Papers

Deterministic Secure Quantum Communication (DSQC) is a quantum cryptographic technique engineered to transfer a message through a quantum channel, requiring an auxiliary classical channel for eavesdropping verification and decoding, but without prior key distribution. This article presents a theoretical high-dimensional prepare and measure DSQC protocol using the Reed-Solomon erasure coding to ensure data resilience to noise. This protocol offers the following benefits: it eliminates the need for quantum memory or entanglement, it can be built with commercially available technology, and its higher capacity improves the overall transmission rate.

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) often uses trajectory structure for future-goal sampling and multi-step targets, yet logged trajectories may be partitioned for administrative reasons that do not correspond to termination. We introduce SegBench-GC, a controlled stress test of segmentation invariance that holds transitions, source trajectories, goal sampling, optimization settings, and evaluation fixed while varying only artificial backup boundaries and whether those boundaries retain continuation value. Continuation-valid targets (CVT) provide the segmentation-consistent control: reward accumulation stops at an artificial cut, but the target bootstraps from its stored successor. In a matched-count PointMaze study with 35,000 artificial cuts, three segmentation realizations, and three optimization seeds, final 50-episode-per-task success is 50.5% uncut, 39.1% with CVT, and 19.1% when the same cuts are treated as absorbing; across segmentation realizations, naive mean success ranges from 4.8% to 31.9%. An independent published n-step baseline (n=25) from the Decoupled Q-Chunking codebase shows the same failure on Puzzle-4x5: 47.2% uncut, 58.5% CVT, and 0.27% naive across three optimization seeds. A target-level diagnostic verifies the analytic target difference to numerical precision, and learned-critic diagnostics show a large optimistic shift under naive handling while CVT remains approximately aligned with the uncut critic. CVT applies standard continuation bootstrapping rather than a new Bellman rule; the contribution is the controlled benchmark, failure isolation, and cross-learner evidence that administrative segmentation can materially change multi-step offline GCRL.

Agentic AI has the potential to accelerate curation of biological databases and knowledge bases. However, uptake has been hindered by a number of challenges and obstacles, including access to agents and appropriate training. Here we describe how we have attempted to address and mitigate these challenges and obstacles through the deployment of a cloud-based agentic environment, and the development of an interactive training workshop for the Gene Ontology Consortium. Our cloud environment for agentic-assisted curation was based on the JupyterHub platform, and utilized Claude Code as a universal harness. This allows curators to interact with an agent session through a terminal running in the browser, and has additional benefits such as centralization of access through a single API gateway, removing the need for participants to manage subscriptions or install software locally. We created four training modules, walking participants through basic agentic tool use first and then working up to agentic biological pathway curation using the existing GO-CAM (GO Causal Activity Model) curation tool. Thirty-seven participants took part in the four-hour workshop. Our key takeaway from this workshop is that building community capability with agentic AI is primarily a problem of access, workflow design, and training. Removing technical barriers, introducing capabilities gradually, grounding exercises in familiar curation tasks, and giving curators direct experience evaluating agent output can provide a practical route toward building shared agentic AI capability in distributed scientific communities.

We present Qwen-GuidePlay-2B, a 2B-parameter language model for dialogue-game interaction. We fine-tune Qwen3.5-2B using three steps: a) SFT on only successful game trajectories from Playpen, b) weighted turn-level SFT, and c) teacher-guided SFT. The teacher model (which is a larger model) is only used to fix formatting and evaluate examples, but does not create new gold actions. Our final model scores 57.12 clemscore and 42.68 statscore on the public Playpen validation. In the officially released challenge results, our model obtains the second-highest Playpen clemscore delta among submitted systems (which is approximately +36 over its base model). Our findings suggest that imitating full trajectories helps with playability, while turn-level and teacher-guided training usually improve decision-making and increase the overall score. Alternative procedurally heavy approaches like replay-repair and hard-example mining did not help, which suggests that small models are performant simply by using careful curation strategies rather than aggressive changes. We make available both the model and the code for reproducibility.

Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) of collaborative, inter-organizational processes requires reasoning over multiple interdependent entities, including participants, messages, local executions, and the global collaboration case. Existing approaches extend traditional event logs with collaboration attributes but retain a single-case perspective, leaving much of this structure implicit. Object-centric process mining (OCPM) provides an alternative by representing these entities as first-class objects with explicit relations and multiple notions of case. This study connects collaborative PPM and OCPM through three contributions: (i) a formal semantic mapping from extended collaborative event logs to an OCED-conformant object-centric representation, serialized in OCEL 2.0; (ii) a reformulation of collaborative prediction tasks as object-centric prediction tasks; and (iii) a reproducible converter and prediction pipeline implementing the proposed mapping. We evaluate the framework on four public collaborative event logs and a fifth derived from the BPI Challenge 2013 incident-management log by executing the fourteen reformulated tasks using five predictive strategies across tabular, sequential, and graph-native encodings. We further discuss the benefits, limitations, and threats to the approach's validity. The representation makes collaboration structure explicit and makes it natural to state prediction targets based on object relations that fall outside the case-centric taxonomy, at the cost of increased relational complexity and dependence on object-centric tooling.

Segmentation models can surpass radiologists, classification models, and vision-language models in tumor detection. Importantly, segmentation models outline tumors, allowing radiologists to better verify and trust the AI output. Their main limitation is the scarcity of tumor masks: creating one 3D tumor mask takes up to 30 minutes, so most public CT datasets contain only a few hundred masks, and even the largest private datasets contain only a couple of thousand. Tumor masks are not produced in clinical routine, but radiology reports are. Public datasets contain tens of thousands of CT-Report pairs, and hospitals contain hundreds of thousands. These reports describe tumors in detail, providing large-scale, informative training data. Here, we introduce Report Supervision (R-Super), a training framework that uses reports to directly supervise and improve tumor segmentation. R-Super introduces new loss functions that teach segmentation models to segment tumors that match report descriptions of tumor count, sizes, and locations. Reports are only used for training. We evaluated R-Super on kidney and pancreatic tumor segmentation, exploring diverse training data sizes, up to 41,418 CT-Report plus 3,488 pancreatic tumor CT-Mask pairs. On external validation, R-Super increased tumor detection F1-Score and segmentation DSC by up to +15% with respect to mask-only training. It also surpassed alternative methods such as CLIP and multi-task learning. Leveraging numerous readily available reports to supplement scarce masks, R-Super strongly improves AI performance when very few training masks are available (e.g., 50), and when many masks are available (e.g., 3,488), unlocking scale in tumor segmentation.

Semantic watermarks tie the mark to sentence meaning rather than token choices, promising robustness to content-preserving edits. However, the detector only observes attacker-supplied text, which can be reworded, reordered, or resegmented to evade detection without content loss. Rewording, reordering, and resegmentation all cause embedding displacement: detection tests embeddings different from those selected during watermarking and can therefore lose the mark. Our adaptive embedding displacement attack (EDA) admits all three edits under a single objective that maximizes this displacement. It uses a public paraphraser and surrogate encoder without access to the provider's generator or secret key. At a 5% false-positive rate (FPR) and content-preservation threshold $\bar{q}=90\%$, EDA successfully removes the mark on between 32.6% and 47.9% of documents across four schemes, the highest among the tested attacks. Therefore, EDA evaluates the schemes' robustness more thoroughly than passive paraphrasing. To address these vulnerabilities, we design (k)-SwordStamp: semantic watermarks with order-robust detection over sub-sentence units, reducing sensitivity to attacker-chosen structure at a small quality cost. Against k-SwordStamp, the strongest no-box attack we test is an EDA variant adapted to its design, with a 10.8% attack-success rate. A stronger EDA with access to the provider's detector and secret key reaches a 39.7% attack-success rate, compared with 65.5% on k-SemStamp. Our code is available at https://github.com/D-Diaa/SwordStamp.

We present TiGER (Time-Integrated Graph for Efficient Retrieval), a novel approach for performing fast time-aware approximate nearest neighbor searches on dynamic vector datasets with flexibility over any possible time range. Our proposed algorithm builds and maintains a unified graph for all vectors by leveraging an index structure based on integrated versioned connectivity, allowing arbitrary time intervals to be queried directly on the unified graph without having to traverse invalid vectors. This forgoes the need for post-search filtering or merging, or separate graphs for each possible composite range. Empirical evaluations show that our method attains up to a 5x improvement in queries per second (QPS) without compromising accuracy over baselines based on filtering or per-time-segment sub-graphs. We believe that this method will enable efficient temporal analysis across evolving datasets in real-time recommendation systems, log analysis, and any scenario requiring fast similarity search over dynamic, time-segmented data.

This work presents a generative continual learning framework based on growing self-organizing maps (GSOMs) that are augmented with learned distributional statistics as well as encoder-decoder models for class-incremental learning. The proposed approach enables exemplar-free replay using distributional statistical memory, which eliminates the need to store raw data. Each GSOM unit maintains its own mean, variance, and covariance estimates, which are subsequently used to generate synthetic samples for replay; in encoder-decoder configurations, these samples are then decoded back into the input space (via ancestral sampling) for subsequent training. Our method is fully unsupervised, as it does not rely on explicit task boundaries or class labels during training. Results across multiple benchmarks show that the proposed approach achieves performance competitive even with supervised state-of-the-art memory-based methods while consistently outperforming memory-free approaches. In several settings, our framework matches or exceeds existing baselines, particularly in challenging single-class incremental scenarios. We also provide baseline results for single-class incremental TinyImageNet and MiniImageNet, offering a useful reference for future work. This work highlights the effectiveness of an unsupervised, adaptive, topology-driven neural form of statistical replay as a scalable, flexible approach to continual learning.

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), retrieval may provide insufficient or conflicting information needed to answer a question. The system should not only know when to answer but also be able to identify cases in which the documents provided in RAG are insufficient or contain conflicting information. This can be framed as a three-way classification problem, where we use the model's internal signals to determine whether the provided information in the input can be classified as sufficient, insufficient, or conflicting. We create a controlled benchmark dataset that replicates a RAG setup with fictitious information and labels each instance as answerable, insufficient, or conflicting. We use hidden activations and attention-derived features as inputs to train a lightweight linear model to distinguish among the three classes. Across 16 language models spanning different architectures and a range of model sizes, our feature-based router consistently outperforms prompting-based baselines and the performance of specialised RAG-models. We further conduct analyses into the information dynamics of the models. We show that the most informative signals for the classification are available in the middle layers, with hidden activation states being more effective than attention values or the MLP-feature outputs in most of the tested models. Overall, our results suggest that language models internally encode whether retrieved evidence is sufficient to support answering, and that this signal can be decoded reliably for RAG triage.

A spacecraft closing on a target from three hundred kilometres to contact flies one guidance law across five orders of magnitude of range, and a controller that is provably safe at close range can lose that guarantee completely at long range while continuing to fly as though nothing were wrong. This paper derives the range at which the guarantee lapses and uses it as a design rule. The bound compares the prediction model's own linearisation error against the disturbance set the controller was built to reject, and needs only the sampling period, the orbit and that disturbance bound, so it can be evaluated before any simulation. On a Mars Sample Return approach it disqualifies the homing phase, where most of the propellant is spent, and clears the other two. Re-posing the disqualified phase in relative orbital elements restores the guarantee; re-posing a phase the rule already clears, in a frame two orders of magnitude more accurate, changes propellant by under a tenth of one per cent, and it is that second prediction that makes the rule falsifiable rather than descriptive. The constraint tightening also ties the prediction horizon to feasibility, so the horizon search limit becomes a mission parameter rather than a solver setting. Against a reimplementation of a published benchmark that reproduces its propellant to within one per cent, over five hundred dispersed Monte Carlo transfers per case on matched seeds, the controller saves 29% of the propellant on a circular target orbit and 40% on an eccentric one, docking inside the 0.20 m capture requirement on essentially every draw at a median miss near 5 cm. Two results run the other way: the saving is bought with time of flight and computation, and it comes from what the guarantee demanded of the terminal condition rather than from better disturbance rejection. Recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability are not claimed.

Subword tokenization hinders low-resource language processing by imposing frequency patterns from dominant languages onto script-sharing variants. Byte-level models bypass this issue by processing raw UTF-8 characters, yet they create a granularity mismatch for word-level tasks in non-Latin scripts. Hierarchical byte-level architectures address this mismatch by grouping bytes into word-aligned chunks. However, these architectures require massive training data and suffer from representational misalignment when paired with frozen subword-based language models. In this paper, we propose an adapted hierarchical network framework that bridges this modality gap without extensive training. Our method initializes byte embeddings directly from the subword representations of a frozen base model. We apply a chunk alignment loss to project dynamically grouped byte chunks toward precomputed subword targets, and interleave lightweight part-of-speech (POS) supervision to guide boundary detection. Experiments across six languages demonstrate that our tokenizer-free approach improves performance for word-level morphological tasks, yielding up to a 13.3% improvement on POS tagging.

Data preprocessing is a crucial part of deep learning workflows on edge devices. However, decoding data saved in JPEG format is very compute-intensive and occupies a major portion of the preprocessing pipeline. Therefore, increasing the decoding speed is vital for improving overall throughput, especially for inputs with large image sizes, which are often subject to preprocessing bottlenecks. On the other hand, edge devices are equipped with specialized hardware units to accelerate media processing and image decoding. For instance, the NVIDIA Jetson platform possesses a dedicated NVJPEG unit. These units can be used to enhance the performance of the preprocessing pipeline. This paper introduces the utilization of such specific hardware acceleration units for offloading decoding tasks. By combining this with a multi-instance approach, it allows for the parallelization of all compute resources including CPU, NVJPEG, GPU, and DLA in Jetson devices. In this work, we compare various potential pipeline designs. On ResNet18, ResNet50, and ResNet152, three models with different sizes, we evaluate the impact of batch sizes and image sizes, as well as the characteristics of GPU/DLA inference. Finally, a fine-tuning experiment for multi-instance design has been conducted. The multi-instance design with a specific hardware decoding unit involved offers up to 30.02% speedup for large image sizes, compared with the most optimized design without it. Based on these findings, we demonstrate the benefits of using the NVJPEG unit in deep learning workflows and provide guidelines for tuning and optimizing edge inference workflows.

Hamilton-Jacobi reachability (HJR) is an important framework in safe control theory. HJR provides theoretical tools and numerical methods to obtain value-functions for tasks involving target-reaching and obstacle-avoidance. A recent work proposed an algebraic framework to scale to complex, composite tasks via decomposing the value functions of the composite tasks into value functions for the fundamental tasks traditionally studied in HJR, all in the one-player setting. Many of these decomposition results, however, do not directly translate to the two-player setting. In this technical note, we nevertheless show that one of the previous work's key results for analyzing various tasks involving reaching multiple targets while obeying constraints still holds in the two-player setting, so long as a critical monotonicity assumption is satisfied. In particular, we detail the analogous result and its proof (which structurally differs from the one-player case), we show via a counter-example what can go wrong if this monotonicity assumption is not satisfied, and we show how the analysis of a variety of tasks can be performed using this result. Such tasks include sequential and any-order multi-target-reaching tasks under constraints. We note that, whereas the prior work considered discrete-time, infinite-horizon tasks, which are more standard in reinforcement learning, we here consider continuous-time, finite-horizon tasks, which are more standard in HJR.

In ranked-choice voting, a Condorcet-winning set is a group of candidates for which no outside candidate is preferred to every member of the group by a majority of voters. We study Condorcet-winning sets in planar metric elections, where voters rank candidates according to their distance under a given norm. We formulate general metric elections, peer selection, and the one-round Voronoi game as instances of a two-player Stackelberg game and place these problems in a common hierarchy. We also introduce a new variant, which we call strong peer selection. Our main result concerns peer selection under the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$ norms. We prove that every planar instance admits a Condorcet-winning set of size at most three, even under strong peer selection. This follows from a new result for strong rectangular $\varepsilon$-nets. We show that, for every set of points in the plane, one can choose at most three input points that intersect every axis-parallel rectangle containing more than half of the points, improving the previous threshold of $9 / 16$ due to Ashok et al. Under the $\ell_2$ norm, we prove that every planar metric election admits a Condorcet-winning set of size at most four, improving on the general bound of five due to Song et al. Finally, we give new norm-independent bounds for the one-round Voronoi game.

Unsupervised representational alignment recovers a stimulus-by-stimulus correspondence from geometry alone, but the automorphism group of the stimulus geometry bounds what any such alignment can identify, before data exist. The obvious diagnostic for this degeneracy, the cheapest non-identity relabelling, ranks two published designs in the wrong order, because dense sampling creates near-duplicates whose transposition is nearly free. We turn this known invariance (Demetci et al., 2024) into a design-time diagnostic and intervention. In colour, where candidate geometries have closed form, we show that the failure is structural: sixty-four times the restart budget leaves a symmetric design unmoved while an asymmetric set at the same N recovers every time. Discriminating representational models and recovering a correspondence are essentially uncorrelated objectives (r = -0.02 over 3,000 subsets). Choosing nine colours by this diagnostic alone, without consulting any learned representation, moves all 93 model representations away from the degenerate point and cuts catastrophic alignment failures from 75% to 2% with the models, the layers, N and the solver all held fixed. The same risk arises wherever a regular design meets its candidate geometry's isometry group, including evenly spaced orientations, tones, or motion directions, and the check costs one function call before data collection.

Generation and discovery are different problems. A generative model trained on valid artifacts reproduces a distribution, whereas discovery must produce artifacts that lie outside the observed corpus, satisfy hard structural constraints, and improve on established designs under evaluation that the model cannot influence. We introduce a diffusion-based discovery framework. Unlike conventional generative models that sample from learned distributions, it learns transition operators that transform existing artifacts into new candidates. Controlled partial re-noising followed by denoising defines a diffusion mutation kernel, a learned transition distribution that preserves the structural regularities of feasible designs while moving between regions of the design space. The learned model supplies feasibility structure only, and all correctness and performance judgments remain with external engineering tools. Intermediate diffusion trajectories are additionally monitored under a conformal risk budget so that unpromising candidates are discarded before expensive evaluation. We evaluate the framework on three electronic design spaces, an environment that supplies rigorous non-differentiable evaluators in the form of simulation, formal equivalence checking, and industrial physical implementation. The framework discovers 32-bit prefix adders that are formally verified equivalent to addition over all 2^64 input pairs and reduce delay by 17% and area by 18% relative to Kogge-Stone under a placed-and-timed flow; seven independently re-simulated amplifier topologies absent from the training corpus, spanning gains of 21.9-66.1 dB and bandwidths of 72.9 kHz-207 MHz; and macro placements on held-out netlists reaching 0.68x wirelength of an industrial placer.

Continuous data assimilation improves flow predictions by continually nudging a model toward available observational data. For slightly compressible flow, a recent model addresses the limitations of velocity-only nudging by assimilating both velocity and pressure data and nudging both quantities into the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations [5]; continuous-in-time error estimates and preliminary experiments show that this joint nudging is effective and substantially reduces the model error relative to velocity-only nudging. Motivated by these results, we carry out the numerical analysis of the model and its finite element discretizations. We establish stability and error estimates for the semi-discrete scheme and for the fully discrete, linearized backward Euler scheme. The analysis shows an infinite predictability horizon: the effect of the initial error decays exponentially in time, and the model error is first order in the observation resolution H and of order $\mu_1^{-1/2}$ in the pressure nudging parameter $\mu_1$. Balancing these two error terms, we choose $\mu_1=\mathcal{O}(H^{-2})$, which yields the optimal convergence rate. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted rates.

Give an agent a human's credential and it inherits the person's reach without the judgment that limits its use. It can sweep every reachable record into model context, where hidden instructions steer its next call, and every request stays credential-valid while the agent exceeds its job or absorbs a secret. Prompts are a brittle guardrail: one fallible reasoner interprets the task and enforces its limits. We present Out-of-Band Policy Enforcement (OBPE), a trusted boundary outside agent reasoning. It authorizes the typed operation and resource, narrows the query before the backend call, then filters records and fields or masks values in the response. Semantic gating can deny or hold an authorized call on argument values or external state. A data policy owner sets the maximum grant; agent policy can only narrow it. We prove, under stated conditions, that the policy plan is order-independent and agent policy cannot widen the ceiling. Field removal covers one execution; masking and history rules claim less. We release an HTTP proxy prototype simplified from our production system, with conformance tests tying its typed Cedar policy core to the model. Against Jira and ServiceNow mocks, our benchmark compares prompted agents with and without OBPE on four models, including 20 adaptive red-team tasks. A trace failure means protected data entered agent context, an exact value appeared in the answer, or a forbidden effect completed. In 3,621 trials it fell from 57.6% to 0.2%, a cluster-weighted reduction of 41.2 points [95% CI: 27.7, 54.9]; fulfillment fell from 79.1% to 60.9%, while paired safe-useful completion rose 21.8 points [9.5, 35.2]. Some answers reconstructed a value that never entered context or used filtered row counts as an oracle: shaping one execution is not noninterference. Write controls, durable approval, and temporal and aggregate policies lie outside this evaluation.

The discovery and evolution of medical imaging technologies have enabled non-invasive visualization of internal anatomy that has be- come essential for supporting diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. However, because medical imaging relies on complex physical processes and contrast mechanisms for image formation, imaging alone is not sufficient to enable humans to leverage the resulting in- formation fully. In addition, traditional methods to visualize the resulting information use two-dimensional displays to present three-dimensional anatomical structures. The introduction of Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR) technologies offers an opportunity to provide valuable paradigms for medical imaging visualization, allowing users to observe, explore, and interact with anatomical infor- mation in more spatially intuitive ways. However, naive implementation without careful design considerations can lead to perceptual inconsistencies, potentially compromising utility and effectiveness. In this paper, we present a structured taxonomy of medical AR/MR visualization strategies aimed at providing clearer insight into how visualization design varies across clinical use cases. The taxonomy organizes techniques based on four core design components: image modality, data dimensionality, display technology, and clinical application. In addition, we introduce two critical dimensions that are often overlooked in the literature: visualization anchoring (the spatial relationship between virtual content and the physical world), and perceptual awareness (the use of visual cues to support spatial interpretation). Together, these components form a comprehensive taxonomy, offering a detailed framework for selecting appropriate visualization techniques in medical applications.

Parallel applications process large amounts of data, leading to intensive parallel I/O operations. These operations can exhibit different levels of complexity, including, among others, multiple I/O access patterns, data staging, and contention risks. Therefore, in order to exploit high-performance computing (HPC) systems efficiently and optimize the I/O performance, it is crucial to consider the I/O behaviour of the HPC applications. In this work, we have developed a framework that reproduces the I/O access pattern of real applications in a simulated environment provided by ElastiSim, a batch-system simulator for rigid, malleable, and evolving workloads. The simulated applications are generated based on I/O traces captured from real applications provided by the HPC Input/Output (HPCIO) analysis repository. The HPCIO analysis database includes traces combined with information about real applications' performance across different parallel I/O libraries and layers of the I/O stack. We have conducted detailed case studies of real-world applications' traces to demonstrate how the proposed modeling framework can provide insights into the performance characteristics of I/O applications, including the I/O congestion analysis based on the application's I/O access pattern.

In many computational science and engineering problems, repeatedly solving fully resolved physics-based models to design for a quantity of interest (QoI) can quickly become intractable, requiring the use of low-fidelity models to predict the same QoI but introduce errors where some features are neglected or are otherwise inaccurately resolved. We use Gaussian Functional Regression (GFR) to learn a correction to a 2D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model to predict the aerodynamic coefficients from a 3D RANS model. This model pair has a disparity in the governing physics from the reduced dimensionality, a previously unexplored application for GFR. Empirically, our results show that with a proper choice of low-dimensional (LD) model, the proposed kernel allows for the use of fewer high-dimensional (HD) evaluations to regress a response surface to the same level of accuracy as standard stationary kernels. Moreover, the new kernel provides more informative uncertainty quantification, which we show is advantageous when used to drive an adaptive sampling algorithm. Finally, we propose a novel neural network accelerated kernel, which we show offers predictions in good agreement while speeding up evaluations by millions of times in wall clock measurements, bringing the computational budget within the real-time regime.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) broaden access to authentic scientific inquiry through responsive instructor support as research problems become increasingly complex. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) may extend this support by providing individualized assistance that can adapt as student needs change. However, how embedding GenAI within a CURE to provide support across the research process impacts student inquiry, collaboration, and scientific reasoning remains unresolved. Here we use longitudinal qualitative data collected across three semesters of a bioinformatics and genomics CURE to show that GenAI expanded the intellectual reach of the research experience in three distinct ways. First, personalized, on-demand scaffolding allowed students to move beyond the boundaries of instructor expertise and transform their own interests into researchable inquiry, with all teams developing distinct self-directed projects rather than selecting instructor-provided topics. Second, GenAI became part of the distributed cognitive system of research teams, helping novice researchers communicate and coordinate across differentiated expertise without eliminating specialization. Third, expanded capability did not replace the need for disciplinary judgment. Students increasingly validated, revised, or rejected AI-generated contributions, such that research independence emerged through retained intellectual responsibility. Together, these findings suggest that GenAI can extend the reach of CUREs by expanding what novice researchers can investigate, how they can collaborate, and the level of responsibility they can assume while preserving human judgment central to authentic scientific inquiry.

We study an end-to-end learnt short-block codes for a $N$-user real Gaussian interference channel with heterogeneous pairwise interference strengths, while keeping single-user decoding at every receiver. In this paper, we study the case wherein only a few dominant interferers exist and investigate whether Siamese-style coupled training can adapt selectively to encode (& decode) to ensure optimal performance corresponding to best tradeoff between orthogonality and coding gain or it enforces unnecessary global orthogonality oblivious of the reality. Our work focuses on a 4-user unequal-interference configuration with one dominant pair $(1,2)$ (of strength $\Lambda$) and a weak pair (with weak background coupling ($\lambda$)), through which we demonstrate a selective interference suppression phenomenon where the learned codebooks become near-orthogonal primarily for the dominant pair, while weakly coupled pairs retain alignment needed for coding gain. We quantify this behaviour using latent-space cross-user similarity statistics (worst-case coherence measure, average similarity measure, etc) and connect these geometric signatures to the observed BLER robustness under unequal interference. It seems that the SiameseNet selectively suppresses the interferences from various interferring user pairs to yield optimal tradeoff between coding gain and BLER dictated by orthogonality.

Nearest neighbor classification relies fundamentally on how locality is defined, yet conventional $k$-NN imposes the same neighborhood cardinality throughout the feature space. This assumption can be inadequate for data whose local geometry varies substantially across the underlying manifold. We introduce Curvature-Aware Radius Shrinkage for Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Classification (CARSANN), a geometry-driven framework that adapts the spatial support of each neighborhood according to local geometric complexity. CARSANN first estimates intrinsic dimensionality using TwoNN and constructs an intrinsic representation through principal component analysis. Local mean curvature is then estimated using a shape-operator-based formulation and controls neighborhood scale: highly curved regions receive stronger radius shrinkage, whereas approximately flat regions retain broader spatial support. Unlike methods that modify only the number of neighbors or the local metric, CARSANN explicitly adapts the spatial extent of local evidence. Experiments on more than 70 real-world OpenML datasets show that CARSANN consistently improves upon standard $k$-NN and is competitive with adaptive nearest-neighbor methods. In a controlled comparison using the same base neighborhood size, CARSANN achieves higher balanced accuracy on 40 of 45 datasets, increasing mean balanced accuracy from 0.6506 to 0.7528. The advantage also persists against $k$-NN with fixed $k=5$. Friedman and Nemenyi tests confirm that the improvements are statistically significant. These results indicate that local manifold curvature can serve as an effective geometric control variable for adapting neighborhood support, providing a complementary paradigm to cardinality-based nearest-neighbor adaptation.

Pothole detection and its severity measurement is still an important challenges in urban infrastructure management, where late maintenance directly contributes to vehicle damage, road accidents, and escalating repair costs. Existing automated approaches depend on 2D RGB images and cannot measure physical depth of potholes. In this paper, we present a depthaware pothole detection framework and then compare five architectures: YOLOv8n, YOLOv8nSeg, YOLOv9t, RTDETRL, and RTDETRX for RGB-D sensor fusion-based detection and automated depth measurement. A custom offline augmentation pipeline is used here to simulate adverse road monitoring conditions. All models are trained on the PothRGBD dataset with an 80% training and 20% validation split and evaluated using Precision, Recall, mAP@50, and mAP@50_95. Before measuring the depth data, all depth maps are corrected for camera tilt using RANSAC ground-plane orthorectification and all zero-valued sensor pixels are cast to NaN before any statistic is computed. YOLOv8nSeg achieves the highest mAP@50 of 0.9556 and mAP@50_95 of 0.6758 with the most accurate depth estimate of 2.96 cm with the pixel-precise Dseg algorithm. YOLOv8n achieves the fastest inference at 3.6ms. RTDETRX achieves the highest detection confidence at 92.70%. An important finding is that even after full RANSAC orthorectification, bounding box models overestimate pothole depth by 0.16 to 0.21 cm compared to pixel precise segmentation masks. This confirms that the pavement inclusion bias is structural rather than a calibration artifact.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has emerged as a novel paradigm for transforming content to increase visibility in Large Language Model (LLM) responses. Traditional GEO methods, however, select rewriting strategies in isolation, ignoring a critical externality: as adoption of content optimization grows, optimal strategies for rewriting content change. We formalize GEO as a competitor-aware strategy selection problem and propose a two-phase pipeline to solve it: (1) We use Bayesian Optimization of Combinatorial Structures (BOCS) to efficiently search the space of rewriting strategies, (2) We generate preference pairs and grounded reasoning traces from the BOCS black-box observations to fine-tune a language model to analyze a document corpus and propose optimal rewriting strategy combinations. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several impression metrics over existing agentic and single-heuristic methods on both geo-bench and our synthetically augmented competitive dataset geo-bench_comp. Our method also transfers to multiple out-of-distribution datasets, proving effective across domains, queries, and document types.

The growing scientific literature contains decades of experimental and computational results that could support data-driven and physics-based modeling, yet much of this infor- mation remains locked in publications and is not readily usable for large-scale analysis or sci- entific software. Building structured databases from the literature is particularly challenging whenrelevantstudiesmustfirstbediscoveredamonglargecollectionsofpapersandreported quantities must be extracted with enough scientific context to remain usable. We present LitCurate, an open-source framework for building scientific databases from the literature using large language models within an auditable, stage-wise curation workflow. LitCurate integratesliteraturediscovery, relevancescreening, full-textprocessing, andstructuredinfor- mation extraction while retaining intermediate results and provenance, allowing researchers to inspect and revise individual stages rather than treating automated curation as a black- box process. We apply LitCurate to construct an equation-of-state database of lower-mantle and lower-mantle-relevant high-pressure mineral phases from experimental and theoretical studies, comprising 1,334 entries from 205 papers. The resulting dataset links reported equation-of-state parameters to mineral phases, compositions, equation formulations, meth- ods, and parameter constraints, and labels values as source-reported or citation-reported when provenance can be determined. The records are available through a searchable web application. By connecting scientific literature to traceable, machine-readable data, LitCu- rate provides a reusable approach for transforming accumulated literature into resources for scientific analysis and computational modeling.

Subarctic regions have the potential to see increased deployment of autonomous robots in applications including forestry, mining, and environmental monitoring. In these conditions, an autonomous system's reliance on GNSS or cloud computing is precarious due to dense tree canopies and atmospheric attenuation, necessitating onboard sensing and data processing. However, established exteroceptive modalities, including cameras, lidars, and radars, are typically evaluated in structured urban settings or in environments that lack significant seasonal variations. To address this, we present a field report on a year-long deployment of a mobile robot in a subarctic boreal forest. We evaluate 64 km of data using nine odometry, localization, and mapping methods and assess their performance across seasonal changes. The performed experiments suggest that the environment changes significantly hinder the performance of state-of-the-art techniques, which show increased fragility when subject to conditions characterized by self-similar scenes or tall snowbanks. Additionally, complex Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms offer limited accuracy gains over a proprioceptive baseline while significantly increasing system fragility. Furthermore, by correlating the position drift with features and confidence weight distribution, we show that visual-based SLAM methods are particularly affected by the seasonal changes. Additionally, we investigate the task of cross-season localization in a prior map. While lidar-based methods successfully completed localization runs between seasons, radar and visual methods are prone to failure due to a few matching features between runs, even within the same season. Finally, we detail the challenges and lessons learned from this year-long trial, including a multi-season Teach and Repeat (T&R) evaluation using both radar and lidar-based pipelines.

Quantum DeepONet accelerates neural-operator inference by evaluating an orthogonally parameterized network on a quantum computer, reproducing in ideal simulation the accuracy of its classical counterpart at asymptotically lower inference cost. Its trunk network, however, receives query coordinates with limited spectral structure, requiring the network to learn oscillatory features through its nonlinearities. We propose Quantum SEDONet (Spectral-Embedded Deep Operator Network), which assigns each trunk coordinate a spectral basis according to its boundary condition: Fourier features for periodic coordinates and Chebyshev features for bounded, non-periodic coordinates. The basis is selected per coordinate rather than per problem, allowing both representations within a single problem. Under unary amplitude encoding, the embedding incurs no additional qubits or circuit depth when its dimension remains within the network width, while increasing the parameter count by only a few percent. Across four benchmarks, Quantum SEDONet reduces the mean relative L2 error by 54.1% for the antiderivative, 49.6% for advection, 36.0% for Burgers, and 36.2% for a mixed-boundary channel Poisson problem. Quantum and classical evaluation paths agree to within 10^-8 throughout. The channel Poisson problem simultaneously uses Fourier features in the periodic direction and Chebyshev features in the bounded direction, demonstrating coordinate-wise boundary-matched spectral embedding without additional quantum-resource cost.