Papers

The rapid advancement of generative AI models is leading to more realistic deepfake media, encompassing the manipulation of audio, video, or both. This raises severe privacy and societal concerns. Numerous studies in this area have yielded promising intra-domain results; however, these models frequently exhibit decreased efficacy when faced with data from dissimilar domains. Consequently, recent deepfake detection approaches focus on enhancing the generalization ability through multiple techniques that incorporate all input modalities, including audio, images, and their interactions. In this regard, we propose the EAV-DFD method, a generalized deep ensemble audio-visual model (EAV-DFD) combined with a domain adaptation mechanism utilizing a teacher-student framework to enhance the model's ability to perform and generalize effectively across unseen domains. To evaluate the model's performance, we used the FakeAVCeleb dataset as the primary domain and the DFDC, Deepfake_TIMIT, and PolyGlotFake datasets as an unseen domain. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is efficient in domain adaptation, improving AUC performance of the model by 4.09%, 17.94%, and 0.5% on three unseen datasets, using only a small portion of them to train the student model. This leads to a novel deepfake detection model capable of adapting to new domains and interpreting which modality has been manipulated, highlighting the potential of our approach for real-world applications.

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $\text{IGD}_\text{offline}$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action. While effective, this paradigm suffers from high computational costs and error propagation in multi-step tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Variable Alignment VLA (AVA-VLA), a novel Latent Reasoning VLA framework that models reasoning as a sequence of unobservable latent variables, bypassing the need for explicit text generation. However, latent trajectories are inherently susceptible to noise interference and misalignment with downstream objectives. To address this, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Denoising mechanism that treats latent state generation as a sequential decision process, optimizing reasoning trajectories via task-level rewards. Furthermore, we incorporate an Early-Exit Strategy that adaptively terminates reasoning based on state confidence, enabling a dynamic trade-off between depth and efficiency. Extensive experiments on embodied decision benchmarks demonstrate that AVA-VLA achieves a 6x inference speedup over explicit CoT methods while attaining a 98.3% average success rate on LIBERO, improving both efficiency and long-horizon stability over full-reasoning baselines.

Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Existing difference-in-means based methods, however, are fundamentally limited: they capture only mean differences between class activations and fail to recover discriminative signals that naturally exist in the nonlinear feature subspace under the superposition hypothesis. Motivated by that, we propose High-Dimensional Random-projection for Activation Steering (HiDRA), a training-free approach that integrates seamlessly with existing activation steering methods. By performing activation addition in the projected high-dimensional space, HiDRA can provably capture a better discriminative structure beyond the reach of linear methods. Experiments across diverse LLM families and benchmarks demonstrate that HiDRA consistently outperforms baseline counterparts, achieving stronger behavioral control without significant computational overhead.

The YB Mixer is a sequence token mixing layer derived from free fermion and generalized Yang Baxter structures. It applies a core principle from integrable systems where a local algebraic constraint guarantees global computational stability. By using the Ising exchange algebra the mixer creates a free fermionic structure that acts as an exactly norm preserving orthogonal map. This algebra also produces commuting transfer matrices which allow inference to be order free and adaptable to any variable budget. To ensure the model can generalize to longer sequence lengths it uses a spectral circulant generator. This generator maintains the crucial orthogonal and commuting properties of the system. The result is a highly stable and mathematically grounded architecture for sequence processing.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p<0.05, paired t-test), with particularly strong gains on security audit (+27.6%), code generation (+20.8%), and architecture design (+15.6%). A second scorer (mimo-v2.5-pro) confirms the direction with a smaller effect (+2.7%), suggesting moderate inter-rater agreement. However, the system shows a -7.5% degradation on requirements analysis, revealing that adversarial review architectures have a structural bias toward simplification that is counterproductive for completeness-oriented tasks. We analyze this boundary condition through a task-type framework and demonstrate that reviewer prompt adaptation partially mitigates the issue. Our findings provide the first empirical characterization of when multi-model adversarial review helps versus harms, with implications for the design of collaborative AI systems.

Manipulation demonstrations have temporal phase structure, and a natural hypothesis is that demonstration-curation metrics should be applied within phases rather than globally. The idea is to segment each trajectory into phases, score each phase with the metric that is locally most informative, and then aggregate. This follows directly from prior work showing that a single global metric can be the best detector of a defect and yet the worst curator of the resulting policy. We test the per-phase hypothesis on three contact-rich LIBERO pick-and-place tasks with a controlled early-release structural defect, comparing phase-gated curation against the same metrics applied uniformly and against a strong single global metric. Across all three tasks and five random seeds per condition, phase-gated curation is never the best curation strategy, and it is the worst of the three on two of the three tasks (Task 1: 86.0 vs. 92.0 for global; Task 3: 22.7 vs. 48.0 for uniform). We trace the failure to a concrete mechanism. When the defect signal is concentrated in a single phase, rank-aggregating across phases dilutes that signal with uninformative scores from defect-free phases, selecting a worse demonstration subset than simply applying the defect-informative metric everywhere. We further show that the per-phase metric selection does not transfer across tasks, since no phase shares a winning metric between any two tasks, so the selection cannot be reused and must be re-derived per task from a noisy sweep. These results bound a plausible and previously untested method, and they argue that practitioners should prefer identifying a single defect-informative metric over decomposing curation by phase. We release the full pipeline, all metric implementations, and per-seed results.

This study examines whether machine learning (ML) models can outperform the naive random walk benchmark in forecasting the monthly USD/CAD exchange rate. Using daily data from the Bank of Canada spanning January 2017 to May 2026, resampled into 113 monthly observations, five ML models are evaluated: linear regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and AdaBoost. These models are benchmarked against the naive random walk model and exponential smoothing with Holt-Winters seasonality (ETS). All models are evaluated using an expanding-window framework to maintain strict out-of-sample integrity, and forecast-accuracy differences are assessed using the Diebold-Mariano (DM) test. Structural break detection identifies four significant breakpoints in the series, corresponding to the escalation of the US-China trade war in 2018, the COVID-19 economic recovery in 2020, the peak of the Bank of Canada rate-hiking cycle in 2022, and the start of the Bank of Canada rate-cutting cycle in 2024. SHAP, or Shapley Additive Explanations, analysis is applied to interpret the drivers of the best-performing ML model. The results show that the naive random walk model remains a formidable benchmark. Linear regression is the only model that statistically outperforms the naive random walk model, with a DM statistic of 3.0585 and a p value of 0.0071, whereas the ML ensemble models show only marginal differences. Random Forest with an expanding-window framework achieves the lowest MAPE of 1.17 percent among all models except the random walk. SHAP analysis confirms that short-term lags, particularly lag1 and lag2, and recent rolling means dominate predictions, consistent with the near-random-walk behavior of exchange rates.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) detect features via inner product, so a feature's activation scales with both its directional alignment and the input's norm. Features that fire on token norm therefore claim dictionary slots regardless of content alignment. This matters because sublayer normalization has already discarded the magnitude the score measures, so the encoder detects a quantity the model does not read. We replace the score with a learned blend of cosine similarity and input magnitude, letting the optimizer choose how much norm to use; a per-feature extension lets each feature decide independently. In both regimes, training is free to recover inner product but never does, with no feature ever choosing more than half-magnitude dependence. At matched reconstruction, the cosine encoder learns features that align with human-recognizable concepts far more often than standard, filling dictionary slots that inner product wastes on norm detectors. Loss reweighting that equalizes gradients barely closes the gap, confirming forward-pass score geometry as the lever. The advantage is not universal across tasks or depths, but we believe cosine scoring should be the default for dictionary learning on normalized representations.

Surrogate models are central to scientific machine learning, where they enable fast prediction, simulation, inference, and control for complex physical systems. For time-dependent problems, however, accurate interpolation of training trajectories is not sufficient: reliable surrogates should also respect the conservation laws, invariants, admissibility conditions, and dissipative structures that give those trajectories physical meaning. We introduce Physics-conforming Latent Twins, a framework for learning latent surrogate solution operators whose dynamics satisfy selected physical principles by design. The method builds on the Latent Twin formulation by jointly learning an encoder, a decoder, and a latent flow map between arbitrary time-indexed states, while constraining the latent dynamics to preserve or dissipate prescribed structural quantities. We develop a constraint-transfer viewpoint that connects physical structure in the original state space with compatible constraints in latent space, and prove structure-preservation bounds showing how latent enforcement improves control of physical defects after decoding. We also derive algebraic conditions for latent flow maps that preserve linear and quadratic invariants or enforce dissipative inequalities. Numerical experiments on representative ODE and PDE benchmarks demonstrate improved constraint satisfaction, structural fidelity, and qualitative long-time behavior while maintaining accurate surrogate prediction.

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

World models have become a central abstraction in modern AI. The term now refers to several different objects: action-conditioned environment models, latent imagination models, future-video predictors, interactive neural simulators, latent predictive representations, and synthetic-data engines. Evaluation has broadened along with the term. Recent papers measure video realism, perceptual similarity, instruction following, physical plausibility, policy ranking, executability, planning success, and downstream policy improvement. This produces both metric diversity and a recurring problem of claim/evidence mismatch: papers sometimes make a stronger claim about what their model is useful for than their evaluation can establish. This paper surveys the recent literature and argues that, for models presented as world models for embodied decision-making, the more decisive issue is not whether the model generates visually convincing videos, but whether it supports reliable interventional reasoning, policy evaluation, planning, and policy optimization under intervention, policy-induced distribution shift, and long-horizon rollout. We organize the survey using an L0–L7 ladder spanning visual plausibility to policy optimization utility, noting that the levels cut across several orthogonal axes and so form an evidential hierarchy rather than a single scalar. The framework foregrounds interventional action fidelity, closed-loop rollout validity, reward/value prediction, policy-ranking agreement, optimization lift, model exploitability, and uncertainty calibration, with a minimal feasible reporting set for real-robot settings.

In networked dynamical systems, the parameter of primary mechanistic interest is signed interaction structure. Recovering this structure from perturbation time-series data is a fundamental identification problem, compounded by three coupled obstacles: the combinatorial complexity of interaction architectures, ambiguity of causal attribution under limited interventions, and state-dependent dynamics that confound structural inference. Each obstacle is structural in origin and calls for a structural solution. We address these challenges by adopting a reductionist approach, introducing Fundamental Dynamical Units (FDUs): signed three-node interaction patterns as composable primitives that convert the interaction hypothesis space into a finite, constructive, and tractable representation. We show that local interaction structure determines the perturbation conditions required to disentangle direct from relayed influence, making intervention design a structural consequence of the FDU representation. We embed FDU-regularized structural inference within a physics-informed neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) whose governing-equation constraint transforms structural hypotheses into verifiable dynamical predictions, enabling joint recovery of interaction structure and perturbation-resolved trajectories. Validated on synthetic benchmarks with known ground truth, the framework supports structural commitment, expressed through FDU primitives, motif-prescribed intervention design, and physics-informed learning, as a principled basis for mechanistically interpretable inference in networked dynamical systems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Linear attention replaces softmax attention's growing KV cache with a fixed recurrent state, but this compression limits exact state tracking and long-context memory. We introduce Semidirect Fourier Delta Attention (SFDA), a phase-controlled generalization of Kimi Delta Attention that replaces real diagonal decay with block-rotational Fourier control: \[ S_t=(I-\beta_t k_tk_t^*)\Lambda_tS_{t-1}+\beta_tk_tv_t^*, \qquad \Lambda_t=\diag(\alpha_t\odot e^{i\theta_t}). \] Our main result is a constructive chunk-WY factorization for products \(A_t=\Lambda_t-u_tr_t^*\), giving \[ A_t\cdots A_1=\Gamma_t-Y_tM_tW_t^* \] with rank growth bounded inside fixed chunks. This yields an exact affine chunk transfer, formal stability and complexity bounds, and a compact characterization of phase-plus-low-rank memory. We verify the algebra numerically and show in toy state-tracking experiments that SFDA learns cyclic memory where the phase-disabled KDA baseline remains near chance. Fused kernels and large-scale language-model comparisons are left to future work.

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.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models activate only a sparse subset of experts per token, yet consecutive tokens frequently activate different experts – causing constant weight swapping between slow storage and fast memory on edge devices. Existing remedies are either system-level (caching heuristics) or post-hoc (router fine-tuning), leaving the root cause unchanged during pretraining. We propose StickyMoE, a differentiable routing consistency loss that penalises abrupt expert switches between adjacent tokens, encouraging the router to maintain the same expert assignment across semantically coherent spans. StickyMoE requires no architectural changes, adds a single hyperparameter lambda, and unlike post-hoc methods, allows expert representations and routing decisions to co-adapt from the first training step. Experiments on small-scale MoE language models show that StickyMoE reduces the expert switch rate by up to 60% with less than 4% perplexity degradation, Pareto-dominating post-hoc fine-tuning on the quality-locality frontier. Routing temporal locality is most efficiently instilled at training time.

The signed integer alphabet contains one more negative representable value than positive. Yet, by convention, the standard symmetric integer quantizer fixes its scale to be strictly positive, which assigns this extra representable value to the negative tail and can force clipping of positive outliers. In this work, we show that, at few-bit precision, such clipping is a non-trivial source of quantization error. Asymmetric quantization addresses this problem with a zero point, shifting the grid toward the observed data range; however, this flexibility is well-known to carry a runtime penalty. For example, in llama.cpp on an AMD EPYC(TM) "Turin" CPU, a 4-bit symmetric format uses up to 9% less memory with up to 2.45$\times$ higher throughput than its asymmetric counterpart. We highlight signed symmetric quantization as a third option that retains the runtime profile of symmetric quantization without the penalty of the asymmetric format: our signed absmax grid places the extra representable value on the dominant-outlier tail through a principled and lightweight sign selection rule while keeping the zero point at zero. Our theoretical analysis offers two main results. First, we establish the signed absmax grid as conditionally bound-optimal on $\ell_2$ quantization error, and show that the condition holds for 88-99% of weight groups across pre-trained large language models (LLMs) at low bit widths. Second, we show that negating the scale of a standard symmetric quantizer is analytically equivalent to a unit zero point shift on the same signed integer alphabet. We empirically validate our proposal on models from the Qwen3, Qwen3.5, and Llama3 families, and observe improvement in perplexity and downstream few-shot accuracy over the standard unsigned symmetric quantizer at no extra inference cost

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder that continues to impact millions of people worldwide. Predicting AD conversion during the prodromal stage remains critical for disease understanding and patient care. As such, survival models are widely used for AD risk prediction, yet they are typically static predictors with limited interpretability and no capacity for natural language reasoning. In this work, we propose iLENS, an interpretable large language model (LLM) guided framework based on mixture-of-experts (MoE) for survival prediction in AD conversion. Our approach uses LLM to synthesize structured neuroimaging measurements and unstructured information to guide expert routing. Our framework demonstrates competitive predictive performance and capability in patient subtyping. Furthermore, our framework provides transparent, biologically grounded rationales for its routing decisions, bridging the gap between high-performance survival analysis and interpretable clinical decision support.

The most widely used RANSAC variants score candidate models by counting inliers or summing per-point scores that saturate beyond a residual threshold. Every such score requires a user-supplied parameter that is a function of the inlier scale, which must itself be estimated from contaminated data. We remove this dependence by reversing the usual order of inference: rather than estimating the scale and then scoring against it, we marginalize the inlier scale analytically in closed form under a conjugate Inverse-Gamma prior for a fixed inlier partition, then optimize over partitions. A single closed-form expression spans the non-informative Jeffreys limit and informative empirical-Bayes priors, so the same score adapts across data-rich and data-scarce regimes without any change to the algorithm. The proposed RANSAC score is the first in which the inlier scale is genuinely absent from the formula. The score admits O(N log N ) computation via sort-and-sweep. On a benchmark of nearly 70 000 image pairs spanning different two-view estimation problems and both engineered and learned feature pipelines, the proposed score exceeds the state of the art (RANSAC, MSAC, GaU, MAGSAC): it stays nearly flat under threshold miscalibration where baselines degrade, reaches near-optimal accuracy from as few as two validation pairs where baselines need ont he order of 100 times more,. and tightens its prior regularization as validation data grows scarce.

Few-shot label acquisition lacks a label-free signal for when additional labels cease to improve accuracy: existing stopping criteria either require a held-out validation set (violating the few-shot premise) or rely on theoretically ungrounded heuristics, so we introduce the spectral saturation index $S(K)=\mathrm{erank}(\hat{\Sigma}_W^{(K)})/K$, the exponential spectral entropy of the pooled within-class covariance normalized by per-class support size $K$, which measures the exploration rate per label and falls below a fixed threshold $\tau=0.02$ once the explored spectral subspace saturates and marginal accuracy gains vanish; across 49 real tasks (binary, 5-way, 10-way) and three frozen backbones (PCA-50, CLIP ViT-B/32, DINOv2 ViT-S/14), $S(K)$ correlates strongly with the marginal gain on doubling the support set ($\rho_{\text{pool}}=0.6366$, $p=2.9\times10^{-57}$, cluster-bootstrap 95% CI $[0.551,0.720]$), a fixed $\tau=0.02$ classifies stop/continue decisions with cluster-bootstrap $\mathrm{AUC}=0.787$ (95% CI $[0.713,0.860]$) with high recall on meaningful gains ($\Delta A>1\%$), and a partial correlation controlling for $\log K$ yields $\rho_{\text{partial}}=0.324$ ($p=1.65\times10^{-13}$), confirming $S(K)$ carries spectral information beyond shared $K$-dependence; theory predicts this from first principles, since the population effective rank sets the saturation scale $K_{\text{sat}}\approx\mathrm{erank}(\Sigma_W)/\tau$, $\tau=0.02$ sits at the boundary between the first and second descent (Nakkiran et al., 2021), and $O(1/K)$ bias in the sample effective rank explains the small-$K$ hump in $S(K)$; for unregularized linear probes ($C=\infty$), practitioners should halt when $S(K)<0.02$ (PCA-50, hard stop) or monitor $S(K)$ dropping from $\sim0.3\to0.05$ (foundation models, diminishing-returns signal), with computation costing $\sim1$ ms at $d=50$.

Continual learning capability is critical for Industrial LLMs, as deployed models must be continuously updated to meet evolving requirements and environments, rather than repeatedly retrained from scratch. However, most existing research focuses on improvements on static benchmarks, failing to capture real industrial needs. In this survey, we reformulate Industrial Continual Learning (ICL) for LLMs as a closed-loop update-and-release problem in a versioned ecosystem, where updates propagate hierarchically to industrial, application-specific models and LLM-powered applications, with capability inheritance and transfer across versions and model families. From this ecosystem perspective, we identify three core challenges: repeated adaptation erodes model plasticity, foundation-model upgrades break capability inheritance, and long-term sustainability is constrained by deployment requirements. We then organize the technical landscape of ICL around five lifecycle design principles: preserving plasticity headroom, treating upgrades as capability transfer, enabling trustworthy continual reinforcement learning, making training recipes self-optimizing, and building accountability as a base layer for long-term iteration. For each principle, we synthesize representative technical directions. Finally, we evaluate the maturity of each principle and its technical components via an evidence-based lens, identify key gaps hindering real-world deployment, and outline a practical ICL deployment blueprint and a pathway for feeding industrial realities back into academic research.

This paper proposes a new approach to near-sensor computing, in which a lightweight Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is performed directly on the deployment device to find the best tiny neural architecture for analyzing the real-time data acquired through sensors. This new adaptation capability can be particularly useful in the case of human-machine interfaces for which the neural network analyzing the biometrical data can be re-designed each time the user changes, after a guided data collection procedure, fighting the typical data variations between individuals on a new level. To implement the proposed approach a new NAS has been designed and then validated on the Italian Sign Language dataset (ISL), a collection of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals of the signs of the Italian alphabet, using several embedded systems. Moreover, further validation on the Case Western Reserve University dataset (CWRU), a benchmark for intelligent fault diagnosis, is presented to suggest another possible application of the proposed approach. When run on a Raspberry Pi 4, the proposed NAS performs beyond the state of the art proposing a tiny neural architecture having 0.63 times less RAM occupancy and 5.96 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the ISL dataset; and 0.44 times less RAM occupancy and 0.2 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the CWRU dataset.