Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.CR
SAGE: Efficient Protected Vision-Language Inference on Smart Glasses
Zhimin Li, Pan Wang, Jingxian Chen et al. (+3 more)
Smart glasses are a promising platform for
vision-
language assistants, but private split inference remains expensive: protecting visual representations before transmission does not remove the cost of on-device
vision encoding, wide protected
tokens, or hardware-unaware execution. We present SAGE (Smart-glasses-Aware Guarded Encoding), a hardware-aware framework for efficient protected VLM inference on smart glasses. SAGE keeps raw images and unprotected visual
tokens on the trusted device, reduces visual input cost, executes shape-specialized INT8 graphs, and compresses protected representations into compact 256-dimensional INT8 packets before transmission. Unlike efficiency methods optimized only for nominal model size, SAGE selects its operating point using downstream answer quality together with measured latency,
memory, and thermal behavior on real Mentra Live glasses. On a matched Qwen workload, SAGE reduces glasses inference latency by 39.18%, device-sensor temperature rise by 21.91%, and protected packet size by 96.56%, while retaining 85.62% of the protected reference's relaxed utility and comparable prompted containment. Direct glasses-to-phone tests deliver all 192 packets and reduce median packet-plus-acknowledgment time from 71.3 to 10.0 ms. The compact protected interface also transfers across four additional VLM families. These results show that private wearable VLM inference must be optimized jointly across representation protection, communication, and real-device execution rather than through model compression alone.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Zhimin Li, Pan Wang, Jingxian Chen, Yuantao Tang, Qian Lou, Jingtong Hu
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Critical Mass: Structure-Disjoint Splits Drift With the Libraries They Are Built On
Tomo Oga, Devesh Shah, Cailum M. K. Stienstra et al. (+4 more)
Molecular machine learning evaluates out-of-distribution performance with structure disjoint splits, a construction rule fixed once at the scale its library happened to have: threshold a pairwise distance, then assign whole connected components to folds. For predicting structures from mass spectra, the field has converged on single-linkage clustering under the myopic Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) distance at a threshold of 10. This convention was set on 29,000 molecules but public libraries now hold 227,690 molecules. MCES is NP-hard per pair over a quadratically growing set, and so the criterion has never been evaluated at that scale. We propose an optimized version of this criterion, allowing for computationally feasible application on the public libraries: Admissible bounds and a union-find skip reduce $2.6 \times 10^{10}$ molecular pairs to only $1.15 \times 10^{7}$ integer programs, a $2{,}259\times$ saving, while provably producing the lossless partition. We find that at this scale the graph percolates. A single component holds $95.5\%$ of the library, capping any test set at $4.5\%$. What remains is not merely smaller, but systematically different: a held-out compound outweighs a training compound 88.1% of the time, because a fixed absolute budget is a tighter relative tolerance on a larger molecule. Large library
benchmarks using this splitting rule naively therefore conflate structural novelty with extrapolation to larger, more complex chemistry.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Tomo Oga, Devesh Shah, Cailum M. K. Stienstra, Gabriel Asher, Antonio H. de O. Fonseca, Niall O'Connor, Michael Widrich
Computational Engineering
MindVLM: Neural-Grounded Visual Captioning via Subject-Aware Semantic Evidence Selection
Zixiang Yin, Yu-Ping Wang and Zhengming Ding
Translating visual
brain activity into natural
language offers a powerful window into human cognition and neural semantic representation. Most prior
brain-captioning approaches project fMRI signals into
language space using paired supervision. However, the widely used Natural Scenes
Dataset (NSD) was built based only on image-fMRI pairs, while existing methods rely on MS-COCO captions as indirect textual supervision. Critically, during fMRI acquisition, participants observe only cropped image regions, whereas the associated MS-COCO captions describe full scenes. This mismatch creates a fundamental gap between neural representations and textual supervision, introducing an inherent semantic loss in NSD-based
brain captioning. To mitigate this limitation, we reformulate
brain captioning as Neural-Grounded Visual Captioning, where
language is generated directly from visually grounded neural evidence rather than text supervision. We propose MindVLM, a framework that maps fMRI signals into subject-aware visual
tokens and leverages a frozen
vision language model (VLM) to produce interpretable and personalized descriptions. Instead of point-wise regression, MindVLM focuses on extracting semantically relevant visual cues from neural activity, naturally accommodating partial observability and inter-subject variability. Extensive experiments on NSD show that MindVLM consistently improves caption quality across multiple VLM backbones, including LLaVA-v1.5, Qwen2.5-VL, and Gemma3, beyond intrinsic model priors. Despite requiring neither text supervision nor an LLM during training and operating under an image-grounded inference paradigm distinct from conventional captioning methods, MindVLM remains competitive with supervised approaches, suggesting that subject-specific neural grounding provides an efficient, scalable, and interpretable path toward faithful
brain-to-
language generation.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering
Mesh-Native Tokenisation: Retrofitting Foundation Models to Unstructured Data
Georg Maierhofer, Miles Cranmer and Payel Mukhopadhyay
Physics foundation models are an increasingly popular approach for building versatile emulators for spatiotemporal systems. They require tokenisation layers that lift physical field data into a latent representation suitable for dynamic processing. A typical choice for this layer is a convolutional encoder, which lifts field information in a locality-aware way and can be trained very efficiently. However, this choice cannot be applied to a large class of scientific computing problems where data are represented on unstructured meshes, for example simulations on domains with curved boundaries. Such data typically require graph neural network architectures, which are more expensive to train and, in the form currently used, encode information differently from their CNN counterparts, thus limiting the portability of physics emulators between these data regimes. In this work we introduce Mesh-Native Convolution (MNC), a locality-aware tokenisation layer that encodes unstructured mesh-based data in a way that is analogous to CNNs. This approach leads to models that can be trained once on mesh data and then deployed to arbitrary unstructured meshes, even if these are irregular, with minimal retraining. We show that this tokenisation approach can be used to retrofit grid-pretrained foundation models efficiently on unstructured meshes and provide theoretical results to confirm the consistency of this approach with classical CNN encoders. We demonstrate the favourable performance of this retrofitting approach, which in many cases reaches acceptable accuracy even in zero-shot deployment, and outperforms existing baselines after only a few epochs of fine-tuning, thus providing an efficient bridge between the two data regimes.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Market Impact Estimation via Causal Foundation Models
Dennis Thumm and Ying Chen
When a trader executes a large order, the relevant question is not what will the price be? but what would the price have been had I not traded?
Market impact is thus a causal quantity, yet classical models (Almgren–Chriss, propagators) regress price on flow, which is biased whenever informed flow moves prices through information as well as trading. We present a proof-of-concept Causal
Market Simulator: a continuous-time causal prior-data fitted network (PFN) trained on a synthetic
market prior in which a hidden informational flow confounds the flow–price relation by construction, with confounding strength an exact per-episode knob. On this prior, the naive
estimator's bias follows a closed form we confirm empirically (up to 68% overestimation), while the PFN tracks the unbiased true-parameter oracle at high confounding. Its do-ablated twin, the same model with the intervention inputs removed, collapses onto the pre-window mean. Zero-shot, the model responds at the ground-truth scale to metaorders in an ABIDES limit-order book ($+0.38$ pre-onset standard deviations against seed-replay counterfactuals), and its intervention response replicates on about 2,300 detected flow bursts in BTC/ETH/SOL perpetuals and 3,800 on Nasdaq equities, evidence consistent with, though not proof of, causal transfer. Off-prior the response degrades gracefully, and split-conformal recalibration repairs interval calibration. Transfer hinges on encoding the metaorder as added flow rather than a clamped price level, not on more training. A recurrent state-space variant closes the remaining shape gap: its impact accrues over execution duration where the
transformer's stays flat, raising the correlation with measured metaorder impact from $+0.68$ to between $+0.92$ and $+0.96$, at the cost of weaker on-prior deconfounding that traces to the training recipe rather than to recurrence.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Bi-FORK: Generative Modeling of High-Dimensional Bifurcating Systems
Anna Zimmel, Fleur Hendriks, Markus Holzleitner et al. (+4 more)
Bifurcations are ubiquitous in physical systems, from structural buckling to fluid and
climate dynamics, yet they remain largely unexplored in deep learning. At a
symmetry-breaking bifurcation, a single input admits multiple equally valid solutions, violating the one-to-one assumption underlying most learned physical surrogates. We introduce Bi-FORK, a generative framework for learning these one-to-many solution maps in high-dimensional systems. Bi-FORK generates complete trajectories through latent flow matching, preserving space and time coherence, and uses repulsion-guided sampling to recover distinct solution branches in a single amortized pass. We evaluate Bi-FORK on buckling beams, mechanical metamaterials, and Allen-Cahn phase separation, spanning continuous, discrete, and field-valued bifurcations with discretizations up to 260,000 points. Bi-FORK recovers the
multimodal solution structure while scaling several orders of magnitude beyond prior approaches, opening generative modeling to high-dimensional bifurcating physical systems.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Anna Zimmel, Fleur Hendriks, Markus Holzleitner, Florian Sestak, Martin Weichselbaumer, Vlado Menkovski, Johannes Brandstetter
Computational Engineering
AB-PIELMs: Adaptive-Basis Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machines for Residual-Driven Domain Decomposition
Aldis Daniel, Vikas Dwivedi and Balaji Srinivasan
Physics-informed neural solvers often struggle with multiscale behavior and sharp gradients due to the use of global approximation spaces and nonconvex training. We introduce AB-PIELM, an adaptive-basis physics-informed extreme learning machine that combines domain decomposition with joint optimisation of spatial and spectral hyperparameters while retaining deterministic normal-equation training. The method adapts both the number and placement of subdomains and the locality of radial basis functions, enabling problem-dependent allocation of representational capacity without modifying the underlying solver. Experiments on oscillatory function approximation and singularly perturbed advection-
diffusion equations demonstrate accurate solutions across a wide range of stiffness regimes while using substantially fewer
neurons than existing neural and PIELM-based approaches. The learned hyperparameters are interpretable, concentrating resolution near sharp gradients. The framework also supports inverse problems, successfully recovering
diffusion coefficients from sparse noisy observations using
Bayesian optimisation. These results indicate that adaptive-basis PIELM formulations provide an efficient and stable alternative to gradient-trained neural PDE solvers and naturally extend to broader classes of differential equations.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cond-mat.soft
Autonomous thermodynamic cycles via robotic mobility and sensing
Sofia Kuperman, Ezra Ben-Abu, Yaron Veksler et al. (+3 more)
Thermodynamic cycles are the foundation of energy conversion across natural and engineered systems, transforming heat into useful work. However, these cycles traditionally operate between fixed thermal reservoirs, restricting them to specific locations and temperature differences. Here, we introduce autonomous thermodynamic cycles enabled by robotic mobility and sensing, allowing
robots to perform thermodynamic cycles by accessing spatially varying temperature fields. We experimentally realize this concept using multistable gas-filled capsules that circulate within the system across a thermal gradient. Our model reveals that rapid transitions in the capsules' energy states allow the system to operate as a mobile heat engine that harvests and stores energy. By linking the capsule-scale internal energy dynamics to the
robot's large-scale navigation strategy, we optimize locomotion paths that balance motion cost and energy harvesting. These findings demonstrate that thermodynamic cycles can emerge when autonomous systems navigate their environments, offering an artificial analog of organisms that forage for energy across spatial resources.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Sofia Kuperman, Ezra Ben-Abu, Yaron Veksler, Anna Zigelman, Sefi Givli, Amir D. Gat
Computational Engineering
A joint error metric for scoring CFD against wind tunnel data, scaled by the robust spread of the participants (AutoCFD5 Case 2)
Hendrik Hetmann and Charles Mockett
AutoCFD5 Case 2 compares the participants' CFD results with wind tunnel measurements of surface pressure, velocity profiles and force coefficients. To place each run on a diagram of error against computational cost, these quantities must be combined into one number. This note defines that number, the joint error. Following the practice of interlaboratory proficiency testing (ISO 13528), every deviation from the experiment is expressed in units of the spread of the participants' results at that point, estimated robustly with the standard's
Algorithm A. The point-wise spreads are pooled into one scale per component, so that every measurement point carries equal weight within its component. The joint error is a fixed weighted sum of five component errors. The scales are computed once from all AutoCFD5 submissions received by 5 October 2026 and then frozen, so that scores are reproducible and comparable across workshops.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from quant-ph
When Does Interference Help Learning? Kernel Geometry as a Pre-Experimental Test for Photonic Reservoir Computing
Oishik Kar and Aswath Babu H
Multi-
photon interference is the resource most native to photonic
quantum machine learning, yet experiments on photonic reservoirs have reported advantages, null results, and train-only effects. These outcomes cannot be compared: each measures task-dependent accuracy on different tasks and platforms. Here we resolve the question task-independently through the kernel geometry of
boson-sampling feature maps. Interference redistributes feature variance across roughly twice as many effective dimensions as distinguishable-particle statistics, generating a large
geometric separation between the corresponding kernels. The separation grows superlinearly with indistinguishability, is linear in Hong–Ou–Mandel visibility at small visibility for two to four
photons, and retains approximately 80% of its magnitude at the source quality of current
quantum processors. Under experimental sampling budgets the separation is learnable on adversarially constructed tasks (accuracy advantage +0.22 plus or minus 0.05) and an order of magnitude smaller on natural tasks, gated by kernel–task
alignment. The results reconcile the existing experimental record and supply a pre-experimental protocol: kernel geometry establishes that an interference-specific learning resource exists, and task
alignment determines whether a given task can access it; both are computable before committing significant hardware resources.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.AI
EvoSim: Learning to Model, Modeling to Learn
Yun-Wei Song, Jinkai Tao, Jun-Dong Zhang et al. (+3 more)
Physics-based models connect scientific explanation with quantitative prediction. Constructing them requires selecting physical processes, defining states and governing equations, specifying couplings, and identifying parameters from experiments. Existing AI systems remain limited in making these model structure decisions autonomously. We introduce EvoSim, a self-evolving AI scientist for physical modeling. It uses experimental discrepancies to drive mechanism and equation revisions and held-out experimental data to test physical plausibility. Exploration traces make updates to knowledge, skills, and multi-
agent orchestration. This co-
evolution improves physics-based models and EvoSim's ability to select mechanisms, diagnose failures, and coordinate research. We evaluate EvoSim on two industrial battery modeling tasks. It predicts lithium-metal-plating onset from 25 to 45 degrees Celsius and 2 C to 6 C with a mean absolute error of 1.79% in state of charge. Dynamic voltage prediction under vehicle driving conditions achieves a root mean square error of 7.62 mV, surpassing the reported accuracy of models developed by human experts. Self-
evolution reduces model and physics errors by approximately 36% relative to baseline, demonstrating improved scientific modeling capability. EvoSim turns experimental observations into validated models and cumulative research expertise.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Yun-Wei Song, Jinkai Tao, Jun-Dong Zhang, Rui Zhang, Yi-Min Wu, Qiang Zhang
Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from cs.AI
TokenBank: Financial Infrastructure for AI Services
Cary Chang and Jialin Zhou
AI services incur inference costs during execution, while revenue may arrive later. Changing API prices, limited upfront capital, and service failures can limit operators' ability to sustain or expand their services. Beyond reducing per-request costs, operators need to plan future spending, fund execution before revenue arrives, and obtain compensation for specified losses. This requires clear agreements across services with different pricing and execution conditions. These agreements must distinguish rights to consume services from rights to receive payments, define obligations under uncertain costs and income, and specify which failures qualify for compensation and how much can be paid. We present TokenBank, a financial infrastructure that represents these commitments through structured contracts. It supports service-consumption rights, agreements that settle API-price differences in cash (forwards), financing through limited rights to future service revenue, and protection claims for specified service failures. Contracts specify participants, covered services, validity, ownership, fulfillment conditions, and settlement rules. Evaluation combines replay of 899,441 API requests, real model-driven
agent execution, and contract API tests. In a zero-discount rising-price resampling scenario, forwards reduce mean expenditure by USD 304.88 but increase its standard deviation from USD 1,152.45 to USD 1,190.82. A controlled replication with five portfolios per capital condition finds mean contribution differences between financing and self-funding of +1.0635, -0.1406, and -0.2962 experimental USD under low, baseline, and ample capital, respectively. The evaluation distinguishes contract correctness from economic effectiveness under declared economic and failure assumptions; supplier invoices and commercial revenue are unavailable.
Read the full abstract ▾
Computational Engineering
Sign-Constrained Intervention Effects for Domain-Generalizable ICU World Models
Zhen Xu, Nicholas Konz, Zhen Tan et al. (+2 more)
Predicting how a patient's vital signs respond to an intervention is a central question in intensive care. World models can do so by learning dynamics as a function of prior actions. However, such models tend to be brittle outside of training data. Clinicians choose drug dosages based on the patient's state, so the association a model learns between dose and outcome runs opposite to the drug's effect, generalizing poorly to out-of-distribution (OOD) dosing practices. Yet, pharmacological information provides the directional effects of different drugs, which are invariant to OOD shifts. To resolve the OOD sensitivity of current ICU world models, we introduce PHYSIO WORLD, which isolates an intervention's effect by evaluating a forward pass twice: once under recorded doses, and once with those doses set to zero. The difference is projected onto pharmacologically admissible effect directions stated by 70 rules over 28 drugs, leaving the magnitude to be learned from data. Across five distribution-shift parameters over cohorts from three intensive-care databases, and against forecasters, counterfactual models, and invariance objectives, PHYSIO WORLD attains the lowest OOD RMSE in every setting, improving on the strongest external baseline by 8-12%, while matching the in-distribution error of its backbone. Reversing the pharmacological directions degrades accuracy below the backbone, and data-mined directions recover almost no gain, indicating the improvement derives from the content of the pharmacological knowledge. The construction may extend to other settings where the sign of an effect is known in advance and its magnitude is confounded by treatment assignment.
Read the full abstract ▾
All authors Zhen Xu, Nicholas Konz, Zhen Tan, Zachary Plotkin, Tianlong Chen
Computational Engineering
Synchronization Reveals Market Structure That Classical Randomness Tests Cannot Detect
Nam H. Le
Synchronization among coupled oscillators – from
neurons to power grids – is a universal signature of collective behavior, classically measured by the Kuramoto order parameter. Applied identically across five asset classes and 61 financial instruments, a Kuramoto-style cross-timeframe coherence measure detects structure that a calibrated, heteroskedasticity-robust variance-ratio test of the random-walk hypothesis does not: the two diagnostics are statistically independent even on the same price windows. Here we explain why, and extract the physics behind it. The four-state regime alphabet underlying the measure is a Z4 clock model whose exact factorization into two Ising sectors is precisely the order parameter's decomposition into a direction channel and a
volatility channel, and the sign-flip
symmetry of returns acts on the regime circle as a reflection, yielding a parity selection rule: the direction channel is provably independent of the variance ratio and of every statistic built from squared returns – confirmed by controlled simulation on processes with and without genuine persistence. Boltzmann inversion of the regime statistics then yields effective couplings between adjacent timescales, benchmarked against matched random-walk, GARCH, and fractional-Gaussian-noise nulls: the direction sector's coupling never exceeds its random-walk null in a single instrument, and its deficit independently re-measures the panel's Hurst exponent, while the
volatility sector's coupling exceeds every null in every instrument and survives across scale separations where GARCH cannot – a
volatility cascade. A closed-form mean-field analysis places
markets deep below the synchronization transition, with all genuine cross-scale structure confined to the even,
volatility sector.
Read the full abstract ▾