Papers

Recent brain decoding studies have made substantial progress in reconstructing externally perceived visual content from neural signals. However, using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to guide facial expression editing remains largely unexplored and poses a distinct challenge: rather than recovering what a subject sees, it requires identifying facial-action related patterns from noisy EEG signals and grounding them in localized, identity-preserving expression edits. In this paper, we investigate EEG-conditioned facial image editing for fine-grained facial action unit (AU) control and propose MindAU, a unified framework for controlling facial AU edits from EEG signals. MindAU first learns noise-robust and AU-discriminative EEG representations through temporal masked reconstruction and AU classification supervision. It then bridges the modality gap via Dual-Stream Manifold Alignment, aligning EEG features with AU-level text semantics and identity-reduced visual displacement trajectories in the multimodal space of Qwen2.5-VL. Finally, MindAU incorporates EEG-aware Multimodal Rotary Positional Embeddings, landmark-guided reference masking, and AU-aware region supervision into a multimodal diffusion-based editor for high-fidelity identity-preserving editing. We also introduce E-CAFE, a curated benchmark for EEG-Conditioned Action-Unit Facial Editing with paired EEG-face editing samples and standardized evaluation protocols. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MindAU and suggest its potential as a step towards future assistive expression technologies for individuals with facial neuromuscular disorders.

Safety alignment of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models aims to suppress harmful generations while preserving utility on benign prompts. Recent methods often appear to deliver high safety with high utility, but this conclusion rests largely on coarse global utility metrics (e.g., FID, CLIPScore) that are insensitive to fine-grained semantic correctness, creating an illusion of high utility. We show that when utility is measured with structured evaluation, this illusion breaks: on TIFA (Text-to-Image Faithfulness evaluation with Question Answering), safety-aligned models suffer substantial drops in semantic fidelity, including failures in object counts, attributes, and relationships. To diagnose the source of this gap, we analyze the text-encoder prompt embedding space and uncover semantic collapse, a contraction of embedding spread coupled with distortion of inter-prompt similarity structure, which strongly correlates with structured utility loss. Guided by this insight, we propose StructureAware Geometric Regularization (SAGE), a safety alignment objective that explicitly preserves embedding spread and inter-prompt relational structure during adaptation. Our method restores structured utility (TIFA +5.0% over prior state-of-the-art) while maintaining strong safety performance and competitive coarse-grained utility scores. Our source code and trained models are available at https://adeelyousaf.github.io/SAGE_ECCV26_Project_Page/.

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (URL) aims to pre-train scalable, skill-conditioned policies without extrinsic rewards, serving as a foundation for downstream control tasks. Despite recent progress, we argue that current off-policy URL methods are limited by two critical, overlooked bottlenecks: (1) non-stationary skill semantics and (2) brittle generalization. To address these challenges, we propose GenDa (Generalizable Data-efficient Agent), a unified framework for robust unsupervised reinforcement learning. First, we introduce a skill relabeling mechanism to mitigate non-stationarity and significantly improve data efficiency for pre-training. Second, we propose a Complementary Information Bottleneck (CIB), encouraging the learned skill policy to focus on ego-centric features and become robust to distribution shifts for downstream tasks. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that GenDa significantly enhances the scalability of URL with superior generalizability and data efficiency. Our code and videos are available at https://ihatebroccoli.github.io/official-GenDa.

Self-supervised Continual Graph Learning (CGL) aims to successively learn from a graph sequence with different tasks without label supervision - a paradigm that has attracted widespread attention. Most existing self-supervised CGL methods rely on instance-level consistency objectives that enforce stability of individual node (or node-pair) embeddings. Due to optimizing nodes in isolation, these methods fail to maintain global relational structure, causing inter-node correspondences to progressively distort under continual learning. To this end, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Optimal Transport (SAOT) framework that explicitly captures and preserves relational structure within graph representations across sequential tasks. Specifically, SAOT leverages optimal transport theory to capture global inter-node correspondences, thereby facilitating and enhancing graph representation learning. Simultaneously, SAOT incorporates a cross-task knowledge distillation mechanism to preserve the previous structural knowledge. Extensive experiments on four CGL benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAOT outperforms existing self-supervised baselines. In particular, SAOT achieves significant performance gains, improving average accuracy by up to 5% on CoraFull-CL and over 15% on Products-CL compared with state-of-the-art methods in the Class-IL setting.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information (QI) are rapidly co-evolving. AI is becoming a practical tool for learning, designing, controlling, and verifying quantum systems, while QI offers new computational models, representational structures, and learning-theoretic questions for AI. This survey reviews the interface from both directions. In the AI for QI direction, we organize recent progress around the central tasks of extracting information from limited measurements, training and discovering quantum algorithms, stabilizing noisy hardware, automating experimental and programming workflows, and extending learning-based methods to sensing and networking. In the QI for AI direction, we examine how quantum computation and quantum-inspired structures affect learning through algorithmic speedups, expressivity, trainability, generalization, neural-network design, and tensor-network representations. We close by identifying cross-cutting challenges in reproducibility, scalability, hardware realism, and co-design, arguing that progress will depend on tighter integration of theory, experiment, and hybrid quantum–classical systems.

Mobile on-device AI (MoAI) systems that integrate locally deployed AI models with conventional mobile software components are emerging as a key paradigm for delivering intelligent functionality directly on end-user devices. By moving inference from remote cloud services to the local mobile environment, such systems enable privacy-preserving, low-latency, and offline-capable AI functionality, yet introduce new security risks arising from the local storage of AI models. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on MoAI security, covering security pillars, attack landscape, and defense landscape of MoAI systems. We further identify unresolved gaps in current attack and defense research and point to promising directions for future research in this emerging area. Our work establishes the first systematic framework for understanding the attack and defense landscapes of MoAI systems, serving as a foundation for building secure MoAI systems and advancing research in this critical domain. Companion resources are available at https://github.com/Jinxhy/Awesome-MoAI-Security.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) captures endogenous brain activity with high temporal fidelity and holds substantial promise for precise emotion decoding. However, channel redundancy and pronounced inter-subject variability remain key obstacles to scalable generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework termed PRioritized channel Importance with Semi-supervised doMain adaptation (PRISM), enabling label-efficient cross-subject emotion decoding. On the channel side, PRISM assigns differentiable, data-dependent channel weights via a lightweight expert ensemble, amplifying reliable electrodes while suppressing distractors. On the domain side, PRISM leverages unlabeled data through confidence-filtered pseudo-labels to drive consistency regularization and domain alignment, mitigating subject-specific heterogeneity. Extensive experiments show that PRISM surpasses state-of-the-art methods on DEAP, DREAMER, and SEED datasets, achieving robust cross-subject generalization given limited annotations.

Large language models achieve strong performance on many reasoning tasks when allowed to externalize intermediate steps as Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, many questions require the model to internalize the multi-step reasoning within a single forward pass before generating the answer. We study this challenge through two-hop reasoning, a representative task where the model must compose multiple pieces of parametric knowledge within a single forward pass. Standard non-recurrent Transformers suffer from a depth-local storage problem: facts learned in earlier layers are unavailable where second-hop retrieval happens. We found that Looped Transformers mitigate this issue by reusing the same memory, but still generalize imperfectly. We show that the remaining bottleneck is representational. In the two-hop reasoning task, the first loop often makes the correct bridge entity nearly perfectly decodable, yet the corresponding hidden state remains poorly aligned with the bridge token embedding. Surprisingly, an easy training-free realignment intervention nearly closes the generalization gap. Building upon this insight, we propose DiscoLoop, a looping architecture whose recurrence carries both a discrete embedding channel and a continuous hidden-state channel. DiscoLoop achieves near-perfect accuracy with substantially fewer training steps across symbolic and synthetic-language multi-hop reasoning tasks. When applied to real-world pretraining, DiscoLoop attains lower training loss and stronger benchmark performance than looped-transformer baselines, suggesting that the mixed-channel design transfers to practical language modeling.

Recursive Feature Machines (RFMs) are a class of kernel machines that utilize the Average Gradient Outer Product (AGOP) as a mechanism for feature learning. They have been shown to effectively replicate the learning dynamics and feature representations of Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs) across various settings. However, despite comparable capacity for feature learning and the similarities in the features they acquire, RFMs exhibit significantly lower performance than neural networks in certain data-corrupted scenarios. In this work, we investigate these limitations in mathematical problems. As a solution, we introduce a remarkably effective transformation applied to the training labels which promotes learning in noisy, complexly represented, and class-imbalanced data. This simple yet powerful adjustment enables RFMs to close the performance gap with FNNs and, in some cases, even surpass them.

A growing body of literature suggests that training data membership inference problems are fundamentally hard tasks in modern language modeling settings. We argue that output watermarking techniques are the right gadget to make training membership tests for generative models more tractable, based on prior results showing that language models exhibit residual watermark "radioactivity" under partially watermarked training datasets. We pit a watermark-based dataset inference approach head-to-head against traditional loss-based membership inference methods and show that watermarking can achieve comparable membership detection performance when subset exposure is high enough, under an alternate set of assumptions.

We establish approximation and learning guarantees for Fourier neural operators (FNOs) applied to time-$T$ solution operators of dissipative evolution equations. The analysis builds on the premise that FNOs can efficiently approximate and learn solution operators whenever these operators admit stable and accurate spectral discretizations. To formalize this idea, we introduce classes of evolution operators defined through spectral methods and derive FNO approximation bounds and polynomial sample complexity guarantees for these classes. For equations with polynomial nonlinearities, the learning rates depend primarily on the smoothness of the input space and the dimension of the physical domain. Our results hold uniformly over broad families of dissipative equations, rather than for a single fixed PDE, and apply in particular to the Navier–Stokes, Allen–Cahn, and Cahn–Hilliard equations. For equations with non-polynomial smooth nonlinearities, we prove that polynomial sample complexity still holds with rates that now additionally depend on the smoothness of the nonlinear terms and the dissipation strength. Overall, we connect classical spectral approximation theory with modern operator learning and explain when FNOs can learn nonlinear evolution operators efficiently.

The bias-reliability tradeoff conjectures that LLM evaluation systems are constrained in (gamma, H, CV) space, where evaluator coupling (gamma), strategy diversity (H), and small-sample measurement reliability (CV(N)) cannot be simultaneously optimized at fixed sample size N. Prior evidence rests on n=5 conditions with complete metrics from a single study. We expand the empirical base to 11 conditions, measuring gamma and H for all 11 (nine with valid weight vectors) and CV(N=5) for seven with sufficient seeds (N >= 5). Five conditions provide the complete (gamma, H, CV) triple. The data confirm the trade-off: conditions with low evaluator coupling (gamma < 0.2) exhibit high measurement noise (CV(N=5) > 1.0), while conditions with strong coupling (gamma > 0.9) achieve low noise (CV(N=5) < 0.16). The correlation r(H, gamma) = -0.989 (n=5, excluding GPT-4o conditions) confirms that evaluator coupling suppresses strategy diversity. Four GPT-4o conditions show gamma=0.000 and H=1.000 across all seeds – a pattern we attribute to version drift in the June 2026 GPT-4o API. No condition occupies the region {gamma < 0.2, CV(N=5) < 0.3}. We release all per-condition metrics as a standardized benchmark dataset for evaluator comparison.

The emergence of powerful deep generative models based on diffusion and flow matching has enabled the learning and modeling of complex distributions. Learning quantum distributions, however, remains challenging due to the inherent difficulty of accurately modeling the meaningful physical properties of quantum states. We propose Quantum Flow Matching (QFM), a novel generative model designed to learn quantum distribution by utilizing spin Wigner function and flow matching. By converting density matrix into the spin Wigner function and leveraging functional flow matching to learn distributions in function space, QFM enables accurate and effective learning of multi-qubit quantum distributions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating physical quantities such as trace, purity, and entanglement entropy of the generated quantum states, accurately capturing the underlying physics of the given quantum distributions.

When LLM agents use evaluator feedback to adapt their behavior in closed loops, evaluator biases propagate through the agent's strategy distribution – a phenomenon known as evaluator preference coupling. Prior work has documented coupling across multiple evaluator families and model versions, but the field lacks a standardized protocol that enables third-party researchers to (i) reproduce coupling measurements, (ii) compare results across evaluators and time points, and (iii) detect measurement decay as proprietary evaluators silently update. This paper provides the protocol. We specify EPC (Evaluator Preference Coupling) – a detailed, RFC-style protocol specification for the four-phase isolation paradigm, covering executor and evaluator configuration, strategy and task design, the TTRL update rule, metric computation (gamma, JSD, ECE, Brier), and output schema. We accompany the protocol with a versioned Reference Snapshot v1.0: coupling measurements for eight evaluator conditions (N=122 unique experimental repetitions across GPT-4o, Qwen, DeepSeek, and others) derived from five independent studies, annotated with evaluator version identifiers, API endpoints, and measurement dates. The snapshot is explicitly time-bound: all values are conditional on specific model versions and are expected to decay as proprietary evaluators update. We define a versioning convention (vX.Y-Z, encoding protocol version, snapshot version, and evaluator generation) and provide a usage guide covering adoption, interpretation, and known pitfalls. The protocol, reference snapshot, and implementation code are released as open infrastructure.

Achieving true artificial general intelligence requires foundation models capable of integrating new modalities without forgetting prior knowledge. However, accommodating continuous generative objectives alongside discrete understanding tasks causes severe gradient conflicts. Existing architectures, including standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), are highly susceptible to representation overwriting. Even structurally partitioned paradigms like Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) remain vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting, severely impeding multimodal scalability. In this work, we introduce Rosetta, a composable native multimodal pretraining framework designed for seamless and non-destructive modality expansion. Rosetta adopts a modular paradigm where core foundational knowledge is preserved within global shared experts, while modality-specific capabilities are distributed across plug-and-play experts. To guarantee non-destructive composition, we propose Momentum-Anchored Orthogonal Projection (MAOP). MAOP leverages the optimizer's momentum state as an implicit semantic anchor, selectively neutralizing conflicting gradient components from new modalities while preserving synergistic updates. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, while standard MoE and MoT architectures suffer catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, Rosetta robustly preserves established language and visual understanding. Furthermore, it delivers superior image generation and unlocks cross-modal synergy, paving the way for truly composable and unified multimodal foundation models. To facilitate further multimodal research, we release our code and checkpoints to the community. Project page at https://rosetta-lmm.github.io/.

Oscillatory neural networks (ONNs) have emerged as a promising neuromorphic architecture, leveraging coupled dynamical systems to perform computation and represent information through phase relationships. Their interactions can be designed to support intrinsic energy-minimizing dynamics, enabling tasks such as associative memory and optimization, and positioning them as a candidate architecture for continuous learning and inference. We present a neuromorphic primitive implemented using memristive edges with inhibitory couplings as a potential design for autonomous learning, and provide circuit simulation validation that the system is capable of denoising noisy inputs on an auto-associative task. While numerical Hopfield/Ising models routinely assume signed weights, neuromorphic implementations of ONNs often fail to realize negative weights due to device and circuit constraints. A practically implementable route to inhibitory (negative) weights is particularly valuable: it expands the class of attractor structures accessible to oscillator networks beyond purely synchronous couplings, and supports phase-coded memories where anti-phase constraints are not merely transiently enforced during training but can persist autonomously after release. We provide circuit simulations and theoretical analyses demonstrating that signed effective weights are necessary for anti-phase attractors to persist autonomously.

Airbnb is a community based on connection and belonging – many hosts on Airbnb are everyday people who share their worlds to provide guests with the feeling of connection and being at home; Airbnb strives to connect people and places. Among our efforts to connect guests and hosts, we provide tools to enable hosts to set competitive prices, which helps improve affordability for guests while helping hosts get more bookings. We also personalize the guest experience to show them the listings that match their needs. To help inform these efforts, we combine economic modeling and causal inference techniques to understand how guests book stays based on the prices hosts set, among other factors, and how that preference varies across different guests and listings. Such understanding helps us identify opportunities for Airbnb to support the marketplace and better connect guests and hosts. For example, understanding how much guests respond to different prices helps optimize the tools that we provide to hosts, in order to enable hosts to choose and set competitive prices that further balance demand and supply. As another example, understanding heterogeneity in guest preferences helps us personalize the guest experience and better match them with the listings that meet their needs, based on how much they respond to different prices and other factors.

Can language agents continually learn from experience, turning earlier interactions into reusable capabilities? AhaBench evaluates this ability through exploration after solved hidden-state puzzles, computational transfer after mathematical teaching, and sustained business operation under delayed feedback. The benchmark is agnostic to how an agent learns; the evaluated agents use fixed model weights. Curriculum profiles, teaching contrasts, and daily trajectories reveal a common challenge: using explicit guidance is more reliable than generalizing beyond it or sustaining useful behavior. Across the Puzzle panel, the advantage over matched cold targets is 36.0-53.5 points greater with trace support than at the trace-free endpoint; Qwen 3.6 Plus nevertheless retains a +12.57-point post-curriculum gain. In Euler, worked procedures yield 80.0-100.0% held-out accuracy across models, while question-plus-answer teaching yields 0.0-73.9%. Vending trajectories separate sustained profit, late recovery, and incomplete operation: Doubao Seed 2.0 Pro finishes nominal operation at +495 but averages -10 over the year. Together, these results make continual learning an operational target: experience should yield capabilities that remain effective as guidance, inputs, and business states change. We release tasks, validators, a simulator, records, and analyses for developing agents that turn useful insights into lasting abilities.

Telecom Service and Network Operations Centers (SNOCs) rely on large collections of cloud documents, including Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), vendor technical manuals, incident reports, and configuration guides, to maintain uninterrupted network operations. During critical incidents, engineers must quickly retrieve accurate information, yet traditional keyword based and single stage retrieval approaches often struggle to provide precise results. This paper presents Athena for Cloud Knowledge Base, a fully offline, multi agent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for enterprise cloud document search in Vodafone Idea's SNOC environment. The system integrates dense retrieval using E5 Large V2 embeddings, BM25 sparse retrieval, and Knowledge Graph expansion within a LangGraph based orchestration framework. Retrieved candidates are fused using Weighted CombSUM, followed by cross encoder reranking and Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to obtain a diverse and relevant evidence set. To improve answer reliability, the framework performs per chunk LLM evaluation with explicit attribution verification, assessing each MMR selected chunk independently before generating a response. Unsupported or weak evidence is discarded, and if no chunk satisfies the verification criteria, the system automatically evaluates multiple chunks together as a fallback. Experiments on a corpus of 4200 SNOC cloud documents containing 312000 indexed chunks show that the proposed approach achieves an MRR at 10 of 0.910 and an Exact Match (EM) score of 78.4 percent, outperforming single stage dense retrieval by 14.6 percentage points. The entire pipeline operates in a fully offline environment, satisfying enterprise data sovereignty requirements while delivering accurate and grounded responses for cloud document search.

Getting accurate, grounded answers out of large enterprise document repositories is a difficult problem. Dense vector retrieval alone frequently performs poorly on queries that mix technical terminology, vendor-specific acronyms, or require reasoning across several non-adjacent sections. DocuSearch was built to address exactly this gap - an offline, multi-agent document intelligence system developed and evaluated in a production telecom network operations environment. Rather than relying on a single retrieval signal, DocuSearch pulls together three complementary sources of evidence: semantic search over a Qdrant vector store using BGE-Large embeddings, BM25 full text search over an SQLite FTS5 index, and Knowledge Graph neighbour expansion from a structured edge table. These three ranked lists are merged through Reciprocal Rank Fusion with signal weights of 0.50 for vector search, 0.35 for BM25, and 0.15 for the knowledge graph, using a smoothing constant of 60 to stabilize scores. A cross-encoder then reranks the fused list, and Maximal Marginal Relevance with a balance factor of 0.65 prunes results for relevance and diversity. What makes DocuSearch distinctive is a per-chunk evaluation loop treating each chunk as its own mini-retrieval problem: an LLM decides whether the chunk needs more context, whether it fully answers the query, and whether the answer is grounded in retrieved text. Ungrounded answers are not returned; the system falls back to a multi-chunk merge instead. On a telecom corpus, DocuSearch reaches Precision@10 of 0.69, Recall@10 of 0.79, and a grounding rate of 89.6% - gains of 15, 16, and 18.4 percentage points over a dense-only RAG baseline. Index Terms: retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graph, reciprocal rank fusion, enterprise document search, agentic evaluation, BM25, cross-encoder reranking, on-premise deployment, LangGraph, telecom AI.

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed for sophisticated data engineering tasks such as generating structured queries from natural language, Text-to-SQL, and automating complex spreadsheet operations. However, maximizing their utility demands both higher finetuning-free accuracy and solutions to the computational bottleneck imposed by the Transformer architectures inherent quadratic (On2) time complexity. This paper introduces a novel drop-in neurosymbolic layer designed to seamlessly integrate into existing LLM backbones enhancing logical reasoning and mitigating long-context resource consumption. On the reasoning front, the layer immediately and significantly improves performance yielding an average accuracy increase of 85% across rigorous benchmarks including BIRD-CRITIC and LiveSQLBench, critically achieving these gains without any task specific finetuning or RLHF. Concurrently, we repurpose this approach to address the severe computational strain of long context inference. By leveraging symbolic processing to prioritize and compress relevant contextual information the layer reduces the effective token usage by over 50% and brings the effective time complexity down from O(n2) to approximately O(n) on certain long context tasks. This dual impact approach not only makes LLMs substantially more reliable for data engineering but also drastically reduces the computational pressure on inference chips, making long context tasks more manageable and cost effective.

Token-level hallucination detectors score each token independently from a single signal, and fail exactly when the generating model is confidently wrong. This paper instead treats hallucination as a temporally extended span and detects it by sequence labeling: each token is scored from a 33-dimensional feature stream that fuses text statistics, Natural Language Inference (NLI) entailment, and language model surprisal, with no access to model internals. A Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) over these features reaches an AUC of 0.840 on RAGTruth (10 seeds), an 11-point gain over an independent logistic-regression baseline (p = 0.002, Wilcoxon signed-rank). A controlled decomposition attributes most of the gain to temporal order rather than model capacity: evidence propagates from confident positions to ambiguous neighbors within a span. The same 0.845 ceiling recurs across recurrent, state-space (Mamba), and attention architectures, locating the bottleneck in the feature set rather than the model. Because it reads only the generated text and external signals, the detector works on closed-source models, and it keeps working on text produced by language models it never saw during training, losing under 4% AUC.

Parkinson's disease (PD) selectively impairs distinct stages of motor control. Using backspace events as natural error-correction episodes in the public neuroQWERTY MIT-CSXPD dataset (n=57 subjects, 27 PD with UPDRS-III scores), we test whether passively-collected keystroke timing dissociates a variability-based pre-error monitoring signal from a speed-based post-error recovery signal. Pre-error typing instability does not track PD severity (r=-0.072, p=0.721), while post-error pause duration does (r=+0.656, p=0.0002; subject-level OLS p=1.2x10^-4, n=27, primary analysis given within-subject event clustering). A mixed-effects log-normal model with a random subject intercept confirms this while retaining full event-level power (coef=0.0250, p=1.2x10^-4, n=1,563 events), closely matching the subject-level OLS despite an unrelated estimation strategy. Error-detection latency also correlates with UPDRS-III (r=+0.660), confirming the dissociation is between variability and speed, not detection and correction per se. A log-normal accelerated failure time model yields a coefficient of 0.0255 (bootstrap 95% CI [0.0146, 0.0357]), a 2.6% increase per UPDRS-III point. After controlling the immediately thecoefficient attenuates to 0.0133 (p=3.1x10^-21),consistent w timingincrement above general bradykinesia. Results reacross both S2:r=+0.645), survive jackknife exclusion of every subject, andnatingfinger-tapping and mPower smartphone tapping (group AUC=0.836). cellent(ICC(2,1)=0.945, n=20).

Machine learning models trained on biochemical data are routinely evaluated using splits that fail to account for relational structure, causing information leakage and over-optimistic performance estimates. Existing splitting methods lack theoretical grounding and scale at best quadratically. We introduce the Relational Generative Process (RGP), a mathematical formalization explaining why relational structure arises in biochemical datasets, and Refnd, a splitting algorithm that leverages a proximity graph computed in loglinear time using Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW). We validate on an antimicrobial peptide dataset, showing that Refnd splits yield lower but more realistic evaluation performance than traditional splits. Refnd is applicable to any dataset arising from an RGP such as protein sequences and structures, small molecules, and nucleotide sequences, and is openly available as a Rust accelerated Python package: pip install refnd.

Machine learning surrogate models are increasingly being explored in engineering product development to augment simulation-driven design, offering near-instantaneous predictions that complement computationally expensive high-fidelity analyses. However, a critical gap limits their adoption in safety-critical workflows: a point prediction without an accompanying uncertainty estimate cannot tell an engineer when the model should not be trusted. This work presents a systematic, head-to-head comparison of two widely used uncertainty quantification approaches – Monte Carlo Dropout and Deep Ensembles – applied to an open-source surrogate pipeline built on NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo. A key contribution is the use of concrete dropout, a built-in PhysicsNeMo capability that eliminates the dropout rate as a manual hyperparameter by learning it end-to-end during training, directly addressing the most common criticism of Monte Carlo Dropout-based uncertainty quantification. Automotive crash simulation is used as the application domain, with a steel bumper beam impact problem serving as the benchmark. Both methods are evaluated on identical held-out simulations and compared on point accuracy, uncertainty band calibration, and computational cost. The results reveal a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and calibration that challenges the common assumption that deep ensembles are the default gold standard for surrogate uncertainty quantification. The findings demonstrate that well-calibrated, hyperparameter-free uncertainty estimates are achievable within a fully open-source engineering workflow at a fraction of the computational cost of ensemble approaches.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) teaches large language models new skills through a teacher that shares the student's backbone and supervises its own rollouts. Existing teachers either inject privileged context at the input – inducing post-hoc rationalization – or fine-tune weights, accumulating drift and forgetting across tasks. We propose \method, whose teacher differs from the student only by a learnable soft prompt: trained on $(x, y_\text{gold})$ pairs with the backbone frozen, the prompt yields a task-specific teacher that preserves the student's exact representational geometry. \method\ extends naturally to multi-task settings by routing each example in a merged corpus to its corresponding soft-prompt teacher, allowing a single student to absorb knowledge from $K$ teachers in parallel; at inference, all prompts are discarded. On Qwen3-1.7B-Base and Phi-4-mini-instruct across four tasks (Science, Tool Use, Biology, Math), the single-task variant (OPD with a PT teacher) matches or exceeds full fine-tuning while training orders of magnitude fewer parameters, and the multi-task variant achieves the best overall average ($56.2$ on Qwen3-1.7B-Base) while preserving general-capability benchmarks – in contrast to sequential SFT, which degrades both.

Bigger language models are less reliable. Across three families, three benchmarks and six rungs, including in-the-wild chat logs, scaling closes the start-of-response knowledge gap up to $7\times$ while within-response knowledge degradation grows up to $39\times$. We trace that residual to one variable, the per-position disagreement $\delta = \log p_M - \log p_O$ against a stronger oracle, whose second moment splits exactly into bias$^2$ $\mathrm{KL}(p_M \,\|\, p_O)^2$ and decoding risk $\mathrm{Var}[\delta]$. That split is an interpretability statement before it is a statistical one: the model's self-readable uncertainty $H(p_M)$ enters only the bias term, so the risk term has no model-readable component. Risk also takes a growing share of the squared error with scale, $31\%$ to $49\%$ from $1.7$B to $14$B. At a fabrication $H(p_M)$ relaxes within one token while risk persists up to $23\times$ longer, leaving a confident-but-precarious regime that bridges consecutive fabrications ($+69\%$ at $14$B). Contracting that risk at fixed $\mathrm{KL}$ removes $35$-$74\%$ of web-verified hallucinations across six rungs and three families. Semantic entropy fires $\approx$$30\%$ less on that branch ($p\!<\!10^{-16}$) though it carries nearly $4\times$ the fabrications. Bigger models snowball mistakes faster, through a failure mode that is dominant, self-perpetuating, causal and invisible to the model itself.

Time-dependent reliability analysis is crucial for ensuring the long-term safety and performance of engineering systems under uncertainties. However, traditional surrogate model methods often struggle to incorporate time-independent random variables and capture their complex interactions with time-dependent stochastic processes. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a dual-domain fused long short-term memory (DDF-LSTM) model for efficient and accurate time-dependent reliability analysis. A novel network architecture is developed to jointly process information from both time-dependent and time-independent domains. Specifically, the time-independent variables are embedded into the initial hidden states, and a fully connected layer is introduced to map both LSTM outputs and time-independent variables into the final output space. Furthermore, an improved loss function is designed to emphasize the model's sensitivity to minimum responses, thereby improving the precision of failure probability estimation. The proposed method effectively captures the dependencies among random variables, stochastic processes, and the temporal behavior of limit state functions. Once trained, the DDF-LSTM model enables efficient Monte Carlo simulation to estimate time-dependent failure probabilities with minimal computational cost. Four case studies validate the proposed method's enhanced computational efficiency and predictive accuracy.

In recent years KolmogorovArnold Networks KANs have attracted increasing attention due to their effectiveness in machine learning and scientific computing offering a new paradigm for neural network design In this paper we present SechKAN a novel KAN based on hyperbolic secant sech functions The hyperbolic secant basis is adopted for its smooth bellshaped form localized responses and wellbehaved gradients We employ a 1D linear projection to reduce the number of parameters allowing SechKAN to maintain a model size comparable to that of multilayer perceptrons MLPs Experimental results show the effectiveness of SechKAN on function fitting PDE surrogate modeling and image classification benchmarks including MNIST FashionMNIST CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 On function fitting SechKAN achieves performance comparable to both MLPs and representative KAN variants On PDE surrogate modeling it outperforms MLPs and achieves competitive or better performance than representative KAN variants On image classification benchmarks SechKAN achieves the best performance among the evaluated KAN variants while remaining competitive with MLPs using a comparable number of parameters However SechKAN still incurs higher computational cost than MLPs and some KAN variants Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN.

Continual anomaly detection (CAD) studies how models can adapt to evolving data distributions while retaining performance on previously observed regimes. CAD benchmarks, however, depend critically on how tasks are defined, filtered, ordered, and validated. In tabular domains, task boundaries are rarely given, and arbitrary splits can create unlearnable, redundant, or overly transferable tasks that obscure genuine continual-learning behavior. To this end, we introduce a systematic framework for reproducible benchmark scenario design from existing tabular anomaly-detection datasets. The framework discovers candidate tasks, filters unsuitable tasks, and derives principled orderings that expose diverse dynamics. The framework allows us to deliver five benchmark-ready scenarios from three large-scale cybersecurity anomaly detection datasets, yielding both single-dataset and multi-dataset CAD settings.