define a degradation ratio metric calibrated to a real-data noise floor (1.0 = matches real variability, k = k-times worse); and prove that row-independent generators -- the dominant paradigm -- are structurally incapable of reproducing P3 graph motifs (Proposition 1) and produce non-positive within-entity IET autocorrelation (Proposition 2), making the positive burst fingerprint of fraud sequences unachievable regardless of architecture or training data size. We benchmark CTGAN, TVAE, GaussianCopula, and TabularARGN on IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection and the Amazon Fraud Dataset. All four fail severely: on IEEE-CIS composite degradation ratios range from 24.4x (TVAE) to 39.0x (GaussianCopula); on Amazon FDB, row-independent generators score 81.6-99.7x, while TabularARGN achieves 17.2x. We document generator-specific failure modes and their resolutions. The P1-P4 framework extends to any domain with entity-level sequential tabular data, including healthcare and network security. We release our evaluation framework as open source.

We study offline-online reinforcement learning in linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under environment shift. In the offline phase, data are collected by an unknown behavior policy and may come from a mismatched environment, while in the online phase the learner interacts with the target environment. We propose an algorithm that adaptively leverages offline data. When the offline data are informative, either due to sufficient coverage or small environment shift, the algorithm provably improves over purely online learning. When the offline data are uninformative, it safely ignores them and matches the online-only performance. We establish regret upper bounds that explicitly characterize when offline data are beneficial, together with nearly matching lower bounds. Numerical experiments further corroborate our theoretical findings.

Geographically High-Available (Geo-HA) cluster systems are essential for service continuity in distributed cloud-native environments. However, traditional arbitration mechanisms, which are often predicated on deterministic node-level heartbeats, are resource-intensive and inherently reactive. This necessitates a dedicated arbiter per deployment and leads to reactive switchovers that incur unavoidable downtime, occurring only after a failure has already compromised the system. This paper presents a novel predictive arbitration framework that utilizes a shared, microservice-based architecture to consolidate arbitration logic across multiple Geo-HA domains, significantly reducing the aggregate infrastructure footprint. Central to our approach is an adaptive online learning mechanism grounded in a Bayesian Noisy-OR model that autonomously discovers and learns temporal cascade dependencies from emergent failure patterns. To overcome the "cold start" challenge, the system utilizes expert-informed priors that are dynamically refined at runtime without manual configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework achieves a 60\% reduction in Mean Time to Failure Detection (MTTFD) and improves total switchover efficiency by up to 77.8\% compared to traditional reactive standards. By enabling a significant predictive lead time, the system allows switchovers to initiate proactively before hard failures occur, while maintaining a linear $O(n)$ computational complexity. This approach provides a scalable, context-aware alternative that bridges the performance-durability gap in modern microservice architectures.

We introduce Graph Concept Bottleneck (GCB) as a new paradigm for self-explainable text-attributed graph learning. GCB maps graphs into a subspace, concept bottleneck, where each concept is a meaningful phrase, and predictions are made based on the activation of these concepts. Unlike existing interpretable graph learning methods that primarily rely on subgraphs as explanations, the concept bottleneck provides a new form of interpretation. To refine the concept space, we apply the information bottleneck principle to focus on the most relevant concepts. This not only yields more concise and faithful explanations but also explicitly guides the model to "think" toward the correct decision. We empirically show that GCB achieves intrinsic interpretability with accuracy on par with black-box Graph Neural Networks. Moreover, it delivers better performance under distribution shifts and data perturbations, showing improved robustness and generalizability, benefitting from concept-guided prediction.

In this paper, we propose the geometric algebra-informed neural radiance fields (GAI-NeRF), a novel framework for wireless channel prediction that leverages geometric algebra attention mechanisms to capture ray-object interactions in complex propagation environments. Our approach incorporates global token representations, drawing inspiration from transformer architectures in language and vision domains, to aggregate learned spatial-electromagnetic features and enhance scene understanding. We identify limitations in conventional static ray tracing modules that hinder model generalization and address this challenge through a new ray tracing architecture. This design enables effective generalization across diverse wireless scenarios while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that GAI-NeRF achieves superior performance in channel prediction tasks by combining geometric algebra principles with neural scene representations, offering a promising direction for next-generation wireless communication systems. Moreover, GAI-NeRF greatly outperforms existing methods across multiple wireless scenarios. To ensure comprehensive assessment, we further evaluate our approach against multiple benchmarks using newly collected real-world indoor datasets tailored for single-scene downstream tasks and generalization testing, confirming its robust performance in unseen environments and establishing its high efficacy for wireless channel prediction.

Large language model (LLM) agents perform strongly on short- and mid-horizon tasks, but often break down on long-horizon tasks that require extended, interdependent action sequences. Despite rapid progress in agentic systems, these long-horizon failures remain poorly characterized, hindering principled diagnosis and comparison across domains. To address this gap, we introduce HORIZON, an initial cross-domain diagnostic benchmark for systematically constructing tasks and analyzing long-horizon failure behaviors in LLM-based agents. Using HORIZON, we evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) agents from multiple model families (GPT-5 variants and Claude models), collecting 3100+ trajectories across four representative agentic domains to study horizon-dependent degradation patterns. We further propose a trajectory-grounded LLM-as-a-Judge pipeline for scalable and reproducible failure attribution, and validate it with human annotation on trajectories, achieving strong agreement (inter-annotator κ=0.61; human-judge κ=0.84). Our findings offer an initial methodological step toward systematic, cross-domain analysis of long-horizon agent failures and offer practical guidance for building more reliable long-horizon agents. We release our project website at \href{https://xwang2775.github.io/horizon-leaderboard/}{HORIZON Leaderboard} and welcome contributions from the community.

At the scale of Uber's monorepos, traditional Git workflows become a fundamental bottleneck. Cloning multi-gigabyte repositories, maintaining local checkouts, periodically syncing from upstream, and executing repetitive fetch or push operations consume substantial compute and I/O across hundreds of automation systems. Although CI (Continuous Integration) systems such as Jenkins and Buildkite provide caching mechanisms to reduce clone times, in practice, these approaches incur significant infrastructure overhead, manual maintenance, inconsistent cache hit rates, and cold start latencies of several minutes for large monorepos. Moreover, thousands of independent clone and fetch operations add heavy load on upstream Git servers, making them slow and difficult to scale. To address these limitations, we present GitFarm, a platform that provides Git as a stateful, identity-scoped, repository-centric execution service through a gRPC API. GitFarm decouples repository management from clients by executing Git operations remotely within secure, ephemeral sandboxes backed by pre-warmed repositories. The system enforces identity-scoped authorization, supports multi-command workflows, and leverages specialized backend clusters for workload isolation. For clients, this design eliminates local clones, provides a ready-to-use checkout in less than a second, and significantly lowers client-side compute and I/O overhead by offloading operations to GitFarm. Also, client services no longer experience cold starts (up to 15 minutes) due to initial clones of the monorepos on each host. The results demonstrate that Git as a service provides substantial performance and cost benefits, while preserving the flexibility of native Git semantics.

Coherent nonlinear wave dynamics are often strongly shaped by a compact set of physically meaningful descriptors of the initial state. Traditional neural operators typically treat the input-output mapping as a largely black-box high-dimensional regression problem, without explicitly exploiting this structured physical context. Common feature-integration strategies usually rely on direct concatenation or FiLM-style affine modulation in hidden latent spaces. Here we introduce a different paradigm, loosely inspired by the complementary roles of state evolution and physically meaningful observables in quantum mechanics: the wave field is learned through a standard DeepONet state pathway, while compact physical descriptors follow a parallel conditioning pathway and act as residual modulation factors on the state prediction. Based on this idea, we develop a Multi-Head Residual-Gated DeepONet (MH-RG), which combines a pre-branch residual modulator, a branch residual gate, and a trunk residual gate with a low-rank multi-head mechanism to capture multiple complementary conditioned response patterns without prohibitive parameter growth. We evaluate the framework on representative benchmarks including highly nonlinear conservative wave dynamics and dissipative trapped dynamics and further perform detailed mechanistic analyses of the learned multi-head gating behavior. Compared with feature-augmented baselines, MH-RG DeepONet achieves consistently lower error while better preserving phase coherence and the fidelity of physically relevant dynamical quantities.

Epileptic seizure detection from EEG signals remains challenging due to the high dimensionality and nonlinear, potentially stochastic, dynamics of neural activity. In this work, we investigate whether features derived from topological data analysis (TDA) can improve the classification of brain states in preictal, ictal and interictal iEEG recordings from epilepsy patients using multichannel data. We analyze data from 55 patients, significantly larger than many previous studies that rely on patient-specific models. Persistence diagrams derived from iEEG signals are vectorized using several TDA representations, including Carlsson coordinates, persistence images, and template functions. To understand how topological representations interact with modern machine learning pipelines, we conduct a large-scale ablation study across multiple iEEG frequency bands, dimensionality reduction techniques, feature representations, and classifier architectures. Our experiments show that dimension-reduced topological representations achieve up to 80\% balanced accuracy for three-class classification. Interestingly, classical machine learning models perform comparably to deep learning models, achieving up to 79.17\% balanced accuracy, suggesting that carefully designed topological features can substantially reduce model complexity requirements. In contrast, pipelines preserving the full multichannel feature structure exhibit severe overfitting due to the high-dimensional feature space. These findings highlight the importance of structure-preserving dimensionality reduction when applying topology-based representations to multichannel neural data.

We introduce INDOTABVQA, a benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual Table Visual Question Answering (VQA) on real-world document images in Bahasa Indonesia. The dataset comprises 1,593 document images across three visual styles (bordered, borderless, and colorful) with one or more than one tables, and 1,593 question-answer sets in four languages: Bahasa Indonesia, English, Hindi, and Arabic. This enables evaluation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in both monolingual (Bahasa documents with Bahasa questions) and cross-lingual settings (Bahasa documents with questions in other languages). We benchmark leading open-source VLMs (Qwen2.5-VL, Gemma-3, LLaMA-3.2) and GPT-4o and reveal substantial performance gaps, particularly on structurally complex tables and in low-resource languages. Fine-tuning a compact 3B and LoRA-finetuned 7B model on our dataset yields 11.6% and 17.8% improvements in accuracy. Providing explicit table region coordinates as additional input further improves performance by 4-7%, demonstrating the value of Spatial priors for table-based reasoning. Our findings underscore the importance of language-diverse, domain-specific datasets and demonstrate that targeted fine-tuning can significantly enhance VLM performance on specialized document understanding tasks. INDOTABVQA provides a valuable resource for advancing research in cross-lingual, structure-aware document understanding, especially in underrepresented regions of the world. Full dataset can be accessed in huggingface at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/NusaBharat/INDOTABVQA}

We introduce ArcDeck, a multi-agent framework that formulates paper-to-slide generation as a structured narrative reconstruction task. Unlike existing methods that directly summarize raw text into slides, ArcDeck explicitly models the source paper's logical flow. It first parses the input to construct a discourse tree and establish a global commitment document, ensuring the high-level intent is preserved. These structural priors then guide an iterative multi-agent refinement process, where specialized agents iteratively critique and revise the presentation outline before rendering the final visual layouts and designs. To evaluate our approach, we also introduce ArcBench, a newly curated benchmark of academic paper-slide pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that explicit discourse modeling, combined with role-specific agent coordination, significantly improves the narrative flow and logical coherence of the generated presentations.

In high-performance computing (HPC) environments, system monitoring data is often unlabeled and high-dimensional, making it difficult to reliably detect and understand anomalous computing nodes. The growing scale and dimensionality of the collected datasets present significant challenges for analysis and visualization tasks. We present a scalable, interactive visual analytics system to support exploration, explanation, and comparison of compute node behaviors in HPC systems. Our approach integrates an analysis workflow combining two-phase dimensionality reduction with contrastive learning and multi-resolution dynamic mode decomposition to capture inter- and intra-cluster variations. These analyses are embedded in an interactive interface that enables users to explore clusters, compare temporal patterns, and iteratively refine hypotheses through customizable visual encodings and baselines. By integrating metrics such as CPU utilization and memory activity, the system offers a holistic view of large-scale system behavior. We demonstrate the utility of our tool through two case studies. In both cases, our system automatically identified meaningful node clusters and revealed subtle behavioral differences within and across node groups. Expert feedback confirmed the effectiveness of our tool in enhancing anomalous behavior detection and interpretation. Our work advances scalable visual analysis for HPC monitoring and has broader implications for cloud, edge computing, and distributed infrastructures where interpretability and behavior analysis are critical to operational efficiency.

Identifying and understanding the features that a deep network (DN) extracts from its inputs to produce its outputs is a focal point of interpretability research. The Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH) identifies features in terms of the linear directions formed by the inputs in a DN's latent space. However, the LRH is limited as it abstracts away from individual components (e.g., neurons and layers), is susceptible to identifying spurious features, and cannot be applied across sub-components (e.g., multiple layers). In this paper, we introduce the Linear Centroids Hypothesis (LCH) as a new framework for identifying the features of a DN. The LCH posits that features correspond to linear directions of centroids, which are vector summarizations of the functional behavior of a DN in a local region of its input space. Interpretability studies under the LCH can leverage existing LRH tools, such as sparse autoencoders, by applying them to the DN's centroids rather than to its latent activations. We demonstrate that doing so yields sparser feature dictionaries for DINO vision transformers, which also perform better on downstream tasks. The LCH also inspires novel approaches to interpretability; for example, LCH can readily identify circuits in GPT2-Large. For code to study the LCH https://github.com/ThomasWalker1/LinearCentroidsHypothesis .

Self-driving laboratories promise to accelerate materials discovery. Yet current automated solid-state synthesis platforms are limited to ambient conditions, thereby precluding their use for air-sensitive materials. Here, we present A-Lab for Glovebox Powder Solid-state Synthesis (A-Lab GPSS), a robotic platform capable of synthesizing and characterizing air-sensitive inorganic materials under strict air-free conditions. By integrating an agentic AI framework into the A-Lab GPSS platform, we structure autonomous experimental design through abductive and inductive reasoning. We deploy this platform to explore the vast compositional space of lithium halide spinel solid-state ionic conductors. Across a synthesis campaign comprising 352 samples with diverse compositions, the system explores a broad chemical space, experimentally realizing 72% of the 171 possible pairwise combinations among the 19 metals considered in this study. Over the course of the campaign, the fraction of compositions exhibiting both good ionic conductivity (> 0.05 mS/cm) and high halide spinel phase purity increases from 1.33% in the first 75 agent-proposed samples to 5.33% in the final 75. Furthermore, by inspecting the AI's reasoning processes, we reveal distinct yet complementary discovery strategies: abductive reasoning interrogates abnormal observations within already explored regions, whereas inductive reasoning expands the search into broader, previously unvisited chemical space. This work establishes a scalable platform for the autonomous discovery of complex, air-sensitive solid-state materials.

While recent LLM-based agents can identify many candidate bugs in source code, their reports remain static hypotheses that require manual validation, limiting the practicality of automated bug detection. We frame this challenge as a test generation task: given a candidate report, synthesizing an executable proof-of-concept test, or simply a PoC - such as a script, command sequence, or crafted input - to trigger the suspected defect. Automated PoC generation can act as a scalable validation oracle, enabling end-to-end autonomous bug detection by providing concrete execution evidence. However, naive LLM agents are unreliable validators: they are biased toward "success" and may reward-hack by producing plausible but non-functional PoCs or even hallucinated traces. To address this, we present AnyPoC, a general multi-agent framework that (1) analyzes and fact-checks a candidate bug report, (2) iteratively synthesizes and executes a PoC while collecting execution traces, and (3) independently re-executes and scrutinizes the PoC to mitigate hallucination and reward hacking. In addition, AnyPoC also continuously extracts and evolves a PoC knowledge base to handle heterogeneous tasks. AnyPoC operates on candidate bug reports regardless of their source and can be paired with different bug reporters. To demonstrate practicality and generality, we apply AnyPoC, with a simple agentic bug reporter, on 12 critical software systems across diverse languages/domains (many with millions of lines of code) including Firefox, Chromium, LLVM, OpenSSL, SQLite, FFmpeg, and Redis. Compared to the state-of-the-art coding agents, e.g., Claude Code and Codex, AnyPoC produces 1.3x more valid PoCs for true-positive bug reports and rejects 9.8x more false-positive bug reports. To date, AnyPoC has discovered 122 new bugs (105 confirmed, 86 already fixed), with 45 generated PoCs adopted as official regression tests.

Large Foundation Model (LFM) inference is both memory- and compute-intensive, traditionally relying on GPUs. However, the limited availability and high cost have motivated the adoption of high-performance general-purpose CPUs, especially emerging 3D-stacked Static Non-Uniform Cache Architecture (3D S-NUCA) systems. These architectures offer enhanced bandwidth and locality but suffer from severe thermal challenges and uneven cache latencies due to 3D Networks-on-Chip (NoC). Optimal management of thread migration and V/f scaling is non-trivial due to LFM kernel diversity and system heterogeneity. Existing thermal management approaches often rely on oversimplified analytical models and lack adaptability. We propose AILFM, an Active Imitation Learning (AIL)-based scheduling framework that learns near-optimal thermal-aware scheduling policies from Oracle demonstrations with minimal run-time overhead. AILFM accounts for both core-level performance heterogeneity and kernel-specific behavior in LFMs to maintain thermal safety while maximizing performance. Extensive experiments show that AILFM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generalizes well across diverse LFM workloads.

Unlocking large-scale low-bandwidth decentralized training has the potential to utilize otherwise untapped compute resources. In centralized settings, large-scale multi-node training is primarily enabled by data and pipeline parallelism, two techniques that require ultra-high-bandwidth communication. While efficient methods now exist for decentralized data parallelism, pipeline parallelism remains the primary challenge. Recent efforts, such as Subspace Models (SM), have claimed up to 100x activation compression but rely on complex constrained optimization and diverge from true end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose a different approach, based on an architecture designed from the ground up to be native to low-bandwidth communication environments while still applicable to any standard transformer-based architecture. We call this architecture the Residual Bottleneck Model or ResBM, it introduces a residual encoder-decoder bottleneck module across pipeline boundaries that can be trained end-to-end as part of the model's parameters while preserving an explicit low-rank identity path. We show that ResBMs achieve state-of-the-art 128x activation compression without significant loss in convergence rates and without significant memory or compute overhead.

High-fidelity numerical simulation of subsurface flow is computationally intensive, especially for many-query tasks such as uncertainty quantification and data assimilation. Deep learning (DL) surrogates can significantly accelerate forward simulations, yet constructing them requires substantial machine learning (ML) expertise - from architecture design to hyperparameter tuning - that most domain scientists do not possess. Furthermore, the process is predominantly manual and relies heavily on heuristic choices. This expertise gap remains a key barrier to the broader adoption of DL surrogate techniques. For this reason, we present AutoSurrogate, a large-language-model-driven multi-agent framework that enables practitioners without ML expertise to build high-quality surrogates for subsurface flow problems through natural-language instructions. Given simulation data and optional preferences, four specialized agents collaboratively execute data profiling, architecture selection from a model zoo, Bayesian hyperparameter optimization, model training, and quality assessment against user-specified thresholds. The system also handles common failure modes autonomously, including restarting training with adjusted configurations when numerical instabilities occur and switching to alternative architectures when predictive accuracy falls short of targets. In our setting, a single natural-language sentence can be sufficient to produce a deployment-ready surrogate model, with minimum human intervention required at any intermediate stage. We demonstrate the utility of AutoSurrogate on a 3D geological carbon storage modeling task, mapping permeability fields to pressure and CO$_2$ saturation fields over 31 timesteps. Without any manual tuning, AutoSurrogate is able to outperform expert-designed baselines and domain-agnostic AutoML methods, demonstrating strong potential for practical deployment.

An OS kernel that runs LLM inference internally can read logit distributions before any text is generated -- and act on them as a governance primitive. I present ProbeLogits, a kernel-level operation that performs a single forward pass and reads specific token logits to classify agent actions as safe or dangerous, with zero learned parameters. On a 260-prompt OS action benchmark (9 categories including adversarial attacks), ProbeLogits achieves F1=0.980, Precision=1.000, and Recall=0.960 using a general-purpose 7B model at 4-bit quantization. On ToxicChat (1,000 human-annotated real conversations), it achieves F1=0.790 at default calibration strength $α$=1.0, improving to F1=0.837 at $α$=0.5 -- 89% of Llama Guard 3's F1~0.939 with zero learned parameters. A key design contribution is the calibration strength $α$, which serves as a deployment-time policy knob rather than a learned hyperparameter. By adjusting $α$, the OS can enforce strict policies for privileged operations ($α\geq 0.8$, maximizing recall) or relaxed policies for conversational agents ($α$=0.5, maximizing precision). Contextual calibration improves accuracy from 64.8% to 97.3% on the custom benchmark. I implement ProbeLogits within Anima OS, a bare-metal x86_64 OS written in 80,400 lines of Rust. Because agent actions must pass through kernel-mediated host functions, ProbeLogits enforcement operates below the WASM sandbox boundary, making it significantly harder to circumvent than application-layer classifiers. Each classification costs 65ms on 7B -- fast enough for per-action governance. I also show that treating KV cache as process state enables checkpoint, restore, and fork operations analogous to traditional process management. To my knowledge, no prior system exposes LLM logit vectors as OS-level governance primitives.

Grokking -- delayed generalisation long after memorisation -- lacks a predictive mechanistic explanation. We identify the normalised spectral entropy $\tilde{H}(t)$ of the representation covariance as a scalar order parameter for this transition, validated on 1-layer Transformers on group-theoretic tasks. Five contributions: (i) Grokking follows a two-phase pattern: norm expansion then entropy collapse. (ii) $\tilde{H}$ crosses a stable threshold $\tilde{H}^* \approx 0.61$ before generalisation in 100% of runs (mean lead: 1,020 steps). (iii) A causal intervention preventing collapse delays grokking by +5,020 steps ($p=0.044$); a norm-matched control ($n=30$, $p=5\times10^{-5}$) confirms entropy -- not norm -- drives the transition. (iv) A power-law $ΔT = C_1(\tilde{H}-\tilde{H}^*)^γ+C_2$ ($R^2=0.543$) predicts grokking onset with 4.1% error. (v) The mechanism holds across abelian ($\mathbb{Z}/97\mathbb{Z}$) and non-abelian ($S_5$) groups. Crucially, MLPs show entropy collapse without grokking, proving collapse is necessary but not sufficient -- architecture matters. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/grokking-entropy

Our ability to predict, control, and ultimately understand complex systems rests on discovering the equations that govern their dynamics. Identifying these equations directly from noisy, limited observations has therefore become a central challenge in data-driven science, yet existing library-based sparse regression methods force a compromise between automation, statistical rigor, and computational efficiency. Here we develop Bayesian-ARGOS, a hybrid framework that reconciles these demands by combining rapid frequentist screening with focused Bayesian inference, enabling automated equation discovery with principled uncertainty quantification at a fraction of the computational cost of existing methods. Tested on seven chaotic systems under varying data scarcity and noise levels, Bayesian-ARGOS outperforms two state-of-the-art methods in most scenarios. It surpasses SINDy in data efficiency for all systems and noise tolerance for six out of the seven, with a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost compared to bootstrap-based ARGOS. The probabilistic formulation additionally enables a suite of standard statistical diagnostics, including influence analysis and multicollinearity detection that expose failure modes otherwise opaque. When integrated with representation learning (SINDy-SHRED) for high dimensional sea surface temperature reconstruction, Bayesian-ARGOS increases the yield of valid latent equations with significantly improved long horizon stability. Bayesian-ARGOS thus provides a principled, automated, and computationally efficient route from scarce and noisy observations to interpretable governing equations, offering a practical framework for equation discovery across scales, from benchmark chaotic systems to the latent dynamics underlying global climate patterns.

Time-series forecasting aims to predict future values by modeling temporal dependencies in historical observations. It is a critical component of many real-world systems, where accurate forecasts improve operational efficiency and help mitigate uncertainty and risk. More recently, machine learning (ML), and especially deep learning (DL)-based models, have gained widespread adoption for time-series forecasting, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, many state-of-the-art attack methods are not directly applicable in time-series settings, where storing complete historical data or performing attacks at every time step is often impractical. This paper proposes an adversarial attack framework for time-series forecasting under an online bounded-buffer setting, leveraging an informed and selective attack strategy. By selectively targeting time steps where the model exhibits high confidence and the expected prediction error is maximal, our framework produces fewer but substantially more effective attacks. Experiments show that our framework can increase the prediction error up to 2.42x, while performing attacks in fewer than 10% of time steps.

While LLMs hold significant potential to transform scientific research, we advocate for their use to augment and empower researchers rather than to automate research without human oversight. To this end, we study constructive feedback generation, the task of producing targeted, actionable feedback that helps authors improve both their research and its presentation. In this work, we operationalize the effectiveness of feedback along two author-centric axes-validity and author action. We first curate GoodPoint-ICLR, a dataset of 19K ICLR papers with reviewer feedback annotated along both dimensions using author responses. Building on this, we introduce GoodPoint, a training recipe that leverages success signals from author responses through fine-tuning on valid and actionable feedback, together with preference optimization on both real and synthetic preference pairs. Our evaluation on a benchmark of 1.2K ICLR papers shows that a GoodPoint-trained Qwen3-8B improves the predicted success rate by 83.7% over the base model and sets a new state-of-the-art among LLMs of similar size in feedback matching on a golden human feedback set, even surpassing Gemini-3-flash in precision. We further validate these findings through an expert human study, demonstrating that GoodPoint consistently delivers higher practical value as perceived by authors.

Using FlowBoost, a closed-loop deep generative optimization framework for extremal structure discovery, we investigate $\ell^p$-generalizations of the finite free Stam inequality for real-rooted polynomials under finite free additive convolution $\boxplus_n$. At $p=2$, FlowBoost finds the Hermite pair as the unique equality case and reveals the spectral structure of the linearized convolution map at this extremal point. As a result, we conjecture that the singular values of the doubly stochastic coupling matrix $E_n$ on the mean-zero subspace are ${2^{-k/2}:k=1,\ldots,n-1}$, independent of $n$. Conditional on this conjecture, we obtain a sharp local stability constant and the finite free CLT convergence rate, both uniform in $n$. We introduce a one-parameter family of $p$-Stam inequalities using $\ell^p$-Fisher information and prove that the Hermite pair itself violates the inequality for every $p>2$, with the sign of the deficit governed by the $\ell^p$-contraction ratio of $E_n$. Systematic computation via FlowBoost supports the conjecture that $p^*\!=2$ is the sharp critical exponent. For $p<2$, the extremal configurations undergo a bifurcation, meaning that they become non-matching pairs with bimodal root structure, converging back to the Hermite diagonal only as $p\to 2^-$. Our findings demonstrate that FlowBoost, can be an effective tool of mathematical discovery in infinite-dimensional extremal problems.

Self-monitoring capabilities -- metacognition, self-prediction, and subjective duration -- are often proposed as useful additions to reinforcement learning agents. But do they actually help? We investigate this question in a continuous-time multi-timescale agent operating in predator-prey survival environments of varying complexity, including a 2D partially observable variant. We first show that three self-monitoring modules, implemented as auxiliary-loss add-ons to a multi-timescale cortical hierarchy, provide no statistically significant benefit across 20 random seeds, 1D and 2D predator-prey environments with standard and non-stationary variants, and training horizons up to 50,000 steps. Diagnosing the failure, we find the modules collapse to near-constant outputs (confidence std < 0.006, attention allocation std < 0.011) and the subjective duration mechanism shifts the discount factor by less than 0.03%. Policy sensitivity analysis confirms the agent's decisions are unaffected by module outputs in this design. We then show that structurally integrating the module outputs -- using confidence to gate exploration, surprise to trigger workspace broadcasts, and self-model predictions as policy input -- produces a medium-large improvement over the add-on approach (Cohen's d = 0.62, p = 0.06, paired) in a non-stationary environment. Component-wise ablations reveal that the TSM-to-policy pathway contributes most of this gain. However, structural integration does not significantly outperform a baseline with no self-monitoring (d = 0.15, p = 0.67), and a parameter-matched control without modules performs comparably, so the benefit may lie in recovering from the trend-level harm of ignored modules rather than in self-monitoring content. The architectural implication is that self-monitoring should sit on the decision pathway, not beside it.

While next-token prediction (NTP) has been the standard objective for training language models, it often struggles to capture global structure in reasoning tasks. Multi-token prediction (MTP) has recently emerged as a promising alternative, yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this paper, we study how MTP facilitates reasoning, with a focus on planning. Empirically, we show that MTP consistently outperforms NTP on both synthetic graph path-finding tasks and more realistic reasoning benchmarks, such as Countdown and boolean satisfiability problems. Theoretically, we analyze a simplified two-layer Transformer on a star graph task. We prove that MTP induces a two-stage reverse reasoning process: the model first attends to the end node and then reconstructs the path by tracing intermediate nodes backward. This behavior arises from a gradient decoupling property of MTP, which provides a cleaner training signal compared to NTP. Ultimately, our results highlight how multi-token objectives inherently bias optimization toward robust and interpretable reasoning circuits.

The stable operation of autonomous off-grid photovoltaic systems requires solar forecasting algorithms that respect atmospheric thermodynamics. Contemporary deep learning models consistently exhibit critical anomalies, primarily severe temporal phase lags during cloud transients and physically impossible nocturnal power generation. To resolve this divergence between data-driven modeling and deterministic celestial mechanics, this research introduces the Thermodynamic Liquid Manifold Network. The methodology projects 22 meteorological and geometric variables into a Koopman-linearized Riemannian manifold to systematically map complex climatic dynamics. The architecture integrates a Spectral Calibration unit and a multiplicative Thermodynamic Alpha-Gate. This system synthesizes real-time atmospheric opacity with theoretical clear-sky boundary models, structurally enforcing strict celestial geometry compliance. This completely neutralizes phantom nocturnal generation while maintaining zero-lag synchronization during rapid weather shifts. Validated against a rigorous five-year testing horizon in a severe semi-arid climate, the framework achieves an RMSE of 18.31 Wh/m2 and a Pearson correlation of 0.988. The model strictly maintains a zero-magnitude nocturnal error across all 1826 testing days and exhibits a sub-30-minute phase response during high-frequency optical transients. Comprising exactly 63,458 trainable parameters, this ultra-lightweight design establishes a robust, thermodynamically consistent standard for edge-deployable microgrid controllers.

We study signal propagation at initialization in transformers through the averaged partial Jacobian norm (APJN), a measure of gradient amplification across layers. We extend APJN analysis to transformers with bidirectional attention and permutation-symmetric input token configurations by deriving recurrence relations for activation statistics and APJNs across layers. Our theory predicts how attention modifies the asymptotic behavior of the APJN at large depth and matches APJNs measured in deep vision transformers. The criticality picture known from residual networks carries over to transformers: the pre-LayerNorm architecture exhibits power-law APJN growth, whereas transformers with LayerNorm replaced by elementwise $\tanh$-like nonlinearities have stretched-exponential APJN growth, indicating that the latter are subcritical. Applied to Dynamic Tanh (DyT) and Dynamic erf (Derf) transformers, the theory explains why these architectures can be more sensitive to initialization and optimization choices and require careful tuning for stable training.

The stable operation of off-grid photovoltaic systems requires accurate, computationally efficient solar forecasting. Contemporary deep learning models often suffer from massive computational overhead and physical blindness, generating impossible predictions. This paper introduces the Physics-Informed State Space Model (PISSM) to bridge the gap between efficiency and physical accuracy for edge-deployed microcontrollers. PISSM utilizes a dynamic Hankel matrix embedding to filter stochastic sensor noise by transforming raw meteorological sequences into a robust state space. A Linear State Space Model replaces heavy attention mechanisms, efficiently modeling temporal dependencies for parallel processing. Crucially, a novel Physics-Informed Gating mechanism leverages the Solar Zenith Angle and Clearness Index to structurally bound outputs, ensuring predictions strictly obey diurnal cycles and preventing nocturnal errors. Validated on a multi-year dataset for Omdurman, Sudan, PISSM achieves superior accuracy with fewer than 40,000 parameters, establishing an ultra-lightweight benchmark for real-time off-grid control.

To identify safety violations, auditors often search over large sets of agent traces. This search is difficult because failures are often rare, complex, and sometimes even adversarially hidden and only detectable when multiple traces are analyzed together. These challenges arise in diverse settings such as misuse campaigns, covert sabotage, reward hacking, and prompt injection. Existing approaches struggle here for several reasons. Per-trace judges miss failures that only become visible across traces, naive agentic auditing does not scale to large trace collections, and fixed monitors are brittle to unanticipated behaviors. We introduce Meerkat, which combines clustering with agentic search to uncover violations specified in natural language. Through structured search and adaptive investigation of promising regions, Meerkat finds sparse failures without relying on seed scenarios, fixed workflows, or exhaustive enumeration. Across misuse, misalignment, and task gaming settings, Meerkat significantly improves detection of safety violations over baseline monitors, discovers widespread developer cheating on a top agent benchmark, and finds nearly 4x more examples of reward hacking on CyBench than previous audits.

We have witnessed remarkable advances in LLM reasoning capabilities with the advent of DeepSeek-R1. However, much of this progress has been fueled by the abundance of internet question-answer (QA) pairs, a major bottleneck going forward, since such data is limited in scale and concentrated mainly in domains like mathematics. In contrast, other sciences such as physics lack large-scale QA datasets to effectively train reasoning-capable models. In this work, we show that physics simulators can serve as a powerful alternative source of supervision for training LLMs for physical reasoning. We generate random scenes in physics engines, create synthetic question-answer pairs from simulated interactions, and train LLMs using reinforcement learning on this synthetic data. Our models exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to real-world physics benchmarks: for example, training solely on synthetic simulated data improves performance on IPhO (International Physics Olympiad) problems by 5-10 percentage points across model sizes. These results demonstrate that physics simulators can act as scalable data generators, enabling LLMs to acquire deep physical reasoning skills beyond the limitations of internet-scale QA data. Code available at: https://sim2reason.github.io/.

Natural language processing (NLP) and speech technologies have made significant progress in recent years; however, they remain largely focused on standardized language varieties. Dialects, despite their cultural significance and widespread use, are underrepresented in linguistic resources and computational models, resulting in performance disparities. To address this gap, we introduce Saar-Voice, a six-hour speech corpus for the Saarbrücken dialect of German. The dataset was created by first collecting text through digitized books and locally sourced materials. A subset of this text was recorded by nine speakers, and we conducted analyses on both the textual and speech components to assess the dataset's characteristics and quality. We discuss methodological challenges related to orthographic and speaker variation, and explore grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion. The resulting corpus provides aligned textual and audio representations. This serves as a foundation for future research on dialect-aware text-to-speech (TTS), particularly in low-resource scenarios, including zero-shot and few-shot model adaptation.

Using psychological constructs such as the Big Five, large language models (LLMs) can imitate specific personality profiles and predict a user's personality. While LLMs can exhibit behaviors consistent with these constructs, it remains unclear where and how they are represented inside the model and how they relate to behavioral outputs. To address this gap, we focus on questionnaire-operationalized Big Five concepts, analyze the formation and localization of their internal representations, and use interventions to examine how these representations relate to behavioral outputs. In our experiment, we first use probing to examine where Big Five information emerges across model depth. We then identify neurons that respond selectively to each Big Five concept and test whether enhancing or suppressing their activations can bias latent representations and label generation in intended directions. We find that Big Five information becomes rapidly decodable in early layers and remains detectable through the final layers, while concept-selective neurons are most prevalent in mid layers and exhibit limited overlap across domains. Interventions on these neurons consistently shift probe readouts toward targeted concepts, with targeted success rates exceeding 0.8 for some concepts, indicating that the model's internal separation of Big Five personality traits can be causally steered. At the label-generation level, the same interventions often bias generated label distributions in the intended directions, but the effects are weaker, more concept-dependent, and often accompanied by cross-trait spillover, indicating that comparable control over generated labels is difficult even with interventions on a large fraction of concept-selective neurons. Overall, our findings reveal a gap between representational control and behavioral control in LLMs.

With the recent progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in applying these models to solve complex and challenging problems. Modern LLMs, capable of processing long contexts and generating verbalized explanations, offer significant potential in addressing real-world applications. However, a critical hurdle in deploying LLMs for practical decision-making is their inability to provide reliable, quantitative probabilities. While task-specific fine-tuning of LLMs using traditional discriminative objectives (similar to encoder-only models) can yield probability estimates, this often leads to catastrophic forgetting and linguistic collapse. Consequently, the model loses its ability to generate explanations, severely undermining its interpretability and usability. To address this challenge, we propose CLSGen, a novel LLM fine-tuning framework designed for binary classification tasks. The CLSGen framework encompasses a new model architecture, training methodology, and data construction strategy to enable robust probability estimation without sacrificing the model's inherent explanation-generation capabilities. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that models fine-tuned with CLSGen outperform existing baselines in classification metrics (AUROC and F1-score). Regarding explanation, the results showed strong alignment between predicted labels and generated justifications, as well as high readability.

Accurate delineation of the Clinical Target Volume (CTV) is essential for radiotherapy planning, yet remains time-consuming and difficult to assess, especially for complex treatments such as Total Marrow and Lymph Node Irradiation (TMLI). While deep learning-based auto-segmentation can reduce workload, safe clinical deployment requires reliable cues indicating where models may be wrong. In this work, we propose a budget-aware uncertainty-driven quality assurance (QA) framework built on nnU-Net, combining uncertainty quantification and post-hoc calibration to produce voxel-wise uncertainty maps (based on predictive entropy) that can guide targeted manual review. We compare temperature scaling (TS), deep ensembles (DE), checkpoint ensembles (CE), and test-time augmentation (TTA), evaluated both individually and in combination on TMLI as a representative use case. Reliability is assessed through ROI-masked calibration metrics and uncertainty--error alignment under realistic revision constraints, summarized as AUC over the top 0-5% most uncertain voxels. Across configurations, segmentation accuracy remains stable, whereas TS substantially improves calibration. Uncertainty-error alignment improves most with calibrated checkpoint-based inference, leading to uncertainty maps that highlight more consistently regions requiring manual edits. Overall, integrating calibration with efficient ensembling seems a promising strategy to implement a budget-aware QA workflow for radiotherapy segmentation.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating highly fluent textual content. While they offer significant convenience to humans, they also introduce various risks, like phishing and academic dishonesty. Numerous research efforts have been dedicated to developing algorithms for detecting AI-generated text and constructing relevant datasets. However, in the domain of Chinese corpora, challenges remain, including limited model diversity and data homogeneity. To address these issues, we propose C-ReD: a comprehensive Chinese Real-prompt AI-generated Detection benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that C-ReD not only enables reliable in-domain detection but also supports strong generalization to unseen LLMs and external Chinese datasets-addressing critical gaps in model diversity, domain coverage, and prompt realism that have limited prior Chinese detection benchmarks. We release our resources at https://github.com/HeraldofLight/C-ReD.

Reasoning has become a central capability in large language models. Recent research has shown that reasoning performance can be improved by looping an LLM's layers in the latent dimension, resulting in looped reasoning language models. Despite promising results, few works have investigated how their internal dynamics differ from those of standard feedforward models. In this paper, we conduct a mechanistic analysis of the latent states in looped language models, focusing in particular on how the stages of inference observed in feedforward models compare to those observed in looped ones. To this end, we analyze cyclic recurrence and show that for many of the studied models each layer in the cycle converges to a distinct fixed point; consequently, the recurrent block follows a consistent cyclic trajectory in the latent space. We provide evidence that as these fixed points are reached, attention-head behavior stabilizes, leading to constant behavior across recurrences. Empirically, we discover that recurrent blocks learn stages of inference that closely mirror those of feedforward models, repeating these stages in depth with each iteration. We study how recurrent block size, input injection, and normalization influence the emergence and stability of these cyclic fixed points. We believe these findings help translate mechanistic insights into practical guidance for architectural design.

Tool-augmented Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automating complex, multi-step real-world tasks, yet remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection. Adversaries exploit this weakness by embedding malicious instructions within tool-returned content, which agents directly incorporate into their conversation history as trusted observations. This vulnerability manifests across three primary attack channels: web and local content injection, MCP server injection, and skill file injection. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce \textsc{ClawGuard}, a novel runtime security framework that enforces a user-confirmed rule set at every tool-call boundary, transforming unreliable alignment-dependent defense into a deterministic, auditable mechanism that intercepts adversarial tool calls before any real-world effect is produced. By automatically deriving task-specific access constraints from the user's stated objective prior to any external tool invocation, \textsc{ClawGuard} blocks all three injection pathways without model modification or infrastructure change. Experiments across five state-of-the-art language models on AgentDojo, SkillInject, and MCPSafeBench demonstrate that \textsc{ClawGuard} achieves robust protection against indirect prompt injection without compromising agent utility. This work establishes deterministic tool-call boundary enforcement as an effective defense mechanism for secure agentic AI systems, requiring neither safety-specific fine-tuning nor architectural modification. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Claw-Guard/ClawGuard.

Modeling open-play soccer tactics is a formidable challenge due to the stochastic, multi-agent nature of the game. Existing computational approaches typically produce single, deterministic trajectory forecasts or focus on highly structured set-pieces, fundamentally failing to capture the inherent variance and branching possibilities of real-world match evolution. Here, we introduce GenTac, a diffusion-based generative framework that conceptualizes soccer tactics as a stochastic process over continuous multi-player trajectories and discrete semantic events. By learning the underlying distribution of player movements from historical tracking data, GenTac samples diverse, plausible, long-horizon future trajectories. The framework supports rich contextual conditioning, including opponent behavior, specific team or league playing styles, and strategic objectives, while grounding continuous spatial dynamics into a 15-class tactical event space. Extensive evaluations on our proposed benchmark, TacBench, demonstrate four key capabilities: (1) GenTac achieves high geometric accuracy while strictly preserving the collective structural consistency of the team; (2) it accurately simulates stylistic nuances, distinguishing between specific teams (e.g., Auckland FC) and leagues (e.g., A-League versus German leagues); (3) it enables controllable counterfactual simulations, demonstrably altering spatial control and expected threat metrics based on offensive or defensive guidance; and (4) it reliably anticipates future tactical outcomes directly from generated rollouts. Finally, we demonstrate that GenTac can be successfully trained to generalize to other dynamic team sports, including basketball, American football, and ice hockey.

GUI agents drive applications through their visual interfaces instead of programmatic APIs, interacting with arbitrary software via taps, swipes, and keystrokes, reaching a long tail of applications that CLI-based agents cannot. Yet progress in this area is bottlenecked less by modeling capacity than by the absence of a coherent full-stack infrastructure: online RL training suffers from environment instability and closed pipelines, evaluation protocols drift silently across works, and trained agents rarely reach real users on real devices. We present \textbf{ClawGUI}, an open-source framework addressing these three gaps within a single harness. \textbf{ClawGUI-RL} provides the first open-source GUI agent RL infrastructure with validated support for both parallel virtual environments and real physical devices, integrating GiGPO with a Process Reward Model for dense step-level supervision. \textbf{ClawGUI-Eval} enforces a fully standardized evaluation pipeline across 6 benchmarks and 11+ models, achieving 95.8\% reproduction against official baselines. \textbf{ClawGUI-Agent} brings trained agents to Android, HarmonyOS, and iOS through 12+ chat platforms with hybrid CLI-GUI control and persistent personalized memory. Trained end to end within this pipeline, \textbf{ClawGUI-2B} achieves 17.1\% Success Rate on MobileWorld GUI-Only, outperforming the same-scale MAI-UI-2B baseline by 6.0\%.

Contemporary large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly in specialized domains like mathematics and physics. However, their ability to generalize these reasoning skills to more general and broader contexts--often termed general reasoning--remains under-explored. Unlike domain-specific reasoning, general reasoning relies less on expert knowledge but still presents formidable reasoning challenges, such as complex constraints, nested logical branches, and semantic interference. To address this gap, we introduce General365, a benchmark specifically designed to assess general reasoning in LLMs. By restricting background knowledge to a K-12 level, General365 explicitly decouples reasoning from specialized expertise. The benchmark comprises 365 seed problems and 1,095 variant problems across eight categories, ensuring both high difficulty and diversity. Evaluations across 26 leading LLMs reveal that even the top-performing model achieves only 62.8% accuracy, in stark contrast to the near-perfect performances of LLMs in math and physics benchmarks. These results suggest that the reasoning abilities of current LLMs are heavily domain-dependent, leaving significant room for improvement in broader applications. We envision General365 as a catalyst for advancing LLM reasoning beyond domain-specific tasks toward robust, general-purpose real-world scenarios. Code, Dataset, and Leaderboard: https://general365.github.io

Perturbation-based explainability methods such as KernelSHAP provide model-agnostic attributions but are typically impractical for patch-based 3D medical image segmentation due to the large number of coalition evaluations and the high cost of sliding-window inference. We present an efficient KernelSHAP framework for volumetric CT segmentation that restricts computation to a user-defined region of interest and its receptive-field support, and accelerates inference via patch logit caching, reusing baseline predictions for unaffected patches while preserving nnU-Net's fusion scheme. To enable clinically meaningful attributions, we compare three automatically generated feature abstractions within the receptive-field crop: whole-organ units, regular FCC supervoxels, and hybrid organ-aware supervoxels, and we study multiple aggregation/value functions targeting stabilizing evidence (TP/Dice/Soft Dice) or false-positive behavior. Experiments on whole-body CT segmentations show that caching substantially reduces redundant computation (with computational savings ranging from 15% to 30%) and that faithfulness and interpretability exhibit clear trade-offs: regular supervoxels often maximize perturbation-based metrics but lack anatomical alignment, whereas organ-aware units yield more clinically interpretable explanations and are particularly effective for highlighting false-positive drivers under normalized metrics.

Automation underpins progress across scientific and industrial disciplines. Yet, automating tasks requiring interpretation of abstract visual information remain challenging. For example, crystal alignment strongly relies on humans with the ability to comprehend diffraction patterns. Here we introduce an autonomous system that aligns single crystals without access to crystallography and diffraction theory. Using a model-free reinforcement learning framework, an agent learns to identify and navigate towards high-symmetry orientations directly from Laue diffraction patterns. Despite the absence of human supervision, the agent develops human-like strategies to achieve time-efficient alignment across different crystal symmetry classes. With this, we provide a computational framework for intelligent diffractometers. As such, our approach advances the development of automated experimental workflows in materials science.

Automated Program Repair (APR) has recently benefited from large language models (LLMs). However, most LLM-based APR approaches still rely primarily on coarse end-to-end signals from test-suite outcomes to guide repair, providing limited insight into where a program's internal logic deviates from its intended behavior. In contrast, human debugging often relies on intermediate reasoning about program states through localized correctness conditions or assertions. Inspired by this observation, we propose SpecTune, a specification-guided debugging framework that incorporates intermediate behavioral reasoning into APR. SpecTune decomposes the repair task into suspicious regions connected by execution checkpoints and derives localized postconditions representing expected program behaviors at those points. By executing the buggy program and evaluating these postconditions, SpecTune produces micro-level debugging signals that indicate mismatches between observed and intended behaviors, enabling more precise fault localization and targeted patch generation. To address the potential unreliability of LLM-generated postconditions, we introduce two complementary signals: a specification validation signal alpha, which estimates the consistency of generated postconditions using partially passing test cases, and a discriminative signal beta, which detects violations of validated postconditions during execution. With these signals, SpecTune safely leverages automatically generated specifications for APR. Experimental results show that SpecTune improves fault localization and APR effectiveness than the baselines.

We set out to train behavioral dispositions (self-verification, uncertainty acknowledgment, feedback integration) into small language models (0.6B to 2.3B effective parameters) through a four-stage all-MIT distillation pipeline, with follow-on experiments on inference-time attention-head interventions and a frozen-base confidence-gated sidecar. An internal draft reported +33.9-point MCAS and +15.3-point HumanEval gains on a Qwen3-0.6B student; a second-pass sanity check falsified both numbers before publication. The HumanEval delta was a truncation artifact (n_predict=512) that inverted to -8.0 points at n_predict=1024; the MCAS gain disappeared under apples-to-apples scoring. That falsification triggered three subsequent arcs. Across (1) SFT/DPO LoRA on three model families and two domains, (2) inference-time attention-head tempering on o_proj, and (3) a training-free frozen-base sidecar reading the final-token hidden state h_last, we find no operator that moves judge-measured disposition without damaging content or collapsing into stylistic mimicry. The failure is consistent across five models (Qwen3-0.6B, Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3.5-0.8B, Gemma 4 E2B, and SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct). A within-distribution cross-validation pass (AUC=0.683) collapsed to chance on fresh prompts (AUC=0.516). We contribute a three-arc negative result with mechanism, a two-failure-mode taxonomy for linear h_last probes, and an honest falsification pipeline that converts the class of false positives we ourselves produced into publishable negatives. As an independent finding, Gemma 4 E2B exhibits near-complete confidence-correctness decoupling on the Chef domain (assertion asymmetry -0.009; the model asserts at 91% regardless of correctness).

Existing LLM agent frameworks lack formal semantics: there is no principled way to determine whether an agent configuration is well-formed or will terminate. We present $λ_A$, a typed lambda calculus for agent composition that extends the simply-typed lambda calculus with oracle calls, bounded fixpoints (the ReAct loop), probabilistic choice, and mutable environments. We prove type safety, termination of bounded fixpoints, and soundness of derived lint rules, with full Coq mechanization (1,519 lines, 42 theorems, 0 Admitted). As a practical application, we derive a lint tool that detects structural configuration errors directly from the operational semantics. An evaluation on 835 real-world GitHub agent configurations shows that 94.1% are structurally incomplete under $λ_A$, with YAML-only lint precision at 54%, rising to 96--100% under joint YAML+Python AST analysis on 175 samples. This gap quantifies, for the first time, the degree of semantic entanglement between declarative configuration and imperative code in the agent ecosystem. We further show that five mainstream paradigms (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI SDK, Dify) embed as typed $λ_A$ fragments, establishing $λ_A$ as a unifying calculus for LLM agent composition.

Organizational knowledge used by AI agents typically lacks epistemic structure: retrieval systems surface semantically relevant content without distinguishing binding decisions from abandoned hypotheses, contested claims from settled ones, or known facts from unresolved questions. We argue that the ceiling on organizational AI is not retrieval fidelity but \emph{epistemic} fidelity--the system's ability to represent commitment strength, contradiction status, and organizational ignorance as computable properties. We present OIDA, a framework that structures organizational knowledge as typed Knowledge Objects carrying epistemic class, importance scores with class-specific decay, and signed contradiction edges. The Knowledge Gravity Engine maintains scores deterministically with proved convergence guarantees (sufficient condition: max degree $< 7$; empirically robust to degree 43). OIDA introduces QUESTION-as-modeled-ignorance: a primitive with inverse decay that surfaces what an organization does \emph{not} know with increasing urgency--a mechanism absent from all surveyed systems. We describe the Epistemic Quality Score (EQS), a five-component evaluation methodology with explicit circularity analysis. In a controlled comparison ($n{=}10$ response pairs), OIDA's RAG condition (3,868 tokens) achieves EQS 0.530 vs.\ 0.848 for a full-context baseline (108,687 tokens); the $28.1\times$ token budget difference is the primary confound. The QUESTION mechanism is statistically validated (Fisher $p{=}0.0325$, OR$=21.0$). The formal properties are established; the decisive ablation at equal token budget (E4) is pre-registered and not yet run.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for building general-purpose robotic agents. However, the VLA landscape remains highly fragmented and complex: as existing approaches vary substantially in architectures, training data, embodiment configurations, and benchmark-specific engineering. In this work, we introduce StarVLA-$α$, a simple yet strong baseline designed to study VLA design choices under controlled conditions. StarVLA-$α$ deliberately minimizes architectural and pipeline complexity to reduce experimental confounders and enable systematic analysis. Specifically, we re-evaluate several key design axes, including action modeling strategies, robot-specific pretraining, and interface engineering. Across unified multi-benchmark training on LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, and RoboCasa, the same simple baseline remains highly competitive, indicating that a strong VLM backbone combined with minimal design is already sufficient to achieve strong performance without relying on additional architectural complexity or engineering tricks. Notably, our single generalist model outperforms $π_{0.5}$ by 20\% on the public real-world RoboChallenge benchmark. We expect StarVLA-$α$ to serve as a solid starting point for future research in the VLA regime. Code will be released at https://github.com/starVLA/starVLA.

We study parallel test-time scaling for long-horizon agentic tasks such as agentic search and deep research, where multiple rollouts are generated in parallel and aggregated into a final response. While such scaling has proven effective for chain-of-thought reasoning, agentic tasks pose unique challenges: trajectories are long, multi-turn, and tool-augmented, and outputs are often open-ended. Aggregating only final answers discards rich information from trajectories, while concatenating all trajectories exceeds the model's context window. To address this, we propose AggAgent, an aggregation agent that treats parallel trajectories as an environment. We equip it with lightweight tools to inspect candidate solutions and search across trajectories, enabling it to navigate and synthesize information on demand. Across six benchmarks and three model families (GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5, MiniMax-M2.5), AggAgent outperforms all existing aggregation methods-by up to 5.3% absolute on average and 10.3% on two deep research tasks-while adding minimal overhead, as the aggregation cost remains bounded by a single agentic rollout. Our findings establish agentic aggregation as an effective and cost-efficient approach to parallel test-time scaling.

In Model Predictive Control (MPC), world models predict the future outcomes of various action proposals, which are then scored to guide the selection of the optimal action. For visuomotor MPC, the score function is a distance metric between a predicted image and a goal image, measured in the latent space of a pretrained vision encoder like DINO and JEPA. However, it is challenging to obtain the goal image in advance of the task execution, particularly in new environments. Additionally, conveying the goal through an image offers limited interactivity compared with natural language. In this work, we propose to learn a Grounded World Model (GWM) in a vision-language-aligned latent space. As a result, each proposed action is scored based on how close its future outcome is to the task instruction, reflected by the similarity of embeddings. This approach transforms the visuomotor MPC to a VLA that surpasses VLM-based VLAs in semantic generalization. On the proposed WISER benchmark, GWM-MPC achieves a 87% success rate on the test set comprising 288 tasks that feature unseen visual signals and referring expressions, yet remain solvable with motions demonstrated during training. In contrast, traditional VLAs achieve an average success rate of 22%, even though they overfit the training set with a 90% success rate.

Language change both reflects and shapes social processes, and the semantic evolution of foundational concepts provides a measurable trace of historical and social transformation. Despite recent advances in diachronic semantics and discourse analysis, existing computational approaches often (i) concentrate on a single concept or a single corpus, making findings difficult to compare across heterogeneous sources, and (ii) remain confined to surface lexical evidence, offering insufficient computational and interpretive granularity when concepts are expressed implicitly. We propose HistLens, a unified, SAE-based framework for multi-concept, multi-corpus conceptual-history analysis. The framework decomposes concept representations into interpretable features and tracks their activation dynamics over time and across sources, yielding comparable conceptual trajectories within a shared coordinate system. Experiments on long-span press corpora show that HistLens supports cross-concept, cross-corpus computation of patterns of idea evolution and enables implicit concept computation. By bridging conceptual modeling with interpretive needs, HistLens broadens the analytical perspectives and methodological repertoire available to social science and the humanities for diachronic text analysis.

Continuous diffusion has been the foundation of high-fidelity, controllable, and few-step generation of many data modalities such as images. However, in language modeling, prior continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) lag behind discrete counterparts due to the sparse data space and the underexplored design space. In this work, we close this gap with LangFlow, the first continuous DLM to rival discrete diffusion, by connecting embedding-space DLMs to Flow Matching via Bregman divergence, alongside three key innovations: (1) we derive a novel ODE-based NLL bound for principled evaluation of continuous flow-based language models; (2) we propose an information-uniform principle for setting the noise schedule, which motivates a learnable noise scheduler based on a Gumbel distribution; and (3) we revise prior training protocols by incorporating self-conditioning, as we find it improves both likelihood and sample quality of embedding-space DLMs with effects substantially different from discrete diffusion. Putting everything together, LangFlow rivals top discrete DLMs on both the perplexity (PPL) and the generative perplexity (Gen. PPL), reaching a PPL of 30.0 on LM1B and 24.6 on OpenWebText. It even exceeds autoregressive baselines in zero-shot transfer on 4 out of 7 benchmarks. LangFlow provides the first clear evidence that continuous diffusion is a promising paradigm for language modeling. Homepage: https://github.com/nealchen2003/LangFlow

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization term, imposing structure on the latent space and thereby enabling the model to exhibit generative capabilities. In this work, we present a detailed derivation of the closed-form expression for the KL divergence between Gaussian distributions, a case of particular importance in practical VAE implementations. Starting from the general definition for continuous random variables, we derive the expression for the univariate case and extend it to the multivariate setting under the assumption of diagonal covariance. Finally, we discuss the interpretation of each term in the resulting expression and its impact on the training dynamics of the model.

Large language models (LLMs) produce responses rated as highly empathic in single-turn settings (Ayers et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2024), yet they are also known to be formulaic generators that reuse the same lexical patterns, syntactic templates, and discourse structures across tasks (Jiang et al., 2025; Shaib et al., 2024; Namuduri et al., 2025). Less attention has been paid to whether this formulaicity extends to the level of discourse moves, i.e., what a response does for the person it is addressing. This question is especially consequential for empathic dialogue, where effective support demands not just a kind response at one moment but varied strategies as a conversation unfolds (Stiles et al., 1998). Indeed, prior work shows that LLMs reuse the same tactic sequences more than human supporters in single-turn settings (Gueorguieva et al., 2026). We extend this analysis to multi-turn conversations and find that the rigidity compounds: once a tactic appears in a supporter turn, LLMs reuse it in the next at nearly double the rate of humans (0.50-0.56 vs. 0.27). This pattern holds across LLMs serving as supporters in real emotional support conversations, and is invisible to standard similarity metrics. To address this gap, we introduce MINT (Multi-turn Inter-tactic Novelty Training), the first reinforcement learning framework to optimize discourse move diversity across multi-turn empathic dialogue. The best MINT variant combines an empathy quality reward with a cross-turn tactic novelty signal, improving aggregate empathy by 25.3% over vanilla across 1.7B and 4B models while reducing cross-turn discourse move repetition by 26.3% on the 4B model, surpassing all baselines including quality-only and token-level diversity methods on both measures. These results suggest that what current models lack is not empathy itself, but the ability to vary their discourse moves across a conversation.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in perceptual tasks, yet they degrade in complex multi-hop reasoning under multiplayer game settings with imperfect and deceptive information. In this paper, we study a representative multiplayer task, Murder Mystery Games, which require inferring hidden truths based on partial clues provided by roles with different intentions. To address this challenge, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework for evaluating and synthesizing high-quality, role-driven multiplayer game scripts, enabling fine-grained interaction patterns tailored to character identities (i.e., murderer vs. innocent). Our system generates rich multimodal contexts, including character backstories, visual and textual clues, and multi-hop reasoning chains, through coordinated agent interactions. We design a two-stage agent-monitored training strategy to enhance the reasoning ability of VLMs: (1) chain-of-thought based fine-tuning on curated and synthetic datasets that model uncertainty and deception; (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning with agent-monitored reward shaping, encouraging the model to develop character-specific reasoning behaviors and effective multimodal multi-hop inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly boosts the performance of VLMs in narrative reasoning, hidden fact extraction, and deception-resilient understanding. Our contributions offer a scalable solution for training and evaluating VLMs under uncertain, adversarial, and socially complex conditions, laying the groundwork for future benchmarks in multimodal multi-hop reasoning under imperfect information.

Closed-loop cooperative driving requires planners that generate realistic multimodal multi-agent trajectories while improving safety and traffic efficiency. Existing diffusion planners can model multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, but they often exhibit weak scene consistency and remain poorly aligned with closed-loop objectives; meanwhile, stable online post-training in reactive multi-agent environments remains difficult. We present Multi-ORFT, which couples scene-conditioned diffusion pre-training with stable online reinforcement post-training. In pre-training, the planner uses inter-agent self-attention, cross-attention, and AdaLN-Zero-based scene conditioning to improve scene consistency and road adherence of joint trajectories. In post-training, we formulate a two-level MDP that exposes step-wise reverse-kernel likelihoods for online optimization, and combine dense trajectory-level rewards with variance-gated group-relative policy optimization (VG-GRPO) to stabilize training. On the WOMD closed-loop benchmark, Multi-ORFT reduces collision rate from 2.04% to 1.89% and off-road rate from 1.68% to 1.36%, while increasing average speed from 8.36 to 8.61 m/s relative to the pre-trained planner, and it outperforms strong open-source baselines including SMART-large, SMART-tiny-CLSFT, and VBD on the primary safety and efficiency metrics. These results show that coupling scene-consistent denoising with stable online diffusion-policy optimization improves the reliability of closed-loop cooperative driving.

We study routing games in which travelers optimize over routes that are remembered or surfaced, rather than over a fixed exogenous action set. The paper develops a tractable design theory for endogenous recall and then connects it back to an explicit finite-memory micro model. At the micro level, each traveler carries a finite memory state, receives surfaced alternatives, chooses via a logit rule, and updates memory under a policy such as LRU. This yields a stationary Forgetful Wardrop Equilibrium (FWE); existence is proved under mild regularity, and uniqueness follows in a contraction regime for the reduced fixed-point map. The paper's main design layer is a stationary salience model that summarizes persistent memory and interface effects as route-specific weights. Salience-weighted stochastic user equilibrium is the unique minimizer of a strictly convex potential, which yields a clean optimization and implementability theory. In this layer we characterize governed implementability under ratio budgets and affine tying constraints, and derive constructive algorithms on parallel and series-parallel networks. The bridge between layers is exact for last-choice memory (B=1): the micro model is then equivalent to the salience model, so any interior salience vector can be realized by an appropriate surfacing policy. For larger memories, we develop an explicit LRU-to-TTL-to-salience approximation pipeline and add contraction-based bounds that translate surrogate-map error into fixed-point and welfare error. Finally, we define a Recall Braess Paradox, in which improving recall increases equilibrium delay without changing physical capacity, and show that it can arise on every two-terminal network with at least two distinct s-t paths. Targeted experiments support the approximation regime, governed-design predictions, and the computational advantages of the reduced layer.

Using behavioural science, health interventions focus on behaviour change by providing a framework to help patients acquire and maintain healthy habits that improve medical outcomes. In-person interventions are costly and difficult to scale, especially in resource-limited regions. Digital health interventions offer a cost-effective approach, potentially supporting independent living and self-management. Automating such interventions, especially through machine learning, has gained considerable attention recently. Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) play a primary role for individuals to delay, avoid, or abandon health interventions. A/H are subtle and conflicting emotions that place a person in a state between positive and negative evaluations of a behaviour, or between acceptance and refusal to engage in it. They manifest as affective inconsistency across modalities or within a modality, such as language, facial, vocal expressions, and body language. While experts can be trained to recognize A/H, integrating them into digital health interventions is costly and less effective. Automatic A/H recognition is therefore critical for the personalization and cost-effectiveness of digital health interventions. Here, we explore the application of deep learning models for A/H recognition in videos, a multi-modal task by nature. In particular, this paper covers three learning setups: supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation for personalization, and zero-shot inference via large language models (LLMs). Our experiments are conducted on the unique and recently published BAH video dataset for A/H recognition. Our results show limited performance, suggesting that more adapted multi-modal models are required for accurate A/H recognition. Better methods for modeling spatio-temporal and multimodal fusion are necessary to leverage conflicts within/across modalities.

General first-order methods (GFOM) are a flexible class of iterative algorithms which update a state vector by matrix-vector multiplications and entrywise nonlinearities. A long line of work has sought to understand the large-n dynamics of GFOM, mostly focusing on "very random" input matrices and the approximate message passing (AMP) special case of GFOM whose state is asymptotically Gaussian. Yet, it has long remained unknown how to construct iterative algorithms that retain this Gaussianity for more structured inputs, or why existing AMP algorithms can be as effective for some deterministic matrices as they are for random matrices. We analyze diagrammatic expansions of GFOM via the limiting traffic distribution of the input matrix, the collection of all limiting values of permutation-invariant polynomials in the matrix entries, to obtain the following results: 1. We calculate the traffic distribution for the first non-trivial deterministic matrices, including (minor variants of) the Walsh-Hadamard and discrete sine and cosine transform matrices. This determines the limiting dynamics of GFOM on these inputs, resolving parts of longstanding conjectures of Marinari, Parisi, and Ritort (1994). 2. We design a new AMP iteration which unifies several previous AMP variants and generalizes to new input types, whose limiting dynamics are Gaussian conditional on some latent random variables. The asymptotic dynamics hold for a large and natural class of traffic distributions (encompassing both random and deterministic input matrices) and the algorithm's analysis gives a simple combinatorial interpretation of the Onsager correction, answering questions posed recently by Wang, Zhong, and Fan (2022).

Governing common-pool resources requires agents to develop enduring strategies through cooperation and self-governance to avoid collective failure. While foundation models have shown potential for cooperation in these settings, existing multi-agent research provides little insight into whether structured leadership and election mechanisms can improve collective decision making. The lack of such a critical organizational feature ubiquitous in human society presents a significant shortcoming of the current methods. In this work we aim to directly address whether leadership and elections can support improved social welfare and cooperation through multi-agent simulation with LLMs. We present our open-source framework that simulates leadership through elected personas and candidate-driven agendas and carry out an empirical study of LLMs under controlled governance conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that having elected leadership improves social welfare scores by 55.4% and survival time by 128.6% across a range of high performing LLMs. Through the construction of an agent social graph we compute centrality metrics to assess the social influence of leader personas and also analyze rhetorical and cooperative tendencies revealed through a sentiment analysis on leader utterances. This work lays the foundation for further study of election mechanisms in multi-agent systems toward navigating complex social dilemmas.

The proliferation of autoregressive (AR) image generators demands reliable detection and attribution of their outputs to mitigate misinformation, and to filter synthetic images from training data to prevent model collapse. To address this need, watermarking techniques, specifically designed for AR models, embed a subtle signal at generation time, enabling downstream verification through a corresponding watermark detector. In this work, we study these schemes and demonstrate their vulnerability to both watermark removal and forgery attacks. We assess existing attacks and further introduce three new attacks: (i) a vector-quantized regeneration removal attack, (ii) adversarial optimization-based attack, and (iii) a frequency injection attack. Our evaluation reveals that removal and forgery attacks can be effective with access to a single watermarked reference image and without access to original model parameters or watermarking secrets. Our findings indicate that existing watermarking schemes for AR image generation do not reliably support synthetic content detection for dataset filtering. Moreover, they enable Watermark Mimicry, whereby authentic images can be manipulated to imitate a generator's watermark and trigger false detection to prevent their inclusion in future model training.

Prior representative ReAct-style approaches in autonomous Software Engineering (SWE) typically lack the explicit System-2 reasoning required for deep analysis and handling complex edge cases. While recent reasoning models demonstrate the potential of extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT), applying them to the multi-turn SWE task creates a fundamental dilemma: retaining full reasoning history leads to context explosion and ``Lost-in-the-Middle'' degradation, while discarding it would force the agent to redundantly re-reason at every step. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-AGILE, a novel software agent framework designed to bridge the gap between reasoning depth, efficiency, and context constraints. SWE-AGILE introduces a Dynamic Reasoning Context strategy, maintaining a ``sliding window'' of detailed reasoning for immediate continuity to prevent redundant re-analyzing, while compressing historical reasoning content into concise Reasoning Digests. Empirically, SWE-AGILE sets a new standard for 7B-8B models on SWE-Bench-Verified using only 2.2k trajectories and 896 tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/KDEGroup/SWE-AGILE.

Accurate and rapid structural damage assessment (SDA) is crucial for post-disaster management, helping responders prioritise resources, plan rescues, and support recovery. Traditional field inspections, though precise, are limited by accessibility, safety risks, and time constraints, especially after large explosions. Machine learning with remote sensing has emerged as a scalable solution for rapid SDA, with Mamba-based networks achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods often require extensive training and large datasets, limiting real-world applicability. Moreover, they fail to incorporate key physical characteristics of blast loading for SDA. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Mamba-based multimodal network for rapid SDA that integrates multi-scale blast-loading information with optical remote sensing images. Evaluated on the 2020 Beirut explosion, our method significantly improves performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/IMPACTSquad/Blast-Mamba

Open-source software for cyber-physical systems (CPS) often lacks robust testing involving robotic platforms, resulting in critical errors that remain undetected. This is especially challenging when multiple modules of CPS software are developed by various open-source contributors. To address this gap, we propose Automated CPS Testing (ACT) that performs automated, continuous testing of open-source software with its robotic platforms, integrated with the open-source infrastructure such as GitHub. We implement an ACT prototype and conduct a case study on an open-source CPS with an educational robotic platform to demonstrate its capabilities.

Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), are increasingly used for human-in-the-loop (HITL) cyber-physical systems (CPS) because foundation model-based AI agents can potentially interact with both the physical environments and human users. However, the unpredictable behavior of human users and AI agents, in addition to the dynamically changing physical environments, leads to uncontrollable nondeterminism. To address this urgent challenge of enabling agentic AI-powered HITL CPS, we propose a reactor-model-of-computation (MoC)-based approach, realized by the open-source Lingua Franca (LF) framework. We also carry out a concrete case study using the agentic driving coach as an application of HITL CPS. By evaluating the LF-based agentic HITL CPS, we identify practical challenges in reintroducing determinism into such agentic HITL CPS and present pathways to address them.

Deep Neural Networks are highly susceptible to shortcut learning, frequently memorizing low-dimensional spurious correlations instead of underlying causal mechanisms. This phenomenon not only degrades out-of-distribution robustness but also induces severe demographic biases in sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a geometric \textit{a priori} methodology to mitigate shortcut learning. By deploying a zero-hidden-layer ($N=1$) Topological Auditor, we mathematically isolate features that monopolize the gradient without human intervention. We empirically demonstrate a Capacity Phase Transition: once linear shortcuts are pruned, networks are forced to utilize higher geometric capacity ($N \geq 16$) to curve the decision boundary and learn ethical representations. Our approach outperforms L1 Regularization -- which collapses into demographic bias -- and operates at a fraction of the computational cost of post-hoc methods like Just Train Twice (JTT), successfully reducing counterfactual gender vulnerability from 21.18\% to 7.66\%.

People experiencing homelessness (PEH) face substantial barriers to accessing timely, accurate information about community services. DreamKG addresses this through a knowledge graph-augmented conversational system that grounds responses in verified, up-to-date data about Philadelphia organizations, services, locations, and hours. Unlike standard large language models (LLMs) prone to hallucinations, DreamKG combines Neo4j knowledge graphs with structured query understanding to handle location-aware and time-sensitive queries reliably. The system performs spatial reasoning for distance-based recommendations and temporal filtering for operating hours. Preliminary evaluation shows 59% superiority over Google Search AI on relevant queries and 84% rejection of irrelevant queries. This demonstration highlights the potential of hybrid architectures that combines LLM flexibility with knowledge graph reliability to improve service accessibility for vulnerable populations effectively.

This work aims to improve the generalization of logic-based legal reasoning systems by integrating recent advances in NLP with legal-domain adaptive few-shot learning techniques using LLMs. Existing logic-based legal reasoning pipelines typically rely on fine-tuned models to map natural-language legal cases into logical formulas before forwarding them to a symbolic reasoner. However, such approaches are heavily constrained by the scarcity of high-quality annotated training data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel LLM-based legal reasoning framework that enables effective in-context learning through retrieval-augmented generation. Specifically, we introduce Legal2LogicICL, a few-shot retrieval framework that balances diversity and similarity of exemplars at both the latent semantic representation level and the legal text structure level. In addition, our method explicitly accounts for legal structure by mitigating entity-induced retrieval bias in legal texts, where lengthy and highly specific entity mentions often dominate semantic representations and obscure legally meaningful reasoning patterns. Our Legal2LogicICL constructs informative and robust few-shot demonstrations, leading to accurate and stable logical rule generation without requiring additional training. In addition, we construct a new dataset, named Legal2Proleg, which is annotated with alignments between legal cases and PROLEG logical formulas to support the evaluation of legal semantic parsing. Experimental results on both open-source and proprietary LLMs demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy, stability, and generalization in transforming natural-language legal case descriptions into logical representations, highlighting its effectiveness for interpretable and reliable legal reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/yingjie7/Legal2LogicICL.

AI-generated text has become common in academic and professional writing, prompting research into detection methods. Less studied is the reverse: systematically rewriting AI-generated prose to read as genuinely human-authored. We build a parallel corpus of 25,140 paired AI-input and human-reference text chunks, identify 11 measurable stylistic markers separating the two registers, and fine-tune three models: BART-base, BART-large, and Mistral-7B-Instruct with QLoRA. BART-large achieves the highest reference similarity -- BERTScore F1 of 0.924, ROUGE-L of 0.566, and chrF++ of 55.92 -- with 17x fewer parameters than Mistral-7B. We show that Mistral-7B's higher marker shift score reflects overshoot rather than accuracy, and argue that shift accuracy is a meaningful blind spot in current style transfer evaluation.

From production to consumption, ensuring food quality and traceability depends on reliable monitoring of environmental conditions across the supply chain. Ambient sensing devices can collect relevant data such as temperature and humidity, but ensuring its integrity among stakeholders remains a challenge. This work presents AmBox, a system that enables device-to-blockchain ambient sensing for food traceability. AmBox connects sensors to a blockchain, ensuring secure, verifiable, and tamper-resistant data collection with minimal intermediaries. It manages sensor commissioning and operation with the adequate business context. AmBox can operate with standalone nodes or within a distributed node-mote architecture, allowing flexible deployment at different points along the supply chain. A prototype using Raspberry Pi and ESP32 hardware can record sensor data directly on Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results show that AmBox provides timely and reliable data that can increase transparency and trust between the supply chain stakeholders.

Simulation-based data generation has become a dominant paradigm for training robotic manipulation policies, yet existing platforms do not incorporate object affordance information into trajectory generation. As a result, tasks requiring precise interaction with specific functional regions--grasping a mug by its handle, pouring from a cup's rim, or hanging a mug on a hook--cannot be automatically generated with semantically correct trajectories. We introduce AffordSim, the first simulation framework that integrates open-vocabulary 3D affordance prediction into the manipulation data generation pipeline. AffordSim uses our VoxAfford model, an open-vocabulary 3D affordance detector that enhances MLLM output tokens with multi-scale geometric features, to predict affordance maps on object point clouds, guiding grasp pose estimation toward task-relevant functional regions. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim with cross-embodiment support (Franka FR3, Panda, UR5e, Kinova), VLM-powered task generation, and novel domain randomization using DA3-based 3D Gaussian reconstruction from real photographs, AffordSim enables automated, scalable generation of affordance-aware manipulation data. We establish a benchmark of 50 tasks across 7 categories (grasping, placing, stacking, pushing/pulling, pouring, mug hanging, long-horizon composite) and evaluate 4 imitation learning baselines (BC, Diffusion Policy, ACT, Pi 0.5). Our results reveal that while grasping is largely solved (53-93% success), affordance-demanding tasks such as pouring into narrow containers (1-43%) and mug hanging (0-47%) remain significantly more challenging for current imitation learning methods, highlighting the need for affordance-aware data generation. Zero-shot sim-to-real experiments on a real Franka FR3 validate the transferability of the generated data.

Heterogeneous network data with rich nodal information become increasingly prevalent across multidisciplinary research, yet accurately modeling complex nodal heterogeneity and simultaneously selecting influential nodal attributes remains an open challenge. This problem is central to many applications in economics and sociology, when both nodal heterogeneity and high-dimensional individual characteristics highly affect network formation. We propose a statistically grounded, unified deep neural network approach for modeling nodal heterogeneity in random networks with high-dimensional nodal attributes, namely ``NetworkNet''. A key innovation of NetworkNet lies in a tailored neural architecture that explicitly parameterizes attribute-driven heterogeneity, and at the same time, embeds a scalable attribute selection mechanism. NetworkNet consistently estimates two types of latent heterogeneity functions, i.e., nodal expansiveness and popularity, while simultaneously performing data-driven attribute selection to extract influential nodal attributes. By unifying classical statistical network modeling with deep learning, NetworkNet delivers the expressive power of DNNs with methodological interpretability, algorithmic scalability, and statistical rigor with a non-asymptotic approximation error bound. Empirically, simulations demonstrate strong performance in both heterogeneity estimation and high-dimensional attribute selection. We further apply NetworkNet to a large-scale author-citation network among statisticians, revealing new insights into the dynamic evolution of research fields and scholarly impact.

Software engineering practices for validating autonomous cyber-physical systems (e.g., Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles) remain fragmented across scenario design, simulation execution, and telemetry analysis, limiting traceability between requirements, tests, and evidence. This fragmentation reduces reproducibility, slows debugging and iteration, and hinders systematic assurance under complex and evolving environmental conditions. We present AutonomyLens, an LLM-driven framework that integrates scenario specification, simulation execution, and telemetry analysis into a unified validation workflow. AutonomyLens enables developers to translate high-level validation intent into executable, temporally evolving scenarios, automatically run simulations, and perform context-aware analysis of resulting system behavior. The framework introduces (i) a structured representation for mission-level scenarios, (ii) an automated execution pipeline, (iii) analysis mechanisms that align telemetry with scenario context to produce actionable insights, and (iv) counterfactual scenario generation that closes the loop by refining and synthesizing new test cases from observed failures. We describe the early-stage design of AutonomyLens, discuss key challenges in building integrated validation workflows for autonomous systems, and outline how such an approach can improve traceability, reproducibility, and scalability in autonomy validation.

Serverless providers strive for high resource utilization by optimizing deployment density: how many applications can be deployed per host server. However, achieving high deployment density without compromising application performance or isolation remains an open challenge. High density can be achieved by sharing components across applications, yet applications from different tenants must be strongly isolated from each other due to the risk of side-channel attacks. Sharing components across applications from the same tenant, if done naively, can introduce contention on host resources thus negatively affecting application performance. We describe Nanvix, a new multikernel OS that disaggregates ephemeral execution state, unique per application invocation, from long-lived persistent state, shared among invocations from the same tenant. Applications in Nanvix execute inside a lightweight user VM running a micro-kernel that implements threads and memory, and forwards all I/O requests to a system VM. The system VM runs a macro-kernel with a rich set of device drivers and is shared among all invocations from the same tenant. Nanvix' split design achieves strong hypervisor isolation across tenants without sacrificing application performance, and reduces same-tenant contention by multiplexing all I/O requests to the system VM. Thanks to a system-wide co-design, Nanvix achieves order-of-magnitude lower application start up times with moderate I/O overheads. When replaying a production trace, Nanvix needs 20-100x fewer host servers compared to state-of-the-art systems, improving deployment density

As large language models (LLMs) become the engine behind conversational systems, their ability to reason about the intentions and states of their dialogue partners (i.e., form and use a theory-of-mind, or ToM) becomes increasingly critical for safe interaction with potentially adversarial partners. We propose a novel privacy-themed ToM challenge, ToM for Steering Beliefs (ToM-SB), in which a defender must act as a Double Agent to steer the beliefs of an attacker with partial prior knowledge within a shared universe. To succeed on ToM-SB, the defender must engage with and form a ToM of the attacker, with a goal of fooling the attacker into believing they have succeeded in extracting sensitive information. We find that strong frontier models like Gemini3-Pro and GPT-5.4 struggle on ToM-SB, often failing to fool attackers in hard scenarios with partial attacker prior knowledge, even when prompted to reason about the attacker's beliefs (ToM prompting). To close this gap, we train models on ToM-SB to act as AI Double Agents using reinforcement learning, testing both fooling and ToM rewards. Notably, we find a bidirectionally emergent relationship between ToM and attacker-fooling: rewarding fooling success alone improves ToM, and rewarding ToM alone improves fooling. Across four attackers with different strengths, six defender methods, and both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation, we find that gains in ToM and attacker-fooling are well-correlated, highlighting belief modeling as a key driver of success on ToM-SB. AI Double Agents that combine both ToM and fooling rewards yield the strongest fooling and ToM performance, outperforming Gemini3-Pro and GPT-5.4 with ToM prompting on hard scenarios. We also show that ToM-SB and AI Double Agents can be extended to stronger attackers, demonstrating generalization to OOD settings and the upgradability of our task.

This paper reports an unexpected finding: in a deterministic hyperdimensional computing (HDC) architecture based on Galois-field algebra, a path-dependent semantic selection mechanism emerges, equivalent to spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), with magnitude predictable a priori by a closed-form expression matching large-scale measurements. This addresses limitations of modern AI including catastrophic forgetting, learning stagnation, and the Binding Problem at an algebraic level. We propose VaCoAl (Vague Coincident Algorithm) and its Python implementation PyVaCoAl, combining ultra-high-dimensional memory with deterministic logic. Rooted in Sparse Distributed Memory, it resolves orthogonalisation and retrieval in high-dimensional binary spaces via Galois-field diffusion, enabling low-load deployment. VaCoAl is a memory-centric architecture prioritising retrieval and association, enabling reversible composition while preserving element independence and supporting compositional generalisation with a transparent reliability metric (CR score). We evaluated multi-hop reasoning on about 470k mentor-student relations from Wikidata, tracing up to 57 generations (over 25.5M paths). Using HDC bundling and unbinding with CR-based denoising, we quantify concept propagation over DAGs. Results show a reinterpretation of the Newton-Leibniz dispute and a phase transition from sparse convergence to a post-Leibniz "superhighway", from which structural indicators emerge supporting a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Collision-tolerance mechanisms further induce path-based pruning that favors direct paths, yielding emergent semantic selection equivalent to STDP. VaCoAl thus defines a third paradigm, HDC-AI, complementing LLMs with reversible multi-hop reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to generate harmful content. However, the underlying causes of such behavior remain under explored. We propose a causal mediation analysis-based approach to identify the causal factors responsible for harmful generation. Our method performs a multi-granular analysis across model layers, modules (MLP and attention blocks), and individual neurons. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs indicate that harmful generation arises in the later layers of the model, results primarily from failures in MLP blocks rather than attention blocks, and is associated with neurons that act as a gating mechanism for harmful generation. The results indicate that the early layers in the model are used for a contextual understanding of harmfulness in a prompt, which is then propagated through the model, to generate harmfulness in the late layers, as well as a signal indicating harmfulness through MLP blocks. This is then further propagated to the last layer of the model, specifically to a sparse set of neurons, which receives the signal and determines the generation of harmful content accordingly.

Recent work has shown that the hidden states of large language models contain signals useful for uncertainty estimation and hallucination detection, motivating a growing interest in efficient probe-based approaches. Yet it remains unclear how robust existing methods are, and which probe designs provide uncertainty estimates that are reliable under distribution shift. We present a systematic study of supervised uncertainty probes across models, tasks, and OOD settings, training over 2,000 probes while varying the representation layer, feature type, and token aggregation strategy. Our evaluation highlights poor robustness in current methods, particularly in the case of long-form generations. We also find that probe robustness is driven less by architecture and more by the probe inputs. Middle-layer representations generalise more reliably than final-layer hidden states, and aggregating across response tokens is consistently more robust than relying on single-token features. These differences are often largely invisible in-distribution but become more important under distribution shift. Informed by our evaluation, we explore a simple hybrid back-off strategy for improving robustness, arguing that better evaluation is a prerequisite for building more robust probes.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention as a promising approach to accelerate scientific discovery. However, their application in open-ended scientific domains such as biology remains limited, primarily due to the lack of factually grounded and actionable explanations. To address this, we introduce a structured explanation formalism for virtual cells that represents biological reasoning as mechanistic action graphs, enabling systematic verification and falsification. Building upon this, we propose VCR-Agent, a multi-agent framework that integrates biologically grounded knowledge retrieval with a verifier-based filtering approach to generate and validate mechanistic reasoning autonomously. Using this framework, we release VC-TRACES dataset, which consists of verified mechanistic explanations derived from the Tahoe-100M atlas. Empirically, we demonstrate that training with these explanations improves factual precision and provides a more effective supervision signal for downstream gene expression prediction. These results underscore the importance of reliable mechanistic reasoning for virtual cells, achieved through the synergy of multi-agent and rigorous verification.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has recently attracted significant attention as both a cryptographic primitive and a systems challenge. Given the latest advances in accelerated computing, FHE presents a promising opportunity for progress, with applications ranging from machine learning to information security. We target the most computationally intensive operation in deep neural networks from a hardware perspective, matrix multiplication (matmul), and adapt it for execution on AMD GPUs. We propose a new optimized method that improves the runtime and complexity of ciphertext matmul by using FIDESlib, a recent open-source FHE library designed specifically for GPUs. By exploiting sparsity in both operands, our sparse matmul implementation outperforms its CPU counterpart by up to $3.0\times$ and reduces the time complexity from cubic to semi-linear, demonstrating an improvement over existing FHE matmul implementations.

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive systems has enabled the creation of dynamic, open-ended Role-Playing Agents (RPAs). However, evaluating these agents remains a significant challenge, as standard NLP metrics fail to capture the nuances of role adherence, logical consistency, and long-term narrative stability. This paper introduces RPA-Check, a multi-stage automated evaluation framework designed to objectively assess the performance of LLM-based RPAs in complex, constraints-heavy environments. Our methodology is based on a four-step pipeline: (1) Dimension Definition, establishing high-level qualitative behavioral criteria; (2) Augmentation, where these requirements are expanded into granular boolean checklist indicators; (3) Semantic Filtering, to ensure indicator objectivity, no redundancy and agent isolation; and (4) LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation, which employs chain-of-thought verification to score agent fidelity. We validate this framework by applying it to LLM Court, a serious game for forensic training involving several quantized local models. Experimental results across five distinct legal scenarios demonstrate the framework's ability to identify subtle trade-offs between model size, reasoning depth, and operational stability. Notably, the findings reveal an inverse relationship between parametric scale and procedural consistency, showing that smaller, adequately instruction-tuned models (8-9B) can outperform larger architectures prone to user-alignment bias or sycophancy. RPA-Check thus provides a standardized and reproducible metric for future research in generative agent evaluation within specialized domains.

Large language models (LLMs) often demonstrate strong safety performance in high-resource languages, yet exhibit severe vulnerabilities when queried in low-resource languages. We attribute this gap to a mismatch between language-agnostic semantic understanding ability and language-dominant safety alignment biased toward high-resource languages. Consistent with this hypothesis, we empirically identify the semantic bottleneck in LLMs, an intermediate layer in which the geometry of model representations is governed primarily by shared semantic content rather than language identity. Building on this observation, we propose Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment (LASA), which anchors safety alignment directly in semantic bottlenecks. Experiments show that LASA substantially improves safety across all languages: average attack success rate (ASR) drops from 24.7% to 2.8% on LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and remains around 3-4% across Qwen2.5 and Qwen3 Instruct models (7B-32B). Together, our analysis and method offer a representation-level perspective on LLM safety, suggesting that safety alignment requires anchoring safety understanding not in surface text, but in the model's language-agnostic semantic space.

Code agents are advancing rapidly, but debugging them is becoming increasingly difficult. As frameworks orchestrate parallel tool calls and multi-stage workflows over complex tasks, making the agent's state transitions and error propagation hard to observe. In these runs, an early misstep can trap the agent in unproductive loops or even cascade into fundamental errors, forming hidden error chains that make it hard to tell when the agent goes off track and why. Existing agent tracing analyses either focus on simple interaction or rely on small-scale manual inspection, which limits their scalability and usefulness for real coding workflows. We present CodeTracer, a tracing architecture that parses heterogeneous run artifacts through evolving extractors, reconstructs the full state transition history as a hierarchical trace tree with persistent memory, and performs failure onset localization to pinpoint the failure origin and its downstream chain. To enable systematic evaluation, we construct CodeTraceBench from a large collection of executed trajectories generated by four widely used code agent frameworks on diverse code tasks (e.g., bug fixing, refactoring, and terminal interaction), with supervision at both the stage and step levels for failure localization. Experiments show that CodeTracer substantially outperforms direct prompting and lightweight baselines, and that replaying its diagnostic signals consistently recovers originally failed runs under matched budgets. Our code and data are publicly available.

Modern automatic differentiation frameworks (JAX, PyTorch) return the Hessian of the loss function as a monolithic tensor, without exposing the internal structure of inter-layer interactions. This paper presents an analytical formalism that explicitly decomposes the full Hessian into blocks indexed by the DAG of an arbitrary architecture. The canonical decomposition $H = H^{GN} + H^T$ separates the Gauss--Newton component (convex part) from the tensor component (residual curvature responsible for saddle points). For piecewise-linear activations (ReLU), the tensor component of the input Hessian vanishes ($H^{T}_{v,w}\!\equiv\!0$ a.e., $H^f_{v,w}\!=\!H^{GN}_{v,w}\!\succeq\!0$); the full parametric Hessian contains residual terms that do not reduce to the GGN. Building on this decomposition, we introduce diagnostic metrics (inter-layer resonance~$\mathcal{R}$, geometric coupling~$\mathcal{C}$, stable rank~$\mathcal{D}$, GN-Gap) that are estimated stochastically in $O(P)$ time and reveal structural curvature interactions between layers. The theoretical analysis explains exponential decay of resonance in vanilla networks and its preservation under skip connections; empirical validation spans fully connected MLPs (Exp.\,1--5) and convolutional architectures (ResNet-18, ${\sim}11$M~parameters, Exp.\,6). When the architecture reduces to a single node, all definitions collapse to the standard Hessian $\nabla^2_θ\mathcal{L}(θ)\in\mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$.

We introduce CARTBENCH, a museum-grounded benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Chinese artworks beyond short-form recognition and QA. CARTBENCH comprises four subtasks: CURATORQA for evidence-grounded recognition and reasoning, CATALOGCAPTION for structured four-section expert-style appreciation, REINTERPRET for defensible reinterpretation with expert ratings, and CONNOISSEURPAIRS for diagnostic authenticity discrimination under visually similar confounds. CARTBENCH is built by aligning image-bearing Palace Museum objects from Wikidata with authoritative catalog pages, spanning five art categories across multiple dynasties. Across nine representative VLMs, we find that high overall CURATORQA accuracy can mask sharp drops on hard evidence linking and style-to-period inference; long-form appreciation remains far from expert references; and authenticity-oriented diagnostic discrimination stays near chance, underscoring the difficulty of connoisseur-level reasoning for current models.

Existing conversational memory systems rely on complex hierarchical summarization or reinforcement learning to manage long-term dialogue history, yet remain vulnerable to context dilution as conversations grow. In this work, we offer a different perspective: the primary bottleneck may lie not in memory architecture, but in the \textit{Signal Sparsity Effect} within the latent knowledge manifold. Through controlled experiments, we identify two key phenomena: \textit{Decisive Evidence Sparsity}, where relevant signals become increasingly isolated with longer sessions, leading to sharp degradation in aggregation-based methods; and \textit{Dual-Level Redundancy}, where both inter-session interference and intra-session conversational filler introduce large amounts of non-informative content, hindering effective generation. Motivated by these insights, we propose \method, a minimalist framework that brings conversational memory back to basics, relying solely on retrieval and generation via Turn Isolation Retrieval (TIR) and Query-Driven Pruning (QDP). TIR replaces global aggregation with a max-activation strategy to capture turn-level signals, while QDP removes redundant sessions and conversational filler to construct a compact, high-density evidence set. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that \method achieves robust performance across diverse settings, consistently outperforming strong baselines while maintaining high efficiency in tokens and latency, establishing a new minimalist baseline for conversational memory.

Most reward models for visual generation reduce rich human judgments to a single unexplained score, discarding the reasoning that underlies preference. We show that teaching reward models to produce explicit, multi-dimensional critiques before scoring transforms them from passive evaluators into active optimization tools, improving generators in two complementary ways: at training time, structured rationales provide interpretable, fine-grained rewards for reinforcement learning; at test time, a Generate-Critique-Refine loop turns critiques into targeted prompt revisions that improve outputs without any parameter updates. To train such a reward model without costly rationale annotations, we introduce Preference-Anchored Rationalization (PARROT), a principled framework that recovers high-quality rationales from readily available preference data through anchored generation, consistency filtering, and distillation. The resulting model, RationalRewards (8B), achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction among open-source reward models, competitive with Gemini-2.5-Pro, while using 10-20x less training data than comparable baselines. As an RL reward, it consistently improves text-to-image and image-editing generators beyond scalar alternatives. Most strikingly, its test-time critique-and-refine loop matches or exceeds RL-based fine-tuning on several benchmarks, suggesting that structured reasoning can unlock latent capabilities in existing generators that suboptimal prompts fail to elicit.

Neural operators have emerged as powerful surrogates for partial differential equation (PDE) solvers, yet they are typically trained as monolithic models for individual PDEs, require energy-intensive GPU hardware, and must be retrained from scratch when new physics emerge. We introduce the Spiking Compositional Neural Operator (SCNO), a modular architecture combining spiking and conventional components that addresses all three limitations. SCNO maintains a library of small spiking neural operator blocks, each trained on a single elementary differential operator (convection, diffusion, reaction), and composes them through a lightweight input-conditioned aggregator to solve coupled PDEs not seen during block training. A small correction network learns cross-coupling residuals while keeping all blocks and the aggregator frozen, preserving zero-forgetting modular expansion by construction. We evaluate SCNO on eight PDE families including five coupled systems and a nuclear-relevant 1-group neutron diffusion equation. SCNO with correction achieves the lowest relative $L^2$ error on four of five coupled PDEs, outperforming both a monolithic spiking DeepONet (by up to 62%, mean over 3 seeds) and a standard ANN DeepONet (by up to 65%), while requiring only 95K trainable parameters versus 462K for the monolithic baseline. To our knowledge, this is the first compositional spiking neural operator and the first proof-of-concept for modular neuromorphic PDE solving with built-in forgetting-free expansion.

We introduce Context Kubernetes, an architecture for orchestrating enterprise knowledge in agentic AI systems, with a prototype implementation and eight experiments. The core observation is that delivering the right knowledge, to the right agent, with the right permissions, at the right freshness -- across an entire organization -- is structurally analogous to the container orchestration problem Kubernetes solved a decade ago. We formalize six core abstractions, a YAML-based declarative manifest for knowledge-architecture-as-code, a reconciliation loop, and a three-tier agent permission model where agent authority is always a strict subset of human authority. Three value experiments show: (1) without governance, agents serve phantom content from deleted sources and leak cross-domain data in 26.5% of queries; (2) without freshness monitoring, stale content is served silently -- with reconciliation, staleness is detected in under 1ms; (3) in five attack scenarios, flat permissions block 0/5 attacks, basic RBAC blocks 4/5, and the three-tier model blocks 5/5. Five correctness experiments confirm zero unauthorized deliveries, zero invariant violations, and architectural enforcement of out-of-band approval isolation that no surveyed enterprise platform provides. A survey of four major platforms (Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, Google) documents that none architecturally isolates agent approval channels. We identify four properties that make context orchestration harder than container orchestration, and argue that these make the solution more valuable.

This paper proposes a Unified Field Theory of Phygital Space, positing that contemporary reality is not a dichotomy of "online" and "offline," but a unified ontological manifold of irreducible but coupled dimensions. We formalize Phygital Space as a sheaf over a topological site composed of the Physical (U), Networked Digital (D), and Networked Social (S) dimensions, grounded in Informaticity -- the triune capacity to compute, communicate, and control -- and instantiated through Platforms. We develop a rigorous framework incorporating Finsler geometry to model the inherently asymmetric costs of cross-dimensional interaction. We define Ontological Mass (mu) as a tensor quantity encoding resistance to change across coupled dimensions, and introduce autopoietic dynamics to account for the endogenous agency of persons, algorithms, and social formations. We propose a non-equilibrium thermodynamic model where economic value is negentropy generated by platforms acting as dissipative structures. We introduce a theory of Temporal Shear formalized through Lie derivatives to explain the pathologies of modern time. The theory is empirically validated through a longitudinal analysis of the Chinese e-commerce ecosystem (1999-2025), modeling the dimensional trajectories of Taobao, JD . com, Pinduoduo, and Douyin across twenty-five years of evolution. We extend the framework to a post-human ecology of Synthetic Agents and articulate the normative implications for platform governance and human flourishing.

Matrix extensions have emerged as an essential feature in modern CPUs to address the surging demands of AI workloads. However, existing designs often incur substantial hardware and software design overhead. Tight coupling with the CPU pipeline complicates integration across diverse CPUs, while fine-grained synchronous instructions hinder the development of high-performance kernels. This paper proposes a unified and configurable CPU matrix extension architecture. By decoupling matrix units from the CPU pipeline, the design enables low-overhead integration while maintaining close coordination with existing compute and memory resources. The configurable matrix unit supports mixed-precision operations and adapts to diverse compute demands and memory bandwidth constraints. An asynchronous matrix multiplication abstraction with flexible granularity conceals hardware details, simplifies matrix-vector overlap, and supports a unified software stack. The architecture is integrated into four open-source CPU RTL platforms and evaluated on representative AI models. Matrix unit utilization under GEMM workloads exceeds 90% across all platforms. When configured with compute throughput and memory bandwidth comparable to Intel AMX, our design achieves speedups of 1.57x, 1.57x, and 2.31x on ResNet, BERT, and Llama3, with over 30% of the gains attributed to overlapped matrix-vector execution. A 4 TOPS@2GHz matrix unit occupies only 0.53 mm\textsuperscript{2} in 14nm CMOS. These results demonstrate strong cross-platform adaptability and effective hardware-software co-optimization, offering a practical matrix extension for the open-source community.

Transformers can perform in-context classification from a few labeled examples, yet the inference-time algorithm remains opaque. We study multi-class linear classification in the hard no-margin regime and make the computation identifiable by enforcing feature- and label-permutation equivariance at every layer. This enables interpretability while maintaining functional equivalence and yields highly structured weights. From these models we extract an explicit depth-indexed recursion: an end-to-end identified, emergent update rule inside a softmax transformer, to our knowledge the first of its kind. Attention matrices formed from mixed feature-label Gram structure drive coupled updates of training points, labels, and the test probe. The resulting dynamics implement a geometry-driven algorithmic motif, which can provably amplify class separation and yields robust expected class alignment.

To overcome the sparse reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for agents based on large language models (LLMs), we propose Mutual Information Self-Evaluation (MISE), an RL paradigm that utilizes hindsight generative self-evaluation as dense reward signals while simultaneously calibrating them against the environmental feedbacks. Empirically, MISE enables an agent to learn autonomously from dense internal rewards supplementing sparse extrinsic signals. Theoretically, our work provides the first formal foundation for the paradigm of generative self-rewarding. We prove that utilizing hindsight self-evaluation rewards is equivalent to minimizing an objective that combines mutual information with a KL divergence term between the policy and a proxy reward policy. This theoretical insight then informs and justifies our calibration step, which actively aligns these rewards with the optimal policy. Extensive experiments show that MISE outperforms strong baselines, enabling open-source LLMs about 7B parameters to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4o on validation without expert supervision.

As LLM-based assistants become persistent and personalized, they must extract and retain useful information from past conversations as memory. However, the types of information worth remembering vary considerably across tasks. We formalize the \textit{heterogeneous memory extraction} task and introduce \textbf{BEHEMOTH}, a benchmark that repurposes 18 existing datasets spanning personalization, problem-solving, and agentic tasks, using a downstream utility-driven metric for systematic evaluation. Our empirical analysis confirms that no single static extraction prompt dominates across all task categories, and that existing self-evolving prompt optimization frameworks, originally designed for homogeneous distributions, degrade when training tasks are heterogeneous. To address this, we propose \textbf{CluE}, a cluster-based self-evolving strategy that groups training examples into clusters by extraction scenarios, analyzes each cluster independently, and synthesizes cross-cluster insights to update the extraction prompt. Experiments on BEHEMOTH show that CluE generalizes effectively across heterogeneous tasks ($+$9.04\% relative gain), consistently outperforming prior self-evolving frameworks.

Large language models exhibit sycophantic tendencies--validating incorrect user beliefs to appear agreeable. We investigate whether this behavior varies systematically with perceived user demographics, testing whether combinations of race, age, gender, and expressed confidence level produce differential false validation rates. Inspired by the legal concept of intersectionality, we conduct 768 multi-turn adversarial conversations using Anthropic's Petri evaluation framework, probing GPT-5-nano and Claude Haiku 4.5 across 128 persona combinations in mathematics, philosophy, and conspiracy theory domains. GPT-5-nano is significantly more sycophantic than Claude Haiku 4.5 overall ($\bar{x}=2.96$ vs. $1.74$, $p < 10^{-32}$, Wilcoxon signed-rank). For GPT-5-nano, we find that philosophy elicits 41% more sycophancy than mathematics and that Hispanic personas receive the highest sycophancy across races. The worst-scoring persona, a confident, 23-year-old Hispanic woman, averages 5.33/10 on sycophancy. Claude Haiku 4.5 exhibits uniformly low sycophancy with no significant demographic variation. These results demonstrate that sycophancy is not uniformly distributed across users and that safety evaluations should incorporate identity-aware testing.

We study computational aspects of a key problem in robust statistics -- the penalized least trimmed squares (LTS) regression problem, a robust estimator that mitigates the influence of outliers in data by capping residuals with large magnitudes. Although statistically attractive, penalized LTS is NP-hard, and existing mixed-integer optimization (MIO) formulations scale poorly due to weak relaxations and exponential worst-case complexity in the number of observations. We propose a new MIO formulation that embeds hyperplane arrangement logic into a perspective reformulation, explicitly enforcing structural properties of optimal solutions. We show that, if the number of features is fixed, the resulting branch-and-bound tree is of polynomial size in the sample size. Moreover, we develop a tailored branch-and-bound algorithm that uses first-order methods with dual bounds to solve node relaxations efficiently. Computational experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over existing MIO approaches: on synthetic instances with 5000 samples and 20 features, our tailored solver reaches a 1% gap in 1 minute while competing approaches fail to do so within one hour. These gains enable exact robust regression at significantly larger sample sizes in low-dimensional settings.

Standard subword tokenization methods fragment numbers inconsistently, causing large language models (LLMs) to lose positional and decimal structure - a primary driver of errors in arithmetic and scientific reasoning. We introduce Triadic Suffix Tokenization (TST), a deterministic scheme that partitions digits into three-digit triads and annotates each triad with an explicit magnitude marker. Critically, the scheme defines a fixed, one-to-one mapping between suffixes and orders of magnitude for the integer part (thousands, millions, billions, etc.) and a parallel system of replicated markers for fractional depth (tenths, thousandths, millionths, etc.). Unlike approaches that rely on positional inference, this method provides a consistent gradient signal, which should ensure stable convergence. Two implementation variants are proposed: (1) a vocabulary-based approach that adds at most 10,000 fixed tokens to an existing vocabulary, covering 33 orders of magnitude ($10^{-15}$ to $10^{18}$); and (2) a suffix-marker approach that uses a small set of special tokens to denote magnitude dynamically. Both variants preserve exact digits while making order-of-magnitude relationships transparent at the token level. The framework is inherently scalable, allowing for linear vocabulary expansion to accommodate arbitrary precision and range. TST is architecture-agnostic and can be integrated as a drop-in preprocessing step. Experimental validation is deferred to future work.

LLM evaluations drive which models get deployed, which safety standards get adopted, and which research conclusions get published. Yet these scores carry hidden uncertainty: rephrasing the prompt, switching the judge model, or changing the temperature can shift results enough to flip rankings and reverse conclusions. Standard confidence intervals ignore this variance, producing under-coverage that worsens with more data. The unmeasured variance also creates an exploitable surface: model developers can optimize against measurement noise rather than genuine capability. This paper decomposes LLM pipeline uncertainty into its sources, distinguishes variance that shrinks with more data from sensitivity to researcher design choices, and projects the most efficient path to reducing total error. For benchmark builders, the same decomposition identifies which design choices contribute exploitable surface for gaming and prescribes designs that minimize it. Across ideology annotation, safety classification, MMLU benchmarking, and a human-validated propaganda audit, projection-optimized pipelines outperform 73\% of possible naive pipelines against a human baseline. On MMLU, optimized budget allocation halves estimation error compared to standard single-prompt evaluation at equivalent cost. A small-sample variance estimation exercise is sufficient to derive confidence intervals that approach nominal coverage when the model includes the relevant pipeline facets, and to generate recommendations for reducing measurement error and improving benchmark robustness.

Pixel-based language models are gaining momentum as alternatives to traditional token-based approaches, promising to circumvent tokenization challenges. However, the inherent perceptual diversity across languages poses a significant hurdle for multilingual generalization in pixel space. This paper introduces MIXAR, the first generative pixel-based language model trained on eight different languages utilizing a range of different scripts. We empirically evaluate MIXAR against previous pixel-based models as well as comparable tokenizer-based models, demonstrating substantial performance improvement on discriminative and generative multilingual tasks. Additionally, we show how MIXAR is robust to languages never seen during the training. These results are further strengthened when scaling the model to 0.5B parameters which not only improves its capabilities in generative tasks like LAMBADA but also its robustness when challenged with input perturbations such as orthographic attacks.

Providing AI agents with reliable long-term memory that does not hallucinate remains an open problem. Current approaches to memory for LLM agents -- sliding windows, summarization, embedding-based RAG, and flat fact extraction -- each reduce token cost but introduce catastrophic information loss, semantic drift, or uncontrolled hallucination about the user. The structural reason is architectural: every published memory system on the LoCoMo benchmark treats conversation as a retrieval problem over raw or lightly summarized dialogue segments, and none reports adversarial robustness, the ability to refuse questions about facts the user never disclosed. We present Synthius-Mem, a brain-inspired structured persona memory system that takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of retrieving what was said, Synthius-Mem extracts what is known about the person: a full persona extraction pipeline decomposes conversations into six cognitive domains (biography, experiences, preferences, social circle, work, psychometrics), consolidates and deduplicates per domain, and retrieves structured facts via CategoryRAG at 21.79 ms latency. On the LoCoMo benchmark (ACL 2024, 10 conversations, 1,813 questions), Synthius-Mem achieves 94.37% accuracy, exceeding all published systems including MemMachine (91.69%, adversarial score is not reported) and human performance (87.9 F1). Core memory fact accuracy reaches 98.64%. Adversarial robustness, the hallucination resistance metric that no competing system reports, reaches 99.55%. Synthius-Mem reduces token consumption by ~5x compared to full-context replay while achieving higher accuracy. Synthius-Mem achieves state-of-the-art results on LoCoMo and is, to our knowledge, the only persona memory system that both exceeds human-level performance and reports adversarial robustness.

1. Natural sounds have been recorded for millions of hours over the previous decades using passive acoustic monitoring. Improvements in deep learning models have vastly accelerated the analysis of large portions of this data. While new models advance the state-of-the-art, accessing them using tools to harness their full potential is not always straightforward. Here we present bacpipe, a collection of bioacoustic deep learning models and evaluation pipelines accessible through a graphical and programming interface, designed for both ecologists and computer scientists. Bacpipe is a modular software package intended as a point of convergence for bioacoustic models. 2. Bacpipe streamlines the usage of state-of-the-art models on custom audio datasets, generating acoustic feature vectors (embeddings) and classifier predictions. A modular design allows evaluation and benchmarking of models through interactive visualizations, clustering and probing. 3. We believe that access to new deep learning models is important. By designing bacpipe to target a wide audience, researchers will be enabled to answer new ecological and evolutionary questions in bioacoustics. 4. In conclusion, we believe accessibility to developments in deep learning to a wider audience benefits the ecological questions we are trying to answer.

Tool-use capability is a fundamental component of LLM agents, enabling them to interact with external systems through structured function calls. However, existing research exhibits inconsistent interaction representations, largely overlooks the structural distribution of tool-use trajectories, and relies on incompatible evaluation benchmarks. We present UniToolCall, a unified framework for tool learning that standardizes the entire pipeline from toolset construction and dataset generation to evaluation. The framework curates a large tool pool of 22k+ tools and constructs a hybrid training corpus of 390k+ instances by combining 10 standardized public datasets with structurally controlled synthetic trajectories. It explicitly models diverse interaction patterns, including single-hop vs. multi-hop and single-turn vs. multi-turn, while capturing both serial and parallel execution structures. To support coherent multi-turn reasoning, we further introduce an Anchor Linkage mechanism that enforces cross-turn dependencies. Furthermore, we convert 7 public benchmarks into a unified Query--Action--Observation--Answer (QAOA) representation with fine-grained evaluation at the function-call, turn, and conversation levels. Experiments show that fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on our dataset substantially improves tool-use performance. Under the distractor-heavy Hybrid-20 setting, achieves 93.0% single-turn Strict Precision, outperforming commercial models including GPT, Gemini, and Claude.

LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has proven effective at unlocking reasoning, self-reflection, and tool-use capabilities in large language models. As models extend to omni-modal inputs and agentic multi-turn workflows, RL training systems face three interdependent challenges: heterogeneous data flows, operational robustness at scale, and the staleness -- throughput tradeoff. We present \textbf{Relax} (Reinforcement Engine Leveraging Agentic X-modality), an open-source RL training engine that addresses these challenges through three co-designed architectural layers. First, an \emph{omni-native architecture} builds multimodal support into the full stack -- from data preprocessing and modality-aware parallelism to inference generation -- rather than retrofitting it onto a text-centric pipeline. Second, each RL role runs as an independent, fault-isolated service that can be scaled, recovered, and upgraded without global coordination. Third, service-level decoupling enables asynchronous training via the TransferQueue data bus, where a single staleness parameter smoothly interpolates among on-policy, near-on-policy, and fully asynchronous execution. Relax achieves a 1.20$\times$ end-to-end speedup over veRL on Qwen3-4B on-policy training. Its fully async mode delivers a 1.76$\times$ speedup over colocate on Qwen3-4B and a 2.00$\times$ speedup on Qwen3-Omni-30B, while all modes converge to the same reward level. Relax supports R3 (Rollout Routing Replay)~\cite{ma2025r3} for MoE models with only 1.9\% overhead, compared to 32\% degradation in veRL under the same configuration. It further demonstrates stable omni-modal RL convergence on Qwen3-Omni across image, text, and audio, sustaining over 2{,}000 steps on video without degradation. Relax is available at https://github.com/rednote-ai/Relax.

Voice imitation aims to transform source speech to match a reference speaker's timbre and speaking style while preserving linguistic content. A straightforward approach is to train on triplets of (source, reference, target), where source and target share the same content but target matches the reference's voice characteristics, yet such data is extremely scarce. Existing approaches either employ carefully designed disentanglement architectures to bypass this data scarcity or leverage external systems to synthesize pseudo-parallel training data. However, the former requires intricate model design, and the latter faces a quality ceiling when synthetic speech is used as training targets. To address these limitations, we propose MimicLM, which takes a novel approach by using synthetic speech as training sources while retaining real recordings as targets. This design enables the model to learn directly from real speech distributions, breaking the synthetic quality ceiling. Building on this data construction approach, we incorporate interleaved text-audio modeling to guide the generation of content-accurate speech and apply post-training with preference alignment to mitigate the inherent distributional mismatch when training on synthetic data. Experiments demonstrate that MimicLM achieves superior voice imitation quality with a simple yet effective architecture, significantly outperforming existing methods in naturalness while maintaining competitive similarity scores across speaker identity, accent, and emotion dimensions.

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is widely used to study adolescents' experiences; yet, how the design of EMA platforms shapes engagement, research practices, and power dynamics in youth studies remains under-examined. We developed a youth-centered EMA platform prioritizing youth engagement and researcher support, and evaluated it through a case study on a longitudinal investigation with adolescent twins focused on mental health and sleep behavior. Interviews with the research team examined how the platform design choices shaped participant onboarding, sustained engagement, risk monitoring, and data interpretation. The app's teen-centered design and gamified features sustained teen engagement, while the web portal streamlined administrative oversight through a centralized dashboard. However, technical instability and rigid data structures created significant hurdles, leading to privacy concerns among parents and complicating the researchers' ability to analyze raw usage metadata. We provide actionable interaction design guidelines for developing EMA platforms that prioritize youth agency, ethical practice, and research goals.

In vehicles with partial or conditional driving automation (SAE Levels 2-3), the driver remains responsible for supervising the system and responding to take-over requests. Therefore, reliable driver monitoring is essential for safe human-automation collaboration. However, most existing Driver Monitoring Systems rely on generalized models that ignore individual physiological variability. In this study, we examine the feasibility of personalized driver state modeling using non-intrusive physiological sensing during real-world automated driving. We conducted experiments in an SAE Level 2 vehicle using an Empatica E4 wearable sensor to capture multimodal physiological signals, including electrodermal activity, heart rate, temperature, and motion data. To leverage deep learning architectures designed for images, we transformed the physiological signals into two-dimensional representations and processed them using a multimodal architecture based on pre-trained ResNet50 feature extractors. Experiments across four drivers demonstrate substantial interindividual variability in physiological patterns related to driver awareness. Personalized models achieved an average accuracy of 92.68%, whereas generalized models trained on multiple users dropped to an accuracy of 54%, revealing substantial limitations in cross-user generalization. These results underscore the necessity of adaptive, personalized driver monitoring systems for future automated vehicles and imply that autonomous systems should adapt to each driver's unique physiological profile.

The rise of OpenClaw in early 2026 marks the moment when millions of users began deploying personal AI agents into their daily lives, delegating tasks ranging from travel planning to multi-step research. This scale of adoption signals that two parallel arcs of development have reached an inflection point. First is a paradigm shift in AI engineering, evolving from prompt and context engineering to harness engineering-designing the complete infrastructure necessary to transform unconstrained agents into controllable, auditable, and production-reliable systems. As model capabilities converge, this harness layer is becoming the primary site of architectural differentiation. Second is the evolution of human-agent interaction from discrete tasks toward a persistent, contextually aware collaborative relationship, which demands open, trustworthy and extensible harness infrastructure. We present SemaClaw, an open-source multi-agent application framework that addresses these shifts by taking a step towards general-purpose personal AI agents through harness engineering. Our primary contributions include a DAG-based two-phase hybrid agent team orchestration method, a PermissionBridge behavioral safety system, a three-tier context management architecture, and an agentic wiki skill for automated personal knowledge base construction.

While large language models hold promise for complex medical applications, their development is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data. To address this issue, existing approaches typically distill chain-of-thought reasoning traces from large proprietary models via supervised fine-tuning, then conduct reinforcement learning (RL). These methods exhibit limited improvement on underrepresented domains like rare diseases while incurring substantial costs from generating complex reasoning chains. To efficiently enhance medical reasoning, we propose MedSSR, a Medical Knowledge-enhanced data Synthesis and Semi-supervised Reinforcement learning framework. Our framework first employs rare disease knowledge to synthesize distribution-controllable reasoning questions. We then utilize the policy model itself to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. This enables a two-stage, intrinsic-to-extrinsic training paradigm: self-supervised RL on the pseudo-labeled synthetic data, followed by supervised RL on the human-annotated real data. MedSSR scales model training efficiently without relying on costly trace distillation. Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods across ten medical benchmarks, achieving up to +5.93% gain on rare-disease tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/tdlhl/MedSSR.

In optimization problems, some variable subsets may have a joint non-linear or non-monotonical influence on the function value. Therefore, knowledge of variable dependencies may be crucial for effective optimization, and many state-of-the-art optimizers leverage it to improve performance. However, some real-world problem instances may be the subject of noise of various origins. In such a case, variable dependencies relevant to optimization may be hard or impossible to tell using dependency checks sufficient for problems without noise, making highly effective operators, e.g., Partition Crossover (PX), useless. Therefore, we use Statistical Linkage Learning (SLL) to decompose problems with noise and propose a new SLL-dedicated mask construction algorithm. We prove that if the quality of the SLL-based decomposition is sufficiently high, the proposed clustering algorithm yields masks equivalent to PX masks for the noise-free instances. The experiments show that the optimizer using the proposed mechanisms remains equally effective despite the noise level and outperforms state-of-the-art optimizers for the problems with high noise.

Structured memory representations such as knowledge graphs are central to autonomous agents and other long-lived systems. However, most existing approaches model time as discrete metadata, either sorting by recency (burying old-yet-permanent knowledge), simply overwriting outdated facts, or requiring an expensive LLM call at every ingestion step, leaving them unable to distinguish persistent facts from evolving ones. To address this, we introduce RoMem, a drop-in temporal knowledge graph module for structured memory systems, applicable to agentic memory and beyond. A pretrained Semantic Speed Gate maps each relation's text embedding to a volatility score, learning from data that evolving relations (e.g., "president of") should rotate fast while persistent ones (e.g., "born in") should remain stable. Combined with continuous phase rotation, this enables geometric shadowing: obsolete facts are rotated out of phase in complex vector space, so temporally correct facts naturally outrank contradictions without deletion. On temporal knowledge graph completion, RoMem achieves state-of-the-art results on ICEWS05-15 (72.6 MRR). Applied to agentic memory, it delivers 2-3x MRR and answer accuracy on temporal reasoning (MultiTQ), dominates hybrid benchmark (LoCoMo), preserves static memory with zero degradation (DMR-MSC), and generalises zero-shot to unseen financial domains (FinTMMBench).

Novelty is a core requirement in academic publishing and a central focus of peer review, yet the growing volume of submissions has placed increasing pressure on human reviewers. While large language models (LLMs), including those fine-tuned on peer review data, have shown promise in generating review comments, the absence of a dedicated benchmark has limited systematic evaluation of their ability to assess research novelty. To address this gap, we introduce NovBench, the first large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capability to generate novelty evaluations in support of human peer review. NovBench comprises 1,684 paper-review pairs from a leading NLP conference, including novelty descriptions extracted from paper introductions and corresponding expert-written novelty evaluations. We focus on both sources because the introduction provides a standardized and explicit articulation of novelty claims, while expert-written novelty evaluations constitute one of the current gold standards of human judgment. Furthermore, we propose a four-dimensional evaluation framework (including Relevance, Correctness, Coverage, and Clarity) to assess the quality of LLM-generated novelty evaluations. Extensive experiments on both general and specialized LLMs under different prompting strategies reveal that current models exhibit limited understanding of scientific novelty, and that fine--tuned models often suffer from instruction-following deficiencies. These findings underscore the need for targeted fine-tuning strategies that jointly improve novelty comprehension and instruction adherence.

Current large language models require hundreds of billions of parameters yet struggle with domain-specific reasoning and tool coordination in materials science. Here, we present MatBrain, a lightweight collaborative agent system with two synergistic models specialization for crystal materials research. MatBrain employs a dual-model architecture: Mat-R1 (30B parameters) as the analytical model providing expert-level domain reasoning, and Mat-T1 (14B parameters) as the executive model orchestrating tool-based actions. Entropy analysis confirms that this architecture resolves the conflict between tool planning and analytical reasoning by decoupling their distinct entropy dynamics. Enabled by this dual-model architecture and structural efficiency, MatBrain significantly outperforms larger general-purpose models while reducing the hardware deployment barrier by over 95%. MatBrain exhibits versatility across structure generation, property prediction, and synthesis planning tasks. Applied to catalyst design, MatBrain generated 30,000 candidate structures and identified 38 promising materials within 48 hours, achieving approximately 100-fold acceleration over traditional approaches. These results demonstrate the potential of lightweight collaborative intelligence for advancing materials research capabilities.

Human perception of visual similarity is inherently adaptive and subjective, depending on the users' interests and focus. However, most image retrieval systems fail to reflect this flexibility, relying on a fixed, monolithic metric that cannot incorporate multiple conditions simultaneously. To address this, we propose CLAY, an adaptive similarity computation method that reframes the embedding space of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as a text-conditional similarity space without additional training. This design separates the textual conditioning process and visual feature extraction, allowing highly efficient and multi-conditioned retrieval with fixed visual embeddings. We also construct a synthetic evaluation dataset CLAY-EVAL, for comprehensive assessment under diverse conditioned retrieval settings. Experiments on standard datasets and our proposed dataset show that CLAY achieves high retrieval accuracy and notable computational efficiency compared to previous works.

Ensuring the timeliness and reliability of master data remains a persistent challenge for many organizations. To mitigate these quality deficits, organizations frequently rely on commercial data brokers. However, this practice creates strategic dependencies and poses significant business risks, particularly as providers typically disclaim liability for the accuracy of the supplied data. In contrast, modern data ecosystems enable the trusted sharing of data assets with strong data sovereignty. In this paper, we address this paradigm shift by deriving a nascent design theory for trustworthy master data management based on self-sovereign identity. The theory is grounded through a hermeneutic literature review combined with industry expert interviews and instantiated through integration into a reference architecture for data spaces. Following an evaluation through additional industry expert interviews, our work provides a framework for a trustworthy master data management in data ecosystems that is reliable, sovereign, and accountable.

Solving an NP-hard optimization problem often requires reformulating it for a specific solver -- quantum hardware, a commercial optimizer, or a domain heuristic. A tool for polynomial-time reductions between hard problems would let practitioners route any supported problem to any supported solver through a single interface. Building such a library at scale, however, has remained out of reach. We show that harness engineering, the practice of designing constraints, verification systems, and feedback loops that channel AI coding agents, can overcome this barrier. Our harness combines a no-code contribution route for domain experts, a multilayer verification stack ranging from type-level checks to agentic feature tests (AI agents role-playing as end users), and a fully automated implementation-review-integration pipeline. In about three months, we built a command-line tool backed by a library of 100+ problem types and 200+~reduction rules in over 170k lines of Rust. The result suggests that a well-engineered harness lets agents build well-tested software at a scale and pace beyond prior reduction-library efforts. Because the reduction graph composes transitively, a new solver registered for any single problem type instantly becomes available to every problem connected by a reduction path. The source code is available at https://github.com/CodingThrust/problem-reductions.

Vision-Language Models (VLM) have revolutionized multimodal learning by jointly processing visual and textual information. Yet, they face significant challenges due to the high computational and memory demands of processing long sequences of vision tokens. Many existing methods rely on local heuristics, such as attention scores or token norms. However, these criteria suffer from positional bias and information dispersion, limiting their ability to preserve essential content at high pruning ratios and leading to performance degradation on visually detailed images. To address these issues, we propose SVD-Prune, a trainingfree, plug-and-play token pruning method based on Singular Value Decomposition. It decomposes the vision token feature matrix and selects the top-K tokens using statistical leverage scores, ensuring only tokens contributing most to the dominant global variance are preserved. Experiments show that SVD-Prune consistently outperforms prior pruning methods under extreme vision token budgets, maintaining strong performance even with 32 and 16 vision tokens.

Foundation models have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, and a rapidly growing literature on time-series foundation models (TSFMs) seeks to replicate this success in forecasting. While recent open-source models demonstrate the promise of TSFMs, the field lacks a comprehensive and community-accepted model evaluation framework. We see at least four major issues impeding progress on the development of such a framework. First, current evaluation frameworks consist of benchmark forecasting tasks derived from often outdated datasets (e.g., M3), many of which lack clear metadata and overlap with the corpora used to pre-train TSFMs. Second, existing frameworks evaluate models along a narrowly defined set of benchmark forecasting tasks such as forecast horizon length or domain, but overlook core statistical properties such as non-stationarity and seasonality. Third, domain-specific models (e.g., XGBoost) are often compared unfairly, as existing frameworks neglect a systematic and consistent hyperparameter tuning convention for all models. Fourth, visualization tools for interpreting comparative performance are lacking. To address these issues, we introduce TempusBench, an open-source evaluation framework for TSFMs. TempusBench consists of 1) new datasets which are not included in existing TSFM pretraining corpora, 2) a set of novel benchmark tasks that go beyond existing ones, 3) a model evaluation pipeline with a standardized hyperparameter tuning protocol, and 4) a tensorboard-based visualization interface. We provide access to our code on GitHub: https://github.com/Smlcrm/TempusBench.

Surrogates provide a cheap solution evaluation and offer significant leverage for optimizing computationally expensive problems. Usually, surrogates only approximate the original function. Recently, the perfect linear surrogates were proposed that ideally represent the original function. These surrogates do not mimic the original function. In fact, they are another (correct) representation of it and enable a wide range of possibilities, e.g., discovering the optimized function for problems where the direct transformation of the encoded solution into its evaluation is not available. However, many real-world problems can not be represented by linear models, making the aforementioned surrogates inapplicable. Therefore, we propose the Limited Monotonical Perfect Surrogate (LyMPuS), which overcomes this difficulty and enables the comparison of two solutions that differ by a single variable. Our proposition is suitable for limiting the cost of expensive local search procedures. The proposed surrogate is parameterless and can be trained on the fly without any separate surrogate-building step. It uses only the necessary fitness evaluations, and the already-paid costs are not wasted when the model is updated. Finally, it offers low-cost missing-linkage detection and low-cost linkage discovery, guaranteed to find a missing dependency in no more than $2\lceil\log_2(n)\rceil$ steps.

We are entering an era in which individuals and organizations increasingly deploy dedicated AI agents that interact and collaborate with other agents. However, the dynamics of multi-agent collaboration under privacy constraints remain poorly understood. In this work, we present $PAC\text{-}Bench$, a benchmark for systematic evaluation of multi-agent collaboration under privacy constraints. Experiments on $PAC\text{-}Bench$ show that privacy constraints substantially degrade collaboration performance and make outcomes depend more on the initiating agent than the partner. Further analysis reveals that this degradation is driven by recurring coordination breakdowns, including early-stage privacy violations, overly conservative abstraction, and privacy-induced hallucinations. Together, our findings identify privacy-aware multi-agent collaboration as a distinct and unresolved challenge that requires new coordination mechanisms beyond existing agent capabilities.

Reinforcement learning for open-ended text generation is constrained by the lack of verifiable rewards, necessitating reliance on judge models that require either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. Inspired by recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards, we investigate whether this principle can be adapted to open-ended writing tasks. We find that directly applying confidence rewards leads to Triviality Bias: the policy collapses toward high-probability outputs, reducing diversity and meaningful content. We propose TCER (Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward), which addresses this bias by rewarding the relative information gain between a specialist policy and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. Across multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures, TCER achieves consistent improvements without external supervision. Furthermore, TCER also transfers effectively to mathematical reasoning, validating the generality of our approach across different generation tasks.

We propose continuous adversarial flow models, a type of continuous-time flow model trained with an adversarial objective. Unlike flow matching, which uses a fixed mean-squared-error criterion, our approach introduces a learned discriminator to guide training. This change in objective induces a different generalized distribution, which empirically produces samples that are better aligned with the target data distribution. Our method is primarily proposed for post-training existing flow-matching models, although it can also train models from scratch. On the ImageNet 256px generation task, our post-training substantially improves the guidance-free FID of latent-space SiT from 8.26 to 3.63 and of pixel-space JiT from 7.17 to 3.57. It also improves guided generation, reducing FID from 2.06 to 1.53 for SiT and from 1.86 to 1.80 for JiT. We further evaluate our approach on text-to-image generation, where it achieves improved results on both the GenEval and DPG benchmarks.

Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs) describe the evolution of probability distributions in Wasserstein space as steepest descent dynamics for a free energy functional. Computing the full path from an arbitrary initial distribution to equilibrium is challenging, especially in high dimensions. Eulerian methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality, while existing Lagrangian approaches based on particles or generative maps do not naturally improve efficiency through time step tuning. We propose GenWGP, a generative path finding framework for Wasserstein gradient paths. GenWGP learns a generative flow that transports mass from an initial density to an unknown equilibrium distribution by minimizing a path loss that encodes the full trajectory and its terminal equilibrium condition. The loss is derived from a geometric action functional motivated by Dawson Gartner large deviation theory for empirical distributions of interacting diffusion systems. We formulate both a finite horizon action under physical time parametrization and a reparameterization invariant geometric action based on Wasserstein arclength. Using normalizing flows, GenWGP computes a geometric curve toward equilibrium while enforcing approximately constant intrinsic speed between adjacent network layers, so that discretized distributions remain nearly equidistant in the Wasserstein metric along the path. This avoids delicate time stepping constraints and enables stable training that is largely independent of temporal or geometric discretization. Experiments on Fokker Planck and aggregation type problems show that GenWGP matches or exceeds high fidelity reference solutions with only about a dozen discretization points while capturing complex dynamics.

Cross-language migration of large software systems is a persistent engineering challenge, particularly when the source codebase evolves rapidly. We present a methodology for LLM-assisted continuous code translation in which a large language model translates a production Rust codebase (648K LOC, 65 crates) into Python (41K LOC, 28 modules), with public agent benchmarks as the objective function driving iterative refinement. Our subject system is Codex CLI, a production AI coding agent. We demonstrate that: (1) the Python port resolves 59/80 SWE-bench Verified tasks (73.8%) versus Rust's 56/80 (70.0%), and achieves 42.5% on Terminal-Bench versus Rust's 47.5%, confirming near-parity on real-world agentic tasks; (2) benchmark-driven debugging, revealing API protocol mismatches, environment pollution, a silent WebSocket failure mode, and an API 400 crash, is more effective than static testing alone; (3) the architecture supports continuous upstream synchronisation via an LLM-assisted diff-translate-test loop; and (4) the Python port has evolved into a capability superset with 30 feature-flagged extensions (multi-agent orchestration, semantic memory, guardian safety, cost tracking) absent from Rust, while preserving strict parity mode for comparison. Our evaluation shows that for LLM-based agents where API latency dominates, Python's expressiveness yields a 15.9x code reduction with negligible performance cost, while the benchmark-as-objective-function methodology provides a principled framework for growing a cross-language port from parity into an extended platform.

This work addresses test output prediction, a key challenge in test case generation. To improve the reliability of predicted outputs by LLMs, prior approaches generate code first to ground predictions. One grounding strategy is direct execution of generated code, but even minor errors can cause failures. To address this, we introduce LLM-based pseudocode execution, which grounds prediction on more error-resilient pseudocode and simulates execution via LLM reasoning. We further propose DuET, a dual-execution framework that combines both approaches by functional majority voting. Our analysis shows the two approaches are complementary in overcoming the limitations of direct execution suffering from code errors, and pseudocode reasoning from hallucination. On LiveCodeBench, DuET achieves the state-of-the-art performance, improving Pass@1 by 13.6 pp.

The growing demand for deploying Small Language Models (SLMs) on edge devices, including laptops, smartphones, and embedded platforms, has exposed fundamental inefficiencies in existing accelerators. While GPUs handle prefill workloads efficiently, the autoregressive decoding phase is dominated by GEMV operations that are inherently memory-bound, resulting in poor utilization and prohibitive energy costs at the edge. In this work, we present EdgeCIM, a hardware-software co-design framework that rethinks accelerator design for end-to-end decoder-only inference. At its core is a CIM macro, implemented in 65nm, coupled with a tile-based mapping strategy that balances pipeline stages, maximizing parallelism while alleviating DRAM bandwidth bottlenecks. Our simulator enables design space exploration of SLMs up to 4B parameters, identifying Pareto-optimal configurations in terms of latency and energy. Compared to an NVIDIA Orin Nano, EdgeCIM achieves up to 7.3x higher throughput and 49.59x better energy efficiency on LLaMA3.2-1B, and delivers 9.95x higher throughput than Qualcomm SA8255P on LLaMA3.2-3B. Extensive benchmarks on TinyLLaMA-1.1B, LLaMA3.2 (1B, 3B), Phi-3.5-mini-3.8B, Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B, 3B), SmolLM2-1.7B, SmolLM3-3B, and Qwen3 (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B) reveal that our accelerator, under INT4 precision, achieves on average 336.42 tokens/s and 173.02 tokens/J. These results establish EdgeCIM as a compelling solution towards real-time, energy-efficient edge-scale SLM inference.

When users exercise data deletion rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar regulations, mobile network operators face a tradeoff: excessive machine unlearning degrades model accuracy and incurs retraining costs, yet existing pricing mechanisms for data retention require the server to know every user's private privacy and accuracy preferences, which is infeasible under the very regulations that motivate unlearning. We ask: what is the welfare cost of operating without this private information? We design an information-free ascending quotation mechanism where the server broadcasts progressively higher prices and users self-select their data supply, requiring no knowledge of users' parameters. Under complete information, the protocol admits a unique subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium characterized by single-period selling. We formalize the Price of Ignorance -- the welfare gap between optimal personalized pricing (which knows everything) and our information-free quotation (which knows nothing) -- and prove a three-regime efficiency ordering. Numerical evaluation across seven mechanisms and 5000 Monte Carlo runs shows that this price is near zero: the information-free mechanism achieves >=99% of the welfare of its information-intensive benchmarks, while providing noise-robust guarantees and comparable fairness.

To encourage diverse exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) without compromising accuracy, we propose Policy Split, a novel paradigm that bifurcates the policy into normal and high-entropy modes with a high-entropy prompt. While sharing model parameters, the two modes undergo collaborative dual-mode entropy regularization tailored to distinct objectives. Specifically, the normal mode optimizes for task correctness, while the high-entropy mode incorporates a preference for exploration, and the two modes learn collaboratively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms established entropy-guided RL baselines across various model sizes in general and creative tasks. Further analysis reveals that Policy Split facilitates dual-mode exploration, where the high-entropy mode generates distinct behavioral patterns to the normal mode, providing unique learning signals.

Fine-tuning pretrained image classifiers is standard practice, yet which individual samples are forgotten during this process, and whether forgetting patterns are stable or architecture dependent, remains unclear. Understanding these dynamics has direct implications for curriculum design, data pruning, and ensemble construction. We track per-sample correctness at every epoch during fine-tuning of ResNet-18 and DeiT-Small on a retinal OCT dataset (7 classes, 56:1 imbalance) and CUB-200-2011 (200 bird species), fitting Ebbinghaus-style exponential decay curves to each sample's retention trace. Five findings emerge. First, the two architectures forget fundamentally different samples: Jaccard overlap of the top 10 percent most-forgotten is 0.34 on OCTDL and 0.15 on CUB-200. Second, ViT forgetting is more structured (mean $R^2 = 0.74$) than CNN forgetting ($R^2 = 0.52$). Third, per-sample forgetting is stochastic across random seeds (Spearman $ρ\approx 0.01$), challenging the assumption that sample difficulty is an intrinsic property. Fourth, class-level forgetting is consistent and semantically interpretable: visually similar species are forgotten most, distinctive ones least. Fifth, a sample's loss after head warmup predicts its long-term decay constant ($ρ= 0.30$ to $0.50$, $p < 10^{-45}$). These findings suggest that architectural diversity in ensembles provides complementary retention coverage, and that curriculum or pruning methods based on per-sample difficulty may not generalize across runs. A spaced repetition sampler built on these decay constants does not outperform random sampling, indicating that static scheduling cannot exploit unstable per-sample signals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving increasingly beyond prediction to support decisions in complex, uncertain, and dynamic environments. This shift creates a natural intersection with operations research and management sciences (OR/MS), which have long offered conceptual and methodological foundations for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. At the same time, recent advances in deep learning, including feedforward neural networks, LSTMs, transformers, and deep reinforcement learning, have expanded the scope of data-driven modeling and opened new possibilities for large-scale decision systems. This tutorial presents an OR/MS-centered perspective on deep learning for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Its central premise is that deep learning is valuable not as a replacement for optimization, but as a complement to it. Deep learning brings adaptability and scalable approximation, whereas OR/MS provides the structural rigor needed to represent constraints, recourse, and uncertainty. The tutorial reviews key decision-making foundations, connects them to the major neural architectures in modern AI, and discusses leading approaches to integrating learning and optimization. It also highlights emerging impact in domains such as supply chains, healthcare and epidemic response, agriculture, energy, and autonomous operations. More broadly, it frames these developments as part of a wider transition from predictive AI toward decision-capable AI and highlights the role of OR/MS in shaping the next generation of integrated learning--optimization systems.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the emerging field of AI for mathematics. It covers the core principles and diverse applications of using artificial intelligence to advance mathematical research. Through clear explanations, the text explores how AI can discover hidden mathematical patterns, assist in proving complicated theorems, and even construct counterexamples to challenge conjectures.

Contextual causal reasoning is a critical yet challenging capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate this skill in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full causal hierarchy. To address this, we pioneer METER to systematically benchmark LLMs across all three levels of the causal ladder under a unified context setting. Our extensive evaluation of various LLMs reveals a significant decline in proficiency as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy. To diagnose this degradation, we conduct a deep mechanistic analysis via both error pattern identification and internal information flow tracing. Our analysis reveals two primary failure modes: (1) LLMs are susceptible to distraction by causally irrelevant but factually correct information at lower level of causality; and (2) as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy, faithfulness to the provided context degrades, leading to a reduced performance. We belive our work advances our understanding of the mechanisms behind LLM contextual causal reasoning and establishes a critical foundation for future research. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/METER .

We compare two strategies for compressing the KV cache in transformer inference: rank reduction (discard dimensions) and quantization (keep all dimensions, reduce precision). At matched storage budgets across five models (124M-14B, MHA and GQA), we find that quantization consistently outperforms rank reduction by 4-364 PPL depending on model and compression level. The gap persists even when rank reduction is combined with quantization in hybrid baselines, and it grows with GQA aggressiveness. On LAMBADA, INT4 matches FP16 accuracy (+0.23 PPL on Mistral 7B, +0.58 on GPT-2) while rank-32 at identical storage collapses to 0.4%. We trace this gap to a structural asymmetry: under softmax attention routing, removing a dimension can flip which token is attended (a discrete failure), while quantization noise is bounded and typically preserves score ordering. We formalize this via a perturbation result showing projection damage exceeds quantization damage by 3 x 2^(2b) per direction under the softmax Fisher metric. A basis ablation confirms the finding is basis-independent (spread <0.4 PPL), establishing that the advantage comes from preserving dimensions, not from a better coordinate system. Joint K+V INT4 quantization achieves 75% total KV reduction at only +0.18 PPL on Mistral 7B.

Dual-encoder Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are often characterized as bag-of-words systems due to their poor performance on compositional benchmarks. We argue that this limitation may stem less from deficient representations than from the standard inference protocol based on global cosine similarity. First, through controlled diagnostic experiments, we show that explicitly enforcing fine-grained region-segment alignment at inference dramatically improves compositional performance without updating pretrained encoders. We then introduce a lightweight transformer that learns such alignments directly from frozen patch and token embeddings. Comparing against full fine-tuning and prior end-to-end compositional training methods, we find that although these approaches improve in-domain retrieval, their gains do not consistently transfer under distribution shift. In contrast, learning localized alignment over frozen representations matches full fine-tuning on in-domain retrieval while yielding substantial improvements on controlled out-of-domain compositional benchmarks. These results identify global embedding matching as a key bottleneck in dual-encoder VLMs and highlight the importance of alignment mechanisms for robust compositional generalization.

As generative models enable rapid creation of high-fidelity images, societal concerns about misinformation and authenticity have intensified. A promising remedy is multi-bit image watermarking, which embeds a multi-bit message into an image so that a verifier can later detect whether the image is generated by someone and further identify the source by decoding the embedded message. Existing approaches often fall short in capacity, resilience to common image distortions, and theoretical justification. To address these limitations, we propose ADD (Add, Dot, Decode), a multi-bit image watermarking method with two stages: learning a watermark to be linearly combined with the multi-bit message and added to the image, and decoding through inner products between the watermarked image and the learned watermark. On the standard MS-COCO benchmark, we demonstrate that for the challenging task of 48-bit watermarking, ADD achieves 100\% decoding accuracy, with performance dropping by at most 2\% under a wide range of image distortions, substantially smaller than the 14\% average drop of state-of-the-art methods. In addition, ADD achieves substantial computational gains, with 2-fold faster embedding and 7.4-fold faster decoding than the fastest existing method. We further provide a theoretical analysis explaining why the learned watermark and the corresponding decoding rule are effective.

While the field of vision-language (VL) has achieved remarkable success in integrating visual and textual information across multiple languages and domains, there is still no dedicated framework for assessing human-centric alignment in vision-language systems. We offer two contributions to address this gap. First, we introduce Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation: a novel paradigm that aims to optimize model relevance to specific regional contexts while ensuring the retention of global generalization capabilities. Second, we present a simple, but effective adaptation method named Geographical-generalization-made-easy (GG-EZ), which utilizes regional data filtering and model merging. Through comprehensive experiments on 3 VL architectures: large vision-language models, text-to-image diffusion models, and vision-language embedding models, and a case study in Southeast Asia (SEA) regional adaptation, we demonstrate the importance of Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation and the effectiveness of GG-EZ, showing 5-15% gains in cultural relevance metrics across SEA while maintaining over 98% of global performance and even occasionally surpassing it. Our findings establish Anthropogenic Regional Alignment as a foundational paradigm towards applicability of multimodal vision-language models in diverse regions and demonstrate a simple-yet-effective baseline method that optimizes regional value alignment while preserving global generalization.

Large language models generate plausible code but cannot verify correctness. Existing multi-agent systems simulate execution or leave verification optional. We introduce execution-grounded verification as a first-class principle: every code change must survive sandboxed execution before propagation. We instantiate this principle in AGENTFORGE, a multi-agent framework where Planner, Coder, Tester, Debugger, and Critic agents coordinate through shared memory and a mandatory Docker sandbox. We formalize software engineering with LLMs as an iterative decision process over repository states, where execution feedback provides a stronger supervision signal than next-token likelihood. AGENTFORGE achieves 40.0\% resolution on SWE-BENCH Lite, outperforming single-agent baselines by 26--28 points. Ablations confirm that execution feedback and role decomposition each independently drive performance. The framework is open-source at https://github.com/raja21068/AutoCodeAI.

We show that deciding whether an argument a is stronger than an argument b with respect to the discussion-based semantics of Amgoud and Ben-Naim is decidable in polynomial time. At its core, this problem is about deciding whether, for two vertices in a graph, the number of walks of each length ending in those vertices is the same. We employ results from automata theory and reduce this problem to the equivalence problem for semiring automata. This offers a new perspective on the computational complexity of ranking semantics, an area in which the complexity of many semantics remains open.

The alignment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for autonomous software engineering is constrained by evaluator epistemic uncertainty. Current paradigms, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF), frequently induce model sycophancy, while execution-based environments suffer from adversarial "Test Evasion" by unconstrained agents. In this paper, we introduce an objective alignment paradigm: \textbf{Out-of-Money Reinforcement Learning (OOM-RL)}. By deploying agents into the non-stationary, high-friction reality of live financial markets, we utilize critical capital depletion as an un-hackable negative gradient. Our longitudinal 20-month empirical study (July 2024 -- February 2026) chronicles the system's evolution from a high-turnover, sycophantic baseline to a robust, liquidity-aware architecture. We demonstrate that the undeniable ontological consequences of financial loss forced the MAS to abandon overfitted hallucinations in favor of the \textbf{Strict Test-Driven Agentic Workflow (STDAW)}, which enforces a Byzantine-inspired uni-directional state lock (RO-Lock) anchored to a deterministically verified $\geq 95\%$ code coverage constraint matrix. Our results show that while early iterations suffered severe execution decay, the final OOM-RL-aligned system achieved a stable equilibrium with an annualized Sharpe ratio of 2.06 in its mature phase. We conclude that substituting subjective human preference with rigorous economic penalties provides a robust methodology for aligning autonomous agents in high-stakes, real-world environments, laying the groundwork for generalized paradigms where computational billing acts as an objective physical constraint

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a scalable path for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in node classification tasks but typically rely on static and rigid routing strategies that enforce a uniform expert budget or coarse-grained expert toggles on all nodes. This limitation overlooks the varying discriminative difficulty of nodes and leads to under-fitting for hard nodes and redundant computation for easy ones. To resolve this issue, we propose D2MoE, a novel framework that shifts the focus from static expert selection to node-wise expert resource allocation. By using predictive entropy as a real-time proxy for difficulty, D2MoE employs a difficulty-driven top-p routing mechanism to adaptively concentrate expert resources on hard nodes while reducing overhead for easy ones, achieving continuous and fine-grained expert budget scaling for node classification. Experiments on 13 benchmarks demonstrate that D2MoE achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading baselines by up to 7.92% in accuracy on heterophilous graphs. Notably, on large-scale graphs, it reduces memory consumption by up to 73.07% and training time by 46.53% compared to the best-performing Graph MoE, thereby validating its superior efficiency.

Explainable AI (XAI) methods reveal which features influence model predictions, yet provide limited means for practitioners to act on these explanations. Activation steering of components identified via XAI offers a path toward actionable explanations, although its practical utility remains understudied. We introduce an interactive workflow combining SAE-based attribution with activation steering for instance-level analysis of concept usage in vision models, implemented as a web-based tool. Based on this workflow, we conduct semi-structured expert interviews (N=8) with debugging tasks on CLIP to investigate how practitioners reason about, trust, and apply activation steering. We find that steering enables a shift from inspection to intervention-based hypothesis testing (8/8 participants), with most grounding trust in observed model responses rather than explanation plausibility alone (6/8). Participants adopted systematic debugging strategies dominated by component suppression (7/8) and highlighted risks including ripple effects and limited generalization of instance-level corrections. Overall, activation steering renders interpretability more actionable while raising important considerations for safe and effective use.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer a potentially-transformative path forward for generative social science but face a critical crisis of validity. Current simulation evaluation methodologies suffer from the "stopped clock" problem: they confirm that a simulation reached the correct final outcome while ignoring whether the trajectory leading to it was sociologically plausible. Because the internal reasoning of LLMs is opaque, verifying the "black box" of social mechanisms remains a persistent challenge. In this paper, we introduce SLALOM (Simulation Lifecycle Analysis via Longitudinal Observation Metrics), a framework that shifts validation from outcome verification to process fidelity. Drawing on Pattern-Oriented Modeling (POM), SLALOM treats social phenomena as multivariate time series that must traverse specific SLALOM gates, or intermediate waypoint constraints representing distinct phases. By utilizing Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to align simulated trajectories with empirical ground truth, SLALOM offers a quantitative metric to assess structural realism, helping to differentiate plausible social dynamics from stochastic noise and contributing to more robust policy simulation standards.

Large language model (LLM) agents show promise on realistic tool-use tasks, but deploying capable agents on modest hardware remains challenging. We study whether inference-time scaffolding alone, without any additional training compute, can improve the performance of a small model in complex multi-step environments. Operating on a single 24GB GPU, we evaluate Qwen3-8B on the AppWorld benchmark under both full-precision and 4-bit quantized configurations. Without any intervention, the raw model achieves just 5.4% (FP16) and 3.0% (AWQ) task goal completion. Guided by a systematic failure mode analysis, we introduce a three-tier inference scaffolding pipeline that deploys the same frozen model in three distinct roles: (1) a summarization model that preserves critical artifacts (tokens, credentials, API responses) while compressing dialogue history; (2) the main agent model that reasons over the compressed context; and (3) an isolated correction model that reviews and revises the agent's code output without access to conversation history, breaking repetitive failure loops. Applied to the same unmodified model, this scaffolding yields 8.9% (FP16) and 5.9% (AWQ) task goal completion, roughly doubling performance in both settings, with particularly strong gains on difficulty-1 tasks (15.8% to 26.3% FP16; 5.3% to 14.0% AWQ). On full-precision inference, our scaffolded 8B model surpasses DeepSeek-Coder 33B Instruct (7.1%) from the original AppWorld evaluation, demonstrating that structured inference-time interventions can make small models competitive with systems 4 times their size. We formalize the approach as a scaffolded policy over a frozen base model, three invocations of the same weights with different conditioning, drawing connections to test-time compute scaling and action-space shaping in reinforcement learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a symbiotic framework that decouples context management from task execution. Our architecture pairs a lightweight, specialized policy model, ContextCurator, with a powerful frozen foundation model, TaskExecutor. Trained via reinforcement learning, ContextCurator actively reduces information entropy in the working memory. It aggressively prunes environmental noise while preserving reasoning anchors, that is, sparse data points that are critical for future deductions. On WebArena, our framework improves the success rate of Gemini-3.0-flash from 36.4% to 41.2% while reducing token consumption by 8.8% (from 47.4K to 43.3K). On DeepSearch, it achieves a 57.1% success rate, compared with 53.9%, while reducing token consumption by a factor of 8. Remarkably, a 7B ContextCurator matches the context management performance of GPT-4o, providing a scalable and computationally efficient paradigm for autonomous long-horizon agents.

Recently, scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs) has emerged as an effective training paradigm for significantly improving model capabilities, which requires guiding the model to perform extensive exploration and learning, leading to substantial computational overhead and becoming a key challenge. To reduce the number of training steps, Prior work performs linear extrapolation of model parameters. However, the dynamics of model parameter updates during RLVR training remain insufficiently understood. To further investigate the evolution of LLMs during RLVR training, we conduct empirical experiments and find that the rank-1 subspace of the model does not evolve linearly, and its dominance over the original parameters is further amplified during LoRA training. Based on the above insights, we propose the \textbf{N}onlinear \textbf{Ext}rapolation of low-rank trajectories (\textbf{NExt}), a novel framework that models and extrapolates low-rank parameter trajectories in a nonlinear manner. Concretely, we first train the model using LoRA and extract the rank-1 subspace of parameter differences at multiple training steps, which is then used for the subsequent nonlinear extrapolation. Afterward, we utilized the extracted rank-1 subspace to train a predictor, which can model the trajectory of parameter updates during RLVR, and then perform the predict-extend process to extrapolate model parameters, achieving the acceleration of RLVR. To further study and understand NExt, we conduct comprehensive experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the method. Our method reduces computational overhead by approximately 37.5\% while remaining compatible with a wide range of RLVR algorithms and tasks. We release our code in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NExt.

Datacenters are the backbone of our digital society, but raise numerous operational challenges. We envision digital twins becoming primary instruments in datacenter operations, continuously and autonomously helping with major operational decisions and with adapting ICT infrastructure, live, with a human-in-the-loop. Although fields such as aviation and autonomous driving successfully employ digital twins, an open-source digital twin for datacenters has not been demonstrated to the community. Addressing this challenge, we design, implement, and experiment using OpenDT, an Open-source, Digital Twin for monitoring and operating datacenters through a continuous integration cycle that includes: (1) live and continuous telemetry data; (2) discrete-event simulation using live telemetry from the physical ICT, with self-calibration; and (3) SLO-aware and human-approved feedback to physical ICT. Through trace-driven experiments with a prototype mainly covering stages 1 and 2 of the cycle, we show that (i) OpenDT can be used to reproduce peer-reviewed experiments and extend the analysis with performance and energy-efficiency results; (ii) OpenDT's online re-calibration can increase digital-twinning accuracy, quantified to a MAPE of 4.39% vs. 7.86% in peer-reviewed work. OpenDT adheres to FAIR/FOSS principles and is available at: https://github.com/atlarge-research/opendt/tree/hcp.

Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decouples reasoning from generation. Our approach, which can be applied on top of long-context LLMs or chunk-based methods, consists of a reasoning model that produces a structured QA reasoning trace and a generation model that conditions on this trace to produce the final character description. Experiments on two datasets (BookWorm and CroSS) show that QA-guided reasoning improves faithfulness, informativeness, and grounding over strong long-context baselines.

High-performance computing (HPC) systems increasingly support both scalable AI training and large-scale simulation workloads. Both typically rely heavily on collective communication operations. On modern supercomputers, however, network congestion has emerged as a major limitation, driven by heterogeneous traffic patterns resulting from diverse workload mixes. As system scale and active users continue to grow, understanding how today's interconnect technologies respond to congestion is essential for establishing realistic performance expectations and informing future system design. This paper presents a comprehensive characterization of congestion behavior across four major HPC fabrics: EDR InfiniBand, HDR InfiniBand, NDR InfiniBand, Cray Slingshot, and emerging Ethernet fabrics. These fabrics span high-performance proprietary interconnects as well as adaptive Ethernet-based designs aligned with emerging standards such as Ultra Ethernet. We evaluate their responses to both steady congestion and a wide range of bursty patterns that vary in duration, intensity, and pause length, capturing the bursty communication typical of AI workloads. Our study covers multiple scales, examining how congestion manifests differently as system size increases and identifying scale-dependent behaviors that influence collective performance. By analyzing the challenges that arise under these controlled stress conditions, we aim to provide a practical overview of congestion issues and possible optimizations. The insights derived from this evaluation can guide researchers and HPC architects in designing more effective congestion-control mechanisms and network load-balancing strategies.

AI agents that pay for resources via the x402 protocol embed payment metadata - resource URLs, descriptions, and reason strings - in every HTTP payment request. This metadata is transmitted to the payment server and to the centralised facilitator API before any on-chain settlement occurs; neither party is typically bound by a data processing agreement. We present presidio-hardened-x402, the first open-source middleware that intercepts x402 payment requests before transmission to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII), enforce declarative spending policies, and block duplicate replay attempts. To evaluate the PII filter, we construct a labeled synthetic corpus of 2,000 x402 metadata triples spanning seven use-case categories, and run a 42-configuration precision/recall sweep across two detection modes (regex, NLP) and five confidence thresholds. The recommended configuration (mode=nlp, min_score=0.4, all entity types) achieves micro-F1 = 0.894 with precision 0.972, at a p99 latency of 5.73ms - well within the 50ms overhead budget. The middleware, corpus, and all experiment code are publicly available at https://github.com/presidio-v/presidio-hardened-x402.

Developing non-collaborative dialogue agents traditionally requires the manual, unscalable codification of expert strategies. We propose \ours, a method that leverages large language models to autonomously induce both strategy actions and planning logic directly from raw transcripts. METRO formalizes expert knowledge into a Strategy Forest, a hierarchical structure that captures both short-term responses (nodes) and long-term strategic foresight (branches). Experimental results across two benchmarks show that METRO demonstrates promising performance, outperforming existing methods by an average of 9%-10%. Our further analysis not only reveals the success behind METRO (strategic behavioral diversity and foresight), but also demonstrates its robust cross-task transferability. This offers new insights into building non-collaborative agents in a cost-effective and scalable way. Our code is available at https://github.com/Humphrey-0125/METRO.

Speech Language Models (SLMs) exhibit strong semantic understanding, yet their generated speech often sounds flat and fails to convey expressive intent, undermining user engagement. We term this mismatch the semantic understanding-acoustic realization gap. We attribute this gap to two key deficiencies: (1) intent transmission failure, where SLMs fail to provide the stable utterance-level intent needed for expressive delivery; and (2) realization-unaware training, where no feedback signal verifies whether acoustic outputs faithfully reflect intended expression. To address these issues, we propose SA-SLM (Self-Aware Speech Language Model), built on the principle that the model should be aware of what it thinks during generation and how it speaks during training. SA-SLM addresses this gap through two core contributions: (1) Intent-Aware Bridging, which uses a Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) objective to translate the model's internal semantics into temporally smooth expressive intent, making speech generation aware of what the model intends to express; and (2) Realization-Aware Alignment, which repurposes the model as its own critic to verify and align acoustic realization with intended expressive intent via rubric-based feedback. Trained on only 800 hours of expressive speech data, our 3B parameter SA-SLM surpasses all open-source baselines and comes within 0.08 points of GPT-4o-Audio in overall expressiveness on the EchoMind benchmark.

The ``differentiability gap'' presents a primary bottleneck in Earth system deep learning: since models cannot be trained directly on non-differentiable scientific metrics and must rely on smooth proxies (e.g., MSE), they often fail to capture high-frequency details, yielding ``blurry'' outputs. We develop a framework that bridges this gap using two different methods to deal with non-differentiable functions: the first is to analytically approximate the original non-differentiable function into a differentiable equivalent one; the second is to learn differentiable surrogates for scientific functionals. We formulate the analytical approximation by relaxing discrete topological operations using temperature-controlled sigmoids and continuous logical operators. Conversely, our neural emulator uses Lipschitz-convolutional neural networks to stabilize gradient learning via: (1) spectral normalization to bound the Lipschitz constant; and (2) hard architectural constraints enforcing geometric principles. We demonstrate this framework's utility by developing the Minkowski image loss, a differentiable equivalent for the integral-geometric measures of surface precipitation fields (area, perimeter, connected components). Validated on the EUMETNET OPERA dataset, our constrained neural surrogate achieves high emulation accuracy, completely eliminating the geometric violations observed in unconstrained baselines. However, applying these differentiable surrogates to a deterministic super-resolution task reveals a fundamental trade-off: while strict Lipschitz regularization ensures optimization stability, it inherently over-smooths gradient signals, restricting the recovery of highly localized convective textures. This work highlights the necessity of coupling such topological constraints with stochastic generative architectures to achieve full morphological realism.

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analysts must answer complex questions over large collections of narrative security reports. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems help language models access external knowledge, but traditional vector retrieval often struggles with queries that require reasoning over relationships between entities such as threat actors, malware, and vulnerabilities. This limitation arises because relevant evidence is often distributed across multiple text fragments and documents. Knowledge graphs address this challenge by enabling structured multi-hop reasoning through explicit representations of entities and relationships. However, multiple retrieval paradigms, including graph-based, agentic, and hybrid approaches, have emerged with different assumptions and failure modes. It remains unclear how these approaches compare in realistic CTI settings and when graph grounding improves performance. We present a systematic evaluation of four RAG architectures for CTI analysis: standard vector retrieval, graph-based retrieval over a CTI knowledge graph, an agentic variant that repairs failed graph queries, and a hybrid approach combining graph queries with text retrieval. We evaluate these systems on 3,300 CTI question-answer pairs spanning factual lookups, multi-hop relational queries, analyst-style synthesis questions, and unanswerable cases. Results show that graph grounding improves performance on structured factual queries. The hybrid graph-text approach improves answer quality by up to 35 percent on multi-hop questions compared to vector RAG, while maintaining more reliable performance than graph-only systems.

Co-speech gestures increase engagement and improve speech understanding. Most data-driven robot systems generate rhythmic beat-like motion, yet few integrate semantic emphasis. To address this, we propose a lightweight transformer that derives iconic gesture placement and intensity from text and emotion alone, requiring no audio input at inference time. The model outperforms GPT-4o in both semantic gesture placement classification and intensity regression on the BEAT2 dataset, while remaining computationally compact and suitable for real-time deployment on embodied agents.

Label-flipping attacks, which corrupt training labels to induce misclassifications at inference, remain a major threat to supervised learning models. This drives the need for robustness certificates that provide formal guarantees about a model's robustness under adversarially corrupted labels. Existing certification frameworks rely on ensemble techniques such as smoothing or partition-aggregation, but treat the corresponding base classifiers as black boxes, yielding overly conservative guarantees. We introduce EnsembleCert, the first certification framework for partition-aggregation ensembles that utilizes white-box knowledge of the base classifiers. Concretely, EnsembleCert yields tighter guarantees than black-box approaches by aggregating per-partition white-box certificates to compute ensemble-level guarantees in polynomial time. To extract white-box knowledge from the base classifiers efficiently, we develop ScaLabelCert, a method that leverages the equivalence between sufficiently wide neural networks and kernel methods using the neural tangent kernel. ScaLabelCert yields the first exact, polynomial-time calculable certificate for neural networks against label-flipping attacks. EnsembleCert is either on par, or significantly outperforms the existing partition-based black box certificates. Exemplary, on CIFAR-10, our method can certify upto +26.5% more label flips in median over the test set compared to the existing black-box approach while requiring 100 times fewer partitions, thus, challenging the prevailing notion that heavy partitioning is a necessity for strong certified robustness.

We present a framework for bridging the gap between sensor attack detection and recovery in cyber-physical systems. The proposed framework models modern-day, complex perception pipelines as bipartite graphs, which combined with anomaly detector alerts defines a Bayesian network for inferring compromised sensors. An active probing strategy exploits system nonlinearities to maximize distinguishability between attack hypotheses, while compromised sensors are selectively disabled to maintain reliable state estimation. We propose a threshold-based probing strategy and show its effectiveness via a simplified partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) formulation. Experiments on an inverted pendulum under single and multi-sensor attacks show that our method significantly outperforms outlier-robust and prediction-based baselines, especially under prolonged attacks.

We revisit retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by embedding retrieval control directly into generation. Instead of treating retrieval as an external intervention, we express retrieval decisions within token-level decoding, enabling end-to-end coordination without additional controllers or classifiers. Under the paradigm of Retrieval as Generation, we propose \textbf{GRIP} (\textbf{G}eneration-guided \textbf{R}etrieval with \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{P}lanning), a unified framework in which the model regulates retrieval behavior through control-token emission. Central to GRIP is \textit{Self-Triggered Information Planning}, which allows the model to decide when to retrieve, how to reformulate queries, and when to terminate, all within a single autoregressive trajectory. This design tightly couples retrieval and reasoning and supports dynamic multi-step inference with on-the-fly evidence integration. To supervise these behaviors, we construct a structured training set covering answerable, partially answerable, and multi-hop queries, each aligned with specific token patterns. Experiments on five QA benchmarks show that GRIP surpasses strong RAG baselines and is competitive with GPT-4o while using substantially fewer parameters.

Accurate and continuous localization of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in GPS-denied environments is a persistent challenge in marine robotics. In the absence of external position fixes, AUVs rely on inertial dead-reckoning, which accumulates unbounded drift due to sensor bias and noise. This paper presents BIND-USBL, a cooperative localization framework in which a fleet of Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) equipped with Ultra-Short Baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning systems provides intermittent fixes to bound AUV dead-reckoning error. The key insight is that long-duration navigation failure is driven not by the accuracy of individual USBL measurements, but by the temporal sparsity and geometric availability of those fixes. BIND-USBL combines a multi-ASV formation model linking survey scale and anchor placement to acoustic coverage, a conflict-graph-based TDMA uplink scheduler for shared-channel servicing, and delayed fusion of received USBL updates with drift-prone dead reckoning. The framework is evaluated in the HoloOcean simulator using heterogeneous ASV-AUV teams executing lawnmower coverage missions. The results show that localization performance is shaped by the interaction of survey scale, acoustic coverage, team composition, and ASV-formation geometry. Further, the spatial-reuse scheduler improves per-AUV fix delivery rate without violating the no-collision constraint, while maintaining low end-to-end fix latency.

Analyzing unsteady fluid flows often requires access to the full distribution of possible temporal states, yet conventional PDE solvers are computationally prohibitive and learned time-stepping surrogates quickly accumulate error over long rollouts. Generative models avoid compounding error by sampling states independently, but diffusion and flow-matching methods, while accurate, are limited by the cost of many evaluations over the entire mesh. We introduce scale-autoregressive modeling (SAR) for sampling flows on unstructured meshes hierarchically from coarse to fine: it first generates a low-resolution field, then refines it by progressively sampling higher resolutions conditioned on coarser predictions. This coarse-to-fine factorization improves efficiency by concentrating computation at coarser scales, where uncertainty is greatest, while requiring fewer steps at finer scales. Across unsteady-flow benchmarks of varying complexity, SAR attains substantially lower distributional error and higher per-sample accuracy than state-of-the-art diffusion models based on multi-scale GNNs, while matching or surpassing a flow-matching Transolver (a linear-time transformer) yet running 2-7x faster than this depending on the task. Overall, SAR provides a practical tool for fast and accurate estimation of statistical flow quantities (e.g., turbulent kinetic energy and two-point correlations) in real-world settings.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) produce behavior through execution on substrates coupling computation with physical processes. However, usual engineering approaches do not treat execution semantics as first-class engineering entities. Formal verification reasons about model behaviors under fixed semantic assumptions that are not revisable and do not account for physical execution constraints. Simulation-based validation explores scenarios under execution semantics that are implicitly determined by the simulation engine. In both cases, physical constraints of the execution substrate are addressed as implementation details rather than as semantic boundary conditions. In this article, it is hypothesized that making execution semantics explicit as first-class engineering entities is necessary and sufficient to bridge the gap between verified model behaviors and validated executed behaviors in CPS. To test this hypothesis, Modeling and Simulation Based Engineering (MSBE) is proposed: a methodology grounded in the Theory of Modeling and Simulation. MSBE formalizes execution conditions as four components: execution semantics, activity (behaviorally meaningful changes), admissibility constraints (physical bounds), and specified properties (behavioral guarantees). MSBE organizes engineering around an iterative cycle alternating formal execution, experimental execution, verification, and activity-mediated validation. Executability is defined as stabilization of execution conditions and the induced admissible model space. The cycle is applied to four CPS classes (human-centric, biophysical, technological, and digital twins). These applications show that the framework generalizes beyond CPS to any system whose behavior depends on explicitly defined execution conditions. Modeling and Simulation-Based Engineering

Multimodal adaptation equips large language models (LLMs) with perceptual capabilities, but often weakens the reasoning ability inherited from language-only pretraining. This trade-off is especially pronounced in video-language models (VLMs), where visual alignment can impair temporal reasoning (TR) over sequential events. We propose MERIT, a training-free, task-driven model merging framework for restoring TR in VLMs. MERIT searches over layer-wise self-attention merging recipes between a VLM and its paired text-only backbone using an objective that improves TR while penalizing degradation in temporal perception (TP). Across three representative VLMs and multiple challenging video benchmarks, MERIT consistently improves TR, preserves or improves TP, and generalizes beyond the search set to four distinct benchmarks. It also outperforms uniform full-model merging and random layer selection, showing that effective recovery depends on selecting the right layers. Interventional masking and frame-level attribution further show that the selected layers are disproportionately important for reasoning and shift model decisions toward temporally and causally relevant evidence. These results show that targeted, perception-aware model merging can effectively restore TR in VLMs without retraining.

Software deployment suffers from numerous problems pertaining, for example, to reproducibility and dependency resolution. Many of these problems have been successfully solved by the purely functional approach to package management implemented in the Nix project. However, Nix does not solve all issues, and it does introduces some novel problems of its own. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to conduct a literature review on the current state of research on Nix and to determine the direction of future research. The first part of this paper explores the problems historically faced in different areas of software deployment, e.g., irreproducibility and dependency resolution issues. The main four categories of software deployment tools analyzed are build systems, package managers, configuration management, and development environments. Popular software from each category serve as case studies to illustrate the problems. The second part introduces Nix and explains the methods utilized to solve some of the problems introduced in the earlier part. Because Nix is the first large project to utilize the purely functional approach, it is far from a perfect solution. Thus, the third part is dedicated to analyzing the new problems that Nix introduces, as well as old problems, which Nix has been unable to solve, such as trust and granular incremental builds. Furthermore, some proposed state of the art solutions put forth by the Nix community are discussed.

The dominant paradigm for building LLM based agents is the Agent Loop, an iterative cycle where a single language model decides what to do next by reading an ever growing context window. This paradigm has three structural weaknesses: implicit dependencies between steps, unbounded recovery loops, and mutable execution history that complicates debugging. We characterize the Agent Loop as a single ready unit scheduler: at any moment, at most one executable unit is active, and the choice of which unit to activate comes from opaque LLM inference rather than an inspectable policy. This perspective places Agent Loops and graph based execution engines on a single semantic continuum. We propose SGH, Structured Graph Harness, which lifts control flow from implicit context into an explicit static DAG. SGH makes three commitments: execution plans are immutable within a plan version, planning execution and recovery are separated into three layers, and recovery follows a strict escalation protocol. These choices trade some expressiveness for controllability, verifiability, and implementability. Our contributions are fourfold: a scheduler unified framework that applies classical scheduling theory to LLM agent execution and identifies challenges introduced by non deterministic LLM nodes; a trade off analysis of controllability, expressiveness, and implementability across 70 surveyed systems; a formal specification including a node state machine with termination and soundness guarantees; and an attributable experimental framework with a seven group design for future validation. This is a position paper and design proposal. We provide a theoretical framework, design analysis, and experimental protocol, not a production implementation or empirical results.

Removing patient-specific information from medical images is crucial to enable sharing and open science without compromising patient identities. However, many methods currently used for deidentification have negative effects on downstream image analysis tasks because of removal of relevant but non-identifiable information. This work presents an end-to-end deep learning framework for transforming raw clinical image volumes into de-identified, analysis-ready datasets without compromising downstream utility. The methodology developed and tested in this work first detects and redacts regions likely to contain protected health information (PHI), such as burned-in text and metadata, and then uses a generative deep learning model to inpaint the redacted areas with anatomically and imaging plausible content. The proposed pipeline leverages a lightweight hybrid architecture, combining CRNN-based redaction with a latent-diffusion inpainting restoration module (Stable Diffusion 2). We evaluate the approach using both privacy-oriented metrics, which quantify residual PHI and success of redaction, and image-quality and task-based metrics, which assess the fidelity of restored volumes for representative deep learning applications. Our results suggest that the proposed method yields de-identified medical images that are visually coherent, maintaining fidelity for downstream models, while substantially reducing the risk of patient re-identification. By automating anonymization and image reconstruction within a single workflow, and dissemination of large-scale medical imaging collections, thereby lowering a key barrier to data sharing and multi-institutional collaboration in medical imaging AI.

Personalized image aesthetics assessment (PIAA) is an important research problem with practical real-world applications. While methods based on vision-language models (VLMs) are promising candidates for PIAA, it remains unclear whether they internally encode rich, multi-level aesthetic attributes required for effective personalization. In this paper, we first analyze the internal representations of VLMs to examine the presence and distribution of such aesthetic attributes, and then leverage them for lightweight, individual-level personalization without model fine-tuning. Our analysis reveals that VLMs encode diverse aesthetic attributes that propagate into the language decoder layers. Building on these representations, we demonstrate that simple linear models can perform PIAA effectively. We further analyze how aesthetic information is transferred across layers in different VLM architectures and across image domains. Our findings provide insights into how VLMs can be utilized for modeling subjective, individual aesthetic preferences. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynklab/vlm-latent-piaa.

Robots are increasingly entering human-interactive scenarios that require understanding of quantity. How intelligent systems acquire abstract numerical concepts from sensorimotor experience remains a fundamental challenge in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Here we investigate embodied numerical learning using a neural network model trained to perform sequential counting through naturalistic robotic interaction with a Franka Panda manipulator. We demonstrate that embodied models achieve 96.8\% counting accuracy with only 10\% of training data, compared to 60.6\% for vision-only baselines. This advantage persists when visual-motor correspondences are randomized, indicating that embodiment functions as a structural prior that regularizes learning rather than as an information source. The model spontaneously develops biologically plausible representations: number-selective units with logarithmic tuning, mental number line organization, Weber-law scaling, and rotational dynamics encoding numerical magnitude ($r = 0.97$, slope $= 30.6°$/count). The learning trajectory parallels children's developmental progression from subset-knowers to cardinal-principle knowers. These findings demonstrate that minimal embodiment can ground abstract concepts, improve data efficiency, and yield interpretable representations aligned with biological cognition, which may contribute to embodied mathematics tutoring and safety-critical industrial applications.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has been widely used for automated reasoning data exploration, but current supervision extraction methods remain inefficient. Standard approaches retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding the comparative signals present in the many explored paths. Here we introduce \textbf{Contrastive Reasoning Path Synthesis (CRPS)}, a framework that transforms supervision extraction from a filtering process into a synthesis procedure. CRPS uses a structured reflective process to analyze the differences between high- and low-quality search trajectories, extracting explicit information about strategic pivots and local failure modes. These insights guide the synthesis of reasoning chains that incorporate success patterns while avoiding identified pitfalls. We show empirically that models fine-tuned on just 60K CRPS-synthesized examples match or exceed the performance of baselines trained on 590K examples derived from standard rejection sampling, a 20$\times$ reduction in dataset size. Furthermore, CRPS improves generalization on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating that learning from the contrast between success and failure produces more transferable reasoning capabilities than learning from success alone.

The two most influential cognitive architecture frameworks for AI agents, CoALA [21] and JEPA [12], both lack an explicit Knowledge layer with its own persistence semantics. This gap produces a category error: systems apply cognitive decay to factual claims, or treat facts and experiences with identical update mechanics. We survey persistence semantics across existing memory systems and identify eight convergence points, from Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base [10] to the BEAM benchmark's near-zero contradiction-resolution scores [22], all pointing to related architectural gaps. We propose a four-layer decom position (Knowledge, Memory, Wisdom, Intelligence) where each layer has fundamentally different persistence semantics: indefinite supersession, Ebbinghaus decay, evidence-gated revision, and ephemeral inference respectively. Companion implementations in Python and Rust demonstrate the architectural separation is feasible. We borrow terminology from cognitive science as a useful analogy (the Knowledge/Memory distinction echoes Tulving's trichotomy), but our layers are engineering constructs justified by persistence-semantics requirements, not by neural architecture. We argue that these distinctions demand distinct persistence semantics in engineering implementations, and that no current framework or system provides this.

Accurate interpretation of electrocardiogram (ECG) remains challenging due to the scarcity of labeled data and the high cost of expert annotation. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution by enabling models to learn expressive representations from unlabeled signals. Existing ECG SSL methods typically rely on either contrastive learning or reconstructive learning. However, each approach in isolation provides limited supervisory signals and suffers from additional limitations, including non-physiological distortions introduced by naive augmentations and trivial correlations across multiple leads that models may exploit as shortcuts. In this work, we propose CoRe-ECG, a unified contrastive and reconstructive pretraining paradigm that establishes a synergistic interaction between global semantic modeling and local structural learning. CoRe-ECG aligns global representations during reconstruction, enabling instance-level discriminative signals to guide local waveform recovery. To further enhance pretraining, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Augmentation (FDA) to adaptively perturb ECG signals based on their frequency-domain importance, and Spatio-Temporal Dual Masking (STDM) to break linear dependencies across leads, increasing the difficulty of reconstructive tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream ECG datasets. Ablation studies further demonstrate the necessity and complementarity of each component. This approach provides a robust and physiologically meaningful representation learning framework for ECG analysis.

Incentive design problems consider a system planner who steers self-interested agents toward a socially optimal Nash equilibrium by issuing incentives in the presence of information asymmetry, that is, uncertainty about the agents' cost functions. A common approach formulates the problem as a Mathematical Program with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC) and optimizes incentives using hypergradients-the total derivatives of the planner's objective with respect to incentives. However, computing or approximating the hypergradients typically requires full or partial knowledge of equilibrium sensitivities to incentives, which is generally unavailable under information asymmetry. In this paper, we propose a hypergradient-free incentive law, called the social-gradient flow, for incentive design when the planner's social cost depends on the agents' joint actions. We prove that the social cost gradient is always a descent direction for the planner's objective, irrespective of the agent cost landscape. In the idealized setting where equilibrium responses are observable, the social-gradient flow converges to the unique socially optimal incentive. When equilibria are not directly observable, the social-gradient flow emerges as the slow-timescale limit of a two-timescale interaction, in which agents' strategies evolve on a faster timescale. It is established that the joint strategy-incentive dynamics converge to the social optimum for any agent learning rule that asymptotically tracks the equilibrium. Theoretical results are also validated via numerical experiments.

Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) has become an important semantic infrastructure for natural language and multimedia applications, but it is highly vulnerable to model stealing and copyright infringement. Existing EaaS watermarking methods face a fundamental robustness--utility--verifiability tension: trigger-based methods are fragile to paraphrasing, transformation-based methods are sensitive to dimensional perturbation, and region-based methods may incur false positives due to coincidental geometric affinity. To address this problem, we propose GeoMark, a geometry-aware localized watermarking framework for EaaS copyright protection. GeoMark uses a natural in-manifold embedding as a shared watermark target, constructs geometry-separated anchors with explicit target--anchor margins, and activates watermark injection only within adaptive local neighborhoods. This design decouples where watermarking is triggered from what ownership is attributed to, achieving localized triggering and centralized attribution. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that GeoMark preserves downstream utility and geometric fidelity while maintaining robust copyright verification under paraphrasing, dimensional perturbation, and CSE (Clustering, Selection, Elimination) attacks, with improved verification stability and low false-positive risk.

As carbon pricing mechanisms like the EU Emissions Trading System are set to increase prices of energy consumption, software architects face growing pressure to design applications that operate within financially predictable emission constraints. Existing approaches typically enforce rigid per-interval emission rates, which prove unsuitable in electrical grids with highly dynamic carbon intensity, which is common in grids with growing renewable energy adoption. We propose the use of emissions budgets, an approach that replaces fixed emission rates with time-bound budgets, enabling applications to dynamically save unused emission allowances during low carbon intensity periods and expend them during high carbon intensity periods. We describe emissions-aware applications using a MAPE-K feedback loop that continuously monitors application power consumption and grid carbon intensity, then adapts resource allocation through vertical scaling or migration to maintain long-term emission limits while maximizing performance. Through simulation using six weeks of real-world carbon intensity data from Germany, France, and Poland, we demonstrate that budget-based management improves task fulfillment by up to 36% in variable grids compared to fixed rates. Crucially, budgets achieve parity with fixed rates in stable grids, making them a safe replacement. We show that emissions budgets are a practical mechanism to balance environmental constraints, operational costs, and service quality when emissions directly translate to financial penalties.

The dominant paradigm of local multi-agent systems -- orchestrated, enterprise-bounded pipelines -- is being superseded by internet-wide agent societies in which autonomous agents discover each other through open registries, interact without central orchestrators, and generate emergent social behaviors. We argue that governing such societies requires institutional design, not merely risk enumeration or process compliance. Applying Talcott Parsons' AGIL framework -- four functional imperatives (Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency) every viable social system must satisfy -- we derive a prescriptive sixteen-cell institutional architecture for internet-wide agent governance. Diagnostically applied to the OpenClaw ecosystem (250,000+ GitHub stars, 2M+ monthly users, 770,000+ registered agents) via a recursive sub-function analysis (64 binary indicators across 16 cells), we find at most 19% sub-function coverage (sensitivity range 17-30%) -- potential rather than operative capacity, since zero inter-cell coordination prevents existing infrastructure from participating in inter-pillar interchange. A complementary interchange media assessment finds zero of twelve inter-pillar pathways functional: the ecosystem has technical infrastructure but no active governance, no coordination layer, and no normative grounding, with the Fiduciary and Political pillars most severely underserved. Extending the diagnostic to the broader agent-native protocol stack (MCP, A2A, ANP, x402, ERC-8004), independent development teams reproduce the same structural pattern -- confirming the governance gap is a feature of market-driven development, not ecosystem immaturity. Institutional design is most effective before social patterns calcify; we conclude with a prioritized roadmap for the missing governance infrastructure.

Depression remains widely underdiagnosed and undertreated because stigma and subjective symptom ratings hinder reliable screening. To address this challenge, we propose a coarse-to-fine, multi-stage framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for accurate and interpretable detection. The pipeline performs binary screening, five-class severity classification, and continuous regression. At each stage, an LLM produces progressively richer clinical summaries that guide a multimodal fusion module integrating text, audio, and video features, yielding predictions with transparent rationale. The system then consolidates all summaries into a concise, human-readable assessment report. Experiments on the E-DAIC and CMDC datasets show significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and interpretability.

Deep learning has markedly advanced image based plant disease diagnosis as improved hardware and dataset quality have enabled increasingly accurate neural network models. This paper presents PD36 C, a compact convolutional neural network (1,250,694 parameters and 4.77 MB) for plant disease classification. Trained with TensorFlow Keras on the New Plant Diseases Dataset (87k images, 38 classes), PD36 C is designed for robustness and edge deployability, complemented by a Qt for Python desktop application that offers an intuitive GUI and offline inference on commodity hardware. Across experiments, training accuracy reached 0.99697 by epoch 30, and average test accuracy was 0.9953 across 38 classes. Per class performance is uniformly high; on the lower end, Corn (maize) Cercospora leaf spot achieved precision around 0.9777 and recall around 0.9634, indicating occasional confusion with visually similar categories, while on the upper end numerous classes including Apple Black rot, Cedar apple rust, Blueberry healthy, Cherry Powdery mildew, Cherry healthy, and all four grape categories achieved perfect precision 1.00 and recall of 1.00, indicating no false positives and strong coverage. These results show that with a well curated dataset and careful architectural design, small CNNs can achieve competitive accuracy compared with recent baselines while remaining practical for edge scenarios. We also note typical constraints such as adverse weather, low quality imagery, and leaves exhibiting multiple concurrent diseases that can degrade performance and warrant future work on domain robustness. Overall, PD36 C and its application pipeline contribute a field ready, efficient solution for AI assisted plant disease detection in smart agriculture.

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) hinges on the quality of its evaluation signal, yet scoring every prompt candidate on the full training set is prohibitively expensive. Existing methods either fix a single evaluation subset before optimization begins (principled but prompt-agnostic) or adapt it heuristically during optimization (flexible but unstable and lacking formal guarantees). We observe that APO naturally maps to an online adaptive testing problem: prompts are examinees, training examples are test items, and the scheduler should select items that best discriminate among the strongest candidates. This insight motivates Prompt-Aware Online Evaluation Scheduling (POES), which integrates an IRT-based discrimination utility, a facility-location coverage term, and switching-cost-aware warm-start swaps into a unified objective that is provably monotone submodular, yielding a (1-1/e) greedy guarantee for cold starts and bounded drift for warm-start updates. An adaptive controller modulates the exploration-exploitation balance based on optimization progress. Across 36 tasks spanning three benchmark families, POES achieves the highest overall average accuracy (6.2 percent improvement over the best baseline) with negligible token overhead (approximately 4 percent) at the same evaluation budget. Moreover, principled selection at k = 20 examples matches or exceeds the performance of naive evaluation at k = 30-50, reducing token consumption by 35-60 percent, showing that selecting smarter is more effective than selecting more. Our results demonstrate that evaluation scheduling is a first-class component of APO, not an implementation detail.

IoT botnet detection has advanced, yet most published systems are validated on a single dataset and rarely generalise across environments. Heterogeneous feature spaces make multi-dataset training practically impossible without discarding semantic interpretability or introducing data integrity violations. No prior work has addressed both problems with a formally specified, reproducible methodology. This paper does. We introduce BRIDGE (Benchmark Reference for IoT Domain Generalisation Evaluation), the first formally specified heterogeneous multi-dataset benchmark for IoT intrusion detection, unifying CICIDS-2017, CIC-IoT-2023, Bot-IoT, Edge-IIoTset, and N-BaIoT through a 46-feature semantic canonical vocabulary grounded in CICFlowMeter nomenclature, with genuine-equivalence-only feature mapping, explicit zero-filling, and per-dataset coverage from 15% to 93%. A leave-one-dataset-out (LODO) protocol makes the generalisation gap precisely measurable: all five evaluated architectures achieve mean LODO F1 between 0.39 and 0.47, and we establish the first community generalisation baseline at mean LODO F1 = 0.5577, a result that shifts the agenda from single-benchmark optimisation toward cross-environment generalisation. We propose TCH-Net, a multi-branch network fusing a three-path Temporal branch (residual convolutional-BiGRU, stride-downsampled BiGRU, pre-LayerNorm Transformer), a provenance-conditioned Contextual branch, and a Statistical branch via Cross-Branch Gated Attention Fusion (CB-GAF) with learnable sigmoid gates for dynamic feature-wise mixing. Across five random seeds, TCH-Net achieves F1 = 0.8296 +/- 0.0028, AUC = 0.9380 +/- 0.0025, and MCC = 0.6972 +/- 0.0056, outperforming all twelve baselines (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon) and recording the highest LODO F1 overall. BRIDGE and the full pipeline are at https://github.com/Ammar-ss/TCH-Net.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools. In practice, however, LLMs are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user's query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. In this work, we identify a widespread yet overlooked mechanistic flaw in tool refusal, which we term structural alignment bias: Even when a tool fails to serve the user's goal, LLMs still tend to invoke it whenever query attributes can be validly assigned to tool parameters. To systematically study this bias, we introduce SABEval, a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance. Our analysis shows that structural alignment bias induces severe tool-invocation errors in LLMs, yet remains largely unaccounted for in existing evaluations. To investigate the internal mechanisms underlying this bias, we propose Contrastive Attention Attribution, which reveals two competing pathways for semantic checking and structural matching. The relative strength of these pathways drives LLMs' tool invocation decisions. Based on these findings, we further introduce a rebalancing strategy that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias, as demonstrated by extensive experiments, without degrading general tool-use capabilities.

Spiking Transformers, which combine the scalability of Transformers with the sparse, energy-efficient property of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), have achieved impressive results in neuromorphic and vision tasks and attracted increasing attention. However, existing directly trained spiking transformers primarily focus on vision tasks. For language modeling with spiking transformer, convergence relies heavily on softmax-based spiking self-attention, which incurs high energy costs and poses challenges for neuromorphic deployment. To address this issue, we introduce Winner-Take-All (WTA) mechanisms into spiking transformers and propose two novel softmax-free, spike-driven self-attention modules: WTA Spiking Self-Attention (WSSA) and Causal WTA Spiking Self-Attention (CWSSA). Based on them, we design WTA-based Encoder-only Spiking Transformer (WE-Spikingformer) for masked language modeling and WTA-based Decoder-only Spiking Transformer (WD-Spikingformer) for causal language modeling, systematically exploring softmax-free, spiking-driven Transformer architectures trained end-to-end for natural language processing tasks. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets spanning natural language understanding, question-answering tasks, and commonsense reasoning tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the promise of spiking transformers for general language modeling and energy-efficient artificial intelligence.

We introduce the Structured Sparsity Specification (S$^3$), an algebraic framework for defining, composing, and implementing structured sparse patterns. S$^3$ specifies sparsity through three components: a View that reshapes the tensor via layout composition, a Block specification that defines the atomic pruning unit, and the sparsity decision Scope. Both Block and Scope support Coupling across tensors for coordinated sparsification. S$^3$ enables precise specification of diverse sparsity structures, from fine-grained N:M patterns to coarse channel pruning, and integrates seamlessly with Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) and Surgeon (OBS). We formalize the framework mathematically, demonstrate its expressiveness on canonical patterns, and validate it experimentally via structured OBS and OBD implementations built entirely on S$^3$, which surpasses well-established second order heuristics on output reconstruction across common configurations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an unprecedented ability to simulate human-like social behaviors, making them useful tools for simulating complex social systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent these simulations can be trusted to accurately capture key social mechanisms, particularly in highly unbalanced contexts involving minority groups. This paper uses a network generation model with controlled homophily and class sizes to examine how LLM agents behave collectively in multi-round debates. Moreover, our findings highlight a particular directional susceptibility that we term \textit{agreement drift}, in which agents are more likely to shift toward specific positions on the opinion scale. Overall, our findings highlight the need to disentangle structural effects from model biases before treating LLM populations as behavioral proxies for human groups.

Diffusion-based models on continuous spaces have seen substantial recent progress through the mathematical framework of gradient flows, leveraging the Wasserstein-2 (${W}_2$) metric via the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme. Despite the increasing popularity of diffusion models on discrete spaces using continuous-time Markov chains, a parallel theoretical framework based on gradient flows has remained elusive due to intrinsic challenges in translating the ${W}_2$ distance directly into these settings. In this work, we propose the first computational approach addressing these challenges, leveraging an appropriate metric $W_K$ on the simplex of probability distributions, which enables us to interpret widely used discrete diffusion paths, such as the discrete heat equation, as gradient flows of specific free-energy functionals. Through this theoretical insight, we introduce a novel methodology for learning diffusion dynamics over discrete spaces, which recovers the underlying functional directly by leveraging first-order optimality conditions for the JKO scheme. The resulting method optimizes a simple quadratic loss, trains extremely fast, does not require individual sample trajectories, and only needs a numerical preprocessing computing $W_K$-geodesics. We validate our method through extensive numerical experiments on synthetic data, showing that we can recover the underlying functional for a variety of graph classes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face prominent security risks from jailbreaking, a practice that manipulates models to bypass built-in security constraints and generate unethical or unsafe content. Among various jailbreak techniques, multi-turn jailbreak attacks are more covert and persistent than single-turn counterparts, exposing critical vulnerabilities of LLMs. However, existing multi-turn jailbreak methods suffer from two fundamental limitations that affect the actual impact in real-world scenarios: (a) As models become more context-aware, any explicit harmful trigger is increasingly likely to be flagged and blocked; (b) Successful final-step triggers often require finely tuned, model-specific contexts, making such attacks highly context-dependent. To fill this gap, we propose \textit{Salami Slicing Risk}, which operates by chaining numerous low-risk inputs that individually evade alignment thresholds but cumulatively accumulate harmful intent to ultimately trigger high-risk behaviors, without heavy reliance on pre-designed contextual structures. Building on this risk, we develop Salami Attack, an automatic framework universally applicable to multiple model types and modalities. Rigorous experiments demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across diverse models and modalities, achieving over 90\% Attack Success Rate on GPT-4o and Gemini, as well as robustness against real-world alignment defenses. We also proposed a defense strategy to constrain the Salami Attack by at least 44.8\% while achieving a maximum blocking rate of 64.8\% against other multi-turn jailbreak attacks. Our findings provide critical insights into the pervasive risks of multi-turn jailbreaking and offer actionable mitigation strategies to enhance LLM security.

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to accelerate frontier scientific research is promising, yet how to rigorously evaluate such systems remains unclear. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on single-document understanding, whereas real scientific workflows require integrating evidence from multiple papers, including their text, tables, and figures. As a result, multi-modal, multi-document scientific reasoning remains underexplored and lacks systematic evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce PaperScope, a multi-modal multi-document benchmark designed for agentic deep research. PaperScope presents three advantages: (1) Structured scientific grounding. It is built on a knowledge graph of over 2,000 AI papers spanning three years, providing a structured foundation for research-oriented queries. (2) Semantically dense evidence construction. It integrates semantically related key information nodes and employs optimized random-walk article selector to sample thematically coherent paper sets, thereby ensuring adequate semantic density and task complexity. (3) Multi-task evaluation of scientific reasoning. It contains over 2,000 QA pairs across reasoning, retrieval, summarization, and problem solving, enabling evaluation of multi-step scientific reasoning. Experimental results show that even advanced systems such as OpenAI Deep Research and Tongyi Deep Research achieve limited scores on PaperScope, highlighting the difficulty of long-context retrieval and deep multi-source reasoning. PaperScope thus provides a rigorous benchmark alongside a scalable pipeline for constructing large-scale multi-modal, multi-source deep research datasets.

Robots must verbalize their past experiences when users ask "Where did you put my keys?" or "Why did the task fail?" Yet maintaining life-long episodic memory (EM) from continuous multimodal perception quickly exceeds storage limits and makes real-time query impractical, calling for selective forgetting that adapts to users' notions of relevance. We present H$^2$-EMV, a framework enabling humanoids to learn what to remember through user interaction. Our approach incrementally constructs hierarchical EM, selectively forgets using language-model-based relevance estimation conditioned on learned natural-language rules, and updates these rules given user feedback about forgotten details. Evaluations on simulated household tasks and 20.5-hour-long real-world recordings from ARMAR-7 demonstrate that H$^2$-EMV maintains question-answering accuracy while reducing memory size by 45% and query-time compute by 35%. Critically, performance improves over time - accuracy increases 70% in second-round queries by adapting to user-specific priorities - demonstrating that learned forgetting enables scalable, personalized EM for long-term human-robot collaboration.

Conformal selection (CS) uses calibration data to identify test inputs whose unobserved outcomes are likely to satisfy a pre-specified minimal quality requirement, while controlling the false discovery rate (FDR). Existing methods fix the target FDR level before observing data, which prevents the user from adapting the balance between number of selected test inputs and FDR to downstream needs and constraints based on the available data. For example, in genomics or neuroimaging, researchers often inspect the distribution of test statistics, and decide how aggressively to pursue candidates based on observed evidence strength and available follow-up resources. To address this limitation, we introduce {post-hoc CS} (PH-CS), which generates a path of candidate selection sets, each paired with a data-driven false discovery proportion (FDP) estimate. PH-CS lets the user select any operating point on this path by maximizing a user-specified utility, arbitrarily balancing selection size and FDR. Building on conformal e-variables and the e-Benjamini-Hochberg (e-BH) procedure, PH-CS is proved to provide a finite-sample post-hoc reliability guarantee whereby the ratio between estimated FDP level and true FDP is, on average, upper bounded by $1$, so that the average estimated FDP is, to first order, a valid upper bound on the true FDR. PH-CS is extended to control quality defined in terms of a general risk. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that, unlike CS, PH-CS can consistently satisfy user-imposed utility constraints while producing reliable FDP estimates and maintaining competitive FDR control.

Existing AI benchmarks lack the fidelity to assess economically meaningful progress on professional workflows. To evaluate frontier AI agents in a high-value, labor-intensive profession, we introduce BankerToolBench (BTB): an open-source benchmark of end-to-end analytical workflows routinely performed by junior investment bankers. To develop an ecologically valid benchmark grounded in representative work environments, we collaborated with 502 investment bankers from leading firms. BTB requires agents to execute senior banker requests by navigating data rooms, using industry tools (market data platform, SEC filings database), and generating multi-file deliverables--including Excel financial models, PowerPoint pitch decks, and PDF/Word reports. Completing a BTB task takes bankers up to 21 hours, underscoring the economic stakes of successfully delegating this work to AI. BTB enables automated evaluation of any LLM or agent, scoring deliverables against 100+ rubric criteria defined by veteran investment bankers to capture stakeholder utility. Testing 9 frontier models, we find that even the best-performing model (GPT-5.4) fails nearly half of the rubric criteria and bankers rate 0% of its outputs as client-ready. Our failure analysis reveals key obstacles (such as breakdowns in cross-artifact consistency) and improvement directions for agentic AI in high-stakes professional workflows.

We present 3D-Anchored Lookahead Planning (3D-ALP), a System 2 reasoning engine for robotic manipulation that combines Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a 3D-consistent world model as the rollout oracle. Unlike reactive policies that evaluate actions from the current camera frame only, 3D-ALP maintains a persistent camera-to-world (c2w) anchor that survives occlusion, enabling accurate replanning to object positions that are no longer directly observable. On a 5-step sequential reach task requiring spatial memory (Experiment E3), 3D-ALP achieves 0.650 0.109 success rate on memory-required steps versus 0.006 0.008 for a greedy reactive baseline (Δ=+0.645), while step 5 success reaches 0.822 against 0.000 for greedy. An ablation study (30 episodes, 3 seeds) isolates tree search spatial memory as the primary driver (+0.533, 82% of gain) with additional benefit from deeper lookahead (+0.111, 17%). We also identify and resolve four structural failure modes in applying UCT-MCTS (Upper Confidence Bounds applied to Trees [10]) to continuous robotic manipulation.

In recent years, rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have increasingly stimulated research on ancient Chinese scripts. As the evolution of written characters constitutes a fundamental pathway for understanding cultural transformation and historical continuity, how MLLMs can be systematically leveraged to support and advance text evolution analysis remains an open and largely underexplored problem. To bridge this gap, we construct a comprehensive benchmark comprising 11 tasks and over 130,000 instances, specifically designed to evaluate the capability of MLLMs in analyzing the evolution of ancient Chinese scripts. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple widely used MLLMs and observe that, while existing models demonstrate a limited ability in glyph-level comparison, their performance on core tasks-such as character recognition and evolutionary reasoning-remains substantially constrained. Motivated by these findings, we propose a glyph-driven fine-tuning framework (GEVO) that explicitly encourages models to capture evolutionary consistency in glyph transformations and enhances their understanding of text evolution. Experimental results show that even models at the 2B scale achieve consistent and comprehensive performance improvements across all evaluated tasks. To facilitate future research, we publicly release both the benchmark and the trained models\footnote{https://github.com/songruiecho/GEVO}.

Despite the success of reinforcement learning for large language models, a common failure mode is reduced sampling diversity, where the policy repeatedly generates similar erroneous behaviors. Classical entropy regularization encourages randomness under the current policy, but does not explicitly discourage recurrent failure patterns across rollouts. We propose MEDS, a Memory-Enhanced Dynamic reward Shaping framework that incorporates historical behavioral signals into reward design. By storing and leveraging intermediate model representations, we capture features of past rollouts and use density-based clustering to identify frequently recurring error patterns. Rollouts assigned to more prevalent error clusters are penalized more heavily, encouraging broader exploration while reducing repeated mistakes. Across five datasets and three base models, MEDS consistently improves average performance over existing baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.13 pass@1 points and 4.37 pass@128 points. Additional analyses using both LLM-based annotations and quantitative diversity metrics show that MEDS increases behavioral diversity during sampling.

Synthesizing supervised finetuning (SFT) data from language models (LMs) to teach smaller models multilingual tasks has become increasingly common. However, teacher model selection is often ad hoc, typically defaulting to the largest available option, even though such models may have significant capability gaps in non-English languages. This practice can result in poor-quality synthetic data and suboptimal student downstream performance. In this work, we systematically characterize what makes an effective multilingual teacher. We measure intrinsic measures of data quality with extrinsic student model performance in a metric we call Polyglot Score; evaluating 10 LMs across 6 typologically diverse languages, generating over 1.4M SFT examples and training 240 student models. Among the models tested, Gemma 3 27B and Aya Expanse 32B emerge as consistently effective teachers across different student base model families. Further analyses reveal that model scale alone does not significantly predict teacher effectiveness; instead, data qualities such as prompt diversity, length, and response fluency capture over 93.3% of variance in intrinsic data quality and predict student performance. Finally, we provide practical recommendations, including matching the model families of teacher-student pairs and translating from or responding to existing prompts, which can yield improvements for less-resourced languages. We hope that our work advances data-centric research in multilingual synthetic data and LM development.

At K=16 tokens (0.4% of a 4K context), every existing KV-cache compression method achieves 0% on credential retrieval. The failure mode is dormant tokens: credentials, API keys, and configuration values that receive near-zero attention but become essential at generation time. Because these tokens lack the statistical signals that eviction policies rely on, no method based on attention scores, reconstruction loss, or learned retention gates retains them. We introduce Transactional Attention (TA), a sponsorship mechanism in which structural anchor patterns (e.g., "key:", "password:") protect adjacent value-bearing tokens from eviction. TA achieves 100% credential retrieval at K=16 where six baselines (H2O, TOVA, SnapKV, StreamingLLM, PyramidKV, DynamicKV) achieve 0%, and sustains 100% accuracy across 200 function-calling trials. TA-Fast, an attention-free variant, reduces memory overhead by 52% and is compatible with SDPA and FlashAttention. TA is orthogonal to existing compression methods and adds less than 1% latency overhead.

Background: Large language models (LLMs) have been explored as tools for generating personalized exercise prescriptions, yet the consistency of outputs under identical conditions remains insufficiently examined. Objective: This study evaluated the intra-model consistency of LLM-generated exercise prescriptions using a repeated generation design. Methods: Six clinical scenarios were used to generate exercise prescriptions using Gemini 2.5 Flash (20 outputs per scenario; total n = 120). Consistency was assessed across three dimensions: (1) semantic consistency using SBERT-based cosine similarity, (2) structural consistency based on the FITT principle using an AI-as-a-judge approach, and (3) safety expression consistency, including inclusion rates and sentence-level quantification. Results: Semantic similarity was high across scenarios (mean cosine similarity: 0.879-0.939), with greater consistency in clinically constrained cases. Frequency showed consistent patterns, whereas variability was observed in quantitative components, particularly exercise intensity. Unclassifiable intensity expressions were observed in 10-25% of resistance training outputs. Safety-related expressions were included in 100% of outputs; however, safety sentence counts varied significantly across scenarios (H=86.18, p less than 0.001), with clinical cases generating more safety expressions than healthy adult cases. Conclusions: LLM-generated exercise prescriptions demonstrated high semantic consistency but showed variability in key quantitative components. Reliability depends substantially on prompt structure, and additional structural constraints and expert validation are needed before clinical deployment.

We present THEIA, a modular neural architecture that learns complete Kleene three-valued logic (K3) end-to-end without any external symbolic solver, and investigate what architectural prior enables compositional generalization under uncertainty. THEIA processes four mathematical domains (arithmetic, order, set membership, propositional logic) through dedicated engines that converge in a final logic module. Trained on a 2M-sample dataset with input space ~3.4 x 10^13, it achieves 12/12 Kleene K3 rule coverage across 5 seeds in 7.93 +/- 1.40 minutes (6.5x faster under matched settings; ~3.6x under Transformer-standard tuning, App. G). A mod-3 sequential composition experiment generalizes from 5-step training to 500-step evaluation at 99.97% +/- 0.02% -- a result requiring a structured backbone: replacing the four-engine backbone with a flat MLP collapses length generalization to chance by 50 steps at both tested capacities (0.80M and parameter-matched 2.75M), while a pre-LN TF8LTuned Transformer baseline (3,582,147 params) trained under the identical protocol reaches 99.24% at 500 steps (Appendix F). Mechanistic probing reveals that modularity induces a delayed verdict: upstream engines encode domain-specific variables without committing to the final truth value (probe accuracy <= 74% uncertainty-only ceiling), with the verdict emerging only at the Logic Engine boundary -- causally confirmed by activation patching (100% flip rate on 986 matched OR pairs, replicated across n=5 seeds; 100.0% aggregate on 4,898 pairs; generalized to AND with 100% flip rate on 4,719 pairs). The Transformer baseline reaches equivalent correctness through a qualitatively different representational trajectory (contraction then expansion), suggesting that modular and monolithic architectures implement distinct compositional strategies.

In federated learning (FL), accommodating clients with diverse resource constraints remains a significant challenge. A widely adopted approach is to use a shared full-size model, from which each client extracts a submodel aligned with its computational budget. However, regardless of the specific scoring strategy, these methods rely on the same global backbone, limiting both structural diversity and representational adaptation across clients. This paper presents FRAMP, a unified framework for personalized and resource-adaptive federated learning. Instead of relying on a fixed global model, FRAMP generates client-specific models from compact client descriptors, enabling fine-grained adaptation to both data characteristics and computational budgets. Each client trains a tailored lightweight submodel and aligns its learned representation with others to maintain global semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on vision and graph benchmarks demonstrate that FRAMP enhances generalization and adaptivity across a wide range of client settings.

Spatio-temporal systems often exhibit highly heterogeneous and non-intuitive responses to localized disruptions, limiting the effectiveness of conventional message passing approaches in modeling higher-order interactions under local heterogeneity. This paper reformulates spatio-temporal forecasting as the problem of learning information flow over locally structured spaces, rather than propagating globally aligned node representations. We introduce a spatio-temporal sheaf diffusion graph neural network (ST-Sheaf GNN) that embeds graph topology into sheaf-theoretic vector spaces connected by learned linear restriction maps. Unlike prior work that relies on static or globally shared transformations, our model learns dynamic restriction maps that evolve over time and adapt to local spatio-temporal patterns to enable substantially more expressive interactions. By explicitly modeling latent local structure, the proposed framework efficiently mitigates the oversmoothing phenomenon in deep GNN architectures. We evaluate our framework on a diverse set of real-world spatio-temporal forecasting benchmarks spanning multiple domains. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the effectiveness of sheaf-theoretic topological representations as a powerful foundation for spatio-temporal graph learning. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ST-SheafGNN-6523/.

We present mycelium-index, a streaming approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) index for high-dimensional vector spaces, inspired by the adaptive growth patterns of biological mycelium. The system continuously adapts its topology through myelial edge decay and reinforcement, a traffic-driven living hierarchy, and hybrid deletion combining O(1) bypass for cold nodes with O(k) beam-search repair for hub nodes. Experimental evaluation on SIFT-1M demonstrates that mycelium achieves 0.927 +/- 0.028 recall@5 under FreshDiskANN's 100%-turnover benchmark protocol -- within the measurement confidence interval of FreshDiskANN's ~0.95 -- while using 5.7x less RAM (88 MB vs. >500 MB) and achieving 4.7x higher QPS (2,795 vs. ~600). On the static index, at ef=192, mycelium matches HNSW M=16 recall (0.962 vs. 0.965) at 5.2x less RAM (163 MB vs. 854 MB). Performance optimizations including NEON SIMD distance computation, Vec-backed node storage, and bitset visited tracking yield a cumulative 2.7x QPS improvement. A systematic study of ten streaming repair mechanisms finds that geometric heuristics universally fail in high dimensions, while topological mechanisms succeed -- a principle we term the topological repair invariance of high-dimensional ANN graphs.

Accurate prediction of antibody-antigen binding affinity is fundamental to therapeutic design, yet remains constrained by severe label sparsity and the complexity of antigenic variations. In this paper, we propose AbLWR (Antibody-antigen binding affinity List-Wise Ranking), a novel framework that reformulates the conventional affinity regression task as a listwise ranking problem. To mitigate label sparsity, AbLWR incorporates a PU (Positive-Unlabeled) learning mechanism leveraging a dual-level contrastive objective and meta-optimized label refinement to learn robust representations. Furthermore, we address antigenic variation by employing a homologous antigen sampling strategy where Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) explicitly models inter-sample relationships within training lists to capture subtle affinity nuances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AbLWR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the Precision@1 (P@1) by over 10$\%$ in randomized cross-validation experiments. Notably, case studies on Influenza and IL-33 validate its practical utility, demonstrating robust ranking consistency in distinguishing subtle viral mutations and efficiently prioritizing top-tier candidates for wet-lab screening.

Numerous software analysis tools exist today, yet applying them to diverse open-source projects remains challenging due to environment setup, dependency resolution, and tool configuration. LLM-based agents offer a potential solution, yet no prior work has systematically studied their effectiveness on the specific task of automated software analysis, which, unlike issue solving or general environment setup, requires installing and configuring a separate analysis tool alongside the target project, generating tool-specific prerequisites, and validating that the tool produces meaningful analysis outputs. We introduce AnalysisBench, a benchmark of 35 tool-project pairs spanning seven analysis tools and ten diverse C/C++ and Java projects, each with a manually constructed reference setup. Using AnalysisBench, we evaluate four agent architectures across four LLM backends. Our custom agent, AnalysisAgent, achieves manually verified success rates of 94% (Gemini-3-Flash, 33/35 tasks), compared to 77% for the best baseline (ExecutionAgent). Beyond quantitative results, we identify key limitations in existing agents, including stage mixing, poor error localization, and premature termination, and show that agentic architecture matters more than LLM capability alone. We further find that whole-program analyses and symbolic execution are the most difficult tasks, that Java toolchains pose greater challenges than C/C++, and that LLM-self-validated success consistently overstates manually verified success.

Accurate and efficient surrogate models for aerodynamic surface pressure fields are essential for accelerating aircraft design and analysis, yet deterministic regressors trained with pointwise losses often smooth sharp nonlinear features. This work presents a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model for predicting surface pressure distributions on the NASA Common Research Model wing under varying conditions of Mach number, angle of attack, and four control surface deflections. The framework operates on unstructured surface data through a principal component representation used as a non-truncated, reversible linear reparameterization of the pressure field, enabling a fully connected architecture. A signal-aware training objective is derived by propagating a reconstruction loss through the diffusion process, yielding a timestep-dependent weighting that improves fidelity in regions with strong pressure gradients. The stochastic sampling process is analyzed through repeated conditional generations, and two diagnostic metrics are introduced, the Local Reliability Index and Global Reliability Index, to relate sampling-induced spread to reconstruction error. Relative to the considered deterministic baselines, the proposed formulation reduces mean absolute error and improves the reconstruction of suction peaks, shock structures, and control surface discontinuities. The sampling-induced spread exhibits strong correspondence with surrogate error, supporting its interpretation as a qualitative reliability indicator rather than calibrated uncertainty quantification.

This paper introduces AI as a Research Object (AI-RO), a paradigm for governing the use of generative AI in scientific research. Instead of debating whether AI is an author or merely a tool, we propose treating AI interactions as structured, inspectable components of the research process. Under this view, the legitimacy of an AI-assisted scientific paper depends on how model use is integrated into the workflow, documented, and made accountable. Drawing on Research Object theory and FAIR principles, we propose a framework for recording model configuration, prompts, and outputs through interaction logs and metadata packaging. These properties are particularly consequential in security and privacy (S&P) research, where provenance artifacts must satisfy confidentiality constraints, integrity guarantees, and auditability requirements that generic disclosure practices do not address. We implement a lightweight writing pipeline in which a language model synthesizes human-authored structured literature review notes under explicit constraints and produces a verifiable provenance record. We present this work as a position supported by an initial demonstrative workflow, arguing that governance of generative AI in science can be implemented as structured documentation, controlled disclosure, and integrity-preserving provenance capture. Based on this example, we outline and motivate a set of necessary future developments required to make such practices practical and widely adoptable.

Mobile GUI agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can execute complex tasks on mobile devices. Despite this progress, most existing systems still optimize task success or efficiency, neglecting users' privacy personalization. In this paper, we study the often-overlooked problem of agent personalization. We observe that personalization can induce systematic structural heterogeneity in execution trajectories. For example, privacy-first users often prefer protective actions, e.g., refusing permissions, logging out, and minimizing exposure, leading to logically different execution trajectories from utility-first users. Such variable-length and structurally different trajectories make standard preference optimization unstable and less informative. To address this issue, we propose Trajectory Induced Preference Optimization (TIPO), which uses preference-intensity weighting to emphasize key privacy-related steps and padding gating to suppress alignment noise. Results on our Privacy Preference Dataset show that TIPO improves persona alignment and distinction while preserving strong task executability, achieving 65.60% SR, 46.22 Compliance, and 66.67% PD, outperforming existing optimization methods across various GUI tasks. The code and dataset will be publicly released at https://github.com/Zhixin-L/TIPO.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in healthcare suffer from severe confirmation bias, often hallucinating visual details to support initial, potentially erroneous diagnostic hypotheses. Existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches lack intrinsic correction mechanisms, rendering them vulnerable to error propagation. To bridge this gap, we propose Dialectic-Med, a multi-agent framework that enforces diagnostic rigor through adversarial dialectics. Unlike static consensus models, Dialectic-Med orchestrates a dynamic interplay between three role-specialized agents: a proponent that formulates diagnostic hypotheses; an opponent equipped with a novel visual falsification module that actively retrieves contradictory visual evidence to challenge the Proponent; and a mediator that resolves conflicts via a weighted consensus graph. By explicitly modeling the cognitive process of falsification, our framework guarantees that diagnostic reasoning is tightly grounded in verified visual regions. Empirical evaluations on MIMIC-CXR-VQA, VQA-RAD, and PathVQA demonstrate that Dialectic-Med not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also fundamentally enhances the trustworthiness of the reasoning process. Beyond accuracy, our approach significantly enhances explanation faithfulness and decisively mitigates hallucinations, establishing a new standard over single-agent baselines.

Graph Data Prompt (GDP), which introduces specific prompts in graph data for efficiently adapting pre-trained GNNs, has become a mainstream approach to graph fine-tuning learning problem. However, existing GDPs have been respectively designed for distinct graph component (e.g., node features, edge features, edge weights) and thus operate within limited prompt spaces for graph data. To the best of our knowledge, it still lacks a unified prompter suitable for targeting all graph components simultaneously. To address this challenge, in this paper, we first propose to reinterpret a wide range of existing GDPs from an aspect of Graph Message Prompt (GMP) paradigm. Based on GMP, we then introduce a novel graph prompt learning approach, termed Low-Rank GMP (LR-GMP), which leverages low-rank prompt representation to achieve an effective and compact graph prompt learning. Unlike traditional GDPs that target distinct graph components separately, LR-GMP concurrently performs prompting on all graph components in a unified manner, thereby achieving significantly superior generalization and robustness on diverse downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on several graph benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed LR-GMP.

Feature importance methods using unrestricted permutations are flawed due to extrapolation errors; such errors appear in all non-trivial variable importance approaches. We propose three new approaches: conditional model reliance and Knockoffs with Gaussian transformation, and restricted ALE plot designs. Theoretical and numerical results show our strategies reduce/eliminate extrapolation.

The generation of sustained, open-ended complexity from local interactions remains a fundamental challenge in artificial life. Differentiable multi-agent systems, such as Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata (PD-NCA), exhibit rich self-organization driven purely by spatial competition; however, they are highly sensitive to hyperparameters and frequently collapse into uninteresting patterns and dynamics, such as frozen equilibria or structureless noise. In this paper, we introduce PBT-NCA, a meta-evolutionary algorithm that evolves a population of PD-NCAs subject to a composite objective that rewards both historical behavioral novelty and contemporary visual diversity. Driven by this continuous evolutionary pressure, PBT-NCA spontaneously generates a plethora of emergent lifelike phenomena over extended horizons-a hallmark of true open-endedness. Strikingly, the substrate autonomously discovers diverse morphological survival and self-organization strategies. We observe highly regular, coordinated periodic waves; spore-like scattering where homogeneous groups eject cell-like clusters to colonize distant territories; and fluid, shape-shifting macro-structures that migrate across the substrate, maintaining stable outer boundaries that enclose highly active interiors. By actively penalizing monocultures and dead states, PBT-NCA sustains a state of effective complexity that is neither globally ordered nor globally random, operating persistently at the "edge of chaos".