Papers

Distribution steering seeks feedback laws that drive the state law of a dynamical system between prescribed initial and terminal distributions. Optimal transport provides a natural geometric approach, but its implementation generally requires a transport map or coupling in the full state space. Sliced optimal transport avoids this full-dimensional construction through one-dimensional projections. Yet, the resulting projected maps specify only directional displacements and do not by themselves prescribe a realizable feedback law. To this end, we develop a finite-horizon control framework based on sliced optimal transport. At each sampling instant, a projected optimal transport map defines a directional terminal condition, whose minimum-energy realization yields a randomized single-direction controller. Averaging over projection directions gives a deterministic sliced feedback. For the single-integrator dynamics, the averaged feedback makes the sliced Wasserstein distance to the target non-increasing. For Gaussian endpoint laws, it is affine, preserves Gaussianity, and steers the mean and covariance to their prescribed terminal values. We further identify a law-dependent gain that yields linear decay of the sliced Wasserstein distance together with an explicit characterization of the control energy. We also prove that the randomized controller converges to the averaged sliced flow as the sampling period vanishes. Finally, we extend the construction to linear dynamical systems. Reachability-normalized coordinates allow instantaneous realization of the sliced velocity for uniformly fully actuated systems, while local controllability Gramians provide exact finite-step realization for general controllable systems. Numerical examples illustrate the resulting distributional flows.

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to harmful requests and jailbreak attacks. Parameter-efficient safety alignment methods based on prompt tuning typically rely on a single global prompt or externally selected prompt modules. Such static designs struggle to maintain a cross-category safety boundary while generating constructive responses tailored to specific risks and avoiding over-refusal of benign inputs. To address these limitations, we propose HiRoute, an input-adaptive hierarchical prompt-tuning framework that separates category-agnostic safety control from category-specific response guidance. HiRoute first trains a lightweight hierarchical router on representations extracted from a frozen LLM to jointly detect harmful intent and predict multi-label risk scores. It then freezes both the backbone model and the router and uses preference optimization with alternating gradient updates to learn a shared coarse-grained prompt and a set of fine-grained prompt experts as continuous embeddings. At inference time, benign inputs bypass the safety branch, whereas risky inputs are processed using the shared prompt together with a router-weighted mixture of risk-specific prompt experts. Experiments across three instruction-tuned models show that HiRoute achieves high safety rates across multiple safety benchmarks while preserving safe-response helpfulness, reducing over-refusal, and maintaining competitive performance on general-purpose tasks.

Access to clinical data is essential for developing reliable healthcare machine learning systems, but direct use of electronic health records is constrained by privacy regulation, institutional review, data-use agreements, and the risk of re-identification. Synthetic data promises a practical alternative: it can preserve useful statistical and clinical structure while reducing exposure of sensitive patient records. Prior studies often evaluate a single generator, one dataset, or a narrow downstream task, making it difficult to know when synthetic data can support model development and when it fails to preserve task-critical signal. We introduce CoMedBench, a reproducible benchmark that evaluates a family of generators under a common clinical-validity framework and one shared training and evaluation engine, spanning static tabular and temporal downstream tasks on established critical-care datasets. In total the benchmark spans 37 dataset-task pairs across two modalities consists of 20 static tabular and 17 temporal ICU time-series-drawn from seven public data sources: three intensive-care databases (MIMIC-III, MIMIC-IV, and eICU) together with the UCI Machine Learning Repository, the CDC BRFSS diabetes cohort (2015), NHANES (1999-2014), and the pycox survival datasets (GBSG and METABRIC). The benchmark evaluates both statistical fidelity and task utility by comparing models trained and tested across real and synthetic data. In these settings, synthetic training data preserves most of the downstream signal: on tabular tasks the reference generator CoMed-CTGAN retains a mean AUROC utility (the synthetic-to-real performance ratio) of 90.6%, rising to 97.3% for the strongest generator, CoMed-TVAE. Temporal ICU tasks are harder and more generator-sensitive: CoMed-CTGAN retains 81.6% (AUROC) and only 64.0% under the imbalance-sensitive AUPRC, whereas CoMed-TVAE still retains ~95% (AUROC).

Simulating the ALICE Zero Degree Calorimeter (ZDC) neutron detector responses at the LHC is computationally expensive, requiring complex Monte Carlo chains. We develop a generative surrogate, focusing on Normalizing Flows (NFs). Through transfer learning, we pre-train on the full imbalanced dataset and fine-tune specialized models for different particle types ($\gamma$, $n$, $\Lambda$, $K_S^0$, $\Sigma^+$) using two gradual-unfreezing schemes. As standard ZDC metrics like Wasserstein distance overlook conditional structure, we introduce refined metrics: conditional weighted MAE, dispersion ratio, and Jaccard co-activation error, that better capture physics-relevant input-output dependencies and response variability. Our ensemble of fine-tuned models achieves a Wasserstein distance of $1.61 \pm 0.02$, outperforming baselines across all metrics. This work provides a generalizable NF-based framework for LHC detector simulation, combining NFs, conditional fine-tuning, and physics-motivated evaluation.

What a finite learning device has recorded and what will hold value for it on future tasks are not the same quantity. We develop a typed accounting for finite-state learning devices that separates four components: a training-side fit functional $\Phi_{\mathrm{fit}}$, the record-correlation stock $J_{D}=I(M;D)$, an update-side search ledger $\sigma_{M}$, and an operational capital value $V(M;T,b)$. This value is the work gap between an informed protocol class and a blind class obtained by deleting the memory-read port and re-optimizing from scratch. (I) Separation: for every $n$, there is a device family on which record correlation and world correlation grow by $n\ln 2$ while the capital gain is exactly zero. In the $\mathrm{flat}^{*}$ regime, data-free updates never increase $V$. (II) Capitalization ledger: an exact $\mathrm{flat}^{*}$ extraction identity and a universal ledger identity give, for (F5$'$)-stable $M$-local updates under a no-discarded-record-correlation condition (f), the bound $\eta_{\mathrm{cap}}\le 1$ for the capitalization efficiency $\eta_{\mathrm{cap}}=\Delta V/(k T\,\sigma_{M})$, together with necessary and sufficient conditions for equality. (III) Value retention: for the retention gap $L_{\mathrm{gen}}$ and retention ratio $\rho_{\mathrm{gen}}$ (the former carries no sign constraint; the latter is defined for positive training-side value and is not confined to $[0,1]$) we give a two-layer alignment domain: an exact exchange rate between value and the side-information-adjusted record fit $I(M';D\mid Y)$ without any record-side-information independence assumption, and a raw record-stock exchange rate under a joint side-information neutrality condition $(M,D)\perp Y$, whose boundary is marked by an explicit one-time-pad witness. These are statements about finite-device value retention under task-distribution shift, not a theory of statistical generalization.

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation has long turned on one question, which pseudo-labels to trust, and a generation of selection rules, dynamic thresholds, per-class curricula, soft confidence weights, answered it for the noisy, under-confident ResNet teachers of their day. Self-supervised foundation encoders change the regime: with a DINOv2 teacher, confidence saturates, so the filtering that helped a weak teacher can hurt a strong one. We propose CW-BASS v2, a saturation-aware pseudo-label selection method that reads the teacher's confidence regime rather than committing to one rule. It pairs held-out calibration, an unbiased per-class noise estimate, with a self-adaptive confidence floor that provably bounds retention away from 1, and combines them in a one-pass gate: measure the reliability of the teacher's confident set, pi_kept = Pr[correct | c >= tau], on a held-out slice, and filter strictly when it meets the confidence demanded (pi_kept >= tau), falling back to the adaptive floor otherwise. The boundary is the pre-existing operating threshold, not a value tuned to mIoU, and across six DINOv2 teachers it makes the correct strict-vs-floor call blind. CW-BASS v2 thus recovers the UniMatch V2 operating point on the saturated benchmarks by selecting strict (Pascal VOC 1/8 87.4 against its reported 87.9; Cityscapes within 0.5), and improves on it where the confident set is unreliable (pi_kept ~ 89%, ADE20K), where the floor edges ahead (+1.5 mIoU, single seed). The gate is principled because the failure it avoids is measured, not assumed: on a reliable, saturated teacher the confidence distribution's dynamic range collapses (98% of Pascal pixels >= 0.95), so an adaptive cutoff floods the retention mask and self-training decays into confirmation bias.

Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) addresses this by using the model's own logits as dense token-level teachers, but extending it to search agents introduces a fundamental tension: the teacher, having access to privileged information such as the correct answer, produces a distribution that differs systematically from the student's exploration-based reasoning, and naive distillation causes the student to inherit this information asymmetry rather than learn better search strategies. We resolve this tension through two contributions. First, we construct Evidence Anchors, which are concise, step-level evidence snippets extracted from the web, as privileged information that captures key reasoning steps without revealing the entire answer path. Second, we propose Step-Level Self-Distilled Policy Optimization (SSPO), which converts teacher-student disagreement into step-level advantage weights within GRPO, applied exclusively to incorrect trajectories. This design decouples what to update from how much to update: the outcome reward determines the direction of policy change, while the teacher modulates its magnitude at each step. Correct trajectories are left untouched, preserving their diversity. On Qwen3-8B, SSPO consistently outperforms GRPO across BrowseComp, GAIA, and FRAMES, surpassing or matching GRPO trained with twice as many gradient steps while adding only about 5 percent overhead per step from a single additional forward pass.

Laplacian-regularized minimization is fundamental in signal processing and machine learning, but explicit construction of the dense graph Laplacian pseudoinverse can be computationally expensive. To address this issue, we consider the setting where the graph Laplacian is given and propose a Difference-of-Convex Regularizer (DCR) graph learning framework that learns a reusable approximation of the pseudoinverse action through regularized Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and shrinkage-regularized Convex–Concave Procedure (CCCP) iterations. For Laplacian-Regularized Nonnegative Least Squares (LR-NNLS), dual and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) analysis motivates separating graph-dependent pseudoinverse learning from instance-specific optimization. The learned pseudoinverse is embedded into a differentiable primal optimization procedure as a graph-aware preconditioner for nonnegative reconstruction and can be reused across LR-NNLS instances sharing the same graph. We establish stability and fixed-point existence guarantees for the proposed pseudoinverse-learning iteration. Experiments across different graph topologies and scales demonstrate near-reference accuracy, competitive time-to-moderate-accuracy behavior, and effective cross-instance reuse across independently generated problem instances sharing the same graph.

Adaptive latent tokenization maps a fine-grained input to a shorter sequence of continuous representations associated with input-dependent spans. We introduce ReconSpan, which divides text into chunks that a backward decoder can reconstruct from a single contextual prefix code and retains one such code as the latent token for each chunk. The reconstruction criterion is applied when chunks are formed, allowing one trained autoencoder to produce average chunk lengths from 6.5 to 12.2. At matched average length, reconstruction-guided boundaries preserve more text than random boundaries. Readers of the resulting latent sequence recover topic information reliably but struggle to extract exact details.

We study decentralized multi-player reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) under three forms of information asymmetry: (A) unobserved actions with common rewards, (B) observed actions with independent rewards, and (C) unobserved actions with independent rewards. Players cannot communicate during learning but may agree on a protocol a priori. For Problems A and B we propose mQ-learning and mQ-learning-intervals, achieving $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{H^4 S A_{\text{joint}}\, T})$ regret, where $H$ is the horizon, $S$ the state count, $T = KH$ the total steps, and $A_{\text{joint}} = \prod_{i=1}^M |\mathcal{A}_i|$ the joint action space across $M$ players. For Problem C we give mEXC and mEXC-Bellman, two-phase explore-then-commit algorithms with regret $\tilde{O}(H (S A_{\text{joint}})^{1/3} T^{2/3})$. Against the centralized joint-action benchmark, decentralized learning under information asymmetry matches the single-agent Q-learning rate of \cite{jin2018q} up to logarithmic factors. Because $A_{\text{joint}}$ grows exponentially in $M$, the bounds are most meaningful for small $M$ or small per-player action sets.

Medical AI has demonstrated specialist-level diagnostic accuracy, yet these capabilities remain largely inaccessible in resource-constrained rural settings where bandwidth is scarce, compute is limited, and clinical decision-making requires integrating heterogeneous modalities. We introduce a cloud–edge collaborative architecture that addresses these constraints: lightweight, domain-specific models on the edge transform raw medical data into compact structured outputs, while a cloud LLM synthesizes these outputs into clinical summaries. An LLM-based orchestrator dynamically selects diagnostic tools based on patient context, promoting comprehensive modality coverage without processing irrelevant inputs. We evaluate on 20 multimodal clinical cases spanning cardiac, obstetric, trauma, and screening scenarios under three simulated network profiles (500,kbps–5,Mbps). The hybrid system achieves 98–99% diagnostic tool recall with 92–96% precision, matches or exceeds cloud-only baselines on clinical accuracy, and maintains bandwidth-invariant latency (25–35,s) at 4–15x lower token cost. These results highlight the role of architectural design in enabling efficient multimodal integration and improving factual grounding compared to cloud-only approaches under deployment constraints.

Few-shot in-context learning (ICL) with multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) enables task adaptation without parameter updates, but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality and coverage of the selected demonstrations. While unlabeled multi-modal data is abundant, it remains elusive how to exploit them for ICL. We propose MAG (MAnifold-Guided semi-supervised in-context demonstra- tion selection), an efficient framework that leverages unlabeled data to improve multi-modal ICL. MAG formulates demonstration selection as a semi-supervised propagation problem on a multi-modal graph and adopts a two-stage strategy: (i) relevance score propagation identifies a compact set of high-impact unlabeled samples for pseudo-labeling, reducing MLLM inference cost; (ii) multi-modal relevance is used to select the final demonstrations. We show that textual represen- tations are more effective for relevance propagation, while both visual and textual modalities are crucial for high-quality demonstration selection. Experiments on eight multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate that MAG consistently outperforms strong baselines in label-scarce regimes, achieving significant gains with a limited pseudo-labeling budget.

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models lacks spatially resolved, falsifiable tools for testing whether internal components are specialized for distinct cognitive operations. We adapt subtraction analysis, the standard framework of human neuroimaging, from biological brains to perturbed transformers, and apply the same logic to both substrates in parallel. Building on the Brain-LLM Unified Model (BLUM), which showed that layer-perturbed LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B error profiles match the lesion patterns of aphasic patients, we develop PRISM (Perturbation-based Regional Interpretability through Subtraction Mapping). PRISM maps the seven clinical Philadelphia Naming Test categories, subtracts error classes pairwise, and treats each perturbation seed as a subject in a group analysis with threshold-free cluster enhancement along the layer axis. We run a structurally matched analysis on 213 chronic post-stroke aphasia patients using correlation-difference lesion-symptom mapping, and replicate both sides on held-out splits. The designs match in subject dimension (seeds, patients), spatial dimension (layers, atlas-parcellated cortex) and thresholding, but the contrast operator differs: a within-subject error-proportion difference for the LLM, a between-subject correlation difference for the cortex. Both substrates recover a robust phonemic-favoring dissociation, a deep layer cluster and a frontal-perisylvian cortical cluster, both replicating; the semantic-favoring direction is a consistently signed but non-significant trend on both. PRISM thus gives a falsifiable, spatially resolved test of functional-specialization claims in transformer language models. A confirmatory ROI-level intervention (PRISM Stage 3) licensing the strongest causal-mechanism claim is left to subsequent work.

Muon, a more recently developed optimizer, is useful for matrix-wise models in AI areas. Although many works have studied Muon and its variants, these methods are still not particularly well-suited for hierarchical structured problems. To fill this gap, we propose an effective federated compositional Muon (FedCoMuon) optimizer to solve distributed matrix-wise compositional optimization problems. Specifically, our FedCoMuon optimizer builds on compositional gradient tracking and orthogonalized momentum. Moreover, we propose a variance reduced variant of FedCoMuon (FedCoMuon-VR) based on a momentum-based variance reduced technique. In theory, we analyze the convergence properties of our algorithms under the non-i.i.d. and non-convex settings. In particular, we prove that our FedCoMuon-VR obtains a lower sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary solution than the existing FedMuon algorithms. Extensive numerical experiments on robust federated learning and task-distributed risk-sensitive meta learning show that our proposed methods are competitive with existing compositional baselines and achieve the best reported accuracy in several settings.

Multi-objective bilevel optimization has wide applications in the AI area such as automated learning and multi-task meta-learning. Although recently some works have been begun to study the multi-objective bilevel optimization, the proposed methods rely on the (strongly) convex lower level problems. In fact, these multi-objective bilevel learning problems are generally nonconvex, and particularly their lower level problems are nonconvex. To fill this gap, we propose a class of Multi-Objective Moreau Envelope based Hessian-free Algorithms (MOMEHA) for the multi-objective bilevel learning problems with nonconvex lower level. Specifically, our method uses the Moreau envelope to relax the original problem into a multi-objective single-level optimization with an envelope constraint. In particular, our method retains computational advantages of being single-loop and Hessian-free in the multi-objective setting by incorporating a smooth weighted Tchebycheff scalarization. Furthermore, we propose a momentum-based variant of MOMEHA (i.e., MB-MOMEHA) method for the stochastic multi-objective bilevel learning problems. In theory, we provide the convergence properties of our algorithms under both deterministic and stochastic setting. Some experiments on few-shot meta-learning and neural architecture search demonstrate that our methods outperform the existing approaches in Pareto front, validating its effectiveness and robustness.

Systems that generate GPU kernels with language models report high correctness rates. Those rates come from a single loose test: run the kernel on a few random inputs at one fixed shape and accept it if the output is close to a reference. A kernel can pass that test and still be silently wrong. It can return an ordinary number where the true answer is a NaN or an infinity, differ from run to run, break when the shape changes, or accumulate in fp16 where the reference keeps an fp32 total. We build the instrument that checks correctness properly: a contract-grade verifier of twelve adversarial gates, each a property a correct kernel must satisfy, several of them tolerance-free, so no choice of threshold can explain a failure away. Aimed outward, the verifier audits 2,638 machine-generated kernels that a public system's own harness had already accepted as correct. It finds 39.5% broken beyond any tolerance argument and 62.1% carrying at least one violation. The field's standard test accepts 1,487 kernels the verifier rejects, against only 14 the other way. We defend the finding four independent ways: a 7/7 positive control, a threshold-calibration sweep, 98.5% agreement with the reference benchmark's own correctness code, and a stratified hand-audit. Aimed inward, the verifier judges a kernel of our own: the first native Blackwell tcgen05 training backward for the gated-linear-recurrence (GDN) family, including the reverse-state stage the field still runs on a fallback. We establish its correctness independently, against a double-precision oracle, and train five family members through it. The correctness signal behind reported progress in kernel generation is far weaker than the numbers suggest, and a set of tolerance-free contracts would close most of the gap.

Self-supervised electrocardiogram (ECG) models are often trained on a few seconds of ECG signal and, increasingly, on discretized token sequences. It remains unclear whether these choices sacrifice information needed for rhythm inference and longitudinal consistency in real-world ambulatory recordings. We present a controlled study on the Icentia11k single-lead dataset that varies (i) the input horizon (16 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes) and (ii) the front-end representation (continuous convolutional patch embeddings vs. fixed vector-quantized tokens), while holding the Transformer backbone and training protocol constant. Representations are assessed by downstream abnormal rhythm detection and by patient-level retrieval that probes cross-session stability. Our results show that increasing temporal context beyond 16-second snapshots yields stronger transfer and higher retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance achieved by the 5- and 10-minute models, indicating improved capture of slow-varying rhythm dynamics and individual-specific structure. Across all evaluated horizons, continuous patch embeddings outperform discretized tokens, suggesting that quantization can discard clinically relevant waveform detail. These findings motivate ECG foundation models that emphasize extended context and continuous encoders for clinical prediction and similarity-based applications. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/muha-0/ecg-ssl-representation-learning.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient framework for analog circuit topology search, where evaluating each candidate topology can require costly simulation. However, representation-based BO methods typically treat circuit embeddings as fixed after encoder training. This creates a mismatch between representation learning and optimization: embeddings learned to encode or reconstruct circuit structure are not necessarily organized according to the figure of merit (FoM) being optimized. This paper introduces Test-Time Analog Representation Adaptation for Bayesian Optimization (TTARO), an online deep-kernel BO framework that adapts circuit representations throughout the search process. Starting from pretrained circuit embeddings, TTARO jointly learns a nonlinear feature transformation and a Gaussian-process surrogate using the FoM labels of the circuits evaluated so far. Following each new evaluation, TTARO updates the representation and surrogate before selecting the next candidate. We compare TTARO with conventional Gaussian Process-based BO over fixed embeddings and with Deep Kernel Learning (DKL), which learns the representation only from the initial evaluated designs and keeps it fixed throughout the remainder of the search. By continually incorporating newly observed FoM labels into representation learning, TTARO aligns the search space with the optimization objective as BO progresses. In our experiments, TTARO reduces regret AUC by 15.2% on average relative to BO and by 20.7% relative to DKL across 40 encoder/kernel/acquisition settings, outperforming prior art in most settings with reductions as large as 46.7%.

Item demand forecasting is an integral component of store assortment optimization. Existing literature focuses on learning a suitable customer choice model and using this model to determine the value of an objective function (i.e. expected demand) with respect to an assortment proposal. However, for large item universe with many categories, this approach can prove inefficient, needing a separate demand forecast for every possible item assortment. An alternate approach exists whereby we combine the efficiency of forecasting item demand independently, while at the same time applying adjustments to the independent forecasts that account for the relations between item demand and the availability of other similar items on the shelf. Central to this approach is the estimation of Demand Transfer (DT) coefficients. These DT coefficients represent the percent of a particular target item's (item that the customer walked in the store to buy) demand that is redirected to each other item in the universe should the target item be removed from the shelf. We introduce an approach that allows us to compute these DT coefficients on large item universes (assortments having 1 million+ items). Experiments on data as well as historical transaction data for multiple locations within categories demonstrate that when certain reasonable assumptions about substitution behavior are satisfied, our procedure is able to accurately estimate underlying DT coefficients and lead to improvements in demand forecasting.

IT service management (ITSM) systems accumulate large volumes of heterogeneous ticket data that are difficult for sales and executive stakeholders to convert into actionable intelligence. This paper presents a sociotechnical AI pipeline, designed and evaluated following design science research principles, that transforms raw ITSM exports into a multilevel decision-support artifact. The pipeline combines LLM-based schema normalization, HDBSCAN sub-topic clustering, and hierarchical agglomerative clustering to generate executive-facing Main-topics and granular Sub-topics. A stakeholder evaluation across six artifacts and five raters from Sales Engineering and customer success roles shows that all four decision-support metrics, interpretability, actionability, trust, and likelihood of use, on average exceed 4.0 out of 5.0, with trust as the most consistent signal. The findings position ITSM analytics as an Information Systems (IS) problem of transformation, abstraction, and human-centered design.

Every interaction between AI agents begins with a handshake: the initiating agent must locate its counterpart, learn what it can do, and establish a session before the first useful message can be sent. Surveys of agent communication protocols name handshake overhead as an efficiency criterion, yet none report measurements. This paper presents the first empirical, phase-decomposed benchmark of the handshake in three major agent protocols: MCP (in both its 2025 initialize and 2026 discover eras), A2A, and ACP. Using each protocol's official SDK, we instrument every request for round trips, per-phase latency, wire bytes, and token cost across cold-start, warm-repeat, capability-mismatch, and degraded-metadata scenarios (N=50 per cell, on loopback and under an emulated 50 ms RTT). Round-trip count dominates handshake cost. A legacy MCP handshake takes three round trips and 230 ms at 50 ms RTT; A2A needs one round trip and 61.0 ms. Round trips are not the whole bill: when an LLM reads the counterpart's metadata, handshake cost scales with the counterpart's capability inventory at 24-107 tokens per capability, so a 200-capability counterpart spends 11% of a 200k-token context window before the agent reads its own task. MCP's own 2026 revision cuts its handshake from three round trips to two and, with era pinning, to zero on warm reconnects, protocol evolution that corroborates the cost we measure. We release the full harness, raw data, and analysis at https://github.com/pvarshh/handshake-benchmark.

Implicit Graph Neural Networks (IGNNs) define node representations as fixed points of graph neural operators, enabling effectively infinite-depth propagation, iteration-independent parameterization, and flexible test-time computation. Yet these benefits depend on the equilibrium being unique and reached by fixed-point iteration. Existing constructions often impose constraints on recurrent updates to obtain these guarantees, limiting the transformations available at equilibrium. This raises a central question: can IGNNs gain expressiveness through richer, edge-dependent transformations while retaining the inherent strengths of their equilibrium formulation? We introduce SheafDEQ, a subhomogeneous deep-equilibrium architecture with adaptive neural-sheaf propagation. Its learned, matrix-valued sheaf restriction maps can align, mix, or reverse neighbouring representations. Under mild regularity conditions, we prove that SheafDEQ admits a unique equilibrium reached globally by fixed-point iteration from any positive initial state. Contractivity further guarantees convergence under bounded communication staleness. We evaluate SheafDEQ on distributed-inference tasks requiring repeated nonlocal aggregation and on community detection whose rewiring increasingly favours cross-community interactions. SheafDEQ improves over implicit baselines on Sums, MNIST Terrain, and Coordinates, and on community detection as connectivity becomes increasingly heterophilic. SheafDEQ remains competitive with recurrent models without equilibrium guarantees. Continued-iteration diagnostics show decreasing residuals and retained test accuracy through 100 iterations, unlike the finite-horizon control, while delayed-update experiments show low sensitivity to bounded communication staleness.

We analyze the original same-step coordinate-wise AdaGrad under generalized smoothness and heavy-tailed noise with bounded variance. In this setting, local curvature may grow sub-quadratically with the gradient norm, and stochastic gradients are assumed to have only bounded conditional second moments. We show that unclipped AdaGrad can become anisotropically miscalibrated: under heavy-tailed noise, the adaptive denominator can learn the geometry of rare noise shocks rather than the local curvature of the objective, leading to a persistent directional distortion that blocks finite-horizon Euclidean progress. We then prove that clipping repairs this failure mode. Our main result is a finite-horizon high-probability guarantee for the original non-lagged AdaGrad update, yielding $\frac1T\sum_{t=0}^{T-1}\|\nabla f(x_t)\|^2=\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{d\big(\sqrt{\log T} + \log \frac{1}{\delta}\big)}{\sqrt{T}}\right),$ and hence $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ complexity. This shows that, for AdaGrad under heavy-tailed noise, clipping is a structural stabilizer of the adaptive geometry rather than merely a robustness heuristic.

A statistic reported without the quantity needed to interpret it is not evidence. We develop that thesis for a concrete practice in AI safety. Interpretability artifacts are calibrated on full-precision weights, deployed on quantized ones, and certified as surviving the change by scale-invariant statistics (cosine similarity, correlation, AUROC) that are reported without their noise floor. For the difference-in-means direction estimator, the split-half floor is governed by one dimensionless number, $\kappa = n\rho^2/d$. The closed form $\mathbb{E}[\cos] \approx (1+4/\kappa)^{-1}$ is classical; the missing input is the class separation $\rho$, which we measure on real activations; no compression-transfer study we know of reports it. On Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, $\rho = 33$–$61$ across depth, so two independent runs of the estimator agree to $0.978$–$0.994$ by sampling alone. A published cosine of $0.996$ between full-precision and quantized refusal directions therefore cannot be read as preservation without the $n$ it was computed at, which is not reported. Where $n$ is known, we judge each low-bit cosine against the split-half null measured within that quantized model, because a full-precision null assumes the low-bit estimator has the same variance. That assumption is exactly what a null exists to test. The result is plain: at INT4 the direction rotated, and the deficit exceeds the estimator's own noise. At INT8 we detect no movement, which is not an equivalence claim. We also show that a scale-invariant statistic cannot distinguish translation from attenuation of a transferred decision variable, although the two call for opposite remedies. We close with reporting recommendations that cost one forward pass. Code, data, and a one-cell reproduction are released at https://github.com/pvarshh/quantinterp

The rapidly increasing student population has posed serious challenges to the traditional academic advising process. This study designs and implements a multi-purpose intelligent system to support students' academic progress, based on a two-part hybrid framework: (1) an advanced model for grade prediction and (2) a rule-based recommendation engine. Using a dataset containing 416,558 educational records from the University of Birjand, students were first divided into homogeneous clusters using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Subsequently, a Stacking Ensemble model combining Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and MLP was trained specifically for each cluster. Evaluation results demonstrated that the Stacking model outperformed base models across all clusters, achieving a final aggregated RMSE of 2.35. The second component is an expert system that provides intelligent recommendations by synergizing educational regulations with the grades predicted by the first component. This system has been implemented as a practical tool on the University of Birjand portal, offering students real-time feedback such as semester GPA prediction, probation risk warnings, and course suggestions for GPA improvement.

Post-training quantization and pruning rely on a small calibration corpus. Whether specialized domains such as finance require domain-matched calibration data remains unsettled. We argue that the answer depends on the task-level damage caused by compression rather than on domain mismatch. If compression preserves the target capability, changing the calibration corpus has little effect. If compression causes large losses, task-formatted calibration can recover part of the loss. We test this hypothesis across two model families, six compression configurations, three token-matched calibration corpora, and ten financial classification and numerical question-answering tasks. The results support this hypothesis. Quantization largely preserves task performance, and calibration choice has little effect in this case. Pruning reduces numerical QA accuracy by over 40 points. In these damaged settings, another generic corpus does not help, while FinMix, a mixture of financial task examples, recovers a large part of the loss. The link between damage and recovery holds across model families and scales. These findings support a practical rule. Measure task-specific compression damage first, and construct specialized calibration data only when the damage is large.

Continuous and subtle GNSS spoofing poses a serious threat to autonomous vehicles because forged positions may remain locally plausible while gradually becoming inconsistent with vehicle motion observed by non-GNSS onboard sensors. Existing AV-oriented detectors commonly rely on residual thresholds or feature-level classification and provide limited modeling of how weak GNSS–motion inconsistency develops and persists over time. This paper formulates subtle GNSS spoofing detection as a causal sequential evidence-modeling problem and proposes a high-order liquid evidence detector. The method first compares the displacement implied by consecutive GNSS positions with that inferred from independent onboard motion observations and converts their difference into uncertainty-normalized residual evidence. It then represents the current inconsistency, its local evolution, excess above the normal level, accumulated persistence, and displacement validity as causal weak evidence. These cues are mapped into instantaneous, evolutionary, and persistent latent states, aligned through a bounded Kirchhoff-inspired symmetric exchange, and combined through an explicit third-order interaction to capture their coordinated support for spoofing. To model how this coordinated evidence develops over time, second-order liquid dynamics track its memory and evolution to estimate causal spoofing probabilities, which are converted into confirmed alarms using validation-selected threshold and persistence parameters. Experiments on the AV–GPS dataset family demonstrate strong controlled and external generalization, together with clear sequential alarm behavior. On Dataset-1, the proposed detector achieves an AUROC of 0.9932 and an AUPRC of 0.9843, while obtaining the lowest false-positive rate among the learning-based baselines. Code: https://github.com/pangjunbiao/HO-LLN-Spoofing.

Large language models can process increasingly long prompts, yet their ability to locate and use decisive evidence may degrade as irrelevant or confusable context is added. We formulate this phenomenon, which we call context poisoning, as extreme-value interference in attention: the decisive-evidence score is upper-bounded, while the maximum score among effective distractors grows with their number. Under a softmax retrieval abstraction, we derive a finite-sample upper bound showing that maintaining a fixed accuracy target above base rate requires the evidence margin to scale as $\Omega(\sqrt{\log N})$, where N denotes the effective distractor count rather than necessarily the raw context length. The analysis connects long-context degradation to score aliasing, positional aliasing, and softmax dilution. Controlled experiments show that retrieval accuracy decreases as total context grows in the presence of embedded hard negatives, that the same-format condition produces the largest observed accuracy drop among the tested distractor constructions at fixed context length, and that retrieval gating can improve evidence use while its net benefit depends on preserving evidence recall. These results motivate evidence bottlenecks, alias-resistant representations, retrieve-then-reason architectures, verifier-mediated memory, and contrastive anti-poison training.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves language models with retrieved evidence, but processing many long passages is costly and can introduce distracting information. Soft compression addresses this challenge by encoding passages as compact sequences of continuous memory embeddings before generation. However, existing methods typically assign each retained passage an identical number of memory embeddings, irrespective of its query-specific relevance. To address this, we propose AdaMem, a relevance-guided soft-compression framework that maps learned passage-relevance estimates to a query-dependent allocation of a fixed memory-token budget. A shared query-conditioned compressor produces both continuous passage memories and relevance scores in a single pass; a deterministic allocation rule assigns more memory tokens to higher-scoring passages and can omit low-scoring ones. Across six open-domain QA benchmarks, AdaMem consistently outperforms OSCAR (the closely matched soft-compression baseline that uses uniform allocation) as well as other soft-compression methods at matched memory budgets. Under standard 16$\times$ compression, AdaMem improves sub-string match by up to 3.2 points (5.5%) over uniform allocation baseline, with an average relative gain of 3.4%; under aggressive 64$\times$ compression the average relative gain grows to 14.6%, with a maximum of 9.8 points (19.7%) on PopQA. AdaMem matches the answer quality of the uncompressed at up to 4$\times$ lower inference latency than full context baseline. AdaMem retains an efficiency profile comparable to the uniform-compression baseline, while achieving up to $4\times$ lower inference latency than full-context inference. Thus, relevance-guided memory allocation is particularly effective when retrieval pools are large and the available memory budget is tight.

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) on coding tasks has primarily focused on performance metrics such as pass@k. As LLMs continue to advance, many models now meet baseline performance requirements, reducing the discriminative power of performance-based evaluation alone. Yet a key question remains largely unexplored: how do LLMs differ in their coding behavior? We propose CLIC (Code Learning for Identification and Comparison), a visual analytics approach that characterizes LLM coding behavior through token-frequency analysis. CLIC represents each code sample as a feature vector of token frequencies and trains an interpretable decision tree to separate two LLMs' code sets. Beyond classification accuracy, we define two new metrics: robustness, which measures whether the two LLMs remain distinguishable as their most-discriminative tokens are progressively removed, and concentration, which measures whether the difference is driven by a few dominant tokens or spread across many. Interpreting numerous pairwise comparisons (across LLM pairs, tasks, and tokenization levels) and tracing the full analytical chain form an inherently multi-scale, hypothesis-driven exploration task. We therefore develop an interactive visual analytics system to navigate the comparison landscape, identify pairs of interest, and drill down into discriminative tokens and their code contexts. Case studies comparing 10 LLMs across 22 Kaggle ML tasks reveal actionable insights for LLM selection and prompt engineering.