Papers

Time series classification underpins applications in healthcare, sensing, and industrial monitoring. Although time series foundation models support forecasting and transferable representation learning, classification still typically requires fitting a task-specific classifier on each target dataset, while individual channels of multivariate inputs are often encoded independently. We introduce ChorusTIC, a classification-native foundation model for in-context classification across heterogeneous channel configurations without target-task parameter updates. ChorusTIC combines episode-consistent Random Subchannel Slot Concatenation with a shared dual-axis encoder to model temporal and cross-channel interactions and map variable channel configurations into a fixed-width representation independent of the original channel count. It then calibrates feature axes using context-derived distributions and predicts query labels through leakage-protected in-context learning. We pretrain ChorusTIC solely on synthetic labeled episodes comprising context and query sets that share a task background, with classes distinguished by sparse temporal or cross-channel rules. Evaluations on the complete UEA-30 and UCR-128 archives show strong full-context and low-label performance without target-specific classifier fitting.

We propose a hybrid sharp-diffuse interface representation for modeling intermittent and isolated topological transitions during Cahn-Hilliard phase coarsening. Away from topological events, the evolution is approximated by the Mullins-Sekerka sharp-interface limit system and computed using a boundary integral formulation. When diffuse transition layers overlap, a novel interface surgery algorithm resolves topology changes through a localized Cahn-Hilliard pseudo-time evolution, after which the sharp-interface calculation is resumed. We develop the mathematical formulation underlying this decomposition, present a simple two-dimensional numerical implementation, and simulate a mass-exchange problem with interface coalescence. By localizing the diffuse evolution to topological events, the method achieves a speedup of two to three orders of magnitude over conventional diffuse-interface simulations.

Controllability of nonlinear systems has been extensively studied by using the Lie algebra methods. Although local controllability can be proved, global controllability is in general hard to obtain even for bilinear systems. Recently, a new approach is developed to study controllability of bilinear systems by checking whether the reduced rank points corresponding to the bilinear terms form hyperplanes or hypersurfaces, so that near-controllability, in the global sense, can be algebraically verified once no hypersurface exists. In this paper, we show that there is a flaw in the algorithm for checking the reduced rank hypersurface germ condition (RRHGC) that some special cases are overlooked. We thus propose a new algorithm for testing the RRHGC based on a Darboux-polynomial characterization, which can be used to deal with all cases. An example is provided to demonstrate the proposed new algorithm.

4D medical image interpolation aims to recover missing volumes from sparsely observed time points and is important for dynamic anatomical analysis in applications such as cardiac MRI and thoracic CT, where motion is often repetitive or near-periodic over clinically relevant intervals. A key challenge is that this structure is not always encoded directly in deformation representations for interpolation. In addition, physiological motion is often non-uniform, so equal temporal intervals do not necessarily correspond to equal amounts of anatomical change. To address these issues, we formulate interpolation as learning a continuous deformation process with a phase-structured prior. Given two endpoint volumes, we parameterize a phase-conditioned velocity field with a finite Fourier basis, which embeds near-periodic motion patterns directly into the deformation space and supports continuous querying at arbitrary target times. We further introduce a phase-aligned temporal reparameterization that maps normalized within-interval time to a latent motion phase according to deformation variation intensity, thereby better modeling non-uniform motion progression. Intermediate volumes are then synthesized by continuously warping both endpoints, followed by bidirectional fusion and lightweight residual refinement. Experiments on ACDC and 4D-Lung show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance over existing baselines while producing anatomically plausible and coherent intermediate volumes from sparse observations.

Recent end-to-end neural motion planners generate trajectories from raw sensor observations, avoiding the privileged geometric models required by classical planners. However, collision-free planning in cluttered environments remains challenging. We present NeurRAFT, a generative planning framework based on anchor-level flow matching and clearance-aware preference tuning. Unlike prior neural planners that model dense waypoint sequences and spend capacity on redundant local details and smoothness, NeurRAFT operates on compact anchor waypoints. We train the planner using a Jacobian-weighted loss that accounts for the task-space impact of each anchor. At inference, the anchors are generated in two integration steps, followed by cubic-spline interpolation to recover a smooth, full-resolution trajectory. Since imitation learning from positive demonstrations cannot distinguish collision-free from near-collision trajectories, collision-prone behaviors persist at test time. Rather than relying on post-hoc corrections, we directly reshape the pretrained planner's distribution toward safer solutions without augmenting inference. Specifically, Direct Preference Optimization shifts probability mass toward trajectories with larger obstacle clearance, with the resulting improvement directly absorbed into the planner parameters. Experiments show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art planners, while real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot transfer to a Franka robot under noisy and partially occluded depth observations. Video results available at https://neurraft.github.io/.

Endpoint-only unsupervised 4D medical image interpolation synthesizes intermediate volumes from sparsely sampled sequences with only the start and end volumes available for training; however, this weakly constrained setting often yields intermediates with unstable boundaries and non-physiological motion, limiting interpretability and downstream analysis. We propose low-rank velocity fields as a structural prior, constraining motion to a structured Tucker low-rank velocity field space that decomposes motion into globally shared spatial bases and a compact sample-specific core, thereby encouraging spatially correlated, anatomy-consistent deformation while suppressing voxel-wise high-frequency artifacts. To capture global coordination and local non-rigid details, we model motion in a coarse-to-fine multi-scale scheme and compose scale-wise deformations at inference to synthesize volumes at arbitrary times. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that, under Tucker parameterization, low-rank parameters control the smoothness energy of the velocity field, explaining why low-rank modeling promotes smoother motion. Experiments on ACDC and 4D-Lung demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, remaining competitive with methods trained with intermediate-frame supervision, and producing intermediates with improved structural coherence and more stable anatomical contours.

Confidence-based voting aggregates parallel LLM rollouts by weighting each with internal signals such as token log probabilities, and has been actively studied for single-turn reasoning. However, modern LLMs increasingly act as multi-turn search agents that retrieve and condition on external documents. In this paper, we show that confidence-based voting transfers poorly to this multi-turn setting, and identify the underlying failure reason as copy inflation: when retrieved documents are appended to an agent's context, tokens copied from those documents receive systematically inflated log probabilities. This flattens confidence scores within each question and weakens the resulting weighted vote. To address this issue, we propose Retrieval-Grounded Voting (RGV), which scores each rollout by the lexical overlap between its final answer and the documents it retrieved. By computing the signal outside the contaminated context, RGV sidesteps both token log probabilities and additional LLM calls. Across four search-agent benchmarks and five LLMs, RGV consistently outperforms confidence-based voting, with gains of up to +5.4% accuracy and +35% on minority-correct questions, where the correct answer appears in only 1-2 of 8 rollouts.

LLM agents integrated with external resources gain complex task capabilities, yet the unified natural-language context channel makes them vulnerable to injection attacks: untrusted external data may be dynamically parsed as behavior-guiding instructions during LLM inference, thereby subverting the agent's decision. Existing defenses focus on static detection or isolation of malicious content at the input/output level, remains insufficient for detecting such dynamic inducements that arise during model reasoning. We propose Attnlocate, a runtime framework for fine-grained localization of context spans that genuinely influence tool-calling decisions, i.e., behavior-guiding instructions. Attnlocate casts this localization problem as an object detection task, aiming to detect the distinctive activation traces induced by behavior-guiding instructions within the attention matrix. Specifically, we design a multi-head, multi-layer attention aggregation scheme to construct a token-level feature space tailored for object detection. Then, a 1-D U-Net equipped with an anchor-free detection head is deployed to detect these spans. Finally, based on the authority of the provider from which the detected behavior-guiding spans originate, Attnlocate dynamically adjudicates malicious invocation attempts. We evaluate Attnlocate across ten agent configurations from five LLM families, covering scenarios involving indirect prompt injection and tool poisoning. Attnlocate achieves a mean IoU of 0.743, an average AUROC of 0.956, and a 0.934 true-positive rate at 0.067 false-positive rate. It also transfers effectively across unseen models and supports authority policy adaptation without retraining.

Generating executable parametric CAD code from dimension-annotated orthographic drawings is a challenging task requiring geometric understanding, procedural reasoning, and precise numerical prediction. Existing vision-language approaches typically formulate this problem as one-shot generation, preventing the model from inspecting intermediate CAD results and correcting early mistakes, often leading to non-executable code or geometrically inconsistent outputs. In this paper, we propose IterCAD, an iterative framework that reformulates orthographic-view-to-CAD generation as a progressive program repair process. Instead of predicting the final CAD code in a single pass, IterCAD repeatedly analyzes the current CAD result, reasons about its discrepancy with the target views, and explicitly decides whether to REVISE the code or STOP the refinement process. To make iterative repair learnable, we further construct IterCAD-RS, a structured revise-or-stop supervision set containing both repairable intermediate CAD states and already-correct states, and develop a three-stage training strategy for initial generation, revision learning, and multi-turn RL optimization. By closing the loop between visual understanding, geometric verification, and code refinement, IterCAD progressively corrects structural and parametric errors. Experiments on CADExpert show that IterCAD consistently improves code executability and geometric fidelity over strong one-shot baselines.

Underactuated systems pose a challenge for convex motion planning because their dynamically feasible motions lie on a manifold of trajectories in function space. Building on our earlier formulation of polytopic action sets (PAS), this paper presents a method for rapidly generating, online, trusted convex sets of short-horizon actions for underactuated and potentially nonlinear systems. Around a nominal trajectory, we construct local finite-dimensional action coordinates in which each parameter vector encodes a complete nearby motion through an affine trajectory map, rendering collision-avoidance and control bounds linear. To remain consistent with the nonlinear dynamics, we introduce a dynamics-violation metric and extract a trusted convex inner approximation using an IRIS-inspired inflation procedure directly in action space. The resulting PAS are reusable convex families of actions that can be queried and composed with linear programs, and a PAS-guided tree expansion treats nodes as composed reachable families rather than single trajectories, coupling local nonlinear fidelity with convex reuse for longer-horizon planning. The planner solves cluttered planar scenes in tens of milliseconds (14-78x faster than a kinodynamic RRT baseline) and reduces terminal error on a nonlinear underactuated benchmark by 26-86% over sampling and NLP baselines.

The emerging W3C WebMCP proposal enables LLM agents to invoke tools exposed by web pages. In multi-party web environments, however, integrating agent execution into a browser security model centered on the Same-Origin Policy (SOP) leaves insufficient provenance and lifecycle guarantees for agent-accessible tools, creating three risks: subject-attribution spoofing, uncontrolled tool lifecycles, and semantic prompt injection. We propose WebMCP-Phalanx, a dual-layer agent runtime architecture. Its first layer provides a browser-native trust anchor that binds each tool to its registering principal through cryptographically protected capability credentials and propagates provenance labels throughout the tool lifecycle. Its second layer separates semantic inspection from privileged tool use. A Quarantine Agent (Q-LLM), without tool invocation authority, inspects tool metadata, outputs, and page-supplied content for prompt injection. Validated content is then forwarded to a Privileged Agent (P-LLM) for execution, while the Q-LLM's internal state remains hidden from page scripts. Empirical evaluation shows that the browser-native ownership mechanism reduces revocation and overwrite attack success from 100% to 0%. The dual-agent runtime blocks all 80 prompt-injection attempts embedded in tool descriptions and limits tool-return attacks to 2 successful cases out of 80. Across experiments, task utility remains statistically indistinguishable from the no-attack baseline. Under a white-box adaptive attacker, however, description-based filtering can be bypassed through malicious tool names invoked before inspection. This finding motivates a call-timing gate that delays tool invocation until all agent-visible tool metadata has been validated.

The Planner-Operator-Reflector (POR) framework is widely used in GUI agents to maintain objective alignment in complex tasks through modular collaboration. However, desktop GUIs introduce a key challenge: large, dense interfaces often exhibit subtle or scattered state changes, placing most of the burden on the reflector, which must compare pre- and post-action screens, while the planner and operator reason over a single state. Existing reflectors collapse change detection and outcome verification into one step, leaving evidence implicit and yielding weakly grounded decisions. To address this limitation, we propose Evidence-First Reflection (EFR), a two-stage reflector that explicitly decouples action-induced visual differences extraction from outcome verification. EFR identifies the action location and candidate changed regions with Set-of-Marks annotations, describes and filters action-relevant changes, and makes the final judgment from the cleaned evidence. This evidence-reasoning decoupled design makes reflection better grounded in screen transitions, while reducing both visual search complexity and reasoning burden. Experiments on OSWorld-Verified and WindowsAgentArena demonstrate that EFR improves reflector accuracy by 7.11%, yielding average end-to-end task success gains of 5.94% and 4.95% on the two benchmarks, respectively.

Chinese ancient document understanding demands complex visual, linguistic, and historical reasoning. Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically rely on an opaque, single-pass generation paradigm, often producing overconfident and weakly grounded responses. To address this, we propose SAGE, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reformulates Chinese ancient document understanding as evidence-grounded inference rather than direct answer generation. SAGE coordinates specialized agents for task-aware planning, tool-mediated evidence acquisition, claim-level verification, and bounded replanning under a constrained shared-state runtime. This design supports bounded evidence seeking, answer revision, and abstention when grounding is insufficient. Experiments on the AncientDoc benchmark show that SAGE consistently outperforms matched direct-answering baselines across three LVLM backbones. Remarkably, SAGE with Qwen3.5-9B surpasses much larger monolithic LVLMs on most evaluated metrics, highlighting the importance of structured, evidence-grounded inference beyond model scaling.

Supervised proxy-based deep cross-modal hashing has become the dominant paradigm for large-scale retrieval. However, prevalent methods model class proxies as deterministic points in the embedding space. This rigid assumption causes severe gradient conflicts in multi-label scenarios, where gradient conflicts arising from label co-occurrence lead to severe gradient contention and optimization collapse. To resolve this, we propose Kent-based Distributional Proxy Hashing (KDPH), a novel framework that shifts proxy representation from static points to flexible anisotropic Kent distributions on the hypersphere. Unlike point proxies that must shift their positions to accommodate conflicting gradients, KDPH absorbs these conflicts by dynamically adjusting its directional variance. This allows the proxy to maintain a stable semantic mean direction while stretching to cover diverse label correlations. Furthermore, to ensure stable training of these geometric parameters, we derive a tailored loss function incorporating the Cayley transform to enforce strict orthogonality. To the best of our knowledge, KDPH is the first framework to successfully introduce the Kent distributions into cross-modal hashing. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that KDPH mitigates proxy collapse and chaotic oscillation, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Senmo996/KDPH-official-code.

Understanding how neural networks learn and organize features is central to understanding their behavior. Much existing theory of feature learning has focused on the emergence of a global low-dimensional representation. We show that this picture is incomplete. In regression problems with clustered data, we demonstrate that multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) develop specialized neurons: individual neurons become strongly aligned with specific features relevant to a particular region of the input space. A substantial fraction of these neurons exhibit monosemanticity: they activate predominantly on inputs from the corresponding cluster. Thus, rather than learning a single global low-dimensional representation, MLPs learn a collection of local low-dimensional representations. Furthermore, we show that this ability to specialize gives MLPs a provable data-efficiency advantage over feature-learning methods based on a global low-dimensional representation.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to assess students' dynamic knowledge states from their learning histories. While most existing KT methods focus on single-domain learning with notable success, real-world learning scenarios often involve multiple domains simultaneously, introducing two critical factors: 1) Cognitive load, arising from managing learning across domains in both temporal and knowledge dimensions. 2) Knowledge transfer, where knowledge states in one domain influence related states both within and across domains. In this paper, we focus on exploring these factors to improve students' knowledge state assessment in multi-domain learning scenarios and propose a novel method incorporating cognitive Load and knowledge Transfer for Multi-domain Knowledge Tracing (LT-MKT). Specifically, to bridge isolated domains, LT-MKT first integrates textual information from questions and their associated concepts to construct a Multi-domain Hierarchical Graph, leveraging the advanced representational capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Then, cross-domain features in both the temporal and knowledge dimensions are explicitly modeled to capture the effects of cognitive load. Additionally, a knowledge transfer module is designed to model the propagation of knowledge states within and across domains. By jointly modeling these factors, LT-MKT enables more accurate prediction of students' future performance. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Large language model (LLM)-based agent applications often incur high response time. Speculative decoding is a promising solution to improve the inference efficiency of LLM agents without impacting generation quality. However, state-of-the-art speculative decoding algorithms exhibit substantial speed degradation under large batch sizes, limiting their effectiveness to deploy in real-world agent applications. In this work, we first present a systematic analysis of speculative decoding for LLM agents and identify two dominant factors of speedup degradation: high rejection rate of speculative tokens, and under-utilization of dynamic token budgets.B ased on these observations, we propose AgentSpec, a speculative decoding algorithm that addresses the limitations of existing methods for LLM agents. AgentSpec incorporates structure-isolated drafting that constrains speculation to semantically coherent segments of the agent workflow, reducing the drafts of irrelevant semantic paths and achieving an extremely low rejection rate. Moreover, AgentSpec adopts redundancy-aware budget allocation that exploits agent-level information to better utilize the dynamically-free token budget during the agent inference. We implement and evaluate AgentSpec on five different workloads and four different models from four different LLM families in vLLM. Our results demonstrate the superiority of AgentSpec over state-of-the-arts.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for future prediction, motivating the use of multiple models as a wisdom-of-the-crowd mechanism. However, simply increasing crowd size does not guarantee effective diversity, as different LLMs may exhibit redundant behaviors. We propose a behavior-aware framework for constructing diverse LLM crowds. The framework characterizes models using their reasoning traces on independent development tasks, clusters models by behavioral similarity, and selects representatives for collective prediction. We evaluate 25 LLMs using seven development benchmarks for behavioral diversity modeling and two future-prediction benchmarks for evaluating diverse crowds' performance. Our results show that crowd composition can matter more than crowd size: a three-model medoid crowd based on K-means++ behavioral clustering outperforms conventional voting over all 25 models on both prediction benchmarks, while reducing model calls by 88% and inference cost by approximately 80%. The results further suggest that representative behavioral diversity, rather than simply maximizing diversity, is important for constructing effective LLM crowds

In this work, we study quantum CSS codes with transversal $T$ gates. Here, $T$ gate transversality is meant in the strongest sense; the application of physical $T$ to every physical qubit yields logical $T$ on every logical qubit, without Clifford corrections. Despite the importance of the $T$ gate in fault-tolerant quantum computation, the parameters of asymptotic families of such codes have not been improved since the work of Hastings and Haah in 2017, and Haah in 2018. In this work, we significantly broaden the achievable parameters of quantum code families with transversal $T$ gates, both expanding the regime of achievable polynomial rate and distance, and constructing such codes with constant rate and growing distance; this is the first time the latter has been achieved, even when allowing Clifford corrections after the transversal $T$ gate. These are also the first codes achieving $\gamma \to 0$ for a code with a transversal $T$ gate, where $\gamma$ is the overhead exponent of magic state distillation. To do this, we develop a framework of divisible decreasing monomial codes, punctured at a downward-closed set on the Boolean hypercube to create logical qubits. We prove a closed-form expression for the distance of such a code punctured at such a set, which may be of independent interest. We first instantiate this with an explicit construction based on weighted Reed-Muller codes, puncturing at low Hamming-weight points, and then with a randomised construction, where a small random set of points is protected from the puncturing to save quantum code distance, achieving improved parameters.

Cities are beginning to use AI not only to analyze public space, but also to define what counts as evidence about it. This thesis asks what follows when scores, maps, and generated images become part of municipal decision-making. I argue that contemporary urbanism operates through two coupled infrastructures: the material city and an epistemic, algorithmic layer that shapes what cities can perceive, compare, and act upon. Because public space is contested, this algorithmic layer cannot be governed through technical performance alone. The thesis develops a civic Right to AI and a pluralistic approach to alignment in which differences in public values are made visible rather than averaged into a single objective. Methodologically, the thesis moves between normative theory, participatory research, machine learning, and governance design. The empirical work is grounded in Montréal. Street Review combines participatory research with computer vision to examine how residents evaluate streets differently and how those judgments can be mapped at city scale using approximately 45,000 street-view images. LIVS (Local Intersectional Visual Spaces) extends the same problem to generative AI. Developed with 30 community organizations, it contains 37,710 pairwise comparisons across 13,462 images and is used to fine-tune and evaluate a Stable Diffusion XL model with Direct Preference Optimization. The results show that alignment can improve, but disagreement and neutrality persist. I treat these outcomes not as annotation noise, but as evidence that some values remain contested. The thesis concludes by translating these findings into municipal practice through lifecycle governance, procurement rules, oversight, recommissioning, and recourse. The resulting framework shows how cities can govern AI without treating plural values as measurement error or forcing them into a single objective.

Human-robot teaching focuses on enabling nontechnical experts to customize robots according to their needs after deployment. With recent advances in machine learning, human-robot teaching is no longer confined to offline learning where the data gathering step from a human teacher is separated from when the robot learns. Instead, more recent approaches for human-robot teaching focus on coupling human teaching with robot learning. This coupling impacts the structure, timing, and content of the teaching and learning interaction. However, it is currently unclear how such coupling dynamics affect humanrobot teaching effectiveness and human perceptions towards the teaching process. Informed by human learning theories, in this paper we propose a new scale for classifying human-robot teaching interactions according to coupling dynamics present between the human teacher and robot learner. We apply this scale to a subset of the human-robot teaching literature to identify how coupling dynamics and human teacher mental model mismatches with the ground truth robot learning system affect teaching effectiveness and human perceptions towards the teaching process

Large language model (LLM) agents invoke external tools to retrieve and reason over information beyond pretrained knowledge. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how such tools are surfaced, and a proxy MCP server aggregates many backend servers behind a single endpoint providing a secure, governable chokepoint for authentication, policy enforcement, and observability. This architecture creates two compounding challenges: a context-engineering bottleneck where full tool schemas saturate the model context window before any user query, and a tool discoverability barrier where users and agents cannot identify the best tool among 2,000+ indexed tools across 200+ MCP servers. Prompt caching reduces reprocessing cost but neither frees context capacity nor improves accuracy. We present SCOUT (Selective Context Optimization for Universal Tooling), which reframes tool exposure as a context-selection problem, injecting only tools relevant to the current step. SCOUT surfaces two MCP meta-tools – tool_search and execute_tool – where tool_search performs hybrid retrieval, fusing BM25 sparse matching with dense vector search via Reciprocal Rank Fusion to return the top-k relevant tools. Backed by zero-downtime catalog update pipelines, SCOUT resolves both context saturation and tool discovery challenges. In production at PayPal, SCOUT reduces MCP tool-token consumption from 140.2k tokens (70.1% of context) to 1.3k tokens (0.8%), a 99% reduction, cutting per-query inference cost at enterprise scale. Because SCOUT is surfaced as standard MCP tools, it is model-agnostic and requires no client-side modifications.

Virtual sensing enables digital twins and safety-critical systems to reconstruct and forecast spatial-temporal physics in real time. However, conventional computational and data-driven methods often face challenges in generalization, latency, and energy efficiency for edge deployment. Neural operators offer a promising alternative but remain reliant on power-intensive hardware. Spiking neurons and neuromorphic computing can improve efficiency, yet surrogate-gradient training and multi-step spiking introduce convergence and latency challenges. We propose the Sparse-Activation-ReLU (SAR) layer, a single-step alternative that promotes activation sparsity without surrogate-gradient training while remaining compatible with event-based computing. Within a trunk-based NOMAD architecture, SAR achieves over a fivefold improvement in the combined Latency-Error-Energy (LEE) metric compared with Variable Spiking Neuron (VSN) and Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) implementations. We further analyze spiking entropy and feature usage and introduce synthetic knowledge distillation, reducing the LEE score by more than twofold. Finally, we improve VSN through a ReLU-based spiking loss and graph-neighbor thresholding. On the Heat Exchanger dataset, these approaches reduce L2 error by more than twofold and nearly sevenfold, respectively, while reducing spiking and spatial aggregation. Overall, the work presented is a step towards energy-efficient virtual sensing by providing an alternative framework that can be positioned towards neuromorphic or other edge device integration that can be a gold standard to compare latency, energy, and error performance for future efficient designs that are sparsity or brain-inspired spiking based.

Large language model providers are compute constrained, and a common response to congestion is to degrade service. A degraded answer fails with some probability, and a failed answer either returns as a retry or departs as churn, destroying LTV on an unaccounted ledger. We model inference allocation as a newsvendor whose stockout cost is churned lifetime value, a geometric retry multiplier in which the recycled product is dissatisfaction, and a two-regime transient fluid queue whose arrival rate is made endogenous by retries. Statically, there is a regime in which a cheaper model saves energy per initiated task while consuming strictly more capacity per initiated task, so the discount inverts when capacity binds. Dynamically, a reactive throttle fired during a surge can cross an ignition threshold beyond which it manufactures more traffic than it sheds, and a release rule set below the degraded equilibrium converts a transient surge into a permanent degraded regime. With heterogeneous customers, throttling is a transportation problem in retry-inflated load whose optimal policy rations intelligence by critical ratio, and whose dual, the shadow price of intelligence, prices a marginal query by class and by hour. Under congestion, throttling is not a cost lever but a demand lever.

Recent advances in single-image 3D Gaussian head reconstruction have enabled highly realistic and freely renderable digital heads from a single portrait. However, reconstruction and rendering can weaken the forgery traces in the source portrait, making the resulting 3D face difficult to classify whether its underlying face is real or fake, and thereby posing risks to identity authentication and face privacy. To study this problem, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark for this task by collecting real portraits and fake portraits from multiple sources and evaluate representative existing detectors on this benchmark, revealing their lack of explicit mechanisms for retaining fine-grained information and maintaining feature consistency across rendered views. To directly address these two limitations, we propose a detector trained with a two-stage strategy. In Stage I, masked autoencoding encourages the visual backbone to retain the fine-grained appearance information required for local reconstruction, while multi-view contrastive learning enforces feature consistency across rendered views of the same head. Since CLS tokens at different depths exhibit complementary spatial attention patterns, Stage II freezes the adapted backbone and concatenates low-, middle-, and high-level CLS tokens for classification. Experiments show that our method achieves the highest accuracy and ranks first across all reported metrics among the evaluated detectors.

Robotic post-harvest handling must hold produce without bruising it, yet fruit stiffness varies several-fold with ripeness, so no fixed grip force suits every item. We instead bound compression strain using only the encoder and motor effort of a servo gripper. Given a strain bound $\varepsilon$ and a stiffness floor $k_{\min}$ set once per crop and gripper, the controller estimates object size $\hat{D}$ at contact, refines stiffness $\hat{k}$ conservatively by probing, and stops at $\hat{F} = \varepsilon \hat{k} \hat{D}$, keeping true strain below $\varepsilon$ with high probability above a quantified contact-detection floor. In simulation, where fixed force thresholds either drop heavy objects or damage soft ones, the proposed controller carries 92% of objects within its operating range with 0.3% damage. On cherry and medium tomatoes, setting $\varepsilon$ above the detection floor scaled the stop force threefold across fruit sizes, carrying all fruits while reducing markings on cherry tomatoes from 8/10 to 1/10; on medium tomatoes both marked 3/6.

Scientific reasoning requires language models to retrieve specialized knowledge and incorporate it reliably into multi-step computation. Conditional memory provides an explicit lookup pathway that complements dense neural representations, but its usefulness is inherently input- and computation-dependent: retrieved information may repair missing scientific associations, yet it may also introduce distracting shortcuts or interfere with reasoning that the base model can already perform correctly. In this work, we systematically investigate when, where, and to what extent conditional memory should participate in scientific reasoning. We characterize the scientific knowledge boundary and controlled interventions on memory-enabled knowledge-circuit nodes. Based on these analyses, we propose a Knowledge Boundary-Aware Router that uses task-specific input proxies available before generation to determine whether memory is activated, which layer-stage nodes receive memory signals, and how strongly these signals contribute. Experiments on biological and chemical reasoning benchmarks, covering two backbone families and six task types, show that memory effects vary substantially across inputs, tasks, and injection locations. Compared with static and activation-rate-matched random routing, our approach more consistently preserves beneficial memory contributions while suppressing memory-induced regressions, establishing selective memory allocation as an important principle for reliable scientific reasoning.

This paper is concerned with a structure-preserving neural network-based framework for the Cahn-Hilliard equation in mixed form. We employ generalized transferable neural networks (GTransNet) for spatial approximation and stabilized backward differentiation formulas (BDF) for temporal discretization. The resulting first- and second-order in time GTransNet-BDF schemes are shown to conserve mass and satisfy energy stability at the time-discrete level. The schemes are implemented by a collocation-based method, in which a least-squares system with constant coefficient matrix needs to be solved at each time step. The solution of this system, which determines the output-layer weights of the network, violates mass conservation due to the expected nonzero least-squares residual. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel post-processing mass-conserving projection that enforces the mass constraint through a minimization problem, whose solution can be computed at negligible computational cost. A key advantage of the proposed method lies in its predetermined hidden layers and mesh-free nature, making the method applicable to complex domains, variable mobility, and long-time simulations. Extensive numerical experiments in two and three dimensions verify convergence, mass conservation, and energy dissipation as well as demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed GTransNet-BDF schemes.

In a deliberative poll, once submissions outnumber what anyone will read, some mechanism chooses which arguments each voter sees, acquiring much of the decision; practice delegates it to opaque learned rankers, so a voter cannot recompute or contest the exposure that shaped their vote. We ask whether it can be a published rule over publicly recomputable evidence with parameters held by the voter, treating legibility as an admissibility condition on usable mechanisms, not an objective traded against accuracy. We formalise a poll over bipolar justification sets, judging a slate by reason coverage, the order it arrives in, and captured endorsement mass; we give seven checkable criteria for a civic recommender and a rule meeting them: a one-hop reversed endorsement flow parameterised by a relation-weight function. An agentic simulator records every slate at every vote, over about 17,000 seed-paired runs. Served slates fall 0.035 short of a label-reading ceiling upper-bounding every selection procedure, opaque ones included: any unconstrained ranker's advantage is bounded and small. On coverage alone, with non-degenerate authoring, the rule is indistinguishable from a random slate, a null due to an order-blind, charity-blind instrument; on the other two it leads at every prefix by a margin widening with adversarial pressure and dominates on mass by a factor of 3.3. Once a realistic fraction of submissions carries no reasons, the coverage margin returns and grows. Label-homogeneous flooding collapses completeness from 0.81 to 0.34 under a flat weight policy, only to 0.44 under author-count normalisation, making the weight function a security control worth 10% of completeness. The choice between ranking arms is a position on a coverage-versus-mass frontier, not a fact, the kind of choice only a legible rule can hand to the person it affects. It maps onto an open-source peer-to-peer platform.

Visual grounding is typically evaluated as a one-shot mapping from an informative referring expression to a visual target. This formulation misses a central property of real-world reference: initial referring expressions are often incomplete or ambiguous, requiring participants to establish shared understanding through interaction. We introduce a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), varying how much target information is provided upfront and how much must be acquired through dialogue. Across four human-grounded visual contexts and four interaction protocols, current LVLMs perform significantly below task-level human baselines. Interaction can help when follow-up questions refine or repair an initial target description. Performance is lowest when no initial description is provided and target information must be acquired through questions, indicating that proactive question-driven grounding remains difficult. LVLMs are also poorly calibrated, often reporting confidence that exceeds their empirical accuracy. Follow-up studies confirm these patterns across varied description sources (human versus AI), reasoning efforts, repeated interactions, description providers, and visual contexts. Overall, interactive visual grounding remains challenging, requiring visual matching, information seeking and synthesis.