Papers

High-rate neural telemetry requires an implant-towearable link whose circuit partition, waveform mapping, packet processing, and failure semantics are mutually consistent. This paper specifies a chip-oriented, one-way impulse-radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) uplink comprising an implanted packet engine and free-running transmitter, a tissue-proxy channel, and a wearable mixed-signal receiver and digital baseband.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, yet estimating when their answers can be trusted remains underexplored. We systematically compare training-free verbalized, token-level and semantic uncertainty estimation methods on twelve MLLMs and five VQA benchmarks. We find that answer length decides which family wins: token-level entropy on short answers, verbalized methods on sentence-length responses, and semantic methods on long-form generation. Token-level entropy becomes far more informative when estimated at a higher temperature than the low ones used to generate answers, and asking a model to judge its own answer becomes more reliable with model size. Building on this, a length-aware recipe that additionally flags responses on which the model abstains outperforms every individual method on average at about a quarter of the cost of semantic methods, although no method attains the coverage required for safe deployment. These results provide practitioners with principled guidance for selecting estimators by answer length and model scale.

Reliable prediction of vehicle dynamics is essential for smart driving applications such as autonomous control and advanced driver-assistance systems. Off-road vehicles used in agricultural and construction settings are particularly prone to nonlinear behavior, including bifurcations and chaotic motion arising from intermittent loss of tire–road contact. Predicting such dynamics is challenging because it requires resolving both smooth nonlinearities and the discontinuous switching associated with contact loss. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of reservoir computing (RC) – specifically an echo state network (ESN) – for data-driven prediction of a jumping quarter-car model. The reservoir is trained on time-series data from a small number of points and evaluated on its ability to reconstruct bifurcation diagrams, phase-space attractors, and time trajectories across periodic and chaotic regimes. The trained reservoir qualitatively reproduces the period-doubling route to chaos, captures the geometric structure of periodic and chaotic attractors. These results demonstrate that reservoir computing is a feasible data-driven predictor of nonlinear dynamics in a practical, non-smooth vehicle system.

This exploratory pilot study evaluates the scope and perceived accuracy of personal information output from ongoing conversational interactions in generative AI systems using GPT-5.2 Instant and GPT-5.2 Thinking, categorized into three output types: Fact, Inference, and Confidence. Based on the evaluation results obtained from 15 Japanese participants, differences in model design have limited impact on personal information output tendencies. Compared with the Inference type, the Fact type shows a more conservative output pattern. Regarding attribute categories, the findings indicate that Core Personal attributes associated with identification are treated relatively conservatively, whereas Behavioral and Linguistic attributes show higher accuracy across both Fact and Inference outputs. Furthermore, Holistic Profile, Psychological and Cognitive, and Residual attributes are more readily inferred, even when not supported by explicit factual outputs. Notably, the lack of null outputs for these attributes in the Inference type suggests that such inferred profiles may be constructed from indirectly available contextual information. The findings may contribute to future discussions regarding privacy awareness and personal information inference in generative AI systems.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) should rely on visual evidence that directly determines the correct answer, but supervision for grounding visual reasoning is often expensive to obtain manually or tied to dataset-specific annotation primitives. We instead introduce model-causal visual evidence as an annotation target, defined as the set of image regions whose counterfactual intervention changes a model's answer distribution for a given image-question pair. Based on this principle, we introduce Counterfactual Search for Grounding Regions (CSGR). CSGR is a scalable pipeline that proposes candidate regions, perturbs them, measures their effect on answer sensitivity, and aggregates this evidence across multiple judges to approximate answer-critical regions in VQA data. To assess whether CSGR annotations contain a useful supervision signal, we plug them into three existing grounding-aware training routines: attention steering, Visual CoTfinetuning, and latent visual reasoning. These experiments test whether the proposed annotation scheme can provide a useful supervision signal across multiple ways of consuming region labels, rather than introducing a new way of using them. Across competing automatic region-labeling mechanisms, CSGR annotations provide the most consistent gains over Cross Entropy-only finetuning in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations, indicating that the proposed labeling scheme captures useful region-level information.

Machine learning for neglected tropical diseases is limited by data, not algorithms: public annotated image sets for leprosy (Hansen's disease) number in the hundreds, orders of magnitude below what generative models require. We ask whether a model trained on abundant chronic wound photography transfers to this low-data regime. We build a three-stage pipeline. First, a DeepLabV3-ResNet50 segmentation network (validation Dice 0.876, IoU 0.799) supplies lesion masks for two wound datasets that ship without them. Second, we assemble a mask-conditioned latent diffusion model from Stable Diffusion 1.5 components and train it on 3,280 region-of-interest wound crops, widening the UNet input convolution from 4 to 11 channels to admit three mask feature maps and a blurred low-frequency context latent. Third, we fine-tune this model on 708 leprosy image-mask pairs drawn from 764 images of approximately 150 patients. We evaluate with LPIPS perceptual distance, anchored by a real-versus-real baseline computed on the same 242 anchor images as the cross-set comparisons; without that reference the cross-set distances cannot be interpreted. The generated set shows no mode collapse: its internal perceptual diversity (0.662) is statistically indistinguishable from that of the real leprosy set (0.672, 95% CI [0.664, 0.680]). Generated images sit 0.044 LPIPS outside the real distribution - measurably apart, but under half of one standard deviation. Fine-tuning shifted the output distribution only marginally, which we trace to lesion geometry reaching the network through input concatenation alone. Chronic wound photography is therefore a viable donor domain for leprosy lesion synthesis: low-level appearance transfers well, and the remaining barrier is semantic control rather than image quality.

Benchmarks agree that vision-language models reason poorly about low-level manipulation, but an aggregate accuracy score does not say which step fails. We separate two steps that affordance questions conflate: identifying which part of an object to act on, and knowing what action that part requires. Across 19 articulated objects we asked eight models, spanning three developers, what motion a robot should apply. Under an open prompt, push was produced once in 64 evaluations where it was correct, despite being correct for 8 of 19 objects and appearing in the offered label set every time. Inspecting the outputs showed why: models described a different part than the one being scored, e.g. explaining how to pick up a camera rather than press its button. Naming the target part raises action accuracy by 0.32 to 0.63 for every model, from 0.158-0.474 to 0.684-0.947, and push recall from 0-1/8 to 7-8/8. No model beats a constant answer that ignores the image under the open prompt; once the part is named, all eight do. Asked to describe the same part in free prose with no label set, models produce pressing language for 6 to 8 of 8. These results are hard to reconcile with missing action knowledge, and instead point to part grounding as the dominant bottleneck, a pattern that holds across all three model families and does not diminish with capability. Naming the part supplies the grounding variable, so this bounds what a perfect part detector would offer rather than demonstrating a general model of mechanics. Two supporting results agree: on real photographs only three of eight models localize grasp points better than a constant baseline, and on rendered objects none do. We also document two measurement errors of our own, a threshold that let a constant baseline score 0.929 and a labelling rule wrong on 4 of 19 objects, both caught only by testing our numbers against trivial alternatives.

AI-research agents, or autoresearch systems, combine language models with tools, search, evaluation, and iterative modification of research artifacts. Their public software ecology is hard to compare because repositories, papers, benchmarks, libraries, and companion artifacts are often counted as one population. We connect two agent-drafted, human-adjudicated registries frozen on 10 June 2026: 139 canonical public repositories and 101 papers on AI-assisted research systems, each record carrying an evidence card anchored to its primary sources. Nine promoted design lineages contain 59 memberships among 52 repositories, seven of them assigned to two lineages. Against this evidence we examine six time-stamped candidate design regularities. A prospective audit of 25 newly ingested repositories observed zero of six specified trigger events, supplying bounded support for R1-R4; broader corpus evidence narrowed the original scope of R5, and a failed directional prediction leaves R6 exploratory. The paper-repository graph contains 212 curator-assigned relatedness edges: 64 of 101 papers carry at least one edge, the edges reach 23 of 139 repositories, and the six most-linked repositories carry 120 of the 212 edges (56.6%). A full-text check of seven papers shows the relation measures our curation, not the papers' citation behavior. An identity audit adjudicated against commit histories and public contributor records confirms at least 18 paper authors who also author a canonical registry repository (20 of 63 candidate author slots in 13 of 101 papers); a byline-matched tier reaches 58 identities but is reported separately and more weakly. The study contributes a source-grounded theory under prospective test, a curator-assigned map of paper-repository relatedness, and explicit limits on claims about public visibility and community structure.

The pulling illusion induced by asymmetric vibration stimuli has attracted attention for its potential applications in rehabilitation and sensory assessment. However, the underlying mechanism of the pulling illusion remains unclear. This study addressed the central question of whether peripheral vibrotactile sensitivity alone is sufficient for the illusion to emerge or whether processing beyond basic vibration detection is also required. Neurological disorders can involve impairments at different levels of the nervous system, providing an opportunity to examine this question. Accordingly, we evaluated directional discrimination performance for the pulling illusion and fingertip vibration detection thresholds in 25 participants with diverse neurological disorders affecting different levels of the nervous system, from peripheral to central. Clustering analysis identified contrasting profiles, with high directional discrimination performance despite elevated vibration detection thresholds and chance-level performance despite relatively low-to-intermediate thresholds. In the generalized linear mixed model, motor-related signs, including hemiplegia and tremor, showed a robust negative association with directional discrimination performance, whereas vibration detection threshold was not robustly associated with performance. Furthermore, in participants with hemiplegia, directional discrimination performance was around chance level on the affected side and close to 100% on the unaffected side, despite stimulus amplitudes well above the measured vibration detection thresholds on both sides. Collectively, these findings suggest that the pulling illusion depends on perceptual processing beyond basic vibration detection, through which asymmetric vibration is experienced as directional pulling.

High classification accuracy alone is insufficient for clinical image analysis, where calibrated confidence and reliable uncertainty estimates are essential. This study proposes a reliability-aware Hybrid-K ensemble selection framework for multiclass cervical cytology classification using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Nine deep learning architectures were evaluated using a fixed stratified five-fold partition and three training seeds. After post-hoc temperature scaling, models were assessed using macro-F1, accuracy, AUROC, expected calibration error (ECE), worst-class ECE (WC-ECE), area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC), Brier score, and negative log-likelihood (NLL). Models were ranked using an equal-weight composite score, and Hybrid-K ensembles were formed from the top-ranked models using soft voting. Robustness was examined using 5,000 Dirichlet-sampled metric-weight vectors, leave-one-metric-out analysis, and corrected paired testing across 15 fold-by-seed evaluations. The final Hybrid-2 ensemble, comprising Swin-Tiny and TinyViT-5M, reduced AURC by 43%, NLL by 17%, and WC-ECE by 36% relative to the best individual model. It was selected in 96.8% of random weighting scenarios, remained unchanged across all leave-one-metric-out analyses, and improved the full composite score. However, per-metric gains were not statistically significant after Holm-Bonferroni correction (all adjusted p >= 0.168). Because post-hoc calibration did not use a fully independent calibration set, calibration-dependent results should be interpreted as exploratory internal estimates. Overall, the framework identified a compact ensemble robust to alternative metric weightings and improved reliability point estimates under internal validation on a single dataset.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) predominantly rely on centralized orchestration and lack formal verification mechanisms for agent reliability, participation, and system-level behavioral alignment. These shortcomings leave open environments severely vulnerable to uncooperative or malicious agents. This work proposes DART, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based reputation and incentive regulation framework for trustworthy multi-agent collaboration, combining centralized operational orchestration with blockchain-enabled decentralized governance and accountability. DART unifies DAG workflow orchestration, capability and reputation-aware task allocation, dynamic behavior updates, multi-factor incentives, and smart contract accountability paired with IPFS storage. Under this paradigm, agent selection dynamically balances task alignment, historical reputation, and workload, while post-execution behavioral evidence continuously calibrates agent trust and the probability of future participation. Evaluated across four axes, DART achieves 93.6% Pass@1 on GSM8K and builds a full-stack application in 142 s using two agents, outperforming centralized baselines. Across five independent 150-round longitudinal trials, Full DART achieves a mean task success rate of 93.33 +/- 2.26%, output quality of 0.9357 +/- 0.0117, retry rate of 0.2307 +/- 0.0816, and allocation delay of 1.1153 +/- 0.0408 s, consistently outperforming its ablated configurations DART isolates persistent and intermittent malicious agents, obtaining a 99.3% output containment rate and restoring system success to 99.8%. These results demonstrate the potential of coupling reputation, incentives, DAG-based coordination, and verifiable blockchain-enabled governance to support adaptive and accountable multi-agent collaboration.

Wherever a coding agent works under engineer supervision, or a clinical model assists a radiologist, the deployment question is whether to keep the human-AI workflow or replace it with the human alone or the agent alone. The human-AI workflow is worth keeping only if it beats both of those alternatives. Yet once it is deployed, neither alternative outcome is observed: recovering one means replaying the task under that alternative, and every replay costs expert time or compute. Under a fixed replay budget, the design question is therefore which tasks should be more likely to receive a human-only replay, and which an agent-only replay. Existing methods do not directly target this decision. Agent benchmarks do not choose which missing baseline to measure, variance-based sampling ignores which of the two comparisons is closer to failing, and Bayesian information methods focus on learning model parameters instead of making the deployment decision. We propose TEAM-Design, a rule that gives every task two replay probabilities, one per baseline. It raises a probability where the missing baseline outcome is hard to predict from what is already known about the task and where that comparison is harder to establish, and lowers it where replay is expensive. We prove that the rule solves this budgeted design problem, and that drawing the replays at random from recorded probabilities still controls the chance of wrongly declaring that the workflow beats both. We reanalyze 6 clinical settings, where no human-AI workflow beats both alternatives, and a coding benchmark, where one does, then evaluate TEAM-Design on synthetic designs and on a semi-synthetic design built from a real chest X-ray reader study. TEAM-Design works best when one of the two comparisons is clearly harder to settle than the other, and can do worse than variance-based allocation when the two are similarly difficult.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, yet existing visual jailbreak research has focused almost exclusively on autoregressive architectures, leaving an important emerging family unstudied: multimodal discrete diffusion vision-language models (dVLMs). We identify a vulnerability specific to diffusion generation: because the visual embedding conditions every reverse denoising step rather than acting as a one-time prefix, adversarial visual semantics are repeatedly propagated and amplified across the generation trajectory, a phenomenon we term cross-step conditional propagation. We provide empirical evidence through stage-sensitivity analysis, prompt-level switch rates, and pairwise denoising-bin disagreement metrics, confirmed by bootstrap resampling. We propose DIVA (Discrete-diffusion Vision-language model Attack), a white-box visual jailbreak framework using cross-modal intent obfuscation and diffusion-aware multi-timestep adversarial optimization. Across three dVLMs, DIVA reaches 58.8%, 67.7%, and 69.1% HADES ASR under the Beaver reward-model metric, outperforming visual jailbreak baselines designed for autoregressive models. Code: https://github.com/loststars2002/DIVA

This paper presents a one-stage learning framework that maps monocular roadside-camera images directly to vehicle states in a ground-fixed coordinate frame. Unlike conventional approaches that first detect vehicles in the image plane and subsequently apply geometric post-processing, the proposed method leverages features from a pretrained object detector to jointly estimate each vehicle's ground-plane position, dimensions, and yaw angle. The framework therefore uses visual features not only for vehicle detection but also for direct spatial and orientation estimation. To support model training and evaluation, we develop a data-collection and label-generation pipeline based on synchronized video from a roadside camera and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Acting as a temporary top-view sensing platform, the UAV provides vehicle trajectories, dimensions, and orientations, which are transformed into the ground-fixed coordinate frame and temporally aligned with the roadside-camera images to generate ground-truth labels. The framework is evaluated using data collected during multiple experiments at the Mcity Test Facility. Results show that the proposed method can recover vehicle trajectories and orientations from monocular roadside imagery without a separate geometric post-processing stage, demonstrating its potential as a scalable approach to infrastructure-based perception at urban intersections.

Eye-tracking data are expensive to collect, requiring specialized hardware and controlled laboratory conditions, and difficult to share due to privacy regulations, which together limit the quantity and diversity of gaze data available for research. We investigate unconditional gaze generation using diffusion models in position and component-wise velocity representations. The models are trained and evaluated on eight-second visual-search trajectories from 28 participants, using a split of 23 training participants and five held-out validation participants, with three training seeds. Evaluation includes kinematic distributions, trajectory geometry, event statistics, and a temporal Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty as a learned comparator. Across eight position-derived features, mean Jensen-Shannon divergence is $0.016 \pm 0.004$ for the position model and $0.037 \pm 0.002$ for the velocity model, with standard deviations calculated across training seeds. These scores do not establish that representation choice caused the difference. A separate comparison using the same evaluation method shows that the ordering of the models varies across training seeds. The position model also produces smaller feature discrepancies than a kinematic Markov baseline. Differences in saccade counts between real and generated data depend strongly on the velocity threshold used to detect events. The results provide quantitative reference measurements for unconditional gaze generation on this visual-search task and show how evaluation choices affect conclusions about generated gaze.

The limitations of on-board sensors and blind spots caused by occlusion cause the reduction of perception quality in autonomous vehicles. In such cases, cooperative perception provides additional data via Vehicle-to-Everything communication to enhance local perception, causing a large volume of data transmission. The vehicle can focus on acquiring and utilizing relevant data according to the prevailing road context by identifying the current traffic situation. To achieve this, we propose a concept for the situation identification of the vehicle using Bird's-Eye-View images. Firstly, the situation around the vehicle is identified using object detection with semantic segmentation, followed by understanding the context of the traffic using a situation identification module consisting of an open-source projective transformation network Cam2BEV and a situation identification neural network. The concept was evaluated and validated by running the software on the CARLA simulator using the in-built RGB camera and the semantic segmentation camera. Additionally, the portability of the situation identification module for real-world applications was verified on Cityscapes and nuScenes urban driving datasets. Overall, the proposed situation identification approach enables efficient sensor data management by prioritizing relevant data to the current traffic situation. The source code is available in the following link: https://github.com/akshaynarla/DySi_Select

In this paper, we tackle automatic anomaly detection in multi-illumination and multi-focus display images. The minute defects on the display surface are hard to spot out in RGB images and by a model trained with only normal data. To address this, we propose a novel contrastive learning scheme for knowledge distillation-based anomaly detection. In our framework, Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation (MKD) is adopted as a baseline, which operates by measuring feature similarities between the teacher and student networks. Based on MKD, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, namely Multiresolution Contrastive Distillation (MCD), which does not require positive/negative pairs with an anchor but operates by pulling/pushing the distance between the teacher and student features. Furthermore, we propose the blending module that transforms and aggregate multi-channel information to the three-channel input layer of MCD. Our proposed method significantly outperforms competitive state-of-the-art methods in both AUROC and accuracy metrics on the collected Multi-illumination and Multi-focus display image dataset for Anomaly Detection (MMdAD).

For a finite simple graph $G$ with at least one edge, the bondage number $b(G)$ is the least number of edges whose deletion increases the domination number $\gamma(G)$. Teschner conjectured that $b(G)\le \tfrac32\Delta(G)$ for every graph $G$. We disprove this conjecture by giving a connected cubic bipartite graph on eighteen vertices with \[ \gamma(G)=6 \qquad\text{and}\qquad b(G)=5. \] The domination number is established by a complete counting argument across the bipartition. An explicit five-edge deletion raises the domination number from six to seven. For the matching lower bound, we give an exact finite certificate: the graph has 297 minimum dominating sets, and deleting any one of its $\binom{27}{4}=17{,}550$ four-edge subsets leaves at least one of those sets dominating. The enumeration is deterministic, uses only exact integer and set operations, and is reproduced by the complete standard-library verifier included in the appendix.

Audio LLM benchmarks measure understanding and dialogue quality, not whether speech-enabled models respond with relational warmth when a vulnerable user discloses a mental-health concern. We introduce a 7-turn scripted-disclosure probe grounded in WHO mental-health clinical guidelines, with each script run on the same model (Azure OpenAI gpt-realtime) in both audio and text-only conditions, and acoustic-prosody analysis of the generated speech. Across 532 responses we identify two audio-specific patterns transcript-only evaluation would miss: at the elicitation turn the model's voice gets shorter, faster, lower-pitched, and quieter rather than warmer (p < .001 for five of seven acoustic features), and the modality gap on relational acceptance, small in aggregate, concentrates in the highest-stakes self-harm/suicide scripts. A two-rater listener study corroborates that perceived warmth is concentrated at specific turns and on bereavement disclosures. Together these patterns indicate that auditing speech-enabled models in mental-health contexts requires evaluating the combined audio-and-text experience the user encounters, not the transcript in isolation. We release the protocol, scoring pipeline, and scripts as a starting point for evaluating speech-enabled models in mental-health contexts.

Dense document images often contain many fine-grained visual and textual entities whose relevance depends on a user query. Standard vision-language retrievers encode cropped regions with a single vector, which can mix distinct entity signals and obscure the evidence needed for fine-grained retrieval. We call this failure mode Semantic Dilution and quantitatively show that it degrades entity-level retrieval as a function of entity density. To mitigate it, we propose SAGE, a training-free framework that parses semantic entities from dense document images, represents them as hierarchical graph nodes with multi-vector embeddings, and retrieves query-relevant evidence through iterative entity-level subgraph matching. We also introduce DEAR, a dataset of 1,055 query–image pairs sourced from product detail pages, where each query requires retrieving and comparing multiple fine-grained entities from visually dense inputs across four question types of increasing complexity. Experiments show that SAGE substantially reduces semantic dilution and outperforms patch-level and OCR-based retrieval baselines on DEAR, achieving a Recall@3 of 0.849 and a generation score of 2.746 on multi-entity visual comparison queries. Our code is available at https://github.com/All4Nothing/SAGE.

Predicting the thermodynamic properties of an alloy requires sampling its configurations across many chemical conditions and recovering free energies on a common absolute scale. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the standard tool, but it requires separate simulations at different conditions, and auxiliary free-energy methods such as thermodynamic integration are used to place results on a common absolute scale. Modern discrete neural samplers typically use reverse KL divergence as the objective and can be mode-seeking or biased. We present Free energy Offering Generative Sampler (FrOGS), a hybrid discrete neural sampler that couples an autoregressive model to a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to be trained jointly under a single shared loss. FrOGS draws i.i.d. configurations, returns an unbiased estimate of the partition function, and gives consistent estimates of thermodynamic observables. We train a single model across a wide range of chemical conditions to produce estimates on a common absolute free-energy scale. FrOGS matches exact finite-size results on the 2D Ising model and reference phase diagrams for AgPd and CuAu, without mode collapse. We additionally compare to SEGAL, a published autoregressive baseline, and find that only FrOGS recovers the stability range of the CuAu$_3$ phase.

Significant challenges remain in AI-driven educational systems in balancing privacy preservation with accurate cognitive diagnosis. To overcome this, we propose a federated inference framework in which several commercial LLM APIs collaborate without requiring access to raw student data or proprietary model internals. Using multiple federated entities, such as LLaMA-3.3-70B, GPT-4o-mini, and Claude-3-Haiku, our framework builds upon a heterogeneous multi-LLM architecture. The predictions generated by these entities are combined with epsilon-local differential privacy by adding Laplace noise locally to each entity's prediction output before aggregation, while residual-based aggregation mitigates model heterogeneity. Our approach is predicated on an honest-but-curious trust paradigm in which API providers are presumed not to abuse submitted queries, and our differential privacy mechanism shields the published diagnostic results from external inference. We conduct rigorous privacy-utility analysis showing strong privacy guarantees with minimal accuracy loss, and extensive real-world evaluations across three educational benchmarks confirm the framework's practical usability and cross-domain generalizability.

Democratizing data access through natural language is a crucial goal for modern enterprises, but the practical adoption of Text-to-SQL is critically hindered by real-world complexities: 1. Obscure and large database schemas, 2. Ineffective retrieval of relevant tables and columns due to structured setting of schemas and vague user query, 3. Generation of syntactically or logically flawed SQL due to a lack of robust validation and correction mechanism. To address these systemic challenges, we introduce Reflect-SQL, a novel framework for Text to SQL, grounded in multi-stage self-reflection approach to develop understanding of obscure schema using a knowledge base, setup a process for effective retrieval and system to generate syntactically/semantically SQL. Instead of a single-pass attempt, our system employs an LLM-as-a-judge driven scoring mechanism within interconnected feedback loops to iteratively refine the results at every stage. A feedback-driven retrieval loop refines the user's natural language query, while a synthesis loop validates and corrects the SQL and finally, an entailment loop optimizes the end-to-end process and continuously enriches the knowledge base. By integrating these layers of reflection, Reflect-SQL bridges the critical gap between user intent and complex data. On the challenging BIRD benchmark, our framework achieves an execution accuracy of 72.03%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating a major leap in reliability for enterprise applications.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) measurements contain mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. However, most self-supervised methods rely on generic image statistics and do not explicitly model this noise, which may limit their ability to effectively suppress realistic LDCT noise. To address this issue, we propose a physics-driven framework with cross-domain iteration for self-supervised LDCT denoising. The proposed framework proceeds in three main steps. First, a learned sinogram prior and the LDCT noise model guide posterior inference of photon counts, enabling separation of the Poisson and Gaussian components. Second, the separated Poisson and Gaussian components are respectively processed by binomial thinning and Gaussian data thinning to construct two branches, and residual scaling matches each branch's noise level to that of the observation, yielding a training pair with approximately independent noise realizations from one low-dose measurement. Finally, the pair is used to train an image-domain network whose forward-projected outputs update the prior. Through cross-domain iteration, the prior and the training pair are progressively refined while maintaining consistency with CT acquisition physics. Experiments on simulated data from AAPM, LIDC-IDRI, and LoDoPaB-CT and on real LDCT data show consistent gains over the evaluated self-supervised baselines across dose levels, with performance comparable to the evaluated supervised baseline.

Decentralized, serverless learning increasingly connects devices running different architectures, where the standard tool, decentralized SGD, is undefined as models with different parameter counts cannot be averaged. Knowledge distillation (KD) exchanges soft predictions rather than weights and sidesteps this obstacle, yet convergence theory for fully decentralized, asynchronous peer-to-peer (P2P) KD is lacking. We provide one, relocating consensus from parameter space to function (output) space: a KD event is a geometric contraction operator in logit space on the peers' predictive distributions, which we analyse in the Hilbert space of predictions on a reference measure. Under standard smoothness/variance assumptions and two realizability assumptions, one bridging parameter SGD to the functional step and one controlling restricted task/KD alignment, the time-averaged functional stationarity and function-space disagreement converge at rate $O(1/(\eta T))$ to an $O(\eta)+O(B_f^2)+O(\zeta_f^2)$ neighbourhood. Here $B_f$ is the distance from the task optimum to the peers' reachable classes and $\zeta_f$ measures persistent local-task heterogeneity. Across homogeneous, width-heterogeneous, and mixed-family networks of the experiments, KD contracts function disagreement by $40-61\times$, while isolated training does not. The sampled stationarity diagnostic has late transient exponents $0.99-1.90$ on the shared-skeleton main runs, and the four-point step-size sweep exhibits the predicted transient: neighbourhood tradeoff.

A layout of a graph G is an injective function $f : V(G) \rightarrow Z$, and the bandwidth of a layout f is $bw(G,f) = max_{uv \in E(G)} |f(u) - f(v)|$. The bandwidth bw(G) of G is the minimum bandwidth of a layout of G. Computing the bandwidth of a graph is a notoriously hard problem: assuming P != NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm, even on very restricted classes of trees [Monien, SIAM Journal on Algebraic Discrete Methods, 1986], and no constant factor approximation, even on trees [Dubey et al., JCSS 2011]. Assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis, there is no algorithm with running time $f(k)n^{o(k)}$ to determine whether an input graph has bandwidth at most k, even on very restricted classes of trees [Dregi and Lokshtanov, ICALP 2014]. In this paper we show that Bandwidth on general graphs is FPT-approximable. In particular we give an algorithm that takes as input a graph G and an integer k, runs in time $2^{O(9^k)}n^{O(1)}$, and outputs a subtree T of G such that $bw(T) \geq k$ or a layout of G of bandwidth at most $(10^{85} k^{28})^{4^k}$. This resolves in the affirmative an open problem of Chung and Seymour [Discrete Mathematics, 1989], who asked whether the bandwidth of every graph G is upper bounded in terms of the maximum bandwidth of a subtree of G. Our theorem leads to a forbidden subgraph characterization for graphs of bounded bandwidth, and can be seen as an analog for bandwidth of the classic grid minor theorem for treewidth, the forbidden subtree theorem for pathwidth, and the forbidden subpath theorem for treedepth.

The rapid advancement of deep learning has presented significant energy efficiency challenges to the conventional von Neumann architecture. In-memory computing (IMC) architectures based on emerging non-volatile memory (eNVM) are widely regarded as a promising solution for accelerating neural network training due to their high parallelism and low power consumption. However, the intrinsic non-idealities of eNVM devices can cause conductance updates to deviate from target values, thereby limiting the performance of on-chip training. To address this challenge, this paper presents a Non-ideality Optimized eNVM Accelerator (NOVA) architecture for on-chip training. Specifically, we first fabricate a two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) and develop a conductance modulation behavioral model calibrated with experimental data. Building upon this device model, we propose, for the first time, a Non-ideality Avoidance Training (NAT) algorithm tailored for eNVM devices, which mitigates accuracy degradation by guiding weight convergence toward the most stable conductance regions of eNVM devices. Experimental results demonstrate that, even under severe device asymmetry, NAT improves the accuracy by an average of 15.1% over the baseline methods across multiple benchmark tasks. Meanwhile, the NOVA achieves an average energy efficiency gain of approximately 33.58$\times$ compared with the peak energy efficiency of graphics processing units (GPUs).

Compact instruction-following rerankers are attractive for deployment, but conventional distillation pipelines typically train students by offline imitation of teacher outputs on a fixed set of examples, constraining supervision to the teacher's observed ranking space. We revisit reranker distillation through the lens of reinforcement learning. We propose a two-stage framework combining off-policy teacher optimization with on-policy student distillation. In Stage 1, a 4B teacher reranker is strengthened with off-policy GRPO using LLM-judge feedback on 88K instruction-following examples. In Stage 2, a compact 1B student samples rankings from its own policy and receives soft teacher-derived rewards on those rankings, coupling student exploration with knowledge transfer. Our strongest gains appear under distribution shift. On MAIR-11, the original 11-subset, 869-query evaluation, the proposed student reaches 0.7670 nDCG@6, outperforming offline listwise KD by +4.6 points. Controlled comparisons against offline pairwise RankNet KD and on-policy GKD show that neither changing the offline distillation objective nor moving teacher-distribution matching on-policy reproduces the performance of reward-based on-policy distillation over student-sampled rankings. The advantage persists on MAIR-Full: across all 126 tasks and 9,356 queries, the proposed method obtains the highest task-macro point estimates among the evaluated distillation variants, reaching 0.6808 nDCG@6 and 0.7865 MRR@6. It also exceeds two released 7B RL-trained rerankers on the comparable MAIR-11 evaluation, while the same Stage 2 training procedure consistently improves three architecturally distinct alternative student backbones. On the 9,861-query validation benchmark, the resulting 1B reranker achieves 0.7624 nDCG@6 while providing a favorable quality-efficiency tradeoff relative to larger alternatives.

Federated Learning enables multiple clients to train a shared model while keeping their local datasets isolated. However, the exchanged model updates may still leak sensitive information, making private aggregation a central building block in practical deployments, especially in the cross-silo setting. Homomorphic Encryption naturally fits the client–aggregator communication pattern of Federated Learning, but conventional single-key deployments rely on strong non-collusion assumptions. Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption removes this limitation, although recent attacks under restricted decryption access require large-variance smudging noise during collaborative decryption, which significantly increases ciphertext size and implementation complexity. In this work, we propose lightweight multi-secret-key protocols for private average aggregation based on RLWE-based Homomorphic Encryption. Our construction departs from the usual multiparty blueprint by avoiding the generation of a collective public key. Instead, each client encrypts its update under its own secret key, while the resulting ciphertexts remain compatible with homomorphic aggregation and collaborative decryption. By explicitly tracking and cancelling the ciphertext noise during decryption, the protocol removes the need for large $\lambda$-dependent smudging noise. We instantiate the construction with both exact BFV-based and approximate CKKS-based variants, prove its security in the semi-honest model against an adversary corrupting the aggregator and up to $L-1$ clients, and compare its communication and runtime performance with state-of-the-art MHE-based aggregation. Our results show that the proposed approach substantially reduces ciphertext expansion and online cost, while preserving practical homomorphic aggregation performance.

Poisson subsampling is the default sampler in differentially private optimization because its independence makes privacy amplification tractable. Practical systems, however, are moving toward structured participation: random allocation (balls-in-bins), per-epoch allocation, random check-ins, schemes widely believed to be at least as private as Poisson subsampling at the matched rate. We isolate the probabilistic mechanism behind this belief and delimit it exactly, for Gaussian mechanisms up to correlated-noise matrix mechanisms. (1) If the participation indicator vector is negatively associated (NA), then at every integer Rényi order $\alpha\ge2$, exactly at all finite parameters, its remove-direction Rényi divergence is dominated by that of the marginal-matched independent scheme. For fixed gradient sequences, this extends to the mechanism level whenever the noise strategy's Gram matrix is sign-balanced, an $O(t^2)$-checkable condition. (2) The integer-order restriction is essential. For random allocation with $k=1$, we prove a linear law for the Rényi-difference criterion: at large $t$, dominance reverses for every $\alpha<3/2$, including KL divergence, while the crossing order tends to $3/2$ independently of $\sigma$. (3) We also localize the known failure of rate-matched Poisson domination exactly: below $(1-q)^t$, the hockey-stick ordering reverses, so substituting the Poisson pair into composition machinery is unsound. An upper-tail argument yields a finite crossover $\gamma_\star$, connecting this threshold picture to the Rényi boundary at $3/2$. Together, these results give a substitution map for privacy accounting: when Poisson-based computations remain sound for structured participation, where they fail, and what sound alternatives cost in deployment.