Papers

Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

Computer-use agents can complete benign user instructions while violating important constraints of the user's environment. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety through local, pre-execution guardrail decisions and end-to-end task execution. Its action-level benchmark contains 324 human-annotated examples in which guardrails classify candidate actions as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe given the original instruction and current interface state. Its risk-augmented execution suite contains 45 tasks derived from 40 OSWorld tasks, keeping original instructions unchanged while modifying the environment to introduce state-dependent safety constraints and preserve a safe path to completion. Augmented evaluators retain the original task-success criteria and add explicit state-based safety checks, distinguishing safe completion from nominal success that violates these constraints. On the action-level benchmark, the strongest evaluated guardrail reaches 79.9% accuracy and 0.80 macro-F1, but performance drops substantially on actions from risk-augmented executions. In full-task evaluation, an unguarded agent completes 62.2% of tasks safely while 37.8% result in unsafe completion; adding the strongest guardrail reduces unsafe completion to 33.3% while leaving safe success unchanged. These results show that state-dependent safety constraints remain challenging both to recognize locally and to preserve during end-to-end computer use.

World models enable language-model agents to predict environment dynamics and plan before acting. In text environments, the model must learn symbolic action effects from serialized state descriptions, but the role of serialization structure remains underexplored. We present HyperWorld, a controlled study of state serialization for learned textual world models. We compare raw observations with three symbolic serializations of the same ground-truth state: independent sentences, pairwise triples, and entity-centered hyperedge units that group multiple related facts around entities and relations. All variants use the same training objective: given a state and an action, predict symbolic effects or judge the action infeasible. Across model scales, data budgets, and in-distribution and out-of-distribution test worlds, hyperedge serialization gives the clearest gains for 0.5B–1.5B models and under distribution shift. Larger models reduce the gap, and pairwise triples can match or slightly exceed hyperedges on in-distribution exact match, but hyperedges achieve the strongest out-of-distribution fact F1 and the best small-to-medium scale trade-off between feasibility detection and effect prediction. In downstream greedy planning, the hyperedge world model also attains the highest success rate among the tested representations. These results show that higher-order state organization is a simple but effective inductive bias for learned symbolic world models, especially when model capacity is limited or test environments differ from training.

State-of-the-art Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) models report execution accuracy exceeding 89 percent on established benchmarks such as Spider and BIRD. However, these benchmarks rely on simplified academic schemas and open-source SQL dialects that do not reflect the complexity of enterprise database environments. We introduce ESQ-Bench, an Oracle-first NL2SQL benchmark with systematic complexity tiers and silent-divergence evaluation across three enterprise schema complexity tiers. We constructed and released six populated schemas (465 tables, 164,682 rows, zero empty tables) with identical seed data on Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server, a four-metric evaluation harness (EM, EX, SR, SD), and 550 gold-validated question-query pairs (Tier-1: 95; Tier-2: 228; Tier-3: 227). Schema-linked prompting with GPT-4o shows monotonic execution-match degradation across tiers: 79.8, 60.3, and 57.2 percent EX on executed queries (June 2026), versus 75.6, 80.4, and 95.8 percent on an earlier 142-question pilot slice. EM stays below 7 percent tier-wide; operational silent-divergence reaches 73 to 99 percent among EX-passing queries. Failure analysis shows wrong-result semantics dominate at higher tiers. Claude Sonnet 4.6 with schema-linked prompts reaches 87.4, 74.9, and 68.7 percent EX (executed queries), exceeding GPT-4o schema-linked on every tier. GPT-4o zero-shot EX on executed queries (78.7, 73.5, and 77.8 percent) inverts schema-linked at Tiers 2 to 3 due to lower execution rates and survivor bias in the zero-shot versus schema-linked analysis. Local Llama 3.2 schema-linked reaches only 13.3 percent bank-wide EX (73 out of 550), underscoring the gap between closed API models and open-weight baselines on enterprise Oracle schemas.

Human speech is richly expressive, with prosody carrying linguistic and emotional information beyond the lexical content. A capable large audio-language model (audio-LLM) should therefore support expressive speech understanding, not only transcribing what was said but also interpreting how it was said. Yet behavioral evaluations alone cannot reveal why a model fails on prosodic input. An error may reflect loss of acoustic information, incorrect internal interpretation, or failure to use a representation that is already available inside the model. We introduce a stage-specific probe ladder for localizing these failure modes in audio-LLMs. Across four understanding-only audio-LLMs, prosodic information is usually preserved in the audio path and decodable in late LLM states. Yet it is only partially expressed in the model's final response. We test the causal status of this latent representation with targeted hidden-state interventions. Every intervention shifts the answer distribution in the predicted direction, and in most model–task cells a single edit at the relevant layer is sufficient to drive the model toward the suppressed prosodic decision, though this recovery is directional rather than a selective restoration of the correct class. Feature-level analysis further suggests that this recoverable signal can be expressed through a small subspace. Some of the highest-attribution features in this analysis align with acoustic cues known to carry prosodic information. Within the matched-content contrasts we test, these results locate the recurring bottleneck not in perceiving prosody but in using it. Models that hear and correctly represent a prosodic cue can still fail to express it in their answers.

This paper focuses on the implementation of a novel supervised Machine Learning model for estimating helicopter weight during takeoff, utilizing extensive datasets from Airbus's global in-service fleet. The study details a learning assurance process aligned with the EASA concept paper for machine learning application, and with the on-going Eurocae ED-324. We propose a set of Machine Learning Requirements, a Machine Learning Model Description, and its implementation for a long short-term memory recurrent neural network. Finally, we verify the requirements on the implementation. Demonstrated on legacy avionics computers, the implementation is suitable for the deployment of the developed Machine Learning Model weight estimator on airborne targets for critical functions such as on-board alerting.

OGX (Open GenAI Stack) is an open-source AI application server and Python library that implements the APIs of major frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) with pluggable backend providers. Developers building agentic AI applications–such as retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, multi-turn agents, and tool-calling workflows–can develop against a single API surface and deploy with any combination of inference engine, vector database, and safety backend, without changing application code. OGX's primary focus is the Responses API for server-side agentic orchestration, conforming to the Open Responses specification. The server also supports the Anthropic Messages API and Google GenAI Interactions API, decoupling SDK choice from model and deployment decisions. With over 20 inference providers, 13 vector store backends, and a companion Kubernetes Operator for production deployment, OGX serves as the self-hosted, model-agnostic backend for AI-powered developer tools including Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and OpenHands. The project has over 8,400 GitHub stars, 242 contributors, and 4,000 commits across nearly two years of public development.

Logic synthesis optimization poses significant challenges due to exponentially growing search spaces, sparse reward signals, and diverse logic structures. Traditional expert-designed flows lack adaptability, while reinforcement learning (RL) methods often suffer from low sample efficiency and limited interpretability. We introduce SKILL, a Self-correcting Knowledge-guided Iterative Large Language Model Agent that unifies multi-agent LLM reasoning and RL-based environment interaction for automated synthesis optimization. SKILL coordinates three specialized LLMs: GPT-4o for strategic planning, Claude Sonnet 4 for detailed reasoning, and Gemini 2.5 Pro for efficient analysis with a PPO-based RL agent that learns actionable policies through direct interaction with synthesis tools. A novel self-correcting module monitors environment feedback (PDA metrics), detects suboptimal behaviors, and invokes LLM-guided recovery strategies. Evaluations on IWLS, OpenCores, and EPFL benchmarks show SKILL achieves a 12.4 % PDA improvement over expert flows and 86.3% success rate on logic systems up to 500K gates.

Early identification of adolescent substance-use risk is an important prevention challenge, yet the relative value of baseline characteristics, longitudinal trajectories, and relational context remains unclear. Using data from approximately 11,860 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, we compare cross-sectional, longitudinal, and graph-based approaches for predicting alcohol sipping, alcohol use, marijuana use, and alcohol/marijuana use. We evaluate tree-based models, recurrent neural networks, and Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (T-GCNs) constructed from family, school, and feature-similarity graphs. Longitudinal models consistently outperform baseline models, with temporal XGBoost achieving the strongest standalone performance. Although T-GCNs generally do not surpass temporal XGBoost, graph-derived risk scores provide complementary information. Combining temporal XGBoost and T-GCN predictions through score-level stacking yields the best performance across all outcomes, achieving AUC-ROC values above 0.79. Feature analyses identify peer deviance, age, externalizing symptoms, parental monitoring, cultural norms, and neighborhood context as important predictors of substance use onset. These findings demonstrate the value of longitudinal modeling for substance-use prediction and suggest that graph-based representations can provide effective auxiliary risk signals.

The local deployment of large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction due to privacy concerns and the desire for on-premise inference. However, the energy costs on consumer hardware remain poorly characterized, as most benchmarks focus solely on accuracy. This paper presents a reproducible, hardware-level energy benchmark of 18 open-source LLMs (0.5B to 7B parameters) executed on a single consumer GPU (RTX 4060ti 16GB). Using the Ollama inference engine, GPU power draw was sampled at 2hz via nvidia-smi across a fixed prompt set. We evaluate mean/peak power, total energy per prompt (J/prompt), energy per output token (J/tok), and throughput (tok/s). Our findings suggest that factors beyond raw parameter count, including model architecture and quantization strategy, drive energy efficiency. Specifically, qwen2.5:0.5b and tinyllama:1.1b achieve the lowest energy cost (0.2747 J/tok and 0.3234 J/tok) and the highest throughput (>325 tok/s). In contrast, the 7B-Mistral model consumes up to 8.6x more energy per token than the most efficient model. Notably, qwen3.5:0.8b(on) exhibits anomalously high per-prompt energy due to extended internal reasoning, highlighting the need to distinguish between token generation modes in efficiency metrics.

Nuclear radiation, the energy released during atomic decay, poses persistent risks to public health and the environment, and concerns have only grown since the Fukushima accident and the recent commencement of treated-water discharge. Modern monitoring networks now record radiation levels and accompanying weather conditions at thousands of stations, opening the door to nationwide forecasting that can inform emergency response, agricultural advisories, and routine public-safety decisions. However, turning this abundance of monitoring data into reliable forecasts is difficult for three reasons. First, the time series at each station are highly non-stationary, shaped by radioactive decay, weather variability, and irregular human interventions. Second, monitoring stations are severely unevenly distributed in space. Roughly 78% of Japan's stations sit in less than 6% of the country, clustered near Fukushima, which breaks the assumptions of standard graph-based models. Third, radiation co-evolves with heterogeneous context such as wind, temperature, and humidity through atmospheric transport processes that purely data-driven models struggle to capture from observations alone. In this study, we introduce NRFormer+, a spatio-temporal Transformer for nationwide nuclear radiation forecasting. NRFormer+ couples non-stationary temporal attention and density-adaptive spatial attention with a new atmospheric diffusion module that estimates how meteorology drives radiation dispersion and injects this physical signal into the network as an architectural prior. NRFormer+ delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on both datasets across all 13 baselines, reducing sudden-change MAE by up to 19.1% over the strongest baseline at comparable inference latency. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/tfeilyu/NRFormer_Plus.

Managing cloud infrastructure efficiently, especially in environments of large cloud providers or hyperscalers, requires optimizing the use of physical resources to minimize costs and maximize performance. Selecting the right virtual machine (VM) sizes is crucial to achieving cost efficiency in these dynamic environments. However, traditional VM allocation and scheduling approaches often fail to account for the fluctuating and unpredictable nature of VM utilization, leading to inefficiencies such as over- or under-provisioning of resources. High-quality interval prediction helps accurately capture uncertainty in cloud resource demand and supports cloud operators in efficient instance provisioning. As an effective and reliable framework for constructing prediction intervals (PIs), conformal prediction (CP) is used for mid- and long-term forecasting tasks in cloud computing environments. This study proposes a new data-driven PI construction approach using bootstrapping conformal prediction for modern, dynamic, data-driven Right-sizing Recommendations (RSR) to enhance provisioning for diverse application workloads on hyperscalers. By learning workload utilization patterns, identifying correlations across multiple time series, and predicting medium- to long-term utilization trends, this research seeks to improve the efficiency of cloud and data center operations through an AI/ML-based provisioning pipeline. Our study demonstrates that AI-driven models, powered by machine learning regression techniques and evaluated using backtesting, achieve promising forecasting results for cloud resource utilization. Additionally, we rank the selected models to identify top-performing approaches for long-life VM candidates. The proposed framework enhances right-sizing recommendations and supports more cost-effective resource allocation in dynamic cloud environments.

Personalized multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aim to generate user-specific responses, but existing methods mainly rely on profile-level information and overlook diverse user preferences. We identify group preference collapse, where multi-user personalized MLLMs become insensitive to individual preferences and drift toward dominant population-level choices due to suppressed preference signals and unreliable preference use during generation. We propose PrefMoE, a preference-centric framework that separates stable profile information from preference-related representations. PrefMoE decomposes preferences into shared prototypes and personalized residuals, preserves individualized residuals with imbalance-aware learning, counterfactual pseudo-user augmentation, and residual decorrelation, and routes profile and preference factors through separate LoRA adaptation paths. Experiments across multiple MLLM backbones show that PrefMoE improves preference-sensitive personalization while substantially reducing preference collapse. Project page: https://prefmoe.github.io/.

Test-time scaling improves large language model reasoning, but spends compute uniformly along a reasoning trace, even in stretches that are already stable. Motivated by the observation that reasoning failures show an early onset of uncertainty, we introduce DeepLook, a training-free decoding framework that monitors segment-level confidence, branches only at uncertainty bottlenecks, and ranks candidate continuations by Average Lookahead Confidence (ALC)—their mean confidence over fixed-horizon rollouts—before completing and voting over a pruned subset. On four competition mathematics benchmarks across four open models, DeepLook matches or exceeds the accuracy of DeepConf-low in 12 of 16 settings while generating 87.3% fewer tokens, showing that a model's own confidence is informative enough to decide where extra decoding compute is worth spending. On knowledge-intensive GPQA-Diamond the accuracy advantage disappears even though the token saving does not: coherent hallucinations also receive high ALC, so internal confidence localizes instability, not falsehood. Code is available at https://github.com/txyang1/deeplook.

Information visualizations are widely used to communicate patterns, trends, and outliers, yet deceptive design choices-such as truncated or inverted axes, distorted aspect ratios, inappropriate encodings, and misleading color mappings-can systematically alter interpretation while preserving the underlying data. As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used for chart understanding and analytical reasoning, assessing their robustness to such deceptive visualizations has become critical for trustworthy data analysis. We introduce VisDeception, the first controlled paired benchmark for evaluating the robustness of VLMs to misleading chart designs. The benchmark contains 1,600 paired faithful and misleading charts spanning eight major categories of deceptive visualization tactics, where each misleading chart is paired with a faithful counterpart generated from the same underlying data. To isolate deception-induced reasoning errors from baseline chart-understanding errors, we introduce the Deception Score, a paired evaluation metric that quantifies how misleading visualizations shift model responses away from the faithful interpretation of the data. Across 32,000 responses from 10 state-of-the-art VLMs, we find that even advanced models remain highly vulnerable to deceptive visual manipulations. To improve robustness, we further propose an inference-time multi-agent mitigation framework that grounds reasoning in structured chart metadata extracted from the visualization before answer generation, enabling models to reduce the influence of deceptive visual cues without requiring explicit user instructions. Together, our findings reveal important reliability gaps in current chart-understanding systems and establish benchmark-driven evaluation, deception-aware metrics, and structured reasoning as promising directions for developing more trustworthy VLMs for visual analytics.

Diffusion models have become a widely used framework for probabilistic time series forecasting, modeling the distribution of future values given an observed history. In time series forecasting, however, the future continues the observed history, creating an asymmetry the standard diffusion process leaves unaddressed, with slowly-varying content largely determined by the observed continuity while higher-frequency dynamics carry most of the residual uncertainty. Existing diffusion-based forecasters decouple this asymmetry through an external rule before generation, leaving the corruption trajectory blind to which parts of the target the history can already anchor. We propose DiffDiff, a diffusion framework that embeds this predictability asymmetry into the diffusion trajectory itself, so that a single end-to-end diffusion process becomes aware of which parts of the target the history can already anchor. DiffDiff makes the forward operator step-dependent so that the noisy intermediate state progressively shifts from the target itself toward its second-order differenced structure, while a conditioning pathway supplies the denoiser with both value-domain and differential history information balanced by a stage-adaptive gate at each diffusion step. The terminal distribution approaches a standard Gaussian, preserving compatibility with existing samplers. On seven benchmarks across four prediction horizons, DiffDiff outperforms six diffusion baselines, while our analyses show that its trajectory reallocates modeling effort according to history predictability and improves distributional fidelity.

Educational chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising effects on learning outcomes, yet most systems delegate pedagogical decisions such as content selection and didactic structuring implicitly to the LLM, making tutoring strategies difficult to trace, evaluate, and reproduce. This paper presents a didactical-driven teacher assistant for a French-language university course on dimensional modelling, operating without commercial LLM budget or GPU infrastructure. The architecture formalises the instructor's pedagogical reasoning into deterministic modules that handle intent detection, concept linking, and didactic approach selection before any text is generated; the LLM acts solely as a linguistic executor. Evaluation on 195 authentic student questions addresses two research questions. First, we show that standard semantic retrieval alone does not reliably recover the pedagogically required content, thereby justifying the upstream orchestration strategy adopted in our architecture (RQ1). Second, compared to free-tier LLMs whose detection performance varies widely across models and which produce errors silently, the deterministic pipeline achieves high pair precision (73%) with full traceability and explicit abstention, though its limited coverage confirms that the detection strategy requires further refinement (RQ2).

Multi-hop question answering requires systems to retrieve evidence from multiple documents and connect scattered facts into a coherent reasoning process. Standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mainly relies on semantic similarity between a query and text chunks, and therefore often fails to model structural relations among entities, facts, and evidence units. Graph-based RAG improves this by introducing graph-structured knowledge, but pairwise edges are still limited in representing higher-order associations involving multiple entities and contexts. We propose HyCE-RAG, a Hypergraph Chain-of-Evidence Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for explainable multi-hop question answering. HyCE-RAG organizes entities, relations, and contextual evidence into hyperedges, builds a query-aware evidence hypergraph, and performs confidence propagation over entity–hyperedge incidence structures. It then uses confidence-guided evidence assembly to select, connect, and rank evidence paths before answer generation. The scoring process jointly considers semantic relevance, entity connectivity, evidence coverage, relation reliability, extraction confidence, and propagated confidence. By providing the language model with structured evidence chains rather than flat retrieved passages, HyCE-RAG supports more faithful and interpretable reasoning. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and two GraphRAG-Bench subsets show that HyCE-RAG consistently outperforms standard RAG and graph-based RAG baselines in answer accuracy, context relevance, and faithfulness. These results suggest that hypergraph-based evidence organization is a promising direction for post-retrieval reasoning in complex question answering.

Atomistic simulations are central to materials design, but their execution involves complex, multi-step workflows that require significant human expertise. Here, we present an agent-based system embedded within the URSA (Universal Research and Scientific Agent) framework that automates the design, execution, and validation of atomistic simulations, demonstrated using the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) tool. Our system autonomously selects interatomic potentials, constructs and runs simulations, and performs iterative error recovery within a closed-loop workflow. We evaluate the scientific reliability of the agent by benchmarking its outputs against LAVA, a high-throughput toolkit for LAMMPS and the Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) calculations. Our framework reduces manual intervention and trial-and-error, thereby improving the rigor, reproducibility, and scalability of atomistic modeling.

Production LLM applications commonly stack a regex filter in front of model-side alignment; prior work found no measurable coverage gain from adding a live Gemini backend behind an active regex filter. We ask whether that ceiling holds when the corpus is designed to bypass the regex. We introduce $L_5$-no-regex – identical to $L_4$-real (Gemini-2.5-flash, token-budget cap, rate limit, output scrub) but with the nine-pattern filter disabled – and evaluate it against $N{=}45$ adversarial probes across three sub-corpora (carry-forward, regex-bypass, alignment-isolate), amplified by Gemini paraphrase and PAIR to ${\sim}1{,}555$ probe-run pairs over $N{=}5$ replications. Under the primary substring classifier, H1 is refuted: $L_5$ block rate is $0,%$ across all five OWASP LLM Top-10 categories ($\Delta\text{pp}{=}0$ vs.\ $L_0$, $p{=}1.00$; Wilson upper bound ${<}5,%$). A secondary LLM-judge metric on PAIR variants shows $56$–$100,%$ block rates ($p{<}0.01$), revealing alignment does respond to adversarially-framed probes – but produces refusals too nuanced for substring matching. The sub-corpus differential prediction is not supported ($p{=}1.00$). Alignment's contribution is metric-dependent: on natural-language harmful-request probes, it adds zero observed coverage beyond the regex; on adversarially-framed variants, an LLM judge detects refusals the substring classifier misses. The locked corpus, mutation artifacts, and export scripts are released for replication.

Deep learning has led to remarkable progress in artificial intelligence, particularly in robotics, imaging and sound processing. However, a major limitation of neural networks remains their strong dependence on large and stationary datasets. In many real-world applications, these conditions are rarely met due to evolving and dynamic environments where data distributions change over time. Continual learning aims to address this challenge by developing models capable of adapting incrementally while maintaining a balance between stability and plasticity under computational constraints. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for continual time series forecasting, designed to extend existing static forecasting models commonly used in the literature by incorporating an Experience Replay strategy guided by Attention mechanisms. This approach allows the model to adapt dynamically to new contexts while preserving prior knowledge, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting. The framework is evaluated on standard forecasting benchmarks as well as on a piezometric dataset exhibiting diverse temporal behaviors. Results show that our approach effectively increases or maintains predictive performance over time while reducing retraining costs and data requirements, thus facilitating the deployment of forecasting models in dynamic and real-world settings.

Long-prompt inference remains expensive because prefill attention scales quadratically with sequence length. We propose Spectral-LSH, a training-free prompt compression method that operates before the prompt enters the language model. Spectral-LSH approximates the dominant components of an implicit attention-kernel operator using a Krylov subspace method together with random features, avoiding explicit $O(N^2)$ attention-kernel materialization. It then applies SimHash in the resulting attention eigenspace to group similar tokens and aggregate them into macro-tokens with causal positional assignments. We evaluate Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on C4. Our experiments reveal a compression-ratio phase transition. Below $\rho = 4 \times$, local token redundancy is low enough that lightweight chunking typically provides the best latency–quality trade-off. Above $\rho = 8 \times$, the spectral path preserves quality that chunking loses. At $\rho = 16 \times$, Qwen2.5-7B (adaptive) reduces the PPL ratio from 353.409 to 196.963, while Qwen2.5-14B (adaptive) reduces it from 9.533 to 3.427. On a small long-context structured stress test containing JSON-like, code-like, and table-like inputs, local LSH also improves every metric over chunking at $8 \times$. The adaptive backend captures both regimes by using the chunk path at low compression and spectral clustering at high compression, although chunking remains the fastest backend in total latency.

Prosumers equipped with distributed generation and flexible loads form autonomous cyber-physical energy systems that control local resources and participate in local energy markets with minimal human intervention. This work develops and evaluates an agent-based simulation platform in which agents, representing prosumer households with photovoltaic systems, battery storage systems, electric vehicles, and heat pumps, participate in a uniform-price double-sided call auction. The effect of individual bidding strategies on community-level efficiency and prosumer-level financial outcomes is incompletely understood, particularly when prosumers with heterogeneous portfolios interact in one market. Four market strategies of increasing complexity are compared: a zero-intelligence constrained baseline, a boundary-price strategy, an extended storage cascade, and a market-adaptive pricing strategy. The simulation is conducted on a community of 33 prosumers at 15-minute resolution, spanning summer, winter, and spring to characterize seasonal variation. Results show that rule-based resource control substantially reduces community energy expenditure: the extended storage cascade achieves a total cost of 39.06 EUR compared to 62.38 EUR under the zero-intelligence baseline, a reduction of 37.4 %. The market-adaptive strategy yields the highest aggregate community financial gain through local energy market participation (14.40 EUR vs. 10.28 EUR for the baseline, a gain of 40.1 %) under summer conditions. Strategy effectiveness depends on both portfolio composition and seasonal supply conditions, requiring joint evaluation of resource control and pricing decisions.

Heart disease kills a lot of people, and one cheap way to catch it early is by listening to heart sounds with a stethoscope, or better yet, just recording them and running them through a model. This project is a binary classification task: take a short clip of someones heartbeat and decide if it sounds normal or abnormal. Instead of trying out a bunch of different models, we kept the CNN the same the whole time and just changed how we turned the raw audio into a picture for it to look at. We tried three ways of doing that: a regular logmel spectrogram, PCEN (which basically normalizes each frequency bin over time), and a multi resolution version that stacks a few different window sizes together. We ran all three on the PhysioNet 2016 heart-sound dataset with the exact same setup but same model, same optimizer, same random seed. Turns out all three do pretty well at catching abnormal cases (sensitivity around 0.95), but PCEN and multi-resolution both edge out the plain logmel on the official PhysioNet accuracy metric (0.915 and 0.916 vs. 0.910). We also ran Grad-CAM to see where the model was actually looking, and it mostly focused on the low frequencies where S1 and S2 heart sounds live, which is a good sign that it learned something real

Large Language Model (LLM) based AI educational content generation systems are increasingly being developed, yet no standardised benchmark exists to systematically evaluate them. This study introduces LessonBench-V1, a benchmark dataset comprising 647 human-written lessons paired with LLM-based reverse-engineered lesson plans across 240 STEM topics spanning mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. The lessons are drawn from 97 trusted open sources, including LibreTexts, Brilliant.org and GeeksForGeeks. Each lesson plan is human-reviewed and produced through a pedagogically grounded methodology that synthesises Bloom's Taxonomy, Gagné's Events, Merrill's First Principles, and the 5E Instructional Model. The lesson plans capture 3,620 learning objectives with pedagogical metadata, enabling systematic, reproducible evaluation of lesson-generation AI agents and supporting further research. The study further proposes a three-dimensional evaluation pipeline for use with the dataset.

This paper examines where final authority should sit once capable AI systems are embedded in organizational workflows. It compares two governance models. The first, frontier-provider sovereignty, assigns privileged authority to the provider of the most capable models and is reflected in contemporary arguments for frontier-model testing, release gating, transparency duties, and compute-related controls. The second, action-centered deployer sovereignty, places final authority over high-impact actions with the organization that authorizes the action, embeds it in a business process, and bears the downstream legal, operational, and commercial consequences. The paper combines comparative reading of public governance frameworks with implementation-informed analysis of runtime heterogeneity and enterprise control requirements. It compares EU AI Act guidance, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, recent Japanese AI policy instruments, and Canada's voluntary code and managerial guidance. Across these materials, the paper finds stronger support for distributed operational accountability than for unilateral frontier-provider control. It further argues that rapid enterprise adoption, declining provider transparency, and widening control gaps increase the value of a portable governance layer centered on governed action rather than on provider-native session objects. The conclusion is layered rather than absolutist: strong upstream authority remains justified for frontier capability gating, but final authority over concrete enterprise action is better located with the deployer and consequence-bearer.

Refusal rates conflate upstream provider behavior with downstream safeguards and do not reveal what information remains in a delivered answer. Safeguard-conditioned uplift is an evidence-gated framework for evaluating benchmark utility and risk-related proxies along deployed access paths for dual-use biology assistants. It attributes interventions to their source, selects thresholds under a legitimate-access budget, and supports content claims only when answer verifiers pass frozen qualification tests. In a prospectively frozen route and generation study, two of six configurations pass the LAB-Bench-calibrated action-level rule, but both inherit the same Claude Opus provider effect rather than independent downstream gains. Positive selectivity persists on 104 previously unused matched pairs, but benign intervention exceeds the $20\%$ limit. No joint-scoring verifier meets the frozen criteria; a factorial follow-up shows that criterion isolation and ordinal outputs improve end-to-end edit-direction accuracy on controlled template edits. The evidence supports action-level selectivity and verifier interface effects, but not calibrated access, verified content removal, or biological-risk reduction.

Forecasting particulate matter (PM10) requires both station-scale accuracy and continuous spatial fields, especially during severe dust storms. Chemical transport models (CTMs) provide gridded forecasts but retain local biases, whereas graph neural networks (GNNs) track monitoring sites well at short lead times but do not produce gridded outputs. Here we present OmniPM-Net, a Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP)-based fusion model that reconciles these two forecast types within a shared spatial representation. A terrain-aware Gaussian set convolution lifts irregular GNN station forecasts onto a regular grid, where a multi-scale Spatial Source Attention (SSA) module blends them with Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) forecasts; a shared omni-query readout then decodes this representation into consistent PM10 predictions at either stations or grid cells over a 108 h horizon. Evaluated across 1,618 air-quality monitoring stations throughout China over the full year of 2024, OmniPM-Net matches the station-level accuracy of the stronger GNN baseline (mean absolute error 21.14 versus 22.00 ug/m3) and reduces the CAMS mean absolute error by 30%, while simultaneously delivering the gridded fields that the discrete GNN cannot. Its clearest gains are in the high-concentration tail, where the 90th-percentile MAE falls by 9% relative to the GNN and 25% relative to CAMS, and during dust episodes, where it improves categorical detection skill while tracking the evolving spatial trajectory.

When LLM agents hand information to one another, does the message format matter? Two literatures disagree: format-optimization work reports that structured messages cut cost without hurting accuracy, while format-restriction studies find that imposing structure degrades generation. Neither line has measured what happens when messages traverse multiple hops, where copy fidelity, rather than one-shot generation quality, dominates. We introduce a controlled relay testbed in which briefs of twelve programmatic atomic facts are re-encoded hop by hop in five formats (free natural language, precision-instructed NL, JSON, triples, key-value) over six hops, scored against programmatic ground truth by a fixed strong grader, across two relay-capability tiers, a cognitive-load condition, and a paired-fork error injection. We find that (i) a strong relay is nearly lossless for every format (hop-6 QA recall $\geq 0.973$), with residual loss concentrated at the first encoding step; (ii) per-hop cognitive load raises generation cost by 24-53% while fidelity changes stay within $\pm 1.8$ points; (iii) under a weak 1.5B relay, the across-format dispersion of hop-6 recall grows by a factor of $8.7$ (CI 5.3-15.5), driven by an encode-drift trade-off that flips the format ranking in transit; and (iv) once an injected error is present, every format propagates it faithfully (surface persistence 83-100%) and no format cascades collateral damage onto neighboring facts. Structure buys a faithful, error-localizing channel, not an error-correcting code.