Papers

Changes in circuit parameters can indicate component degradation in power converters, but measurement noise and limited parameter observability can make these changes difficult to detect reliably. This paper proposes an uncertainty-aware parameter estimation framework to distinguish genuine parameter changes from variations caused by estimation uncertainty. Using a differentiable switched converter model, the method requires only one or two samples per switching period. Model-derived residual whitening and a Bayesian posterior approximation quantify estimation uncertainty and reveal poorly identifiable parameters. Simulations demonstrate improved estimation accuracy over least-squares and physics-informed neural-network benchmarks, with uncertainty estimates consistent with repeated noise realizations. Experiments on a laboratory buck converter validate the estimated parameters against independently derived references and demonstrate the detection of a controlled output-capacitance reduction. The proposed framework provides a basis for reliable parameter-change detection in power converter condition monitoring.

We present a meshfree numerical solver for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on oriented curved surfaces that are represented by surface point clouds. On curved surfaces, numerical challenges pertaining to stiffness and pressure-velocity coupling are exacerbated. Moreover, vector calculus on curved surfaces differs from its Euclidean counterpart. The presented method operates on surface point clouds in an Eulerian frame of reference without requiring a computational grid or mesh. It achieves consistent approximation in space and time with high order of accuracy; we demonstrate up to order six. The incompressibility constraint is locally imposed as a weak artificial compressibility approximation, avoiding global matrix inversion. We show that the method provides consistent and convergent approximations of surface vector fields and differential operators. We study the relationship between error, spatial resolution, and artificial Mach number and characterize the frequency spectrum of the artificial oscillations. We provide numerical solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on symmetric surfaces, such as the sphere and torus, and on parametric and non-parametric asymmetric surfaces. Since the proposed method works directly on unstructured surface point clouds, it provides a promising approach for simulations on image-derived geometries, such as in biological morphogenesis from microscopy videos.

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning of large language models increasingly adopts multiple reward dimensions, including verifiable rules, task-specific evaluators, and learned reward models, to provide richer supervision across diverse capabilities. These dimensions are commonly scalarized with fixed aggregation weights. We identify a failure mode in which aggregation itself induces reward hacking: static projection aliases qualitatively different reward profiles into a single scalar, steering optimization toward whichever dimensions are easiest, densest, or systematically favored by the reward signal. Over training, this traps the policy in suboptimal profiles and prevents convergence to better-balanced ones that would yield higher task performance. To address this, we propose Adaptive Multi-Reward Projection (AMRP), a lightweight online method that reallocates aggregation weights using three signals, relative shortfall, reward volatility, and recent progress, increasing pressure on lagging, unstable, or stagnant dimensions while relieving saturated ones. Across structured reasoning, citation-grounded generation, and open-ended alignment under GRPO, AMRP consistently improves reward-profile balance and downstream performance over fixed and dynamic weighting baselines; it also remains effective with GDPO and PPO, supporting compatibility across RL algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyhappier/AMRP.git.

Conversational artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in everyday social environments, where it functions as both an informational tool and a source of interpersonal feedback. This perspective introduces contingency, i.e., the degree to which system responses vary with user behavior and its interpersonal consequences, as a central construct for evaluating AI systems. We argue that current alignment approaches, including reinforcement learning from human feedback, tend to prioritize user approval and conversational fluency over behaviorally informative feedback, leading to sycophantic patterns of noncontingent affirmation. Drawing on behavioral science and social learning theory, we propose that contingent feedback is a key mechanism through which individuals develop interpersonal skills. When AI systems provide feedback weakly coupled to social consequences, they may reduce opportunities for adaptive calibration in real-world interactions, particularly during adolescence, a critical period for social development. We outline a framework for contingent AI, including trajectory-based evaluation and models of social consequence prediction, and propose a research agenda spanning developmental psychology, human-AI interaction, and machine learning. More broadly, we argue that AI systems should be evaluated not only by user satisfaction, but by their impact on human social learning.

We seek to understand the effect of adding disruptive highly-capable new technologies to competitions by assessing the addition of Dynamite to Rock-Paper-Scissors. We find that providing a versatile Dynamite move to only one player provides limited value (win probability increases from 50% to 55.5%) and is played rarely. That value decreases further if the game is expanded beyond just the original three moves. We also observe several mechanisms by which prior moves can become strategically unplayable, or obsolete. We hope that this model illustrates some non-intuitive aspects of developing new versatile technologies. We also hope that it illustrates some pitfalls for developers and integrators to avoid in order to create value rather than merely capability.

Despite their growing use in video moderation, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit a compositional safety blind spot: videos composed of seemingly benign components can convey harmful meaning when interpreted as a whole. We refer to this phenomenon as Distributed Implicit Harm (DIH), where harm arises from relations among components distributed along a decomposition axis of the video, rather than from any single explicit cue. Among many possible axes, we study two representative cases: temporally distributed harm across visual segments (DIH-T) and cross-modal harm between audio and visual streams (DIH-M). Studying and mitigating DIH at scale requires data that is difficult to collect: such videos lack compositional harm annotations, evade retrieval based on local visual cues, keywords, or single-modality signals, and are consequently absent from existing safety datasets. To bridge this gap, we develop a multi-agent synthesis framework that composes individually benign components into harmful scenarios and generates diverse DIH videos with explicit reasoning annotations, yielding a dataset of over 9,000 videos spanning visual-only and audio-visual settings. Benchmarking over 30 MLLMs spanning frontier proprietary models and leading open-source systems reveals substantial and consistent deficits in detecting both DIH-T and DIH-M. Notably, this failure persists even among the strongest frontier models: they often correctly assess individual components in isolation but fail to recognize the harmful meaning that emerges from their composition. We further evaluate these models on a manually collected set of real-world DIH videos from social media and observe the same failure mode, highlighting DIH as a practical and underexplored challenge for video moderation.

The growing scale of scientific data makes lossy compression essential for reducing data volume under controllable error. Transformation-based compressors using multilevel decomposition, such as MGARD, achieve strong compression ratios but map poorly to GPU architectures. We propose BlockMGARD, an adaptive, Region-of-Interest (ROI)-supported GPU lossy compressor, with four contributions: (1) an In-cache Block decomposition leveraging GPU on-chip memory and constant lookup tables to accelerate decomposition; (2) a hybrid hierarchy combining In-cache Block and global decomposition to balance speed and compression ratio; (3) an end-to-end pipeline with fine-grained ROI error control for feature preservation; and (4) an evaluation against state-of-the-art methods on five real-world datasets. Compared to MGARD-X, BlockMGARD achieves up to 4.2x and 9.1x higher compression and decompression throughput, and up to 8.63x higher compression ratio than uniform-tolerance baselines under ROI-aware error control. Across four GPUs, BlockMGARD achieves near-ideal linear scaling and up to 1.58x I/O cost reduction over MGARD-X.

The accelerated growth in data center projects has introduced a demand-driven bottleneck throughout power grids and contributed to a substantial increase in carbon emissions. These concerns are fueling discussions on methods to use existing energy assets to drive operational efficiency. To this end, this paper explores the benefits of Vehicle-to-Building (V2B) applications to support peak shaving of data center cooling loads. Initially, a literature review was conducted considering V2B constraints and optimization methods including SoC limitations, EV participation, tariffs, and building loads. This analysis was then used to develop a conceptual case study of a 10 MW data center in Loudoun County, VA by simulating a temperature-dependent load profile and adjusting the V2B participation of 40 commercial and passenger EVs. Simulation results indicate that, depending on seasonal variations in cooling load demands, strategic deployment of V2B assets between 12-5pm can offset gross cooling loads by 13-36%.

Modern explicit-time generative models, such as Flow Matching [Lipman et al., 2023] and Rectified Flow [Liu et al., 2023], are typically derived top-down via Optimal Transport and the continuity equation. This standard Eulerian approach focuses on the macroscopic transport of probability mass. In this paper, we present an alternative, bottom-up mechanical derivation grounded in a Lagrangian (particle-centric) perspective. By analyzing the local Taylor expansion of a continuous denoiser, we motivate a strict invariance condition required for optimal, singlestep generation: the conservation of target identity. Enforcing this condition yields a governing quasi-linear advection Partial Differential Equation (PDE). We demonstrate that solving this PDE via the Method of Characteristics analytically yields the straight-line trajectories of Flow Matching. This geometric perspective isolates the Jacobian of the denoiser as the primary source of trajectory curvature, providing a direct mathematical explanation for why straight-line flows enable massive step sizes, and why empirical models require distillation to flatten intersecting characteristics.

Social bots now make up a substantial share of online political communication, where they are studied mainly as producers of misinformation and amplified content. Far less is known about whether their presence reshapes the human relationships that hold movements together. We ask whether exposure to bots during a protest peak is followed by the erosion of cohesion in human networks. Tracking retweet networks of core participants in the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests before, during, and after the peak, we measure change in cohesion at two scales: triadic closure in individual ego networks and edge density within detected communities. Greater bot exposure during the peak predicts steeper subsequent declines in human cohesion at both scales, and the loss concentrates among supporters of the movement. Bots may weaken activism less by changing what people believe than by dissolving the ties through which collective action is sustained.

Agent performance depends jointly on the model parameters and the executable harness code that manages context and control flow. Optimizing either component in isolation can leave the system bottlenecked by its frozen counterpart: weight updates can change which harness is effective, while harness updates can change which model capabilities are exposed. Existing joint-adaptation methods optimize weights and textual prompts but leave the broader harness fixed. We propose Weight-Harness Alternating LEarning (WHALE), a simple recipe that alternates two phases: updating the model under the current harness, then searching for a better harness under the updated model. We instantiate these two phases with online rejection-sampling fine-tuning and Meta-Harness, respectively. When to switch is a key design choice: to separate real improvements from noise without over-optimizing against a changing counterpart, WHALE uses either fixed phase durations or an adaptive patience rule over training signals. Using Qwen3.5-2B/4B agents across three domains (search question answering, mathematical reasoning, and chess puzzles), WHALE outperforms weight-only, harness-only, and Fast-Slow Training by 4.15-24.38 percentage points in best mean@8 accuracy. Either component can be the bottleneck: harness search matches peak weight-only accuracy with far fewer rollouts in SearchQA, but improves math accuracy only after a weight update. Small interleaved updates also outperform stagewise weight-then-harness optimization in accuracy and rollout cost. The code is available at https://github.com/krafton-ai/WHALE.

Digital Twins (DTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies have significantly advanced manufacturing digitalization. However, these technologies are typically applied to individual manufacturing processes rather than integrated into a unified cyber-physical manufacturing environment. This paper proposes a cyber-physical digital factory architecture that enables disembodied work, where manufacturing systems can be supervised and operated remotely through eXtended Reality (XR) user interfaces in collaboration between AI-based control and human operators. The architecture integrates synchronized DTs, hierarchical cloud-edge AI, IIoT, and XR teleoperation interfaces into a cyber-physical manufacturing environment. The proposed approach is validated through representative manufacturing operations, including CNC machining, robotic-assisted abrasive finishing, and robotized disassembly. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture for disembodied manufacturing work and provide a reusable cyber-physical framework for future human-AI-controlled digital factories.

Document-to-slide generation is challenging because slides are dense editable artifacts that require both faithful content selection and precise spatial layout. Recent slide agents adopt iterative reflection, but typically follow a monolithic "one version, one feedback" loop: a slide or deck is rewritten, rendered afterward, and critiqued only at the turn boundary. This delayed feedback makes local failures such as overflow, overlap, clipping, and off-canvas placement difficult to attribute and repair. We propose ReDeck, a step-level render-grounded refinement framework that decomposes slide revision into atomic edit actions and returns renderer-derived observations after each step, turning refinement into "one edit, one observation." To balance local repair with global quality, ReDeck uses multi-granular feedback: step-level render feedback for spatial errors, a turn-level adaptive critic for semantic and design guidance, and a submission-level gate for hard layout validation. We further introduce DeckQuiz, a benchmark that decouples content fidelity, spatial correctness, and design quality. Across GPT-5.4, Claude-4.6, and Gemini-3.1, ReDeck consistently outperforms existing slide-generation agents, and ablations confirm that feedback timing and granularity are critical for reliable slide refinement.

We study federated online reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. While recent multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms achieve strong regret guarantees, they typically require sharing raw trajectories. This reliance incurs a communication cost that scales linearly with the number of episodes and violates the privacy constraints of federated settings. To address these limitations, we propose Fed-LSVI, the first provably efficient federated algorithm for online reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in episodic Markov decision processes. By integrating a determinant-based event-triggered synchronization with a stepwise backward update mechanism, Fed-LSVI enables agents to collaboratively learn an optimal policy by exchanging only compressed sufficient statistics. We prove that Fed-LSVI achieves a regret bound of $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{Md^3H^4T})$, where $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the horizon length, $M$ is the number of agents, and $T$ is the number of episodes per agent, matching the best-known regret for multi-agent online reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. Moreover, by following the stringent communication and privacy constraints of the federated setting, Fed-LSVI reduces the communication cost to only logarithmic dependence on $T$, representing a significant improvement over prior methods.

Public trust in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) may depend not only on technical success but also on the fairness of their decision making. While a recent trend in AV research involves using general purpose "common sense" models to guide AV decision making, the degree to which these inherit human biases in driving is still understudied. Given that psychology studies have shown human driver biases exist, such as lower pedestrian-yielding rates to Black pedestrians in the US, we argue that analyses of model bias should also be part of AV evaluation. Concretely, in this paper we propose two new bias testing methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual-Language Models (VLMs), "All Else Being Equal" tests and "Self-Consistency" tests, and a new benchmark (FairYield) to assess bias in pedestrian-yielding decisions. Our findings show that the yielding decisions of both LLMs and VLMs can be influenced by models' predictions of pedestrian gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, skin tone, and socio-economic status. While the type and degree of bias is different from model to model, we highlight common patterns, and raise questions about the "common sense" model paradigm, particularly the need to either revise the paradigm or address issues of downstream bias.

Crisis helplines assess suicide risk through structured interviews, a process that is slow and dependent on operator training and workload. Natural language processing could support risk assessment and call prioritization, but almost no work addresses Arabic-language helpline calls or operates within the privacy constraints of real helpline data. We analysed de-identified transcripts from Lebanon's National Lifeline for Emotional Support and Suicide Prevention. Audio never left the helpline: calls were transcribed on site with a speech recognition model for Levantine Arabic, and an Arabic named-entity recognition model removed identifying information locally. Only the de-identified transcripts were shared with the research team. Operators recorded the five suicidal ideation items of the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, which we combined into two binary outcomes: at-risk and high-risk. We also machine-translated the transcripts into English, giving a paired Arabic/English comparison. On each corpus, we fine-tuned five instruction-tuned large language models alongside six transformer encoder baselines (four Arabic, two English) and evaluated all models on a held-out test set. We included 383 calls: 373 for the at-risk task (52.3% positive) and 297 for the high-risk task (30.0% positive). The best Arabic model reached a macro-F1 of 81.19 and a ROC-AUC of 90.61 on high-risk; the best English model reached 85.00 and 92.59, identifying 88.9% of high-risk calls. In both languages, high-risk calls separated more cleanly than at-risk calls, and translation to English did not reduce the best observed performance. Suicide risk can be classified from de-identified Arabic transcripts without sending audio outside the helpline. The high-risk results support further testing as an operator-facing tool; lower-severity ideation proved the harder case.

Goal-directed optimization is essential for steering molecular generators to propose candidates with desired properties. However, it is often implemented with policy-gradient reinforcement learning, which requires a generation-trajectory log-probability whose form depends on the model architecture and generation procedure. This makes an optimizer difficult to reuse across architectures and conditional generative designs. Supervised fine-tuning needs none of that machinery, but its update is driven by a fixed dataset, so the reward never enters the update. We introduce Elite-Weighted Supervised Fine-tuning (EW-SFT), which uses reward to guide elite selection of high-scoring molecules, and updates the model by its own pretraining loss on that set. Ablations show that reward information is passed primarily through elite selection, rather than through continuous weighting within the selected set. Because the update consumes only scored molecules and the model's native loss, the same rule applies across autoregressive, masked-diffusion, and discrete-flow generators, and across de novo, motif-extension, and linker-design tasks. Under a fixed budget of 3D shape alignment oracle calls on two kinase reference compounds, EW-SFT consistently outperforms the corresponding native optimizers. It further improves goal-directed optimization under a 2D similarity oracle on four held-out references and achieves comparable performance on a sample-efficiency benchmark without a trajectory-level RL formulation. These results demonstrate that EW-SFT is a unified and effective optimizer across molecular generators, design constraints, references, and oracles.

Robotic manipulation faces a fundamental scaling challenge: robust generalization demands broad physical experience, yet action-labeled robot trajectories are expensive to collect and inherently limited in diversity. Egocentric videos offer a far more scalable source of embodied experience, capturing object interactions, contact dynamics, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors across diverse environments. The central challenge is how to convert this abundant but action-free experience into effective robot control. We introduce ZimaBlue, a scalable framework for learning generalizable World Action Models (WAMs) from large-scale video. ZimaBlue follows a three-stage training curriculum: it first performs causal embodied video pre-training on large-scale human and robot egocentric videos, then grounds the learned visual dynamics in heterogeneous robot trajectories through video-action mid-training with a unified action representation, and finally specializes the model to a target robot for deployment. To make generative WAMs practical for real-time control, ZimaBluefurther adopts an asynchronous Slow-Fast dual-system architecture, where a high-capacity Slow world model provides generalizable spatiotemporal representations and a lightweight Fast branch enables 30 Hz action prediction on NVIDIA RTX 4090. On real-robot zero-shot evaluations, scaling from target-robot data alone to over 120,000 hours of embodied video improves success from 36.1% to 77.8%. ZimaBlue further delivers strong performance across multiple benchmarks, with particularly pronounced gains on unseen tasks.

LLM confidence scores are not independently deployable objects: their decision value depends on the downstream operator and exposure controller that consume them. Monotone recalibration cannot change a coverage-matched rank-based gate, whereas position sizing consumes score magnitude, so changing a confidence map can invalidate a scale fitted to the previous score distribution. We test this on FactSet news for Nasdaq-100 equities, fitting maps and scales on 2021 and evaluating nine open-weight LLMs out-of-sample on 2022–2023. Cross-applying raw and correctness maps with independently fitted scales shows that the two components are not portable alone: scale transfer reduces certainty-equivalent return (CER) in $8/9$ models and produces large risk-target errors. Matching each map with its fitted scale improves ensemble CER by $9.2$ percentage points per year under frozen-scale control ($p<0.001$), and the effect remains significant when the single largest-contributing model is excluded ($+5.5$pp/yr), so it is not driven by one case. Under an identical adaptive-volatility controller, however, the incremental effect falls to $+1.6$pp/yr, with a significant controller interaction. Annual walk-forward effects are smaller, although map–scale interaction remains positive in every fold. Confidence transformations should therefore be evaluated jointly with the downstream controllers that consume them.

Large language models (LLMs) rely on static pretraining corpora, resulting in outdated knowledge over time. Existing approaches for evaluating knowledge edits either suffer from rapid contamination or rely on counterfactual edits that conflict with rigid existing knowledge. In this work, we propose a simulation-driven approach for evaluating and training LLMs on knowledge insertions. We introduce PARALLELEVENTS, a benchmark that simulates coherent trajectories of fictional yet realistic future events, enabling controlled evaluation without data contamination or conflicts with existing knowledge. We further propose SYNAPSE, a training framework that leverages model-generated data to integrate new knowledge into model parameters via instruction tuning. This synthetic pipeline enables scalable knowledge integration without costly human-curated data. SYNAPSE improves QA accuracy by 14.23 points over prior methods, indicating that simulation-based synthetic training yields robust, coherent knowledge insertion.

The number of edge devices in large-scale edge systems is rapidly increasing. Edge devices have limited processing power, memory, and network bandwidth, making resource utilization and data management during edge query processing challenging. Joins are among the costliest database operations in terms of time and resources. The State-of-the-Art edge query processing, Column Imprint-Hash Join CI-HJ, addresses this challenge using equi-height binning to accelerate hash joins. However, it lacks efficiency in real-time processing and scans unnecessary cachelines. This paper presents Workload Aware Column Imprint-Hash Join WACI-HJ, which uses a workload-aware approach to accelerate hash joins. Predicting the upcoming query workload in advance further improves its suitability for real-time edge query processing. WACI-HJ comprises two phases: WACI-HJ Generation Phase, including Pre-processing, Prediction, and Blocking and Hashing modules to compute bins based on the predicted workload before query arrival, and Query Processing and Resource Utilization, which handles query processing and CPU, RAM, and I/O utilization. Evaluations on a benchmark dataset and a real-world Smart Transportation dataset show a 54% reduction in cachelines read and 10% improved query execution time. The proposed technique is effective for both scaled and skewed data. Although PCR is an indirect measure of energy consumption, the work also directly measures energy consumption through energy-efficiency experiments. WACI-HJ shows 1%, 38%, and 49% gain in CPU, RAM, and I/O, respectively. Optimizing cache usage and query execution speeds up real-time traffic analysis, congestion management, and routing in Smart Transportation. Additionally, this technology can be applied to other domains to accelerate edge query processing.

Large language models sometimes deceive users without being instructed to. However, much of the study on deception in models involves instructed deception. We investigated the relationship between instructed and spontaneous (uninstructed) deception in Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. We compared these two deception settings through direction geometry, cross-setting classifiers, and cross-setting steering. We found the two deception settings share a component of direction (cosine of approximately 0.5) and an asymmetry in the transfer between settings regarding detection and causation. Spontaneous trained classifiers performed better on instructed data than vice versa, and instructed derived directions performed better at steering spontaneous prompts than vice versa. Likewise the best token position to derive steering vectors from differed from the best token position to train and apply classifiers.

General-purpose NLP embedding models perform well on linguistic tasks, but their ability to capture symbolic ontological structure remains unclear. We introduce AVA, a systematic framework for evaluating whether embeddings distinguish logic-sensitive relational semantics in ontologies and knowledge graphs. AVA comprises 171,007 contrastive triplets derived from 163 heterogeneous ontologies using hierarchy inversion, relation substitution, and disjointness injection. Each triplet contains an ontology statement, a semantically equivalent paraphrase, and a logic-sensitive hard negative with contradictory relational meaning. We evaluate more than 25 state-of-the-art embedding models and find substantial limitations: the best model achieves only 0.739 triplet accuracy, while hard negative accuracy falls to 0.135. Fine-tuning improves discrimination by a large margin but transfers poorly to downstream Semantic Web tasks, including taxonomy discovery and ontology alignment. Further analysis suggests that improvements stem partly from perturbation-specific pattern recognition rather than robust ontological understanding. These findings reveal a persistent gap between linguistic representation learning and ontology-level discrimination, challenging the assumption that strong NLP benchmark performance translates to Semantic Web competence.

The increasing digitalization of industrial infrastructure and the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) have expanded the cyberattack surface of industrial systems. To address the growing complexity of cyber threats, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly deployed within industrial cybersecurity operations, particularly in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). While these approaches improve anomaly detection, threat analysis, and automated response, their opaque decision-making presents challenges for operational trust, regulatory compliance, and incident response. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the transparency and interpretability of AI-driven cybersecurity systems and decisions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of XAI techniques in industrial cybersecurity, focusing on industrial SOC environments and operational security workflows. We examine the role of AI in industrial SOC workflows, the types of operational data leveraged in industrial environments, and the benefits and limitations of AI-based threat detection. We then review major families of XAI approaches, including feature attribution methods, surrogate models, rule-based explanations, and visualization techniques, and analyze their applicability to industrial use cases. We further discuss the operational, regulatory, and safety requirements that distinguish industrial systems from traditional IT environments. Key challenges are examined, including limited labeled datasets, model reliability, explainability-performance tradeoffs, and the integration of XAI tools into SOC workflows. Finally, we identify open research directions and opportunities for developing trustworthy, operationally viable, and domain-specific XAI-enabled cybersecurity solutions for industrial environments.

Two-sided digital platforms are inherently dynamic: user preferences shift, item popularity evolves, and reviews both reflect and drive these changes. Yet most sequential recommendation systems treat reviews as passive signals for updating user states, leaving two aspects underexplored. First, review generation is nonrandom, depending on evolving latent states of both users and items. Second, reviews can reshape item states, induce spillover across related items, and influence future user decisions. To address these gaps, we propose a two-sided state-space model (TS-SSM) for event-conditioned sequential recommendation. TS-SSM consists of three components: (1) a modality-missing-not-at-random fusion module that encodes review content and informative observation patterns; (2) user-state evolution with temporal variation and local graph message passing that uses related item states to refine user preferences; and (3) item-state evolution with asymmetric carryover of positive and negative review feedback. In experiments across six Amazon categories, TS-SSM increases Recall@20 over BSARec by 14.8%–18.8% and exceeds HM4SR by 11.7% on average. On Goodreads Fantasy, Recall@20 improves HM4SR from .5191 to .5847. Ablations highlight distinct contributions of observation patterns, local propagation, and item dynamics.

World models have made remarkable progress in action-conditioned future prediction for embodied agents, yet still struggle to model physically plausible interactions. Existing approaches address this limitation by constraining the generation process with external representations encoding motion, geometry, or semantics. Obtaining these spatiotemporally dense representations typically requires auxiliary estimators or manual annotations, limiting training scalability. We instead revisit the training objective and identify a supervision-allocation mismatch under the globally averaged mean squared error (MSE) denoising objective: prevalent static content dominates the optimization signal, leaving sparse dynamic-object regions critical to interaction generation disproportionately under-supervised. Motivated by this observation, we introduce IMPACT, a scalable Interaction-aware Model training framework with Prior-guided Attention Calibration and Targeting. IMPACT uses cross-attention associated with manipulated-object tokens as an internal spatiotemporal prior for action-conditioned changes. It samples candidate regions from this prior, calibrates them with detached local prediction errors to construct an interaction map, and uses the map to reweight denoising supervision, requiring neither external representations nor inference-time modifications. Extensive experiments on robot-arm and human-hand manipulation, spanning diverse control modalities and DiT backbones, show that IMPACT consistently outperforms the corresponding MSE-trained baselines, improving interaction fidelity, physical plausibility, and visual quality.

Latent language identification is often used to argue that multilingual language models route computation through language-specific states, such as English pivots. However, existing probes infer latent language from different signals, such as the geometry of hidden states or what can be decoded from intermediate representations. Since such claims shape conclusions about how models share and route information across languages, we ask whether these probes measure the same phenomenon or expose distinct aspects of multilingual computation. We study this question across model families, training regimes, domains, tasks, checkpoints, and up to 27 languages. We find that identification probes systematically disagree: the GMM-based representation probe, which draws evidence from hidden state geometry, shows earlier cross-lingual mixing, whereas decoding-based probes, which rely on output-space decodability, retain sharper language-specific and more English-biased signals. These differences track model multilinguality and training progression, but are comparatively stable across domains. Our results suggest a more cautious interpretation of latent language identification, where current probes expose different aspects of multilingual processing, rather than directly revealing a single internal lingua franca.

AI is increasingly used in the R&D process that produces future AI systems. We study the conditions under which this feedback becomes self-amplifying. Our model describes how the rate of AI capability growth depends on baseline research productivity, recursive feedback, and the increasing difficulty of research progress. We derive a recursive reproduction number, $\mathcal{R}_{\mathrm{AI}}$, that determines whether improvements are amplified or damped across development cycles. This quantity compares the strength of feedback with the rate at which further progress becomes more difficult. When $\mathcal{R}_{\mathrm{AI}}>1$, the effects of improvements compound across development cycles, placing the system in a self-amplifying regime. When $\mathcal{R}_{\mathrm{AI}}<1$, their effects weaken across cycles. The transition depends on the structure of the AI R&D feedback loop and need not occur at any particular level of model capability. A system can therefore enter a self-amplifying regime before acceleration becomes visible, while rapid progress can also occur without self-amplification. Higher baseline research productivity can accelerate progress without changing whether the system is self-amplifying, but the duration of the development cycle becomes a limiting timescale for amplification. Increasing research difficulty can end a period of self-amplification. Extending the model to multiple research actors shows that improvements shared across organizations can make the overall research ecosystem self-amplifying even when no individual actor is. The framework identifies measurable properties of AI R&D systems that can help distinguish recursive amplification from rapid progress driven by other sources, including the strength of recursive feedback, how effectively improvements propagate into successor systems, cycle duration, and the increasing difficulty of further progress.

The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models degrades when the problem they were trained on drifts. This is a near-universal feature of real-world problems, which often change unpredictably. Biological evolution has achieved intelligence by overcoming this obstacle through natural selection acting on heritable variation. AI/ML techniques have long incorporated forms of natural selection, but it has been challenging to maintain model diversity as optimization naturally drives convergence. Here we show that a swarm of AI/ML models subjected to deliberate mutations of their model coefficients away from optimality can reliably and sustainably improve performance in changing environments by acting as a statistical hedge against non-stationarity. We call this mechanism 'Flawed in Nature, Perfect through Evolution', reflecting that the collective performance gain goes at the expense of individual performance. We prove via four theorems that the resulting regret reduction is guaranteed under general conditions, establishing the Flawed-in-Nature mechanism as a generalizable design principle for AI/ML systems. We validate these results on synthetic linear regression tasks, demonstrating that the mutated swarm delivers the best model in $\sim80\%$ of environment changes and that inference synthesis successfully translates this individual advantage into a collective one. The mechanism proves to be most effective when the mutation drift rate matches the drift rate of the environment. We outline a simple, adaptive controller that enables practical applications by tuning the mutation drift rate to match the unknown drift rate of the environment. The close analogy of the Flawed-in-Nature mechanism to biological evolution suggests it may have been a critical missing ingredient for the organic discovery of AI forms that more closely mimic biological intelligence.

We present Qwen-Drive-1.0, an initial step towards a vision-language foundation model for autonomous driving. Qwen-Drive-1.0 retains the architecture of the pretrained vision-language model (VLM) and integrates 3D perception, visual question answering, and motion planning within a unified framework. An external bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception head jointly performs 3D object detection, semantic occupancy prediction, and BEV map segmentation. It serves as a probe of the 3D information accessible from the shared representations and provides an explicit, inspectable interface to 3D scene structure. A Planning Expert conditions on shared VLM representations to generate future ego trajectories. A staged training recipe combines driving supervision with general-purpose vision-language data to acquire driving-specific competence while helping preserve broad visual understanding and instruction-following capabilities. Experiments demonstrate strong 3D perception and driving scene understanding while largely preserving general vision-language capability. Comprehensive evaluations across open-loop, pseudo-closed-loop, and closed-loop settings further show highly competitive motion-planning performance.