Papers

Restricted eigenvalue (RE) bounds govern stable recovery by norm-regularized estimators. For isotropic sub-Gaussian measurements, the benchmark sample size is $1+w(A)^2$, where $w(A)$ is the Gaussian width of the normalized descent cone. The COLT 2015 open-problem note (Banerjee et al., 2015) asked whether the same law follows for heavy-tailed designs from a uniform small-ball condition alone. We give an explicit and systematic negative answer to the general question as formulated there: the proposed law fails in its full dimension-free, arbitrary-set form, and the missing obstruction is simultaneous threshold occupancy. A constant-width polyhedral descent cone with fixed small-ball constants has zero empirical RE on every sample path up to half the ambient dimension. More generally, every finite range space admits exact threshold encoding in an arbitrarily narrow spherical cap and a lift to a full polyhedral descent-cone section. For every fixed threshold VC dimension $d$, as $\beta\downarrow0$, the sharp worst-case sample complexity is $\Theta(\beta^{-1}[d\log(1/\beta)+\log(1/\delta)])$. The separation persists under exact isotropy and all finite moments: on the same constant-width cone, Gaussian measurements succeed with $O(1+\log(1/\delta))$ samples, whereas an isotropic heavy-tailed design fails pathwise for $n\lesssim\sqrt{p/\log p}$. Gaussian smoothing yields an everywhere-positive $C^\infty$ density while retaining arbitrarily poor RE. Under isotropy, a distribution-free fallback governed by affine dimension times squared enclosing radius is sharp on this family.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, computation intensive directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks have become increasingly common in cloud-edge-end collaborative environments. However, cloud, edge, and end nodes are highly heterogeneous in computing capacity, network bandwidth, and energy consumption, which makes the efficient scheduling of tasks with complex dependencies an NP-hard problem. Traditional heuristic algorithms and conventional reinforcement-learning methods often fail to capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of system resources. This paper proposes PPO-STGNN, a DAG task-scheduling algorithm that integrates proximal policy optimization (PPO) with spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs). The method uses an STGNN to extract features from both the DAG task topology and the physical cloud-edge-end resource graph, and then optimizes the scheduling policy through PPO to minimize makespan and schedule length ratio (SLR) while improving CPU and memory load balancing. To accelerate convergence, a multi-teacher behavior-cloning mechanism is introduced for pretraining. Experimental results show that PPO-STGNN significantly improves load balancing while maintaining a low completion time, making it suitable for dynamic and heterogeneous cloud-edge- end DAG scheduling scenarios.

In low-resource settings, deploying TTS typically requires choosing between a large voice-cloning model with costly inference or a compact fixed-voice system that requires a speaker-specific corpus. We study a third route: using a large voice-cloning model as a programmable data source to turn a short voice reference (e.g., 15 seconds) into a compact fixed-voice student trained entirely on synthetic speech. This setting makes pipeline design consequential: teacher errors become training targets, while filtering failed generations can reduce coverage of difficult texts. Thai further introduces challenges from ambiguous word boundaries, lexical tone, names and loanwords, numeric verbalization, and Thai-English code-switching. We study how text preparation, synthetic generation, quality filtering, rejection sampling, and frontend choices affect the resulting student, and where teacher limitations remain. We evaluate CER, Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy, Prosody Pause Accuracy, speaker similarity, and speaking rate. The resulting 82M-parameter model, Wayu-Paxa-TTS-Edge, enables on-device Thai TTS without reference audio. It achieves 68.2% Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy (85.5% of Gemini 3.1) and 91.4% pause precision, outperforming its OmniVoice teacher (89.9%) and reaching 94.8% of Gemini 3.1. It also achieves the lowest pause-placement error and intra-word pause rates among the three systems, and 3.7% and 1.1% CER on Thai and English, respectively. We open-source the model and evaluation framework for Thai TTS development.

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures increase model capacity by combining a collection of expert predictors through input-dependent routing, while often activating only a small subset of experts for each input. Despite their growing importance in modern large-scale models, the statistical roles of their design choices, especially routing, sparse activation, and shared experts, remain only partially understood, as existing theory has largely focused on parametric or correctly specified MoE models. In this paper, we view MoE as a form of localized aggregation and show how this localization reshapes the approximation-estimation-computation tradeoff. We derive oracle risk bounds for learning dense and sparse routing with evolving experts, separating approximation, expert-learning, and router-estimation errors, and characterize how sparse Top-K routing can retain the benefits of localized aggregation while controlling per-input computation. We also interpret gating through the geometry of input space, relating routing performance to regions of local expert advantage, and show how shared experts, as adopted in architectures such as DeepSeekMoE, can extract common predictive structure so that routed experts focus on residual local variation. Together, these results provide a unified statistical framework for understanding MoE through input-dependent expert aggregation, in which expert specialization and computational tradeoffs are governed by local predictive structure.

Faster playback has become a common feature in modern online audiovisual services, allowing users to consume content in less time while still maintaining a coherent viewing experience. However, different modalities of media content, such as video, audio (including speech and music), and audiovisual, exhibit varying requirements for understandability and information integrity under faster playback. These differences lead to noticeable variations in perceived quality depending on the content type. Nevertheless, users' perceived quality at different playback speeds remains insufficiently investigated. To address this gap, this paper conducts a series of subjective experiments to analyze the relationship between playback speed and perceived quality for video, audio, and audiovisual content. Content-specific intrinsic features are extracted to capture temporal dynamics, including temporal information (TI) for video, words per minute (WPM) for speech, and beats per minute (BPM) for music. Predictive models of perceived quality under faster playback are then developed separately for video, speech, and music. By integrating these models, a unified content-adaptive perceived quality assessment model (CAPQ-FAST) is proposed for faster audiovisual playback. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively predicts perceived quality under different playback speeds. This model can help service providers better understand users' viewing intentions and perceptual experiences under faster playback, thereby enabling more adaptive personalized recommendations and playback control to enhance user experience adaptability.

Developing humanoid robots capable of leveraging human behavioral data is essential for general-purpose embodiment, yet conventional development remains bottlenecked by a decoupled paradigm that isolates hardware design from whole-body control. This approach leads to suboptimal systems that compromise human-like fluidity and agility. To bridge this gap, we introduce a data-driven morphology-control co-design framework that optimizes humanoid morphology for human-like movement. To quantify morphological fidelity, we also introduce a novel metric that jointly considers kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics compared to baseline humanoids (Bumi, K1, and Toddlerbot). Finally, we realize this design in Bridge, an open-source, 88cm-tall humanoid platform released alongside its control policy. We demonstrate that Bridge captures human motion data with superior fidelity, exhibiting exceptional performance across foundational locomotion, robust balance, and highly dynamic maneuvers. Videos and open-source materials: https://sites.google.com/view/bridgerobot.

This paper examines the relationship between the parameters of autoencoder models and the statistical properties of the data on which they are trained. Autoencoders are defined as models with an encoder-decoder architecture, trained to reconstruct input data through a compressed latent representation. It is proposed that the model parameters can be viewed as a dense vector representation of the corresponding sample. To test this hypothesis, a theoretical and experimental study is conducted in which a vector representation is formed based on the spectral characteristics of the autoencoder parameter matrices. Theoretical analysis shows that the singular values of the model parameter matrices are related to the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the training data, ensuring the transfer of information between the data space and the parameter space. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10 and FashionMNIST datasets confirm that the resulting vector representations allow for a high degree of accuracy in distinguishing between models trained on different data subsets, without resorting to complex vector generation algorithms or using the original samples. These results suggest that the parameters of trained autoencoders can be viewed as sample representations.

Long-output reasoning has made the key–value (KV) cache a critical memory bottleneck for efficient LLM serving. Existing KV compression methods usually rely on a predefined per-request budget and adjust only which KV states are retained, leaving the total capacity fixed throughout decoding. However, reasoning workloads exhibit substantial demand variation: different requests require different KV capacities, and the attention demand of an individual request evolves during generation. We introduce GrowPage, an on-demand KV budgeting framework that treats KV capacity as a runtime resource. GrowPage maintains lightweight dual-timescale query summaries to capture recent and long-term attention behaviors, and uses their relative attention working sets to estimate demand evolution. At each capacity boundary, GrowPage either compresses KV states within the current allocation or acquires an additional physical page when broader demand emerges. By integrating with PagedAttention's page-level memory abstraction, GrowPage preserves continuous batching and prefix caching. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks across multiple models show that GrowPage achieves a superior performance–throughput trade-off over existing approaches.

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) can directly answer many image-grounded questions, yet they often struggle with complex queries requiring fine-grained visual details or external knowledge. To acquire this missing evidence, agentic VLMs invoke tools such as image cropping, image search, and text search. However, existing training paradigms primarily evaluate tool-use based on final answer correctness, leaving evidence acquisition and utilization insufficiently supervised. This leads to two critical shortcomings: (i) models frequently issue redundant or off-target tool calls that fail to gather necessary evidence, and (ii) even when appropriate tools are called, models often fail to extract the necessary information from the resulting observations. To address these limitations, we introduce the NTEP (Necessary Tool-Evidence Path), a novel annotation scheme that explicitly specifies the essential external evidence and corresponding tool calls for each query. Building upon this, we propose NTEP-R (NTEP Reward), a supervision mechanism ensuring that each tool invocation strictly advances the reasoning process toward the final solution. Specifically, our approach rewards the agent for aligning its pre-call intent with a necessary evidence-seeking goal, and for ensuring the information summarized from the post-call observation aligns with the necessary evidence. Furthermore, we introduce a non-repeated-goal regularizer to penalize redundant calls that revisit satisfied NTEP goals. Extensive evaluations on seven image-grounded benchmarks demonstrate that our 8B-parameter instantiation, NTEP-8B, significantly improves both search-oriented accuracy and tool-use efficiency within a unified three-tool framework. These results highlight the critical value of fine-grained tool-evidence path supervision for training robust agentic VLMs.

Predicting user equipment (UE) performance is essential for proactive network control, resource management, and digital twin sandboxes. However, the inherent flexibility and complexity of beam-based 5G new radio (NR) networks make accurate performance forecasting highly challenging. This paper proposes a data-driven approach to predict the average downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) relying exclusively on standardized reference-signal measurements, namely synchronization signal block (SSB) and channel state information-reference signal (CSI-RS) reference signal received power (RSRP). We formulate this prediction as a supervised learning problem and evaluate various input feature representations using a third generation partnership project (3GPP)-compliant synthetic dataset. Our analysis reveals that filtering measurements based on active CSI-RS beams significantly enhances prediction accuracy while reducing input dimensionality. This activity-aware strategy demonstrates the strong viability of machine learning models for proactive network optimization.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) demonstrates its effectiveness for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs (KGs) by projecting entities and relations into a low-dimensional vector space. It is crucial for KGE models to effectively capture inference patterns (patterns) inherent in KGs, such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion and composition. Although recent KGE models exhibit strong capabilities in modeling such diverse patterns, they suffer from inherent limitations stemming from pattern over-generalization, where embeddings learned from only a single pattern instance inevitably generalize that pattern to all related instances, i.e., generalize the pattern universally. To address this issue, we propose PogRE (Pattern Over-Generalization Robust Embedding), a simple but effective method that utilizes dense linear transformations and compound operations for relation representation. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that a dense linear transformation allows a pattern to become progressively universal as more triples are observed in the pattern. Furthermore, after observing d+1 linearly independent entities (d+1 denotes the dimension of entity), the linear transformation guarantees universal generalization of the pattern across all related instances. Experimental results on three standard benchmark datasets show that PogRE outperforms existing state-of-the-art KGE models in link prediction. Moreover, our empirical results indicate that PogRE effectively addresses the negative impact of over-generalization.

Air-ground collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) pairs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a global bird's-eye view and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a local first-person view, yet the setting remains largely unexplored: existing training-free methods solve single-agent tasks but offer no collaboration mechanism, and a recent CARLA-Air evaluation found no stable cooperative behavior across five state-of-the-art VLA models; naive semantic communication or bidirectional coupling even degrades performance. We establish AGC-VLN (Air-Ground Collaborative VLN), the first training-free baseline for air-ground collaborative VLN. The key insight is that training-free methods decompose navigation into VLM-based semantic reasoning and deterministic geometric execution, exposing a collaboration interface: the UAV's global view, over which it renders the UGV's reported pose and the VLM-anchored target as CAR/GOAL markers with distance labels, yielding a shared bird's-eye map. From this map, the UGV acquires global spatial context its first-person view cannot provide, plans a road-following path with a frozen VLM, and executes it under closed-loop control; in parallel, the UAV runs 3D-SPF, a spatial-search upgrade of SPF that localizes the target in the downward view and flies toward it. On 100 closed-loop episodes in CARLA-Air's Town10HD scene, AGC-VLN reaches a 77.0% joint success rate, a collaboration gain of +27.0% over the weaker individual agent (the UAV, 50.0%), and exceeds the strongest published single-agent baseline (Travel UAV, 53.0%) by 24.0 points, stemming from the complementarity of the UAV's global view and the UGV's road-following execution. Project page: https://github.com/ZSN2024/AGC-VLN.

Existing conversational retrievers commonly treat topical relevance as a proxy for answerability. However, a passage that closely matches the dialogue context is not necessarily the one that supports the correct answer. We identify this mismatch as a systematic answerability gap. To address this issue, we propose CLEAR, a framework that shifts conversational retrieval from topical relevance to answerability. The core of CLEAR is entailment distillation, which transfers answer-passage entailment supervision into a cross-encoder reranker so that the reranker discriminates answer-supporting passages from topical distractors at inference time, without requiring answers. CLEAR is complemented by a passage-centric abductive recall module that brings low-similarity yet answerable passages into the candidate pool by inferring answerable queries from passages with an LLM. Across TopiOCQA, QReCC, and out-of-domain TREC CAsT datasets, CLEAR consistently improves top-ranked precision over strong query-rewriting and dense-retrieval baselines, with the largest gains observed in conversations involving heavier topical noise. Moreover, applying our reranker on top of an LLM-driven query rewriter yields further gains.

Most single-channel separators estimate a source by applying a real gain to the mixture in each time-frequency bin. The optimum of that format, which the oracle masks used as bounds do not attain, is the orthogonal projection of the source onto the line spanned by the mixture, its residual set by the angle between them. Locating an estimator reduces to the block structure of a real-linear operator on stacked spectra, giving a chain of four nested classes whose three larger terms match three assumptions on the prior: zero means, circularity and absence of inter-frequency coupling. Held fixed the chain is a cascade of four orthogonal projections; refitted per frame it collapses onto its first term, attributing the whole residual to one missing real parameter per bin, the phase. When the phase posterior is symmetric about the mixture direction, the minimum mean-square estimate falls back onto the line, with gain the posterior mean of the oracle gain and excess error its variance. On MUSDB18 a posterior mean under a non-circular Gaussian-mixture prior leaves the class yet stays 11.44 dB under the per-frame ceiling, which four times as many components and 7.5x the data do not close; a closed-form gate attributes some 70% of it, in decibels, to the predicted variance. The widest fixed class stays 6.70 dB under the same ceiling. Leaving the class and minimising squared error are conflicting requests: the barrier lies in the criterion rather than in the prior.

We map tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and EO data, while evaluating the potential of foundation models for large-scale forest characterization. We compare two alternative input representations for tree species classification: (i) manually engineered spectral-temporal features (STF) derived from multi-temporal Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 observations, and (ii) embeddings generated by the EO FMs TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Both representations are complemented with canopy height information. Random forest, XGBoost, and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers are evaluated for all input representations, with separate assessments for pure and mixed forest stands. The STF-based MLP achieves the highest classification performance, yielding macro F1 scores of 0.843 and 0.653 for pure and mixed stands, respectively. The MLP trained on TESSERA embeddings delivers competitive performance for pure stands, achieving results within 1.1 percentage points of the best-performing model. TESSERA consistently outperforms STF-based models when fewer than approximately 25% of training plots are available, demonstrating a substantial advantage under limited training data. Multi-year observations systematically improve classification accuracy relative to single-year inputs, while ablation experiments reveal the complementary contributions of Sentinel-1 backscatter, spectral indices, and canopy height data. The best-performing model is subsequently applied at the national scale to generate a 10 m tree species map of Denmark. Area-adjusted validation indicates an overall map accuracy of 79.9%. The resulting map, released as an open-access product, is the first high-resolution national tree species map of Denmark and provides a valuable resource for forest monitoring, ecological research, and land management applications.

We report on our ongoing project to develop a computational pipeline, AutoGraphForge, for an automated graph-theoretic conjecturing-refuting-formalizing-proving system. Conjecture generation is counterexample-guided and runs in rounds: a Graffiti3 generator proposes conjectures over a small, evolving snapshot table $T$ (initially a few hundred graphs with their computed invariants) that grows only by counterexamples to its own conjectures. A novelty filter of $559$ classical and folklore relations, closed under transitive composition and linear identity substitution, decides via a linear program whether a candidate is already implied by known results. Surviving candidates are tested against a dataset of about $348,000$ graphs, unioning the complete House of Graphs invariant export, the exhaustive census of all connected graphs on at most nine vertices, several extremal families (strongly regular, minimal Ramsey, Cayley, cages, barbells, lollipops, spiders), and random models. Counterexample-search algorithms then attack the remainder. Run for several rounds on an HPC cluster, the loop yields $6,522$ conjectures that survived the refutation dataset, the novelty filter and every active-search run – among them nontrivial relations between the annihilation number and the edge-cover number for bipartite and regular graphs, which we prove by hand. A subsequent formalization and proving stage deterministically translates each surviving conjecture into a Lean 4 statement skeleton; every candidate proof is kernel-verified against a pinned mathlib4 and our custom invariant preamble. This stage integrates two neural provers – DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B (served with vLLM) and the Lean-specialised OProver-32B – behind the independent kernel check. It is implemented end-to-end and passes initial sanity checks, with the full pipeline currently running on the cluster.

Industrial inspection pipelines often restore a measured image before a detector acts on it, yet restoration can suppress detector-supported defect structure or create clean-region activations. We formulate restoration as a selective action problem over the measured display, five restored candidates, and review. SafeRestore ranks candidates with action-specific fitted scores, chooses a gate on threshold-tuning data, and evaluates the fixed gate on a disjoint certification sample with two one-sided exact binomial bounds: one for the positive-conditional evidence-loss incident rate and one for the all-accepted excess-activation incident rate. The guarantee is marginal for one policy fixed before its certification outcomes are observed, under an image-level i.i.d. working model. In a retrospective split-sample study of 4,591 public Carinthia-S images, the protocol yields auditable risk-coverage behavior. The primary all-action policy passes in one of five training repetitions (12.0% +/- 26.9% pass-gated test coverage when failures count as zero), whereas fixed bicubic and reduced-complexity variants pass more often. On reserved morphologies, evidence-loss incidence rises to 81.1-90.3%, and KolektorSDD lacks both detector competence and enough positive certification images for the stated target. The contribution is therefore an auditable, detector-relative framework for deciding when a transformed image may be returned automatically and when review remains necessary – not a claim that adaptive routing outperforms simpler policies on the present evidence.

Miner extractable value (MEV) in automated market makers allows block builders to profit from transaction ordering and injected trades, imposing costs on users and contributing to builder centralization. We introduce Otter (Optimal Truthful Trading with Excess Redistribution), a two-asset batch AMM that achieves provable MEV resilience when the consensus layer provides censorship resilience and block space is uncongested. Otter makes truthful behavior a dominant strategy for both users and builders. Consequently, a builder cannot profit from strategic deviations, including reordering bids or injecting sybil bids, even when the builder is itself a trader with intrinsic value. Moreover, we show that Otter maximizes social welfare, in a strong sense, within a natural class of mechanisms satisfying the desired game-theoretic properties. To achieve these guarantees, we introduce a new paradigm called surplus redistribution, which provably prevents residual surplus from being captured as MEV by redirecting it to the broader community. Specifically, the pool's output tokens need not be distributed entirely among users in the current batch. Instead, residual surplus may be transferred to a smart contract governed by the decentralized community. The accumulated surplus can be used to benefit community members — for example, by subsidizing transaction fees, rewarding liquidity providers, or returning assets to the pool. Our approach relies on the underlying consensus layer to provide censorship resilience. We motivate its necessity through an impossibility result showing that the desired game-theoretic guarantees become unattainable when the builder is additionally allowed to censor transactions. Thus, our results also provide a mathematically formal demonstration of how consensus-level security guarantees can fundamentally expand what is achievable at the application layer.

We study the override and update operators on partial functions from the perspective of restriction categories. We propose a definition of override restriction categories, in which both of the operators in question exist. We prove a number of results concerning these operators and their relationship to the structure of the ambient restriction category, as well as relating them to the existing literature on the override and update operators. We provide various examples of override restriction categories and in particular show that every classical restriction category is an override restriction category.

Programming tutors should support learners' own explanations rather than immediately providing model answers. We present ExplainRoute, a pre-deployment audit framework for non-answer-giving programming tutors. Given a code line and a learner explanation, it estimates the explanation state and selects one of two bounded responses: a Feynman-style self-explanation prompt or a Socratic scaffold. The framework exposes its state, strategy, cited code fragment, and leakage risk through a machine-checkable contract. Unlike benchmarks that rank tutors by fluency alone, ExplainRoute audits information boundaries, response polarity, failure closure, and the value of learner-explanation visibility before classroom deployment. We evaluate it offline on the 1,770-pair SelfCode corpus using a code-group split, with 443 pairs reserved in 11 untouched holdout groups. The evaluation compares direct answers, fixed open self-explanation, fixed Socratic scaffolding, adaptive routing, and an adaptive no-state ablation. Contract validity reaches 100% for all pedagogical conditions. Adaptive routing matches the frozen reference rule on 60.5% of records, with state macro-F1 of 0.238 (Open: 0.229; Socratic: 0.246), showing no reliable adaptive advantage. An independent language-model judge scores adaptive responses 4.516/5, outperforming the no-state ablation (2.819/5) but slightly below fixed open self-explanation (4.598/5) and Socratic scaffolding (4.658/5). A blinded rubric evaluation on a stratified 40-row subset confirms that visible learner explanations improve information value while adaptive routing does not outperform fixed strategies. The contribution is a validated audit protocol and a boundary finding, rather than evidence of improved learning, retention, or causal instructional effectiveness.

We study the computational complexity of solving promise systems of equations over finite algebras. Given two algebras $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ with a homomorphism from $\mathbf{A}$ to $\mathbf{B}$, the promise system of equations problem is to determine if an input system of equations has a solution in $\mathbf{A}$ or not even in $\mathbf{B}$. We generalize the results of Larrauri, Mottet, and Živný [ACM ToCL'26] to obtain a $\mathbf{P}-\mathbf{NP}$-hard dichotomy result for promise systems of equations over a class of algebras which contains all monoids, and a dichotomy result for promise systems of equations over algebras in a congruence modular variety. We then consider the metaproblem for promise systems of equations over algebras in a congruence modular variety: given finite algebras $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ such that $\mathbf{A}$ is in a congruence modular variety, we show there is a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for determining whether or not the associated promise system of equations problem is in $\mathbf{P}$.

Large language models (LLMs) are increas- ingly deployed as long-horizon conversational agents, motivating growing interest in mem- ory systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate memory through QA-style probing rather than in-situ conversational usage. We introduce LOCOMO-CONV, a conversa- tional memory benchmark derived from Lo- CoMo with four query styles: dialog, implicit, counterfactual, and composed. Across five rep- resentative memory systems, we evaluate both retrieval recall and end-to-end response qual- ity. Our experiments show that conversational framing exposes substantial retrieval gaps over- looked by QA benchmarks, especially on im- plicit and composed queries, which multi-facet query rewriting narrows for raw-turn mem- ory but not abstractive memory. We further find that strong retrieval does not fully trans- late into response quality, and that implicit queries exhibit silent grounding, where mem- ory improves contextual grounding without ex- plicitly surfacing the gold fact. These results point to reasoning-based memory elaboration as a promising direction, and we release aux- iliary supportive_memory annotations captur- ing conversationally useful context beyond the original gold evidence.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection is a foundational component of data protection infrastructure where missed entities constitute direct privacy and security risks. Although modern PII systems report strong performance on standard benchmarks, we show that these evaluations mask substantial robustness failures under realistic distribution shifts encountered in deployment. Rather than comparing state-of-the-art accuracy, we study how different PII detection paradigms fail under noisy, unstructured, and informal inputs. We construct a stress test benchmark spanning seven categories of natural distribution shift and evaluate representative systems from three widely deployed architectural families: encoder-based NER (SpaCy), rule-based hybrid detection (Presidio), and generative LLM extraction (Qwen2.5-3B). All three exhibit significant degradation on out-of-distribution inputs, but with distinct and complementary failure modes. Encoder models primarily fail on unseen surface forms and boundary detection, rule-based systems fail on non-standard formats, and LLMs exhibit entity-type confusion and generation instability. These results show that aggregate benchmark scores obscure deployment-critical weaknesses and that no single architecture is uniformly reliable across PII categories. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid detection pipeline with a QA-driven feedback loop for iterative risk mitigation, and release our benchmark to support OOD-aware evaluation of PII systems.

Automated pig monitoring is essential for assessing their health, behaviour, and welfare. To date, most pig monitoring solutions operate on the group-level, because individual-level monitoring requires reliable long-term identification and tracking of each animal. For domesticated pigs this remains challenging because pigs of the same breed often have highly uniform appearances. Moreover, research on pig monitoring is almost exclusively reported in top-down view camera settings, which considerably ease tracking, but are not always an option in practice. In this work, BMCTrack-d is presented, a novel tracking-by-detection approach that leverages unique back marks to enable robust pig re-identification and tracking in a challenging side-view camera setting, afflicted by rapidly moving pigs, severe occlusions and low resolution. The method first predicts the detected pigs' identities using a neural network-based back mark classifier. To improve re-identification reliability over time, two dedicated post-processing stages are introduced: a temporal prediction consistency check, which validates the identity assignments against the recent prediction history, and deduplication, which resolves conflicting identity assignments in each time step. By explicitly prioritising accurate, appearance-based re-identification over continuous tracking, the proposed approach addresses a key limitation of existing trackers for individual-level monitoring scenarios. On a demanding test set BMCTrack-d outperforms two strong baselines, BoT-SORT-ReID and TrackTrack-ReID, by 9.11% and 1.03%, respectively, in higher-order tracking accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of back mark-based re-identification and tracking for robust individual-level pig monitoring in challenging settings.

A common approach to representing disk-like and sphere-like geometries in isogeometric analysis is to use collapsed-edge singularities in the underlying parameterization. The resulting tensor-product B-spline spaces on such singular parameterizations lack the required smoothness to be used in isogeometric analysis. Polar splines (Toshniwal et al., CMAME 2017) rectify this issue by extracting a smoother subspace, and have been successfully used to discretize high-order partial differential equations, as well as to perform structure-preserving discretizations of the de Rham complex.The latter is particularly relevant for mixed formulations that appear in applications such as electromagnetism and fluid dynamics. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. We combine the polar spline construction with hierarchical splines to obtain adaptively-refinable polar splines. Moreover, we do so in the context of structure-preserving methods. That is, we show how to construct hierarchical polar spline $k$-form spaces, prove that the corresponding basis functions are linearly independent, and prove that they form a cohomologically-correct discrete de Rham complex. These contributions provide a mathematically sound foundation for adaptive structure-preserving simulations on polar geometries. We also provide numerical experiments that validate the theory and illustrate the practical behavior of the construction with problems where preserving the structure is mandatory. These include a study of spurious harmonics that highlights how cohomology-breaking refinements differ between the polar and tensor-product settings, a discretization of a Maxwell eigenvalue problem on a locally-refined polar mesh, and an adaptive convergence study for a Hodge–Laplace problem.

As generative AI makes polished prose cheap to produce, users can no longer rely on fluency as a proxy for truth. We call this failure mode the Fluency Trap: users trust fluent hallucinations while also discounting accurate content once it is disclosed as AI-generated. Binary “Made with AI” labels respond with authorship disclosure, but they do not show what supports a claim. We propose Provenance Density, an evidence-visualization interface that shows the density of verified claims in a text. In a user study with 81 participants, an idealized Provenance Density interface produced a large discernment gap between truth and fabrication ($+4.15$ points, $d=1.82$), whereas participants given no signal showed no detectable discrimination. A technical audit with 200 samples shows that retrieval density alone is insufficient; unexpectedly, the Consistency Veto carries most of the discriminative signal on dynamic queries. As AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human writing, effective transparency must move from authorship disclosure toward evidence visualization.

Tensor-Train (TT) decomposition effectively compresses large embedding tables in recommendation models, but TT-based embedding lookup remains inefficient because partially shared computation flows across input indices are not fully reused and intermediate results are repeatedly materialized off-chip between sequential TT-core contractions. We present FlowTT, a flow-aware GPU execution framework that reformulates TT gather as a set of prefix-shared irregular computation flows. FlowTT combines flow-aligned prefix-based index grouping, a fused TT-embedding execution path with on-chip intermediate retention, and persistent-thread scheduling with chunk-based work stealing and L2 checkpointing to preserve reuse under skewed workloads. By co-designing task formation, data buffering, and scheduling with the structure of TT gather, FlowTT reduces redundant TT-core operations, global-memory traffic, and load imbalance. On Meta's synthetic recommendation benchmarks (Meta-240, Meta-480, and Meta-788), FlowTT consistently achieves the lowest latency compared to existing methods. At batch size 32,768, it reduces latency by up to 42.2% in inference and 49.2% in training relative to EcoRec, while also achieving the lowest inference peak memory usage. These results show that exposing prefix-shared computation is key to efficient TT-based embedding execution.

Accurate cloud resource forecasting is essential for proactive resource provisioning, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS), and reducing operational costs in dynamic cloud environments. The existing forecasting approaches predominantly estimate future CPU workload directly from historical resource traces, which often overlook the relationship between customer service demand and subsequent resource consumption. This study proposes a two-stage integrated forecasting model that explicitly models this dependency by first forecasting customer service requests, expressed as Transactions Per Second (TPS), and subsequently estimating future CPU workload from the TPS forecast. Both the forecasting component and resource prediction component employed the XGBoost model within a cascaded learning architecture, complemented by adaptive online retraining using an expanding-window strategy to address concept drift in continuously evolving cloud workloads. The proposed work was evaluated using real-world traces collected from a private cloud environment comprising ten applications. Experimental results demonstrate robust forecasting performance by achieving Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE) below $7\%$ for most applications, with the best-performing application achieving an MAE of $0.7372$, RMSE of $1.1866$, SMAPE of $3.57\%$, and an R2 of $0.9185$. Horizon-wise drift analysis confirmed stable recursive forecasting behavior with controlled error accumulation across a 60-step prediction horizon. Compared with the conventional direct CPU forecasting method, the proposed two-stage integrated model gives improved forecasting robustness, computational efficiency, and interpretability, making it well-suited for proactive resource management and intelligent auto-scaling in cloud computing environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to augment software engineering (SE) workflows. While code generation remains the main use case, organizations are actively seeking AI integration in other practices such as test cases generation and code reviews. Organizational AI adoption strategies seem to focus on tangible outcomes such as productivity. However, AI is a disruptive force, introduced into settings where role identity, team norms, and the sources of job satisfaction were well established before the recent advances in generative AI. Historically, technological disruptions have caused psychological and social strains in workplaces, ranging from anxiety and eroded meaning to deskilling and disrupted professional identities. The assumption that AI for SE is cost-free may not be accurate. Therefore, in this study we sought to understand the psychological costs software professionals experience during organizational AI adoption. We carried out a case study in a large software development services company, one year after the company launched its AI adoption. We collected qualitative data through meetings and semi-structured interviews (N = 21). We found that software professionals experience accountability anxiety, craft identity disruption, meaning and satisfaction erosion, cognitive and workload intensification, and uncertainty distress. Practitioners manage these costs through practices that restore control, mitigate them through protective and identity-preserving adaptations, or absorb them, carrying what neither can resolve. We contribute to AI-human collaboration in SE by repositioning AI adoption as a human transition, not only a technological and organizational one.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can improve the specificity and grounding of large language model responses, but its effect is not uniformly beneficial in single-turn mental-health question answering, where user queries often combine emotional distress, treatment concerns, and safety-sensitive needs. We study when retrieval helps or hurts mental-health QA, and whether a lightweight selective retrieval policy can better control this trade-off. We operationalize retrieval need using three draft-conditioned utility dimensions: psychoeducational need, coping need, and response specificity, together with a rule-based safety trigger. Following psychotherapy-grounded RAG systems such as coTherapist, we construct a compact and controllable guideline corpus comprising coping-strategy, psychoeducational, and safety resources. We fine-tune an instruction-tuned generator on MentalChat16K using QLoRA and compare Closed-book, Always Retrieval, and Selective Retrieval settings on CounselBench-Eval and CounselBench-Adv. Experiments show that retrieval is not uniformly beneficial in this domain. Always Retrieval improves specificity but lowers overall quality and introduces additional safety-sensitive failures. Selective Retrieval preserves closed-book behavior for low-need cases while avoiding the additional degradation caused by unconditional retrieval, supporting the view that retrieval activation is a safety-sensitive control decision.