Papers

Load imbalance across edge and cloud layers degrades latency performance in hierarchical edge-cloud computing (HECC) systems under dynamic task arrivals and heterogeneous resources, leading to severe queuing delays and inefficient resource utilization. To address this challenge, we study a joint service placement, computational delegation, and power control (JSCP) problem to minimize the average end-to-end (e2e) latency. The resulting JSCP problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex and NP-hard optimization problem due to the strong coupling between discrete and continuous variables. To enable tractable optimization and stable system adaptation, we exploit the inherent difference in decision dynamics and decompose the problem into long-term system configuration and short-term resource allocation subproblems. Based on this formulation, we propose a two-timescale multi-layer deep reinforcement learning framework with a latent action space (2T-MDRL-LA) to jointly optimize service placement, user association, computational delegation, task offloading, and user transmit power. A latent action representation based on a variational autoencoder is introduced to efficiently compress the high-dimensional combinatorial action space. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively adapts to dynamic network conditions and achieves near-optimal performance compared to branch-and-bound solutions. It achieves up to a 20.8% reduction in average e2e latency and a 13% improvement in resource utilization over the scheme without the computational delegation, while converging approximately 50% faster than conventional proximal policy optimization.

This paper introduces BearingNAS, a Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) framework designed to shift the intelligence directly onto the sensor die via in-sensor processing. BearingNAS frames the search as a constrained optimization problem targeting extreme micro-budgets (4 to 8 kiB of RAM and 16 to 32 kiB of Flash). To eliminate the reliance on expensive discrete GPUs, we propose a lightweight, derivative-free search strategy paired with a single data-flow search space that leverages a decaying kernel growth formulation to prevent parameter explosion. We evaluate our framework on the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing benchmark, optimizing architectures for three STMicroelectronics targets: two commodity microcontrollers and the LSM6DSO16IS Intelligent Sensor Processing Unit (ISPU). Running entirely on a laptop CPU, the search converges in less than an hour. The resulting best in-sensor architecture achieves a highly competitive diagnostic accuracy of 99.50% on the ISPU. These results demonstrate the viability of shifting the machine learning workload inside the sensor package, enabling low-cost, production-scale bearing fault diagnosis.

Transit signal priority (TSP) requires balancing competing objectives: reducing bus delay while limiting adverse impacts on non-bus traffic and avoiding extreme waits for a subset of vehicles. Existing reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches to TSP typically encode transit-aware features (e.g., occupancy and schedule deviation) but optimize a fixed reward or fixed scalarization, which limits operational flexibility when agency priorities change across time-of-day or disruption conditions. We present a preference-conditioned TSP controller, $\pi(a \mid s,w)$, that selects the next signal phase under minimum/maximum green and transition-feasibility constraints and can be tuned at runtime via a preference parameter $w$ to trade off bus-priority emphasis against overall traffic delay without retraining. We implement this on top of IntersectionZoo by introducing a constrained signal-control/TSP wrapper, and we extend scenario generation with bus-prevalence augmentation and timetable-based bus insertion to address sparse transit-priority events during training. Experiments against fixed-time control, a rule-based TSP overlay, and fixed-weight PPO specialists show that a single learned conditioned policy spans a smooth empirical trade-off frontier across runtime preferences, outperforms fixed-time and rule-based baselines, and maintains constraint feasibility, while tail-delay diagnostics reveal that non-bus externalities remain limited for moderate preference settings but can increase substantially under high bus-priority weights. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/urbanAIthi/morl-tsp.

We present E-SpecFormer (Edge Spectrum monitoring Transformer) for end-to-end automatic modulation and covert channel (CC) recognition. We introduce LiTAN (Linear Tanh Attention Network), a Softmax- and LayerNorm-free attention mechanism that reduces complexity while increasing accuracy in RF tasks. E-SpecFormer is parameterized in four scalable variants (Nano, Small, Medium, Large) to accommodate diverse hardware constraints. Using the RadioML2018 dataset for modulation recognition, the Nano variant achieves 86.5% average accuracy for Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs)>0 dB, and on the hardware Trojan (HT)-based CC dataset it reaches 94.2% accuracy, both with fewer than 10k parameters and up to speed of 92 {\mu}s per frame on FPGA/CPU co-execution, surpassing state-of-the-art edge models at a fraction of their cost. These results establish E-SpecFormer as an edge-efficient solution for real-time spectrum intelligence on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. GitHub link to the repository: https://github.com/zsniko/E-SpecFormer.

To excel at their domain large language models are comprised of billions of parameters. Yet this comes at the cost of huge memory requirements restricting their applicability in resource-constrained environments. To address the problem of neural network (NN) compression Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has played a key role as a fundamental component for matrix compression through decomposition. To minimize compression error and to maximize the efficacy of the compressed model on the downstream tasks previous works focused on low-rank approximation of the NN's weight matrices either from the perspective of parameter importance or per-layer functional equivalence. While previous works studied the aforementioned perspectives in isolation in this work we are investigating the effectiveness of an approach that combines ideas from these two perspectives in a single objective. In parallel to this an important aspect that affects the compression quality is the distribution of the compression rate across layers and NN parameters. Earlier works mostly considered distributing the compression rate uniformly across layers and network weights or relied on computationally expensive heuristic search. Contrary to them in this work we propose an enhanced and computationally efficient algorithm for dynamic compression rate allocation. Experimental results support the efficacy of the proposed approach which performs on par or substantially better than the previous state-of-the-art especially under high compression ratios.

Accurate localization of the corpus callosum (CC) in fetal ultrasound (US) images is crucial for the early identification of neurodevelopmental abnormalities. However, this task remains highly challenging due to the intrinsic limitations of US imaging, including low contrast, speckle noise, and the considerable anatomical variability of the CC. We propose FedCC, a federated learning (FL)-based framework for CC localization in fetal US images, specifically designed for realistic multi-center and resource-constrained clinical settings without requiring data sharing. The framework integrates a frozen DINOv2 backbone with a lightweight YOLO-based detection head. To enable parameter-efficient adaptation, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules are incorporated, allowing only a small subset of parameters to be optimized and exchanged among clients. This strategy substantially reduces both computational and communication overhead, making the framework suitable for low-resource environments. The proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-center dataset comprising 10,970 ultrasound frames acquired from 58 pregnant women during routine neurosonographic examinations across three clinical sites using heterogeneous imaging devices. The proposed framework achieved strong performance in the federated setting. In particular, the combination of DINOv2 and LoRA under the FedAvg strategy achieved an average mAP@50 of 0.857 and an F1-score of 0.803, outperforming both full fine-tuning and encoder-freezing baselines. Notably, the proposed approach reduced the number of trainable parameters to 2.9M compared with 24.4M in full fine-tuning, corresponding to an approximately 8.5$\times$ reduction in communication cost. These findings represent a promising step toward scalable, privacy-preserving, and clinically deployable AI systems for fetal neurosonography.

Bayesian Optimization is widely used for expensive black-box optimization, yet its success often depends on choosing a kernel that matches the objective's unknown structure. In this work, we propose ALAS, a flexible Gaussian Process kernel family built from symmetric $\alpha$-stable spectral components. By learning the stability parameter $\alpha$, ALAS adapts its effective smoothness from data, capturing both smooth trends and sharp irregularities. We present two parameterizations: ALAS, a single stationary component with joint spectral modulation, and ALAS-Sep, a separable variant that learns dimension-wise tail behavior to improve robustness on approximately decomposable objectives. Experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world surrogates demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse settings.

Finding exact solutions to the quantum many-body problem is computationally intractable (QMA-hard). Traditional approximations for electrons in an atom or molecule – density functional theory and wavefunction methods – have been indispensable, but their development shows signs of saturation: DFT functionals have proliferated without converging toward the exact functional, and strong correlation remains largely unsolved after decades of effort. This position paper argues that machine learning represents the most promising path forward – not as a proof of logical necessity, but as a decision-theoretic argument: ML succeeds whether the underlying problems are truly hard or merely lack simple analytical solutions. We reframe recent traditional method development as “hand-crafted machine learning” that has exhausted the hypothesis space accessible to human intuition. Significant challenges remain, but these have clear research paths forward, unlike the fundamental barriers facing traditional approaches. ML-based approaches merit strategic priority in quantum chemistry's next phase.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) commonly adapts pretrained weights through low-rank updates, and recent methods further exploit the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the base weight for initialization or subspace selection. However, these methods do not explicitly preserve the coupled geometry between the pretrained left and right singular bases. Motivated by recent minimum-perturbation theory, which shows that stable finetuning follows a coherent SVD rotation in which a single orthogonal $Q$ acts on both the left singular basis $U_0$ and the right singular basis $V_0$, we prove a per-slice analogue: each row slice of $W_0$ can be adapted by a shared orthogonal rotation $Q_i$ on its left basis $U_i$ and right basis $V_i$ together with a diagonal spectrum shift. We implement this form as CORA (Coherent Orthogonal Rotation Adaptation), which applies per-slice orthogonal rotations and a per-layer diagonal scale to the rank-$r$ SVD truncation of $W_0$. CORA uses $\tfrac{1}{2}m(r{-}1)$ trainable parameters per linear layer, about $4{\times}$ fewer than LoRA at the same rank. CORA outperforms LoRA, DoRA, PiSSA, and MiLoRA on commonsense reasoning and code generation while using about $8{\times}$ fewer parameters.

The key-value (KV) cache has become a first-order memory object in LLM serving rather than a temporary per-request tensor. This survey classifies more than thirty KV-management systems and frameworks using four axes: locality, lifetime, ownership, and substrate. The axes reveal five architectural archetypes – local-paged, disaggregated-pipeline, shared-store, memory-pool, and hybrid-tier. Once workload and hardware are fixed, ownership accounts for much of the remaining design variance among distributed systems. The survey also audits current evaluations and identifies seven missing KV-specific measurements, linking them to open problems in fault tolerance, isolation, tiered eviction, speculative decoding, MoE serving, and shared-cache semantics.

This paper presents a safety-centered empirical evaluation of uncertainty-aware last-layer adaptation for referable diabetic retinopathy screening using RETFound, a self-supervised vision-transformer retinal foundation model used here as a frozen feature encoder, and the public APTOS 2019 and DDR diabetic retinopathy fundus image datasets. We compare a cached-feature softmax head, post-hoc temperature scaling, variational Bayesian last-layer heads, a diagonal Laplace last-layer approximation, and an SNGP-style cached-feature head. On APTOS, uncertainty-aware operating points improved sensitivity and selective-referral behavior. The strongest APTOS selective-referral result deferred approximately 20 percent of cases and reduced accepted-case false negatives to zero while preserving high accepted-case specificity. However, threshold tuning also reduced false negatives at high false-positive cost, so false-negative reduction alone was not unique to Bayesian modeling. On DDR, native Bayesian heads qualitatively reproduced the APTOS direction but with weaker tradeoffs, while the APTOS-trained SNGP checkpoint transferred poorly and failed to provide useful external selective-referral behavior. These results highlight the value of safety-centered evaluation beyond aggregate accuracy: uncertainty-aware last-layer heads can improve internal safety-oriented operating points, but trustworthy retinal screening claims require explicit safety-coverage evaluation and second-dataset validation under shift.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) commonly assume a standard isotropic Gaussian prior over the latent space, an assumption that often fails to capture the true distribution of latent representations for complex datasets. This mismatch can limit reconstruction accuracy, reduce sample quality, and constrain the expressive power of the learned latent space. We propose the eXact-Prior Variational Autoencoder (X-VAE), a framework that replaces the conventional standard normal prior with a Gaussian prior derived from the latent representations of a pretrained autoencoder (AE). Specifically, the empirical mean and standard deviation of the AE latent codes are used to parameterize a data-adaptive prior that more closely reflects the underlying structure of the training data. During generation, X-VAE introduces a latent scaling factor that enables explicit control over the variance of the sampled latent vectors, providing a simple mechanism for balancing sample diversity and fidelity. This flexibility makes the proposed approach particularly well suited for applications such as industrial and engineering design, where generated solutions must satisfy strict structural or functional constraints while still permitting meaningful design exploration. We present the mathematical formulation of well-suited X-VAE, derive the corresponding KL divergence objective for the proposed prior, and evaluate the method on standard benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that X-VAE preserves reconstruction quality while producing latent representations that better align with the empirical data distribution, leading to improved controllability and more realistic generated samples.

Deploying 3D point cloud analysis in privacy-sensitive, resource-constrained settings faces two barriers: data cannot be centralized, and models must run on limited edge hardware. We present a multi-seed benchmark jointly evaluating federated learning (FL) and knowledge distillation (KD) for 3D point cloud classification. It spans 13 FL algorithms and 10 KD objectives (a 130-pair cross-product) across 504 training runs, evaluated on ModelNet40 and a clinical craniosynostosis dataset. We report three findings. First, under extreme non-IID label skew, standalone FL degrades sharply: on ModelNet40, the strongest method reaches 76.32% against a 92.26% centralized reference; on clinical data, the best reaches 75.83% against 100%. Second, distillation successfully compresses the teacher into a student 74.51% smaller and roughly twice as fast at inference, often matching or surpassing the teacher. Third, the combined pipeline exposes an evaluation pitfall: when distillation keeps a hard-label cross-entropy term on a labeled proxy split, a collapsed federated teacher (8.50%) paired with Logit-MSE still yields a 92.94% student. This 84.4-point gap reflects the proxy labels rather than the federated model, reusing the very labels whose privacy motivated federation. Objectives without hard labels instead track teacher quality ($r \approx 0.99$) and collapse when the teacher does. We therefore recommend evaluating FL-KD pipelines with label-free distillation so reported accuracy reflects the federated teacher, not the proxy.

Current large-language-model (LLM) physics benchmarks are usually scored by answer accuracy, which cannot distinguish genuine reasoning from recall of familiar problem patterns and reveals little about where a model's reasoning breaks down. We introduce an auditable four-stage diagnostic that evaluates whether an LLM can reason inside an unfamiliar physics framework through induction, formulation, prediction, and review. The diagnostic combines locked pre-registrations, fresh sessions between stages, dual-LLM judging, and a human-audit pathway, and we apply it to three parallel physics worlds: a single-equation counterfactual world ($F=mv$), a historical framework (Aristotelian mechanics), and a four-domain counterfactual world (Decay World). Across Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, the three worlds yield composite PASS rates are 6/15, 6/15, and 0/15 respectively (content $\land$ structural for $F=mv$ and Aristotelian, content axis only for Decay World where the structural axis is out of scope). The most pointed empirical pattern is a qualitative-versus-quantitative asymmetry: in Decay World, models almost never predict the wrong direction of change, but frequently compute the wrong ratio by slipping back to standard-physics relations. The protocol also surfaces two methodology findings: LLM-judge reliability does not transfer across frameworks, and Stage 4 self-review is weak in every framework, with the model's own review wrongly reporting no earlier error in at least two-thirds of the trials that actually contained one. We release the full prompts, responses, verdicts, and audit records.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) paradigm with collaboration among multiple clients without sharing data. FL is challenging under data heterogeneity and partial client participation. Learning sparse models is useful for communication and computational efficiency in FL, but it is especially difficult in the small-sample high-dimensional regime (d >> N) where optimization can yield parameter configurations that fail to generalize to unseen test data. While magnitude-based pruning doesn't account for uncertainty exploration in the parameter space, a formulation with probabilistic gates and an L0 constraint allows sampling from competing sparse configurations during training. In this work, we study entropy regularization of gate distributions as a mechanism to maintain uncertainty in sparse federated optimization by preventing early commitment to sparse support. We examine its impact under data heterogeneity, client participation heterogeneity, and sparsity. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show consistent improvements over federated iterative hard thresholding (Fed-IHT) and pruning after dense federated averaging (FedAvg) training, both in statistical performance on test data and in sparsity recovery accuracy.

Algorithm development for radioisotope identification in mobile urban search scenarios face significant challenges from non-uniform backgrounds, momentary source encounters, and severe class imbalance between rare threat signatures and background measurements. We present a machine learning-based approach to this problem that converts list-mode gamma-ray data into two-dimensional waterfall spectrograms and applies computer vision architectures to the resulting images. Rather than treating waterfalls as conventional images, we employ a representation where consecutive time spectra can form input channels, similar to RGB channels in color images. This representation encodes both spectral and temporal information, enabling neural networks to more effectively learn patterns that distinguish source signatures from background fluctuations. We evaluate three architectures, a multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and vision transformer (ViT), on the Radiological Anomaly Detection and Identification (RADAI) benchmark dataset. At a false positive rate of less than one false alarm per hour, our CNN outperforms the previous-best non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method across all global metrics, achieving true detection, classification, and identification rates of 0.4334, 0.3965, and 0.2950 respectively, compared to 0.4151, 0.3611, and 0.2625 for NMF. At lower false positive rate constraints, the neural network approaches show comparable but ultimately lower performance than NMF, indicating opportunities for further research.

A central goal of science is to produce valid explanations of complex systems: high-level causal accounts that faithfully reflect the behavior of lower-level mechanisms. Yet no consensus exists on how to measure whether a proposed high-level explanation is actually valid. We introduce a benchmark of ten complex systems spanning both discrete and continuous state spaces, as well as static and dynamical regimes, each equipped with consensual ground-truth causal explanations and invalid contrastive conditions. Within a unified causal abstraction framework, we systematically evaluate over thirty candidate metrics drawn from observational, functional, information-theoretic, and causal families. Our results show that only the latter reliably discriminates valid from invalid abstractions, and only when incorporating faithfulness testing over unmapped variables. Building on these findings, we introduce the Causal Abstraction Error (CAE), a continuous validity metric with an explicit faithfulness test, which passes all discrimination tests across every system and can converge with as few as 30 sampled interventions. We offer it as a general-purpose metric for the discovery and validation of high-level explanations.

Accurate prediction of complex dynamical systems from noisy measurements remains a significant challenge in scientific computing. Kernel ridge regression learning strategies are often effective when applied to clean data, but have limited success with noisy data. Recent work has observed that a weak formulation can act to filter noisy data, and different learning strategies have achieved increased noise robustness with a weak-form framework. In this manuscript, we give an overview of the filtering mechanism behind the weak formulation and provide a bias-variance error decomposition. Using these insights, we combine a weak formulation with a kernel learning strategy to propose Weak-form Kernel Ridge Regression (WKRR) for learning dynamical systems. The proposed framework is simple to implement, effective for both clean and noisy data, and outperforms several baseline methods. We demonstrate the performance of WKRR on chaotic benchmark systems in up to 64 dimensions, as well as 15,000-dimensional real-world fluid data.

We present an algorithm for the group distributionally robust (GDR) least squares problem. Given $m$ groups, a parameter vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and stacked design matrices and responses $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{b}$, our algorithm obtains a $(1+\varepsilon)$-multiplicative optimal solution using $\widetilde{O}(\min\{\mathsf{rank}(\mathbf{A}),m\}^{1/3}\varepsilon^{-2/3})$ linear-system-solves of matrices of the form $\mathbf{A}^{\top}\mathbf{B}\mathbf{A}$ for block-diagonal $\mathbf{B}$. Our technical methods follow from a recent geometric construction, block Lewis weights, that relates the empirical GDR problem to a carefully chosen least squares problem and an application of accelerated proximal methods. Our algorithm improves over known interior point methods for moderate accuracy regimes and matches the state-of-the-art guarantees for the special case of $\ell_{\infty}$ regression. We also give algorithms that smoothly interpolate between minimizing the average least squares loss and the distributionally robust loss.

New device layouts pose a challenging modeling problem due to the lack of large datasets for each specific layout. Biosignal foundation models offer a plausible solution if they are able to generalize to new layouts effectively. To improve cross-layout transfer, we study how different channel embedding techniques behave when pretraining layouts differ substantially from the downstream decoding layout. We propose Device Passport, a new channel embedding technique that learns experts and mixture models that take each channel's functional activity and metadata as input. This contrasts with prior embedding methods, which typically use only functional information or only metadata to look up learned or fixed positional embeddings. Across controlled subset-transfer experiments and realistic transfer to ear-EEG, Device Passport is competitive overall and improves over the strongest learned baseline in the layout-transfer regimes that motivate this work. These results suggest that channel embedding design is a key consideration when reusing large-scale pretrained biosignal models on new devices.

Modern time-domain surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) generate hundreds of thousands of alerts each night, making real-time decisions for follow-up observations a central challenge in time-domain astronomy. Robust early classification is crucial for making informed decisions, but is hindered by sparse light curves and degeneracies between classes. In this work, we leverage multimodality to substantially improve real-time classification and demonstrate the practicality of our approach by deploying our model on the ZTF alert stream. Building on the Online Ranked Astrophysical CLass Estimator (ORACLE), we introduce the ORACLE-2 models, which combine light curves, metadata, and images for real-time hierarchical classification. Using both real and simulated datasets, we show that incorporating additional modalities consistently improves classification performance. On observations from ZTF's Bright Transient Survey, our best-performing model, ORACLE-2 Omni, achieves a macro F1 score of 0.73 – an improvement of up to 11% over models using light curves and metadata alone, and up to 40% over light-curve-only models, with the strongest gains realized at early times. To demonstrate applicability to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will increase alert volume by more than an order of magnitude, we train a light curve + metadata variant on the simulated ELAsTiCC dataset. This model achieves a macro F1 score of 0.88, an improvement of up to 13% over the light-curve-only variant, matching the performance of other state-of-the-art models. Finally, we quantify the trade-offs between performance and throughput, identifying regimes where multimodal approaches offer the greatest benefit. These results show that combining multiple modalities improves early-time classification, enabling more effective triage of high-volume alert streams for current and future time-domain surveys.

Watermarking promises statistical traceability of large language model (LLM) uses, but real documents rarely arrive as purely human-written or purely LLM-generated. This motivates a quantitative question beyond detection: what proportion of a document is generated from a pre-specified watermarked LLM? We study this watermark proportion estimation problem under the Gumbel–max watermarking mechanism, treating the next-token prediction distributions as unknown and arbitrary nuisance parameters subject to a non-degeneracy condition. We compare two observation regimes: in the full observation regime, the estimator observes the pseudorandom vector and the selected token at each position; in the more prevalent setting of pivotal reduction, it observes only a scalar pivot, which follows a one-dimensional Uniform–Beta mixture distribution. Under pivotal reduction, we develop a Laguerre-polynomial estimator and establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound for the sample complexity. For full observation, we introduce an event-counting estimator and show a matching lower bound, yielding a substantially smaller sample complexity. As our results imply, although reducing to pivotal statistics is an elegant and prevalent choice, it is not always sample-efficient for estimating the proportion of watermarks.

Reinforcement learning for diffusion large language models (dLLMs) has largely moved to trajectory-aware methods. The current state of the art, TraceRL, holds that random masking is mismatched with the model's inference trajectory, and it reconstructs that trajectory during training by slicing each rollout into up to K/s trajectory-aligned training samples, a cost that grows with the block size K. We show that this mismatch can be mitigated without reconstructing the trajectory. Our method, SLIM-RL, bounds the commit risk of each rollout step with a tau-budget decoder, reducing aggregate commit risk in the training data. During optimization, SLIM-RL trains on these risk-controlled rollouts with a trace-free random-masking objective that adapts variance-reduction tools, combining sequence-level importance sampling, deterministic quadrature over masking levels under a mean-preserving, monotonically decreasing per-block mask schedule that we introduce. On SDAR-4B, SLIM-RL matches TraceRL's best MATH500 accuracy on only 0.46x its training samples at block size 16, improving over TraceRL by 6.32% on MATH500 and 11.05% on GSM8K under matched dynamic sampling. At block size 4, the 4B SLIM-RL surpasses the larger LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B dLLMs on math, exceeding LLaDA-8B by 10.76% on MATH500 while staying below the autoregressive Qwen2.5-7B. On code, it improves over TraceRL by 4.20% on MBPP and 3.65% on HumanEval. The tau-budget decoder transfers training-free across LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR. The source code is available at https://github.com/laolaorkkkkk/SLIM-RL .

We develop a framework for analyzing the learning dynamics of $\ell_2$-adversarial training of single-index models on Gaussian mixtures in the high-dimensional limit under streaming stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We derive deterministic equivalents for a broad class of statistics of the SGD iterates, including the adversarial risk and distance to adversarial optimality, in terms of the solution to a system of ODEs. We use them to study two idealized learning rate schedules: the Polyak stepsize and exact line search. In the case of $\ell_2$-adversarial least squares with a single class, we show that, unlike noiseless standard least squares, no constant learning rate guarantees monotone descent of SGD towards a minimizer of the adversarial risk. We identify anisotropic covariance and a mismatch in ridge parameters as the main sources of suboptimality of exact line search relative to the Polyak stepsize. We also introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE), called adversarial homogenized SGD, that captures the evolution of statistics of the iterates of SGD. For $\ell_2$-adversarial least squares, using this SDE, we show the evolution of the risk is equivalent, up to dimension-free constants, to that of SGD on standard least squares with an adaptive learning rate and adaptive $\ell_2$-regularization. When the dynamics converge, the limiting adversarial risk and SGD iterate are determined by a fixed-point equation, with the limiting iterate being equivalent to the solution of a ridge regression problem whose regularization parameter is the limiting effective regularization of SGD.

Long-horizon multivariate time series forecasting (LTSF) remains challenging due to non-stationarity, regime shifts, and error accumulation. The Variability-Aware Recursive Neural Network (VARNN) is designed to track such variability by maintaining a residual-memory state driven by one-step prediction errors. However, its original formulation is limited to one-step sequence regression and does not directly support multi-step forecasting. In this work, we extend VARNN to long-horizon forecasting and introduce StateFlow, a recurrent forecasting framework that uses VARNN as a dual-state recurrent backbone to capture two complementary signals from the lookback sequence: a hidden-state trajectory representing primary temporal dynamics, including trend, seasonality, level changes, and recurring patterns, and a residual-memory trajectory representing structured local prediction deviations, driven from a nonlinear recurrent transformation of errors between one-step base predictions and observed values. A chunk-based decoder separately summarizes these trajectories and maps them to the future horizon for direct multi-step forecasting. We further employ a two-stage optimization strategy that first trains the VARNN encoder through a one-step base prediction objective to optimize the internal representations over the lookback sequence, and then trains a horizon-specific decoder for direct multi-step forecasting. Experiments on standard LTSF benchmarks show that StateFlow achieves competitive performance against strong linear, recurrent, convolutional, and Transformer-based baselines while preserving linear recurrent encoding and a compact model design.

Many scientific systems exhibit uncertainty from stochastic forcing, unresolved degrees of freedom, or imperfect observations, making reliable surrogate forecasting fundamentally distributional rather than pointwise. For such systems, deterministic neural surrogates fail to capture statistical measures and forecast uncertainty. We introduce TRIE, an evaluation framework for stochastic PDE surrogates that asks whether models reproduce invariant measures, provide trustworthy predictive uncertainty, and scale to efficient probabilistic generation. We demonstrate TRIE on two stationary chaotic spatially extended SPDEs, stochastic Kuramoto–Sivashinsky and stochastic Kolmogorov flow, across 11 parameter values. Our evaluation shows that standard pointwise-trained neural surrogates can produce plausible short rollouts while failing to match long-time statistical structure. Approximate uncertainty methods such as Monte Carlo dropout and heteroscedastic Gaussian likelihoods produce stochastic forecasts, but are often miscalibrated and overconfident under temporal and spatial uncertainty diagnostics. Across these criteria, generative models provide the most consistent performance, accurately capturing invariant measure statistics and achieving the lowest CRPS in all reported probabilistic settings. Finally, we show that latent generative models with automatic dimension discovery retain much of this statistical fidelity while reducing Kolmogorov inference time by roughly $12\times$. We release our code and data at https://github.com/scailab/TRIE-SPDE-Bench to support reproducible evaluation of stochastic PDE forecasting models.

Collaborative-perception enables multi-robot systems to enhance situational awareness by sharing perceptual information. Existing collaborative-perception systems face an inherent trade-off between communication bandwidth requirements and perception accuracy, where methods that exchange more information achieve better perception results at the cost of increased communication overhead. However, real-world communication networks impose bandwidth constraints that require minimizing communication overhead without sacrificing perception performance. To address this challenge, we propose HydraCollab, an adaptive collaborative-perception framework that (i) selectively transmits the most informative sensor features and (ii) dynamically employs collaboration strategies (intermediate or late) based on spatial confidence maps. Extensive evaluations on the V2X-R, V2X-Radar and UAV3D-mini datasets demonstrate that HydraCollab achieves the best overall trade-off between accuracy and communication cost among existing collaborative-perception methods. Relative to SOTA Where2comm, HydraCollab uses only 41% of the bandwidth on V2X-R and 26% on V2X-Radar while improving performance by 0.78% and 0.75% respectively. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/AICPS/HydraCollab.

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have produced superhuman agents across a wide range of competitive games. As a byproduct, researchers have begun studying how these agents play, extracting behavioral representations, analyzing decision structure, and modeling the latent geometry of expert performance. However, this growing body of work has overwhelmingly focused on defeating human players rather than providing feedback, leaving a critical gap in creating model solutions to improve human players. Unlike chess and Go, where AI has become integral to player training, real-time strategy (RTS) games lack principled frameworks for translating expert knowledge into actionable feedback. We introduce Latent Maps of Performance, a framework for counterfactual path generation. We focus on StarCraft~II data to model player improvement as an algorithmic recourse within a learned representation space. As inspiration for our work, we have looked at the championship model used in sports science. We trained a Guided Variational Autoencoder model on 23,305 professional tournament replays, enabling counterfactual traversal between losing and winning gameplay profiles. To fulfill our goal, we have devised and verified four traversal strategies on out-of-distribution (OOD) data randomly sampled from a dataset of amateur replays, namely linear interpolation, iterative optimal transport, density-regularized gradient ascent, and neural flow matching, each designed to generate multi-step improvement trajectories that remain grounded in observed expert behavior while moving a player's profile toward winning configurations. Feedback is extracted at multiple granularities to support players at different stages of improvement. Finally, we conclude that there is a trade-off between the path-finding methods we employ and hope that future research will focus on developing model solutions for human improvement.

We present a black-box model-stealing attack that recovers private vision-tokenizer configurations of deployed vision-language models (VLMs), including the visual patch size and input preprocessing pipeline. The key idea is a task-level side channel induced by ViT-style patchification: when a synthetic grid image is aligned with the hidden patch grid, boundary cues are erased at tokenization, causing periodic accuracy drop. By sweeping the grid cell size and measuring these collapses, we infer the patch size; by introducing padding and a consistency-check test, we further identify whether preprocessing is dynamic- or fixed-resolution and recover the target resize resolution. Across open-source Qwen-VL variants and proprietary models including GPT and Claude, we reliably recover tokenizer-related parameters. Finally, we show that such leakage enables preprocessing-aware transfer attacks and model-targeted adversarial manipulation.

Federated learning is bandwidth-bound on two orthogonal axes: model size, which limits how often parameter-averaging methods can afford to merge, and class count, which makes per-probe soft-label distillation prohibitive at large vocabularies. Both ceilings tighten as modern systems scale. We collapse the class-count axis to $\lceil \log_2 C \rceil$ bits per probe by transmitting only each peer's $\arg\max$ class index, where $C$ is the number of output classes. The resulting protocol, TallyTrain, is not merely compressed: under non-IID training it can be preferable to soft-label distillation, because under-trained peers are confidently wrong and majority voting filters this noise where soft-label averaging amplifies it. Across standard benchmarks, TallyTrain matches or beats soft-label distillation at up to three orders of magnitude less communication. We also relax the model-size axis: we compose the cheap hard-label consensus with sparse parameter merges to obtain a bandwidth-bridge variant, which Pareto-dominates every tested operating point of the standard FedAvg, FedProx and FedDF baselines.