Papers

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a mesh-free framework for solving governing equations, but their application to granular avalanche dynamics over curved terrain remains largely unexplored. This study extends a depth-averaged PINN formulation based on the Savage-Hutter equations to an exponentially curved chute with spatially varying inclination and a strain-rate-dependent Mohr-Coulomb earth-pressure closure. The model is validated against measured front- and rear-edge trajectories from a laboratory granular-avalanche experiment, with selected observations withheld from training. A staged temporal curriculum proved essential for accurate prediction, reducing the held-out trajectory error by approximately two orders of magnitude compared with training over the full time domain from the outset. Sparse-data experiments further showed that observation placement was more influential than observation number within the configurations tested. Four observations bracketing the transition from acceleration to deceleration achieved nearly the same accuracy as the eight-observation reference configuration, whereas observations clustered at early or late times performed poorly. The results demonstrate the importance of both training strategy and informative data placement when applying PINNs to granular flows over curved topography.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use user context such as memory, profiles, and role prompts to personalize their responses. This personalization can affect evidence-based judgment: the same evidence may lead to different conclusions under different user contexts. Finance provides a high-stakes setting to study this problem because decisions often depend on interpreting long and complex documents. We test this using 3,575 SEC filings across twelve LLMs. We compare persona-conditioned retrieval, neutral retrieval, and memory-framed context to separate the effect of evidence selection from the effect of interpretation. We find that most user-context spillover comes from how models interpret the same evidence under different roles, rather than from retrieving different evidence. We then test two simple mitigation strategies: expressing the same investor mindset as a user profile instead of an assistant role, and separating evidence-based and personalized outputs. Both reduce spillover, but neither removes it completely, and their effectiveness varies substantially across models.

Nonlinear-manifold reduced-order models for parametrized finite element problems can achieve substantial compression both in the number of generalized (latent) coordinates and, through sampling-and-weighting hyperreduction, in the number of sampled elements/integration points. Yet current sampling-and-weighting approaches employ weights that remain fixed over the solution manifold. We contend that this restriction leaves hyperreduction potential untapped: allowing the weights to vary continuously and nonlinearly with the latent coordinates can further decrease the number of sampled spatial entities. To exploit this possibility, we propose the Manifold-Adaptive-Weight Empirical Cubature Method (MAW-ECM). Starting from a feasible fixed-weight ECM rule, a greedy pruning strategy removes sampled entities through convex quadratic weight-redistribution problems enforcing local conditions and positivity. The method is assessed on two nonlinear benchmarks: homogenization of a metamaterial unit cell exhibiting negative incremental stiffness, and a history-dependent continuum-damage problem. In both cases, the nonlinear manifold is constructed from an initial linear compression followed by an input-informed identification of the latent coordinates as general linear combinations of the retained modal amplitudes, incorporating graph information when relevant to seek the intrinsic dimensionality of the solution manifold. We show that combining the nonlinear-manifold representation with MAW-ECM reduces the number of sampled integration points by more than two orders of magnitude relative to the corresponding standard linear reduced model. Relative to the fixed-weight manifold models alone, the adaptive weights eliminate approximately 80% of the remaining points in the homogenization benchmark and more than 97% in the damage benchmark, while essentially preserving their accuracy.

High-fidelity TCAD simulation of drift-diffusion transport remains the workhorse of emerging FinFET device design, but it is computationally expensive, especially for 3D structures where runtime escalates steeply with mesh complexity. This sharply limits multi-objective design space exploration. Existing machine-learning surrogates map a fixed set of design parameters to a few scalar device metrics, discarding the underlying physics and losing transferability across device geometries and families. A physics-informed graph attention network (GAT) surrogate is proposed. It operates directly on the tetrahedral TCAD mesh and predicts, at every mesh node, the electrostatic potential together with the electron and hole quasi-Fermi levels, the fundamental unknowns of the drift-diffusion system. Training combines a data loss with finite-volume current-continuity residuals, embedding carrier-transport physics into the objective. Operating on the mesh as a graph, the surrogate inherits size generalization: a model trained on few-fin meshes applies unchanged to substantially larger arrays, bounded at inference only by GPU memory. Per-node uncertainty from a deep ensemble drives an active-learning loop that screens large candidate pools in seconds and forwards only the most informative designs for full simulation. Benchmarked against Sentaurus Device on multi-fin tri-gate FinFETs, the surrogate reproduces the three drift-diffusion fields with sub-volt per-field RMSE and reaches a per-design throughput orders of magnitude higher than the full simulator. The advantage grows with device size: on large multi-fin arrays that are prohibitively slow to simulate directly, inference still completes in under a second per device, enabling Pareto-front exploration across device scales infeasible for direct TCAD sweeps.

Modern portfolio management increasingly demands a balance between traditional risk-adjusted returns and strict Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) mandates. Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches typically optimize for a single ESG provider, neglecting the significant divergence in rating methodologies across the industry and the unintuitive nature of manually weighting conflicting objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by formulating ESG-aware portfolio optimization as a Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) problem that simultaneously incorporates ratings from three distinct ESG agencies. To bridge the gap between high-dimensional algorithmic trade-offs and human decision-making, we integrate a Preference Elicitation framework using Gaussian Processes. This system enables practitioners to infer their latent utility functions through intuitive pairwise comparisons of candidate portfolios based on their Sharpe ratios and aggregate ESG scores. We systematically evaluate our framework by employing Large Language Model (LLM) personas to simulate Portfolio Managers operating under varied regional contexts. Empirical results using historical market data reveal that regional backgrounds fundamentally shift the derived preference weights. For instance, European-based personas tend to prioritize ESG alignment over financial returns, while Texas-based personas favor risk-adjusted performance. This work offers a highly adaptable framework that successfully aligns multi-objective algorithmic trading with diverse, real-world human sustainability preferences.

In many systems, the interaction between a deformable surface or interface and the surrounding bulk fluid is coupled with intrinsic spatiotemporal dynamics within the moving surface. Examples include tumor growth, biological tissue morphogenesis, cardiac mechanics, multi-phase surfactant chemistry, additive manufacturing, clothing wear-and-tear, and reactive combustion flows. Solving such problems requires both geometric computing algorithms to track and resolve the surface and numerical methods to solve the coupled governing equations in the surface and the surrounding bulk phase. Here, we present a fully meshfree numerical solver for such coupled bulk-surface problems with deformable interfaces. The presented solver tracks the surface implicitly, solving for the dynamic surface geometry based on stress balance coupled to surrounding fluid phases. We show convergence for a mass-conserving case on a growing sphere and solve bulk-surface problems with incompressible Navier-Stokes fluids coupled to in-surface nonlinear reaction-diffusion dynamics. Finally, we show a model of biological morphogenesis, solving simultaneously for the dynamic surface shape and the fields on the curved surface with two-way coupling.

Classical constitutive modeling of path-dependent inelastic materials relies on internal state variables whose evolution equations must be postulated based on domain knowledge and calibrated against experimental data. However, in many practical settings, the relevant internal variables are typically not measurable in experiments, and the constitutive response must be inferred entirely from measured strain-stress data without any prior knowledge of the material's internal state. We propose a data-driven constitutive modeling framework based on the concept of a material operator, which treats a deforming material as a functional mapping from its entire strain history to the corresponding stress response. In contrast to traditional autoregressive or recurrent formulations, the model is trained directly on full loading paths as function-to-function mappings, predicting complete stress trajectories in a single parallel forward pass. Temporal path dependence is enforced through a causally masked attention mechanism embedded within the operator, which restricts the model's attention to past material states while preserving computational parallelizability. Spectral convolutions provide discretization-invariant representations in the frequency domain, while causal attention captures highly adaptive, non-local history dependence. Furthermore, sinusoidal activation functions are used to resolve the strong nonlinear transitions inherent in inelastic regimes. The framework is evaluated across multidimensional, rate-independent material models exhibiting complex phenomena, with an emphasis on nonlinear plasticity and ductile damage accumulation. The results demonstrate accurate and robust predictions of irreversible deformation mechanisms while simultaneously achieving resolution invariance and excellent parallel efficiency.

Accurate prediction of bearing remaining useful life (RUL) is a key challenge for intelligent maintenance. Although deep learning-based prediction methods have showed effectiveness, existing methods still have limitations in learning nonlinear bearing degradation processes and model interpretability. Especially in engineering applications, the "black box" nature of deep learning models can easily raise concerns about their reliability. Therefore, we propose a physics-enhanced bidirectional multi-order graph fusion network for interpretable bearing RUL prediction. Our network mines complementary information from both forward and backward degradation sequences. Specifically, our network introduces a multi-order graph propagator to capture the local-global degradation dependencies. A gated cross-fusion mechanism is further designed to dynamically balance the feature contributions from both forward and backward directions. Then, our network stores representative historical degradation prototypes in dynamic memory, so that the final RUL prediction no longer depends solely on the current latent features, but is guided by reusable historical degradation knowledge. To reveal how our model learns the nonlinear degradation process, the feature mapping parts utilize the Kolmogorov-Arnold network, which allows the nonlinear mapping to be visualized using learnable functions. Finally, a physics-enhanced dynamic loss function is developed to help our network learn effective and reliable degradation representations. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method achieves the lowest error while providing more conservative estimates than existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/IMGresearcher/PE-BMGN.

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) for structure-based drug design condition on one rigid protein structure. A flexible target holds several distinct structural shapes, its conformations, each occupied for a fraction of the simulation time. Scoring a candidate against all of them raises an open question: how do K scores become one reward? The designer cannot choose arbitrarily. Populations carry simulation error, and biology dictates which conformations are deal-breakers, so a candidate that fails one is disqualified, not merely ranked lower. No standard rule captures this. We compose the reward from a conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), a worst-case score rule, and an ambiguity radius expressing distrust in the stated weights. Together, these define a family of targets, amortised by a single conditional GFlowNet. We answer whether such a sampler can be trained on fully enumerable synthetic worlds, where every error is exact rather than estimated. Pricing the tail rather than averaging moves 2-10 times more mass to candidates that pass every conformation. One network covers the family to within 0.37-2.7x the error of a perfect sampler. An exact-KL oracle, a copy trained on the true target, shows if a shortfall is the optimiser's or the architecture's. When good candidates are rare, exploration decides: injecting unseen states finds 0.987-1.000 of good regions, while reweighting visited finds 0.35-0.76.

The ability to extract oriented edges from visual input is a core computation across animal vision systems. Orientation maps, long associated with the layered architecture of the mammalian visual cortex, systematically organise neurons by their preferred edge orientation. Despite lacking cortical structures, the Drosophila melanogaster brain contains feature-selective neurons and exhibits complex visual detection capacity, raising the question of whether map-like vision representations can emerge without cortical infrastructure. We integrate a complete fruit fly brain connectome with biologically grounded spiking neuron models to simulate neuroprocessing in the fly visual system. By driving the network with oriented stimuli and analysing downstream responses, we show that coherent orientation maps can emerge from purely connectome-constrained dynamics. These results suggest that species of independent origin could evolve similar visual structures.

Telegram plays a pivotal role in cryptocurrency communication and has been repeatedly associated with coordinated schemes, such as pump-and-dump manipulation. However, existing studies typically focus on known manipulation chats or a limited set of cryptocurrencies, leaving open the question of how Telegram is leveraged for mass promotional activity (shilling) at scale. Moving beyond these limitations, this work analyzes the interplay between information flows and market activity across public Telegram channels. To this end, we propose a scalable framework that (i) classifies crypto-related messages using a fine-tuned encoder model to filter semantic noise, (ii) detects anomalous spikes in cryptocurrency mentions via adaptive thresholding, and (iii) validates temporal associations between social bursts and market movements using quasi-experimental econometric methods (RDD and DiD). We apply this framework to one year of public Telegram data (14,499 channels and over 20 million messages) aligned with transaction data for more than 17,000 cryptocurrencies. Our analysis identifies 47 events consistent with potential pump-and-dump activity and 73 sustained market reactions, showing that manipulative signals are characterized by extreme temporal synchronization and precede price movements by seconds. Notably, psycholinguistic analysis reveals that pump-and-dump messages are linguistically indistinguishable from organic discussions, highlighting the limits of text-based detection alone. Finally, we estimate the cumulative financial volume of detected pump-and-dump events to exceed $200 million and release a public cryptocurrency dictionary and a fine-tuned classifier to support future research.

Small enterprises face increasingly serious threats to their internal networks but often lack the financial resources, computing capacity, and specialist staff required to deploy resource intensive security platforms. This paper designs and implements VPID, a lightweight framework for vulnerability prioritization and intrusion detection that consists of two principal modules: controlled vulnerability validation and intelligent intrusion defense. The first module uses OpenVAS for asset mapping and vulnerability identification, applies a decision tree to prioritize vulnerabilities, and employs a rule engine to generate targeted validation payloads. The second module captures network traffic using Scapy, analyzes it through a detection pipeline that combines a decision tree with multinomial Naive Bayes, verifies traffic assessed as high risk using Snort rules, and performs blocking and alerting through iptables. The evaluation uses 550,000 network flow samples containing normal and attack traffic for detector training, together with 15,000 labeled vulnerability records. On the vulnerability ranking test set, the decision tree achieves a precision of 91.8%, a recall of 89.5%, and an F1 score of 90.6%. On an independent test set containing 55,000 traffic samples, the combined detection pipeline achieves a precision of 94.5%, a recall of 88.3%, and an F1 score of 91.3%, while maintaining a false positive rate below 1.5%.

We propose DiffGeo, a latent space diffusion-based generative framework for aerodynamic design space exploration under extreme data scarcity. DiffGeo combines a learned latent space model for automatic shape parameterization, with a diffusion sampler to directly generate novel, geometry-valid and controllable designs. We validate the approach on a series of case studies: (i) a 2D airfoil generation benchmark, where DiffGeo's latent diffusion model is compared against GAN- and VAE-based baselines in terms of sample quality, diversity and constraint adherence under limited data; (ii) integration into a surrogate-based optimization pipeline, where DiffGeo's conditional sampling produces task-informed airfoil data that improve both surrogate modeling and optimization performance; and (iii) extension to 3D turbomachinery blade prototyping, where DiffGeo generates realistic and high-performance blade geometries from a small set of reference designs. Throughout these investigations, DiffGeo achieves high-quality and diverse shape generation with at least an order of magnitude less data than alternatives, decouples geometry representation from design targets for flexible reuse, and seamlessly incorporates complex design constraints via energy-based conditioning. These capabilities demonstrate DiffGeo's potential to enhance early-stage design by automating design space exploration–improving efficiency, expanding design diversity and embedding engineering knowledge through controllable guidance.

Reconstructing oscillatory wave fields from scattered sensors is a severely underdetermined inverse problem. Beyond the challenges of general physical-field reconstruction, wave responses are complex-valued, frequency-sensitive, and highly oscillatory, while costly simulation and sensing often leave only extreme-sparse observations. Existing low-rank, operator, and diffusion approaches are largely designed for real-valued, smoother fields; dense pixel-space diffusion is particularly inefficient for oscillatory complex fields and difficult to scale to 3D. We propose HarmoCore, which places a generative prior in a compact, continuous, and structured wave-field latent. HarmoCore represents joint real–imaginary channels with Functional Tucker cores over shared continuous spatial bases, learns a frequency-conditioned core diffusion prior, and performs Diffusion Posterior Sampling directly in core space. At fixed sensor coordinates, the multilinear decoder induces an explicit likelihood guidance operator, avoiding dense pixel-space correction. Optional target-equation residual guidance further promotes physical consistency. Experiments on 2D Helmholtz, 2D synthetic wave fields, and 3D Helmholtz show substantial gains under 1%–2% sensing while remaining practical in three dimensions.

Bilevel optimization provides a natural modeling language for hierarchical decision problems. However, applying existing numerical solvers usually requires substantial manual analysis and reformulation. In this paper, we introduce disciplined bilevel programming (DBLP), a symbolic framework that allows users to specify and solve optimistic bilevel problems in a high-level, human-readable way that is close to the mathematical formulation. For problems with a disciplined nonlinear upper problem and a convex lower problem satisfying the disciplined parameterized programming rules, DBLP automatically canonicalizes the lower problem into conic form and constructs an equivalent single-level reformulation using the conic Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. We relax the resulting complementarity constraint and use a gap continuation procedure to approximately solve a sequence of smooth nonlinear problems. We implement DBLP in the open-source Python package BLVPY, an extension of CVXPY for bilevel programming. We demonstrate the modeling and solution capabilities of BLVPY on a range of bilevel optimization problems from several application domains. The proposed framework and implementation allow users to specify and solve bilevel optimization problems within a few lines of code, without prior expertise in bilevel modeling and numerical optimization.

Reliable computational pathology depends on preprocessing methods that identify informative tissue regions while excluding artifacts and low-utility regions from whole-slide images (WSI). However, existing preprocessing pipelines often retain such regions or discard diagnostically relevant tissue, thereby limiting downstream model performance, reliability, and robustness across heterogeneous cohorts. Here, we systematically evaluate how these regions affect downstream AI model performance across multiple clinically relevant applications and introduce MUFASA, a generalizable, information utility-aware preprocessing framework for H&E-stained WSI that excludes artifacts and low-utility regions while preserving biologically meaningful tissue. MUFASA integrates slide-level artifact masking, stain-aware tile filtering, reconstruction-based utility stratification of tiles, and targeted recovery of tissue tiles that are over-filtered by earlier phases. Across tumor diagnosis, tumor subtyping, biomarker status prediction, and survival prognostication tasks in diverse cancer cohorts, MUFASA consistently improves downstream model performance relative to widely used preprocessing baselines. These gains are accompanied by reduced artifact-associated attribution in model heatmaps, indicating improved alignment between retained tissue and model attention. Our findings establish WSI preprocessing as a critical determinant of downstream model performance and validity, revealing that even accurate predictions can conceal important failure modes stemming from anatomically implausible reasoning driven by retained artifact-containing and low information-utility tiles.

Large language models extracting knowledge graphs from text capture only explicitly stated facts, often leaving semantically related entities disconnected across documents. We present an additive, engine-neutral second pass that discovers these latent ties without altering extracted facts. Each document is chunked and embedded once; top-k nearest- neighbor queries across existing chunks yield candidate node pairs via entity membership maps. Candidate pairs are scored using Shepard inverse-distance weighting with a rescaled chord distance metric, avoiding the threshold-collapsing flaw of affine cosine scoring behind a k-NN gate. Un-gated per-pair accumulators form a commutative monoid, ensuring the pipeline is strictly order-independent and scales incrementally without recomputing prior documents. Implemented across FalkorDB, Kinetica, ArangoDB, and Neo4j, our method shows that 768- and 240-dimensional embeddings retain 92% and 72% edge fidelity against a 3072-D baseline while achieving a 25x faster top-k formulation.

Motor imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) decoding could support post-stroke rehabilitation, but models developed on healthy cohorts may not transfer reliably to pathological EEG. We evaluated whether Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can efficiently adapt three pretrained EEG foundation models (i.e., LaBraM-base, REVE-base, and REVE-large) for binary left- versus right-hand MI decoding. Frozen-backbone head-only baselines and LoRA adaptation were evaluated using subject-wise five-fold cross-validation on the PhysioNet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset and a binary subset of the UET175 dataset comprising 30 stroke participants. On EEGMMIDB, LoRA increased accuracy to 0.822 for LaBraM-base and 0.957 for REVE-base. On UET175, all head-only models performed near chance. With LoRA, LaBraM-base remained near chance (0.499$\pm$0.009), whereas REVE-base reached 0.847$\pm$0.194 and outperformed REVE-large (0.806$\pm$0.178), indicating that increased model capacity alone did not improve stroke-domain adaptation. The strongest stroke configuration, REVE-base LoRA, was further evaluated using within-cohort leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (LOOCV), showing 0.952 mean accuracy, but subject-wise accuracy ranged from 0.586 to 1.000, revealing a small low-performing tail. Zero-shot transfer from EEGMMIDB to UET175 remained near chance (0.464$\pm$0.072). These findings show that healthy-benchmark performance does not ensure transfer to stroke EEG. Translation of EEG foundation models to pseudo-online or real-time rehabilitation BCIs should therefore include target-domain adaptation and subject-level assessment of temporal informativeness, spatial sensitivity, and physiological discriminability.

We present a meshfree numerical solver for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on oriented curved surfaces that are represented by surface point clouds. On curved surfaces, numerical challenges pertaining to stiffness and pressure-velocity coupling are exacerbated. Moreover, vector calculus on curved surfaces differs from its Euclidean counterpart. The presented method operates on surface point clouds in an Eulerian frame of reference without requiring a computational grid or mesh. It achieves consistent approximation in space and time with high order of accuracy; we demonstrate up to order six. The incompressibility constraint is locally imposed as a weak artificial compressibility approximation, avoiding global matrix inversion. We show that the method provides consistent and convergent approximations of surface vector fields and differential operators. We study the relationship between error, spatial resolution, and artificial Mach number and characterize the frequency spectrum of the artificial oscillations. We provide numerical solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on symmetric surfaces, such as the sphere and torus, and on parametric and non-parametric asymmetric surfaces. Since the proposed method works directly on unstructured surface point clouds, it provides a promising approach for simulations on image-derived geometries, such as in biological morphogenesis from microscopy videos.

LLM confidence scores are not independently deployable objects: their decision value depends on the downstream operator and exposure controller that consume them. Monotone recalibration cannot change a coverage-matched rank-based gate, whereas position sizing consumes score magnitude, so changing a confidence map can invalidate a scale fitted to the previous score distribution. We test this on FactSet news for Nasdaq-100 equities, fitting maps and scales on 2021 and evaluating nine open-weight LLMs out-of-sample on 2022–2023. Cross-applying raw and correctness maps with independently fitted scales shows that the two components are not portable alone: scale transfer reduces certainty-equivalent return (CER) in $8/9$ models and produces large risk-target errors. Matching each map with its fitted scale improves ensemble CER by $9.2$ percentage points per year under frozen-scale control ($p<0.001$), and the effect remains significant when the single largest-contributing model is excluded ($+5.5$pp/yr), so it is not driven by one case. Under an identical adaptive-volatility controller, however, the incremental effect falls to $+1.6$pp/yr, with a significant controller interaction. Annual walk-forward effects are smaller, although map–scale interaction remains positive in every fold. Confidence transformations should therefore be evaluated jointly with the downstream controllers that consume them.

Financial institutions deploying on-chain FX liquidity face a joint design problem: how much capital to commit, and how to configure the pool, to remain both competitive on trading costs and profitable as a liquidity provider? The StableSwap mechanism (Egorov, 2020) interpolates between constant-product (CPMM) and constant-sum (CSMM) market makers (Port and Tiruviluamala, 2022) via an amplification factor A, but neither extreme suits institutional FX: CPMM pools require excessive capital and generate high impermanent loss; CSMM pools are capital-efficient near the peg but drain rapidly under adversarial flow. Using a Merton jump-diffusion price process (Merton, 1976) and the loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR) framework (Milionis et al., 2022), we map the joint (A, TVL) space to identify configurations that satisfy all three institutional requirements: competitive slippage, positive return, and shock resilience. Minimum viable pool size scales approximately as TVL/Q = 1000/A; ROC at that minimum is thin (about 0.054% per horizon) and independent of A; low-A pools (A <= 10) suffer slippage exceeding 200 bps under a 10x shock, while high-A pools (A >= 500) suffer reserve drain up to 60%, establishing both a capital floor and a practical amplification ceiling.

Load rating is the engineering process of determining the safe load-carrying capacity of an existing bridge structure often through analysis of its load-bearing members and their cross sections. However, when structural drawings and details of the structure are missing or insufficient for such calculations, alternative solutions must be used to infer the capacity. This study proposes a rational and consistent engineering solution for capacity inference based on structural identification (St-Id). The proposed approach uses finite element model updating (FEMU) to estimate the unknown characteristics of structures for use in an analytical load rating, which requires the development of an initial model developed in ABAQUS that can be updated based on experimental test data. ABAQUS allowed for the development of an interface with MATLAB, which facilitated the integration of an automatic iterative parameter optimization algorithm. The optimization algorithm developed in this investigation incorporated the features of a genetic algorithm (GA) and a gradient-based scheme to iterate on the unknown parameters. The proposed approach was evaluated on four in-service highway bridges including two concrete slab and two T-beam structures in varying deterioration condition states, which had sufficient plans available but were treated as having varying degrees of unknown details. The results illustrated that the finite element (FE) model updating approach generated load ratings that were within 0-17% of the target load ratings while alleviating the main challenges of the existing alternatives.

Scientific analysis workflows encode deep domain knowledge through sequences of tightly coupled operations where correctness depends on tool selection, execution order, and parameterization. A CFD engineer investigating flow separation must extract wall shear stress, identify zero-crossings in skin friction, and confirm with boundary-layer profiles: a chain that requires both domain expertise and proficiency with visualization tools. Current approaches to LLM-assisted scientific visualization generate scripts that encode this knowledge implicitly, and often incorrectly, producing code that executes but yields wrong results. We present an architecture that separates intent interpretation (LLM) from execution (deterministic domain tools) from explanation (LLM), connected by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and grounded by domain ontologies that constrain planning to valid analysis chains. We instantiate the architecture in two domains on the same ParaView server infrastructure: computational fluid dynamics post-processing and topological data analysis via the Topology ToolKit (TTK). Adding the second domain required only an ontology and tool wrappers around existing filters, with no change to the architecture, protocol, or deployment. By construction the design removes whole classes of failure that affect script generation (such as API hallucination and missing pipeline stages) and narrows the strategic errors that remain. An ablation across both domains locates the ontology's empirical effect: it does not change which tools the planner selects, which is already reliable, but corrects how the model interprets results, raising interpretation accuracy from 0.41 to 0.91, and only when the relevant fact is retrieved in scoped rather than bulk form. ParaView's client-server model carries analysis to production-scale datasets through a thin browser client.

Deterministic topology optimization can efficiently generate high-performance structural designs, but it does not explicitly control localized fragility induced by manufacturing variations and geometric uncertainties. Such fragility often appears as stress concentrations or hinge-like deformation mechanisms. Conventional robust topology optimization can suppress these features, but typically requires multiple design realizations and substantially increased computational cost. Recent work by Sigmund et al. (2026) introduced sensitivity hot spot penalization (SHoSP), which augments the nominal objective by a smooth maximum of its sensitivities and suppresses localized fragile features at low additional cost while promoting more even stress distributions. This paper establishes a general connection between SHoSP and a first-order worst-case robust approximation under a material-mass perturbation budget using a Taylor expansion and H{"o}lder's duality. The original penalty weight is identified as a dimensionless norm-bounded perturbation budget relative to the area (2D) or volume (3D) of the design domain. This interpretation explains the suppression of sensitivity hot spots, hinge localization, and stress concentrations by limiting the maximum first-order degradation under budgeted perturbations. It is investigated for compliance minimization and compliant mechanism design. Robustness is assessed using a relaxed worst-case density perturbation and by comparing deterministic and SHoSP designs under equivalent perturbation budgets. Stress-related effects observed on structured meshes are cross-validated by stress-oriented topology optimization and body-fitted finite element analyses. Extensions to porous infill optimization, multiple load cases, and large-scale 3D examples further demonstrate the applicability and superior scalability of the SHoSP framework.

Stablecoins, typically pegged to fiat currencies, cannot achieve true stability because they inherit fluctuations in the underlying unit of account. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a stablecoin pegged to the Maximum Likelihood Value (MLV), a newly defined unit of account derived as the most probable configuration of latent real-value movements that explains observed nominal-value (price) changes. Grounded in inferential statistics and modern portfolio theory, MLV represents the most stable unit of account, as it enforces a zero real return on the minimum-variance portfolio. Empirical results confirm the operational viability of an MLV-pegged stablecoin: MLV can be computed in real time from 500 asset price series and improves annualized returns and Sharpe ratios while substantially reducing turnover in portfolio optimization.

Traditional finance relies on experts to hand-craft factors through a principled process grounded in economic rationale. Recent LLM-based multi-agent systems have automated this process, scaling factor mining far beyond manual effort. However, these automated approaches optimize directly for returns and rarely check whether a generated factor still expresses the economic hypothesis that motivated it. We identify this inconsistency between mathematical form and economic meaning as a structural failure mode of return-oriented automation. The resulting factors blur the line between real signals and spurious correlations and break down across regime shifts. We propose FaVOR (Factor Validation through Observable Reasoning), an agentic framework that restructures factor mining around hypothesis-level evidence rather than return outcomes. In place of the standard hypothesis-to-formula leap, FaVOR enforces a three-stage consistency loop tying mathematical form to economic rationale throughout. (1) Decomposition splits a broad economic hypothesis into independent observable conditions. (2) Validation checks whether each factor reflects its intended condition. (3) Integration merges them into a composite whose structure remains interpretable. On the CSI 500 and S&P 500 in 2025, FaVOR outperforms existing baselines while remaining effective across regimes. FaVOR shows that hypothesis-grounded factor discovery produces signals that are interpretable by construction, regime-robust, and economically faithful. The code is available at https://github.com/damilab/FaVOR.

Digital twin technologies have the potential to improve operational flexibility and responsiveness capabilities of nuclear systems. To provide decision support, cyber event characterization, state estimation, predictive control, and real-time dynamic processing of operational data, however, an efficient digital twin needs to integrate multiple models (data-driven as well as physics-based) with explainability while at the same time maintain two-way synchronization with the physical facility at a time constant less than its operational cycle. In this work, we present the Purdue University Reactor One Digital Twin (PUR-1 DT), a cyber-physical digital twin with a complete high-fidelity physics-based and AI-driven virtual model stack (neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, point kinetics) which provides closed-loop explainable diagnostics, forecasting, predictive control, and action recommendation back to the reactor via two-way communications and a cyber-physical testbed. We demonstrate real-time synchronized state estimation and short-term forecasting over a full reactor operational cycle and conduct a series of benchmarking experiments to validate accuracy and latency. Our results show good agreement with experimental results and lay the groundwork for further development and experimental demonstration of DT-enabled functionalities in real-world facilities.

Optimising budget-constrained network interventions requires evaluating not just who is connected, but predicting how strongly individual recipients will propagate the treatment's benefits. Existing models predict spillover from neighbours' treatments and attributes. We argue that spillover also depends on how strongly each neighbour responded to its own treatment. We prove that no model in which neighbours' responsiveness enters separately from their treatments can capture this interaction, and we introduce SpilloverNet, a graph neural network designed to preserve neighbour-level response dynamics. Because a neighbour's response is unobserved, a natural approach is to estimate it from covariates and plug it in. However, we prove that any predictor relying solely on standard network data faces an irreducible error floor set by unobserved personal responsiveness. Empirically, at low heterogeneity the plug-in's correlation with the true response looks acceptable while its spillover error is already 24.5% against an oracle 13.8%; as heterogeneity grows its error climbs to 51.9%, worse than using no responsiveness estimate at all. A per-unit estimate from a direct-response measurement, collected in a small pilot before spillover arrives, escapes this bound and cuts regret against oracle-$\tau$ targeting by up to 14 percentage points in a budgeted targeting problem. On two real social graphs, SpilloverNet reaches 7.7–8.4% error, outperforming standard GNNs as well as specialised causal-representation baselines.

We present an intrinsic finite element formulation for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on Riemannian manifolds. We derive the corresponding weak formulation and prove that the backward Euler discretisation is energy stable. The proposed framework is validated on several representative manifolds, with particular attention paid to the long-time behaviour of the flow and its convergence to steady-state solutions represented by Killing vector fields. Comprehensive comparisons are performed with the surface finite element method and a corresponding eigenvalue formulation for Killing vector fields. The numerical results demonstrate that the intrinsic formulation provides an accurate, computationally efficient, and geometrically transparent alternative to embedded surface finite element formulations, while naturally extending to higher-dimensional Riemannian manifolds.

Meteorological reanalysis encodes extreme weather through continuous, physically constrained fields, posing a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs) whose perceptual assumptions are shaped by natural images. Tropical cyclones exemplify this mismatch: critical properties such as intensity extrema, asymmetry, spatial extent, and physical impacts arise from field-level organization rather than object-centric visual cues. Existing approaches address this gap through text alignment or annotation, treating the problem as multimodal supervision rather than representation design. We introduce Physics-Aware Visual Abstraction (PAVA), a plug-and-play physics-aware representation and annotation interface that maps physical reanalysis fields to visually identifiable and semantically grounded perceptual abstractions for supervision and evaluation in vision-language reasoning. Building on PAVA, we construct OmniClimate-TC, a benchmark for tropical cyclone analysis spanning five classes of reasoning and nine tasks, with 243,890 physically grounded instruction-tuning pairs. Using PAVA-aligned supervision, we adapt VLMs and provide evidence that this representation design improves reasoning over tropical cyclone hazard fields. Our results position OmniClimate-TC as a benchmark for multimedia reasoning over structured geophysical fields, and highlight representation design as a key ingredient for physically grounded reasoning in scientific media.