Papers

Decision tree-based models are widely used in machine learning due to their interpretability and strong empirical performance. However, training decision trees can be computationally expensive, particularly for large and high-dimensional datasets, largely due to the exhaustive search over candidate splits at each node. To improve computational efficiency, we propose Data-Informed Centroid Splitting (DICS), a clustering-based framework that constructs a compact and informative set of candidate splits using data-driven priors. By incorporating class-aware structure, DICS significantly reduces the split search space for classification tasks while preserving predictive performance. We further provide theoretical analysis showing that under the stated assumptions, DICS does not degrade the performance of classification trees compared to exhaustive split search. DICS can be incorporated into classification trees, random forests, and gradient-boosting models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DICS achieves comparable accuracy while substantially reducing training time across synthetic and benchmark datasets, highlighting the benefit of integrating data-informed priors into split selection for scalable classification tree learning.

This paper develops a general transfer learning framework for nonparametric regression with data consisting of multiple groups. Under the assumption that groups share a common structure along with group-specific deviations in additive form, the proposed method employs a two-stage offset learning procedure: the first stage pools data from all groups to estimate an overall mean function, and the second stage estimates offsets for each group, yielding final group-level estimators through additive combination. Upper bounds on the $\mathcal L_2$ error are established for the proposed framework, covering a broad class of nonparametric estimators under mild complexity and noise conditions. When instantiated with deep ReLU networks, explicit convergence rates are derived under hierarchical composition models, demonstrating the ability to overcome the curse of dimensionality. Conditions that enable positive transfer with faster rates are considered, including learning with simpler functions and data augmentation through pooling samples across groups. Various simulations and real-data experiments further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The worldwide network of gravitational-wave detectors have detected more than 350 binary coalescence events till date. Future third-generation detectors, like Einstein telescope, are expected to detect orders-of-magnitude more signals from sources with more complicated characteristics, including eccentric orbits and high-mass ratio binaries. It is well-established that the computational cost of parameter estimation for signals from these kinds of sources will be extremely high. In particular, the process could be sped-up if generating theoretical waveform predictions, used for likelihood calculation becomes faster. Recently, various machine-learning techniques has been proposed to this end. In this work, we propose a two-stage deterministic conditional-autoencoder model for generating four-parameter SEOBNRv4 waveforms. The first-stage of the model generates amplitude and phase series of the waveform, while the second-stage calibrates the residual error in the predictions. Our model achieves a median mismatch of around $10^{-2}$ with the target polarization waveforms, while the calibrated amplitude/phase series achieve $10^{-6}$ level cosine distance error. We then propose a waveform conditioning step to enable use of these surrogate waveforms for downstream parameter estimation tasks. Finally, we perform extensive parameter estimation tests, with ML and EOB waveform injections and try to recover posterior estimates for the source parameters. We find that when ML waveforms are used to recover EOB target parameter estimates, the inferred posterior have some systematic bias. This inherent bias can be estimated and corrected for, and then importance reweighting of posterior samples can enable use of low-accuracy surrogate waveforms at low SNRs.

Small language models are usually built like large ones and then squeezed onto a CPU afterwards. We did the opposite: we fixed the target first, one user, one token at a time, 4-bit weights, ordinary CPU, and chose the architecture to suit it. The result keeps full attention in only 6 of its 18 blocks. The other 12 use short convolutions whose memory is two timesteps wide no matter how long the conversation gets, so two thirds of the network never re-reads a growing cache. Trained from scratch on 59.9B tokens, the model scores 47.31 on a five-task benchmark against a bar of 42.20 that was fixed before training began. It beats GPT-2 124M, Pythia-160M, OPT-125M and GPT-neo-125M, all trained on three to six times more data, and exceeds MobileLLM-125M's published score despite that model seeing a trillion tokens. Validation bits-per-byte is 0.8685. To check the architecture rather than the training recipe, we trained a conventional all-attention model of the same size on the same data, and wrote down the winning condition before scoring either. The hybrid won the chosen quality metric by 0.81%, matched it on downstream tasks, produced a 6.3% smaller 4-bit file, and decoded 1.76x faster at 2048 tokens of context, 2.08x against an external model of similar size. In every measurement the speed advantage is near zero at an empty context and grows with length, which is what the mechanism predicts and what a merely leaner model would not show. A simple bandwidth calculation predicts only 1.17x, so memory volume alone does not explain the gap. We also report what did not work: an unmitigated 4-bit quality cost, roughly half the convolution channels ending up inert and impossible to remove, and a vocabulary larger than this model size warrants.

Memory has become a key component of large language models, enabling them to retain information and learn from long-term interactions. However, existing memory benchmarks mainly evaluate whether information is correctly extracted, stored, and retrieved, while largely overlooking how retrieved memories reshape model reasoning and affect performance on the current task. We identify memory-induced cognitive traps: even faithfully recorded and semantically relevant memories can distort model reasoning or beliefs and degrade current task performance. To systematically evaluate these failure modes, we introduce MemTrapBench, which covers two forms of cognitive traps: Reasoning Fixation and Belief Distortion. Experiments across two model families and five representative memory frameworks show that MemTrapBench is challenging: all evaluated memory strategies underperform the no-memory setting, with even the strongest methods suffering drops of more than 10%. To mitigate these cognitive traps, we propose AdaptiveMem, a simple yet effective inference-time method that instructs LLMs to avoid memory traps. AdaptiveMem mitigates cognitive traps on MemTrapBench while preserving or improving performance on standard memory benchmarks across diverse memory frameworks.

Non-invasive decoding of inner speech faces a fundamental data problem: a corpus pairing brain activity with a person's spontaneous inner monologue cannot be collected, and the available proxy paradigms (cued repetitive and retrospectively reported generative inner speech) are slow to acquire, poorly time-locked, and subject compliance is unverifiable. We therefore treat silent reading as a scalable proxy task and ask how much lexical and semantic information a contrastive decoder can extract from it. We report an open-vocabulary analysis of approximately 240,000 word presentations recorded from a single densely-sampled participant across 393 runs (ca. 49 h) of 19-channel dry-electrode EEG. Words from continuous narrative text were presented in rapid serial visual presentation, with typography randomised on every trial to partially decorrelate word identity from low-level visual form. A convolutional EEG encoder, optionally followed by a causal transformer, was trained with a CLIP-style contrastive objective to align short EEG windows with hidden-state embeddings of the presented word taken from a large language model. Decoding, evaluated as word-grouped top-10 retrieval against permutation baselines, was reliably above chance, extended to mid-frequency and rare words, and scaled log-linearly with training-data volume with no sign of saturation. Removing occipital and posterior-temporal electrodes reduced the word-level gain by roughly one third but left context tracking unchanged. Control analyses separate word-level decoding from narrative context tracking and from a non-neural positional prior introduced by the transformer's positional embedding. These results establish that open-vocabulary word-level information is recoverable from EEG during silent reading, and that decoding is data-limited rather than saturated.

Classical information criteria such as the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) rely on regularity assumptions that break down for singular models, leading to incorrect model selection in settings such as deep learning. The Widely Applicable Bayesian Information Criterion (WBIC) relies on local learning coefficients $\lambda$, which in the analytic case coincides with local Real Log Canonical Thresholds (RLCT) of the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the model, to capture correct marginal likelihood asymptotics. Exact computation of the learning coefficients has been limited to special cases, and only sampling-based estimation methods are generally applicable. We present the first deterministic algorithm that computes local RLCTs exactly for any two-dimensional model whose Kullback-Leibler distance is contact equivalent to a polynomial, derive a bound on its complexity, and demonstrate its effectiveness for a broad class of models, with applications including polynomial neural networks. Beyond providing ground truth to calibrate sampling-based estimators, exact computation reveals algebraic structure in learning coefficients that sampling cannot and out-speeds it in the shallow regime.

Studies of machine-learning-based power-system protection increasingly report near-perfect scores, yet the meaning of those scores depends strongly on the evaluation setting. Protection task, physical scope, measurements, timing, targets, preprocessing, and validation often vary jointly and remain incompletely specified. This paper proposes a standardization-oriented framework that treats evaluation design as part of the scientific contribution. It defines seven required study dimensions: protection objective, physical scope, observability, timing and decision windows, targets and sample validity, validation protocol, and evaluation outputs. The framework is instantiated in a bounded case study on the public PROTECT-90 electromagnetic-transient benchmark, comprising 9022 simulated episodes from a 90 kV double-line topology, for onset-conditioned fault classification and localization. Under centralized sensing, simulation-metadata-aligned 20 ms windows, and episode-grouped validation, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) achieved a five-fold mean macro-averaged F1 score of 0.991 +/- 0.001 for classification and a localization mean absolute error of 10.20 +/- 0.25% of line length (mean +/- std across episode-grouped folds). Extending the decision horizon to 50 ms preserved this task-dependent performance asymmetry, while reduced observability approximately doubled the MLP localization error but had little effect on classification. A synchronized two-ended conventional locator outperformed the learning locators under its richer clean information set, and measurement degradation showed that clean predictive performance did not determine robustness. The framework turns evaluation assumptions into explicit, reproducible evidence and provides a basis for more comparable, auditable evaluation and future certification-oriented assessment of machine-learning protection functions.

Attention dominates token mixing, but it collapses relation formation and flow allocation into a single score-to-flow step. We introduce Relation, which separates them by first organizing pairwise evidence into explicit Self and Exchange relations and deriving information flow afterward. Relation first decides whether a token should rely on itself or draw from its history, and if it draws from history, where to look. This relational organization gives rise to Full Relation, FlashRelation, Linear Relation, and Hybrid Relation. Across matched decoder-only models, Full Relation achieves lower mean final-validation NLL than MHA and reaches the paired MHA final training loss with 4.5-7.3% fewer tokens. Structural diagnostics further show that Relation learns a distinct depth organization: the first layer acts as a current-token anchor and a high-rank router, while later layers shift strongly toward history. In a fixed-context reference benchmark, FlashRelation is 4.17-5.28x faster than the materialized Full Relation implementation. Across scale-matched production workloads, it reaches 89.7-92.9% of PyTorch FlashAttention throughput while executing the exact Full Relation operator. Hybrid Relation demonstrates that Full and Linear Relation layers can be composed within a single decoder. These results support a relation-first view of token mixing: ask Self, ask Others, then let Flow follow Relation.

We present a novel approach to efficient LLM harness optimization through adaptive validation task selection. Harness optimization iteratively rewrites the harness code based on validation performance, enabling substantial performance gains without updating the underlying model weights. Existing approaches, however, evaluate a fixed validation set in full at every iteration, incurring substantial evaluation costs even on tasks that become less discriminative as the harness evolves. We propose $\textbf{Task-CoEvolve}$, which co-evolves the validation tasks with the harness by addressing two challenges: selecting informative tasks and estimating full-set performance from partial evaluations. Task-CoEvolve builds on the observation that tasks on which candidate harnesses disagree are more informative for distinguishing among them than tasks that are consistently solved or failed. It uses variance-weighted sampling based on past outcomes to focus evaluation on tasks near the capability frontier, with the sampling distribution adapting as the harness evolves. It then estimates full-set scores from the sampled tasks by accounting for their sampling probabilities, enabling consistent comparisons across iterations despite evaluating different subsets. Experiments on online text classification and Terminal-Bench 2.1 show that Task-CoEvolve consistently outperforms subset-based baselines and matches the final performance of full-set search while reducing the number of evaluations during optimization by 80%. Code will be released at https://github.com/Agent4Science-UTokyo/Task-CoEvolve.

We present a novel view on feature evolution in Vision Transformers (ViTs) by visualizing the training process over two dimensions – network depth (layer) and training time (epochs). We employ Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract candidate sparse features from CLS-token representations and compare their activation profiles across epoch–layer pairs. This allows us to study feature-level dynamics that are not directly visible from representation-level similarity measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this framework of feature evolution allows us to describe feature migration, the change in the layer where a feature is most detectable during training. Our experiments show that migration is concentrated early in training, occurs more often toward earlier layers than toward deeper layers, and declines as feature organization stabilizes. We further find that deeper layers stabilize earlier and more strongly than shallow layers. The results show that our approach can be employed as a tool for understanding how ViTs learn and evolve.

We study inference-time control for text generation in discrete diffusion language models, where the goal is to steer sampling toward sequence-level rewards without retraining. Prior work in this domain has focused on particle-based methods such as best-of-$n$ sampling and bootstrap sequential Monte Carlo, which may suffer from overoptimism and weight degeneracy, respectively. We address these limitations using nested sequential Monte Carlo methods. We formulate nested SMC (NSMC) and fully-adapted nested SMC (FA-NSMC) for Feynman–Kac steering, identifying and correcting errors in prior formulations that lead to biased final estimates. We evaluate these methods on toxicity and fluency steering tasks, showing that NSMC and FA-NSMC consistently outperform best-of-$n$ and bootstrap SMC.

The detection of rare disease-associated cell subsets from high-dimensional single-cell measurements is critical for understanding diseases such as leukaemia and viral infections. CellCnn, a convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for this task, has demonstrated the ability to identify phenotype-associated cell populations at frequencies as low as 0.01%. Training such models reliably requires patient cohorts that are larger and more diverse than any single institution can typically assemble, and the underlying single-cell data is too sensitive to share across institutional boundaries under existing privacy regulations. We propose a secure multi-party computation (MPC) framework that enables the training and inference of CellCnn entirely on secret-shared data. This ensures that neither the participants nor the computing servers ever observe raw patient data or intermediate values. Evaluated on benchmark single-cell datasets for cytomegalovirus infection (CMV) and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), our implementation preserves accuracy close to its plaintext counterpart while outperforming the prior privacy-preserving baseline. In contrast to earlier privacy-preserving approaches that removed components such as ReLU activations and bias terms, our method retains these key parts of the CellCnn architecture and supports accurate analysis without exposing raw patient data.

The emergence of large-scale Weather and Climate (W&C) datasets offers new opportunities for modeling extreme Earth events (ExEE) and their impacts using deep learning. However, their adoption in operational settings remains limited by the lack of models' interpretability. While for conventional text and image modalities, tools such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven effective for extracting human-understandable concepts, their use for the analysis of ExEE remains challenging due to the nature of W&C data. To address this, we introduce (i) a geographic location-based modulation of the inputs of SAE to capture the local semantic meaning of environmental patterns, and (ii) an ensemble of rule-based SAE-Xplainers to interpret the resulting high-dimensional features derived from complex, multi-modal environmental predictors. We evaluate our method on three ExEE types: the prediction of fires, and the detection of tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers. We show that SAE input modulation improves both reconstruction performance and feature utilization, and that our SAE-Xplainers enable faithful interpretation of complex climatic patterns by unfolding them into human-understandable rules that are consistent with the scientific literature, while also supporting the identification of feature absorption.

Artificial immune networks (AINs) are naturally memory-forming systems, but conventional visual AINs often rely on flattened vector affinity that ignores spatial structure. This paper studies whether structured, gradient-free immune affinity can make Deep AINs viable as replay-free visual class-incremental representation-memory learners. Visual B-cells are formalized as structured templates, including shifted-template affinity, zero-normalized cross-correlation (ZNCC) filters, and feature-map binding profiles. A repertoire is treated both as memory and as a representation-inducing basis, while depth is obtained by passing binding-profile response maps to subsequent immune layers. The resulting Deep AIN exhibits adaptive latent coordinate reorganization: as new classes arrive, the binding-profile space evolves while retaining recoverable structure for earlier classes. Experiments on sklearn digits, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and KMNIST show that preserving response maps is critical. Scalar binding-profile variants underperform, whereas feature-map Deep AINs learn class-discriminative visual memory without replay, label-driven immune updates, or backpropagation through the immune layers. On sklearn digits, downstream probes fitted on the learned binding profiles reach 0.939 final balanced accuracy with logistic regression and 0.902 with 1-nearest-neighbour after all ten classes are encountered, with initial-class retention of 0.978. Adaptive layer-wise scale calibration further improves the two-layer feature-map Deep AIN to 0.978 balanced accuracy. With the same calibration rule, Fashion-MNIST reaches 0.814 and KMNIST reaches 0.853. These probes are external validation tools, not components of the AIN. The results identify structured affinity, response-map preservation, adaptive latent reorganization, and layer-wise scale calibration as key mechanisms for replay-free visual immune memory.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by coordinating multiple agents, but at the cost of substantial token consumption. Recent work on automatic topology design, ARG-Designer, has reframed this problem as autoregressive graph generation. However, its training objective provides no explicit incentive for the model to generate sparse and efficient topologies. We address this limitation by introducing a Reward-Guided Autoregressive Graph Generation (RGA-Designer) inspired by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We train a reward model that jointly captures task correctness and structural compactness, and then fine-tune the pretrained graph generator using the reward model as feedback. Our method preserves task accuracy at the level of ARG-Designer while reducing token consumption by an average of 20.5%.

World models construct latent states that support prediction, planning, and reasoning about an underlying system. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) offer a direct way to learn such states by predicting targets in representation space instead of reconstructing every detail of the observation. Standard JEPAs, however, organize all predictable content through one target embedding and one prediction pathway. In complex systems, this monolithic state can allocate redundant capacity to dominant signals while providing weak or conflicting gradients to less dominant predictive structure. We introduce \method, a latent world-modeling framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization. Learned basis matrices analyze each target state into multiple components, and a dedicated prediction branch estimates each component from a shared context representation. Predictive regression preserves the factor magnitudes required for state synthesis, an orthogonality objective discourages repeated directions, factor-activity regularization maintains variation in projected targets, and online variance regularization discourages coordinate-wise encoder collapse. Predicted components are synthesized into a complete latent state that can be used by a readout, decoder, planner, or autoregressive rollout. The same predictive-state mechanism applies when the target is temporally future, spatially hidden, or another partial observation of the same system. Experiments on controlled vision, single-cell transcriptomics, longitudinal health records, continuous control, and molecular dynamics evaluate representation quality, forecasting, planning, and long-horizon stability.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures significantly expand model capacity without a proportional increase in computational cost. However, optimizing their hyperparameters—particularly the learning rate—at extreme scales of both model size and token budget via sweeping remains computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we propose a compute-efficient, two-step hyperparameter transfer framework that estimates optimal learning rates for training large MoE models by transferring them across scaling model widths, and subsequently extrapolating to trillion-token horizons. First, we formulate a Maximal Update Parameterization ($\mu$P) adaptation for MoE architectures utilizing Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and the Muon optimizer, demonstrating that optimal learning rates transfer consistently across width-scaled models. Second, we extend this transferability along the token dimension by establishing a predictive scaling law. By applying linear regression to the optimal values derived from small proxy models on limited budgets, we successfully extrapolate the ideal learning rate to massive training horizons (e.g., 10 trillion tokens) with high fidelity ($R^2=0.95$). Consequently, this indicates that proxy training on small models is sufficient to determine the optimal learning rate for the extensive training of large-scale MoEs. We apply the proposed methodology to pretrain our foundation model (155B total, 17B active parameters) from scratch, and the stable training and evaluation results validate that optimal configurations for full-scale target models can be accurately predicted with minimal ablation costs.

Multi-module neural systems often expose every module to the full input. We test whether a slot-selective evidence-masking regime – restricting each module to its own evidence span – changes which solutions gradient-based training discovers. Four-cell societies share one frozen pretrained language model and one low-rank adapter, communicating only through two model-width continuous vectors in a fixed relay. On a prospectively sealed natural-language function-composition task, we train ten matched restricted/global pairs identical except for the attention mask. Restricted-visibility societies outperform their globally visible twins by at least 20 percentage points at both depths in 9 of 10 pairs, with median paired advantages of 0.7648 and 0.6050. Cutting communication reduces every restricted society to chance, and in a post hoc collision-stratified analysis the depth-three advantage remains 0.558 on programs whose complete affine map never appeared in training. In six post hoc-selected restricted societies, packet interventions on correctly answered held-out episodes are consistent with approximately value-indexed relay states; the sole high-performing global model also requires communication, but its same-value packets are not interchangeable across episodes. Thus restricted visibility is not necessary for composition. Under the tested seeds, streams, task world, and training budget, the masking regime strongly shifted which solutions training discovered: a post hoc mask crossover finds both arms mask-native. Because the restricted mask both blocks foreign evidence and implicitly identifies each cell's assigned slot, attribution to evidence visibility alone awaits a role-marked control. The preregistered battery nevertheless formally fails because restricted-arm median depth-three accuracy is 0.6988, below the 0.70 floor; an earlier qualification cohort yielded 0/10 complete passes.

Probabilistic time series forecasting remains challenging, largely because modeling distinct trend and seasonal dynamics requires specialized approaches. Existing methods often fail to capture the unique inner properties of these components, lack interpretability, or suffer from heavy memory and runtime overhead. To address these limitations, we propose DecoVAE, a lightweight interpretable trend-seasonal VAE framework that explicitly decomposes time series into trend and seasonal components by applying domain-specific inductive biases. The trend stream enforces structural smoothness using a differential regularizer on the latent trajectory, analogous to the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Concurrently, the seasonal stream operates in the frequency domain via a complex Gaussian VAE, natively capturing the amplitude and phase of periodic patterns. Extensive evaluations across seven real-world benchmarks show that DecoVAE consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves reductions of up to 14.96% in CRPS and 23.30% in NMAE for short-term forecasting, and up to 52.68% and 26.51% for long-term horizons. Crucially, DecoVAE yields these accuracy gains while remaining highly efficient, reducing model weight by up to 93% and accelerating speed by up to 74% compared to the second-best method.

Watermarking schemes for large language model output are evaluated almost exclusively on English text using each scheme's detection threshold and a narrow set of quality measurements. Multilingual deployment exposes evaluation-design choices that are inconsequential on English but determine conclusions cross-lingually. We propose an evaluation framework with four components: detection thresholds calibrated empirically per deployment context, a threshold-independent companion measurement that distinguishes calibration failures from detection failures, three disjoint quality measurement paradigms (distributional, paired-semantic, and reference-perplexity), and a generalized-entropy decomposition of cross-language disparity over a typological family partition. Applied to six watermarking schemes, three open-weight generators, eleven languages spanning four scripts and eight typological families, and both base and instruction-tuned regimes, the framework reveals failure modes that single-language single-paradigm evaluation cannot surface. Across detection and quality, observed disparity is predominantly between-family on the typological partition, indicating that cross-lingual fairness gaps in watermarking are structural to language properties rather than idiosyncratic to particular languages.

Early Classification of Time Series (ECTS) requires making accurate decisions as early as possible in inherently online and evolving environments. Yet, most existing methods assume stationarity and rely on separable designs, where classification and triggering are optimized independently, an assumption that fundamentally limits their adaptability under drift. In this work, we challenge this paradigm and study ECTS under non-stationary conditions. We provide the first systematic comparison between separable and end-to-end approaches across controlled drifting scenarios. Building on Reinforcement Learning, we introduce DQeND, a unified architecture that jointly learns representation, classification, and triggering decisions, while remaining directly comparable to state-of-the-art separable baselines. Across a wide range of drifts, DQeND demonstrates strong robustness across various non-stationary scenarios, consistently outperforming separable baselines. An ablation study further highlights that jointly updating representation and decision modules is critical to these gains. Overall, our results indicate that end-to-end learning can offer improved adaptation capabilities for ECTS in dynamic environments, and motivate further investigation of alternatives to separable designs.

Artificial intelligence can support cultural heritage and digital humanities through large-scale retrieval and analysis of digitized collections. However, cultural heritage data are often distributed across institutions, constrained by ownership and access restrictions, and continuously evolving over time. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is well suited to this setting, as it enables models to learn from distributed and sequential data without sharing raw collections. In this paper, we propose FedCurv-DR, a lightweight, regularisation-based FCL strategy. The method accumulates parameter-importance estimates across clients and experiences to protect learned knowledge, while updating them only at fixed intervals to minimize communication and computation overhead. We evaluate FedCurv-DR in a continual learning scenario using the WikiArt image dataset for genre classification with evolving styles, reporting performance, energy, and fairness metrics. Our results show that FedCurv- DR reduces forgetting and balances performance, fairness, and energy efficiency for sustainable AI in cultural heritage.

Streetscape quality has become a central concern in contemporary urban planning, particularly within the framework of the pedestrian-friendly 15-minute city, where walkability and public-space quality are increasingly recognized as key determinants of urban performance. However, assessing streetscape qualities across large suburban and peri-urban territories remains challenging due to the time and resource demands of conventional field surveys. This paper presents a planning-oriented assessment of streetscape qualities in the north-eastern periphery of Nice (France) using the latest release of SAGAI (Streetscape Analysis with Generative AI), an open-source workflow that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) for large-scale streetscape analysis from Google Street View imagery. The new release addresses limitations of the original framework through improved image acquisition, geographically consistent view generation, support for multiple VLM architectures, consensus-based inference, and an integrated analytical environment. The workflow is applied to several thousand street-level observations to evaluate qualities relevant to pedestrian-friendly urban environments: sidewalk presence, pedestrian entrance density, and vegetation. The resulting maps reveal that the desired streetscape qualities characterize only a fraction of today's suburban streetscapes, mainly in compact developments and traditional suburban faubourgs, while they are particularly lacking on residential hills. The analysis demonstrates the potential of contemporary VLMs to support urban diagnostics in extensive suburban territories where fieldwork would be prohibitively time-consuming. Beyond the case study, the paper illustrates how recent advances in vision-language models can contribute to evidence-based planning by enabling scalable, flexible, and interpretable assessments of urban public-space quality.

Probabilistic forecasting models are widely used for time series forecasting in domains such as energy systems, finance, medicine, and transportation. In recent years, deep generative models have shown strong results on probabilistic forecasting, yet many conventional approaches struggle to capture internal temporal dependencies, leading to latent representations with limited expressive power. To address this limitation, we propose CLaST, a VAE framework for probabilistic multivariate time series forecasting. Unlike existing generative models, CLaST learns embeddings that preserve contextual similarity between observations through our contrastive loss function. Experiments across nine widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate that CLaST consistently surpasses strong baseline methods. In short-term forecasting tasks, our approach achieves improvements of up to $16.4\%$ in CRPS and $14.4\%$ in NMAE over the second-best method. Furthermore, in long-term prediction CLaST attains superior overall performance, exceeding the second-best method by up to $48.6\%$ and $25.1\%$ in CRPS and NMAE, respectively.

District heating energy hubs require reliable heat load forecasts for efficient operational scheduling. Forecasting models trained on historical data may require retraining as networks evolve. Zero-shot time-series foundation models and in-context forecasting therefore offer a promising alternative: they can adapt at inference time from recent observations rather than by repeated retraining. This study systematically evaluates TabPFN-TS and Chronos-2 for probabilistic heat load forecasting in two German district heating networks and compares them with trained baselines. We assess whether TabPFN-TS, whose underlying model is pretrained entirely on synthetic tabular rather than time-series data, can capture complex district heating dynamics. We analyze covariate choice, context length, temporal resolution, and forecast horizon on selected operating weeks, evaluate the selected configuration over the full year, and assess cross-network transfer. The principal benchmark assumes perfect weather forecasts; a separate sensitivity analysis uses retrospective weather predictions. Hourly 24-hour forecasting with a 12-week rolling context and ambient temperature provides a parsimonious configuration; longer context windows do not improve accuracy. Both TSFMs outperform all trained baselines in deterministic accuracy in the full-year benchmarks. Chronos-2 achieves the best deterministic scores, with TabPFN-TS remaining close: their CVRMSE values on the main data set are 12.48% and 13.07%, respectively. Chronos-2 also achieves lower continuous ranked probability scores in both networks, with TabPFN-TS remaining close. a TSFM-based Multi-Resolution Residual-Correction Forecaster combines an hourly base forecast with short-term high-resolution corrections. Relative to direct high-resolution forecasting, it generally reduces errors in total heat demand over 12-hour periods and recorded prediction times.

Pretraining time series foundation models across heterogeneous datasets necessitates effective handling of varying sampling frequencies. Current methods either employ dataset-specific patch sizes and separate FFNs, leading to fragmented representations, or enforce a fixed patch size that neglects inherent temporal variations. To address this, we propose SATS, featuring a scale-aware token alignment mechanism that treats patch size as an explicit notion of scale. By incorporating a contrastive-inspired alignment regularizer, SATS aligns representation spaces across scales while preserving distinct modeling capacities. Furthermore, a hybrid masking strategy combining random and contiguous masking is introduced to capture multi-scale temporal structures. Experimental results on LSTF benchmarks demonstrate that SATS achieves a 9.2% improvement in MSE and an 8.3% gain in GIFT-Eval MASE compared to competitive baselines. Notably, SATS consistently delivers SOTA performance while achieving a 65.6% increase in model efficiency over advanced baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and scalability in time series pretraining.

We summarise the outcome of two summer internship projects based at the University of Manchester, focused on the break-even point in terms of environmental sustainability for ML-based data compression algorithms. Using the example of a ML-based lossless compression algorithm, we compare estimates for the carbon-equivalent of the infrastructure needed for ML training and inference with the carbon-equivalent savings from reduced disk storage requirements, and discuss their break-even point.

Segmentation of curvilinear anatomical structures in 3D medical images remains challenging due to complex topology, severe class imbalance, weak contrast, and large variations in structure morphology. While deep learning approaches for 3D curvilinear segmentation have been proposed, they are often tailored to specific anatomies or modalities, limiting generalization across clinical settings and leaving room for improvement. Recent generative models have shown the benefits of iterative prediction for structured segmentation tasks, yet diffusion-based methods suffer from computationally expensive sampling, hindering their use on high-resolution 3D volumes. We present 3D-CurvSegFlow, a flow matching-based model for 3D curvilinear structure segmentation. The model learns a continuous transformation from a simple source distribution to the target vascular representation, enabling progressive refinement of complex curvilinear geometries with efficient inference. We evaluate our method on Three public challenging datasets covering distinct anatomies and modalities: portal vein, cerebral vessel, and coronary arteries. Using a common architecture and training strategy across all tasks, our method outperforms general-purpose and vessel-specific approaches, with strong preservation of thin branches and vascular continuity. This work not only advances the state-of-the-art in 3D curvilinear segmentation but also opens new avenues for efficient, generalizable, and clinically applicable methods in medical image analysis.

Autonomous driving systems must operate under partial observability, where safety-critical objects may be occluded or visible only to neighboring connected vehicles. Vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation can reduce this uncertainty, but existing cooperative driving methods often compress multi-agent evidence into latent features or hidden multimodal states. As a result, they obscure which agent observed each object, whether the object is visible to the ego vehicle, and how conflicting evidence affects downstream decisions. We propose G-MARK, a grounded multi-agent reasoning framework that converts cooperative object-centric observations into explicit provenance-aware knowledge graphs (KGs). The resulting KGs preserve object hypotheses together with their source attribution, ego-versus-partner visibility, uncertainty, conflicts, spatial relations, and planning-relevant context. G-MARK then derives a shared feature representation from these KGs, enabling lightweight task heads to support object reasoning, motion prediction, control selection, and trajectory forecasting. Compared with the state-of-the-art baseline, GMARK improves occlusion reasoning accuracy by 42.2%, reduces control-selection error by 13.1%, and achieves comparable trajectory-planning accuracy with a 25.6x smaller structured communication payload. Our code is available at https://github.com/bhavyagupta98/g-mark.